How have social forces shaped the work of scholars studying race and race relations in America?
In his book, The Social Sciences and Theories of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2006), Vernon J. Williams Jr. examined the work of major scholars such as Franz Boas, George W. Ellis, Booker T. Washington, Ulysses G. Weatherly and Monroe N. Work and found that ethnicity and a range of social and political pressures had important impacts on the developing fields of sociology and anthropology. An example of this was the debate over “absolute” and “relative” white intellectual superiority. “By adhering to a reifed notion of biological race as real and as a consequence subject to historical and scientific investigation, behaviorial scientists have indeed aided and abetted the promulgation of moot issues,” wrote Williams, professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and professor of American Studies at IU. “For at issue during the past three centuries are ethical problems that often require a leap of faith that clouds the eyeballs of even the strictest methodological puris
