[Review of] William H. Tucker. The Science and Politics of Racial Research

Since there is usually a two year period of time that elapses between the acceptance of a manuscript by a university press and its publication, we must commend William H. Tucker, who is an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, in his anticipation of contemporary controversies in reference to the relative abilities of races. Tucker argues that there is continuity in the thought of racists, which over the past two centuries include anthropometricians, eugenicists, and segregationists. ”The imprimatur of science,“ Tucker argues cogently, ”has been offered to justify, first slavery and, later, segregation, nativism, socio-political inequality, class subordination, poverty, and the general futility of social and economic reform. For Tucker, the attempt to demonstrate that one race is genetically less intelligent than others has been scientifically valueless and socially harmful. Scientific research into racial differences has, in essence, resulted in the “legitimation” of racist ideology. Nevertheless, Tucker is not pessimistic about winning the battle with racists. ”America\u27s democratic political traditions, he writes, ”have prevailed, and today universal suffrage, equal rights under law, and the guarantee of other civil liberties to all citizens are no longer up for debate; where demonstrable infringement has occurred, there is generally outrage and prompt redress

[Review of] Alain LeRoy Locke (Jeffrey C. Stewart, ed.). Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race

Scholars of the history of race and race relations social science should be deeply indebted to Jeffrey C. Stewart for uncovering and meticulously reconstructing these extant lectures by the philosopher better known for his later contributions to the Harlem Renaissance than his social scientific theorizing: Alain LeRoy Locke. The book is an invaluable source on the thought of an African American intellectual on the subject of the nature of race relations during the Progressive Era and on its relationship to ethnic and class relations as well. So fecund are these lectures with insights and hypotheses which deserve further investigation and analysis that it would require a work of equal length to do justice to this collection of lectures. As a consequence, this review focuses only on Locke\u27s treatment of race, race prejudice, and race relations

A History of Race Relations Social Science

This essay argues that the inclusion of white women, African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians into historiography is a fairly recent development ; and that the aforementioned development, which did not begin until the 1960s, has resulted in rigorous investigation into the racial thought of Franz Uri Boas, Robert Ezra Park, and Gunnar Myrdal and a hot debate in reference to their significance and influence on today\u27s social sciences. Furthermore, the integration of African American history into the historiography of race relations social science has given impetus to the movement towards making American intellectual history more inclusive

[Review of] David Levering Lewis. W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919

In a stunning exhibition of biographical craftsmanship, David Levering Lewis narrates, for the years between 1868 and 1919, both the spectacular achievements -- and their import for intellectual life in our own times -- and the equally significant failings of one of the most important American intellectuals of the twentieth century. Lewis\u27s erudite tome supercedes all of the previous biographical treatments of DuBois and will doubtlessly require an equally Herculean effort to match this phenomenal work. Indeed, the awesome task of concluding the latter part of DuBois\u27s long, controversial, and complex life will be exhaustively challenging. Since any exhaustive review of Lewis\u27s work would require much greater space, I will confine my comments to an adumbration of the import of DuBois\u27s thought for ethnicity and gender theories

[Review of] George M. Fredrickson. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa

George M. Fredrickson, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History at Stanford University, has written a magisterial volume that complements his earlier explorations in his highly acclaimed White Supremacy and in some of his major essays in a collection, entitled The Arrogance of Race. Yet, unlike the earlier works, which compare the predominant white racism and ethnocentrism in race relations in the United States and the Union of South Africa, Black Liberation focuses on the political ideologies of “organic” African American and Black South African intellectuals. Fredrickson, to my mind, demonstrates convincingly that historically the ideology of “color-blind universalism” has been both more potent and effective -- in more cases than not-- in countering the overt claims and actions of white supremacists in both countries than “racially exclusive nationalism.

[Review of] James B. McKee. Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of a Perspective

In his sweeping study of the treatment of African Americans in American sociology from the 1920s until the 1960s, James B. McKee, a professor emeritus of sociology at Michigan State University, concludes that sociologists need to revive an older democratic commitment to speak to a larger public that includes and cuts across the conflicting racial identities whose fates are inexorably bound together in the same historical struggles (366-7)

Development of a goal management system

This thesis describes the development of the Goal Management System (GMS), a computer program designed to support goal­setting, planning and performance monitoring. The particular implementation described here is intended primarily for use in an organisational context. Chapter 2 discusses the treatment of goals as a topic in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology and Management Science. A broadly "knowledge-based" account of goal-related processes is derived from this discussion. Chapter 3 assesses the impact of the "symbols vs. neurons" debate upon the viability of a purely knowledge-based model. It is concluded that knowledge-based paradigms are useful for the description of knowledge structures, but that there are good reasons for assuming that they cannot provide an adequate account of the dynamics of knowledge (that is, the processes by which one structure is transformed into another). Therefore, it is appropriate that a systems designer should solve the problems of modelling structures before tackling the (perhaps insurmountable) problems of modelling dynamics. Chapter A considers the implications of "strategic" vs. "value-driven" models of planning. It is concluded that "value-driven" processing is the norm, while "strategic" processing is the exception, but is more likely to provide an appropriate response to radical changes in the planner's environment. A Goal Management System would support the increasing requirement for a strategic approach. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 describe the detailed design and implementation of the system. Chapter 8 describes a few of the practical applications of the system, and discusses ways in which the design could be improved. It is concluded that the basic design concept is correct, and that there is a useful role for this type of system. Chapter 9 evaluates the project as a whole and suggests directions for future research

Closed Fredholm and semi-Fredholm operators, essential spectra and perturbations

AbstractIn these notes we provide rather extensive characterizations of closed densely defined Fredholm and semi-Fredholm operators on a Banach space, and their perturbation classes. We make use of the notions of measure of noncompactness, special norm equalities, and certain “pseudo” Banach algebra concepts as they pertain to closed operators. Classes of perturbations of closed Fredholm and semi-Fredholm operators are effectively identified, respectively, with classes of perturbations of the Wolf, Schechter, and Gustafson-Weidman essential spectra for closed operators. A by-product of this identification is a generalization of the celebrated Weyl theorem which characterizes the essential spectrum of a compact self-adjoint operator on a Hilbert space. We obtain spectral mapping theorems for some particular Wolf and Schechter essential spectra