Economic conditions, not evidence, governed eugenics’ scientific acceptance

Evidence

In the midst of the Great Depression, with so many Americans suffering, it became harder to embrace eugenics—harder to blame one’s economic plight on hereditary factors. Assimilationists took advantage of this lull and continued to assume control of the scientific community. Franz Boas blasted segregationists in his presidential address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931. Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham confessed in 1932 that his earlier findings about IQ tests determining genetic Black inferiority were “without foundation” (although the use of Brigham’s SAT test only expanded). Scientific disciplines split into bickering factions, with geneticists distancing themselves from eugenicists. Meanwhile, eugenics was kept afloat by Nazi Germany and by the American birth control movement, the latter run by Margaret Sanger and her American Birth Control League. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 859

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Kendi’s inversion in its sharpest form: the Depression (material conditions) made eugenics scientifically indefensible even though IQ evidence supposedly supported it — and Brigham disavowed his findings while his SAT test’s use expanded. Ideas track material conditions, not evidence.
• QUESTION: The Brigham confession is fascinating — SAT expanded even as its creator disavowed the racial science behind it. Worth tracing how an instrument outlives its own evidentiary basis.
• XREF: Directly contradicts the reader’s test case of ‘ideas precede policy’ — here material collapse precedes ideological shift, despite the ignorant→hate→discrimination model the reader wants to test.