Discrediting biological racism prepared cultural ground for civil rights

Evidence

One of the important changes that laid the cultural groundwork for the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s was the discrediting of theories of biological racism. A general shift away from notions of distinct “races” and theories of “social Darwinism” began in the 1920s (Gossett, 1963; Sitkoff, 1978). This trend accelerated in the 1930s and 1940s in response to Nazi Germany’s racism. These changes in ideas were readily applied to the “Negro problem” in the United States (Sitkoff, 1978, p. 190). One of the clearest examples of the ultimate impact of this changing cultural attitude toward “prejudice” is the often hotly debated Footnote 11 to the Brown decision which cites the Clarks’ doll selection studies (1947) and Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) as substantiation of the fact that discrimination and prejudice had damaged black children (Wilkinson, 1979). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3356

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the doll studies and Brown v. Board’s Footnote 11, connecting to broader claims about how social science shapes legal reasoning.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3356