This collection of essays provides the reader with nine richly detailed analyses of how "race" has saturated the psychological century from 1870 to 1970. The nine essays included in this volume highlight the substantial progress that has been made by psychologists themselves in clarifying how psychology has shaped the public discourse on race. Defining Difference is divided into four sections: "Foundations of Psychology and Race Before 1900"; "Psychology, Science, and 'Race Mixing' "; "Cultural Contexts and 20th-Century Psychology"; and "Confronting Racism."
In his introduction, Winston notes that "not until the 1970s did psychologists begin serious examination of the history of intelligence, race, and heredity" (p. 5), although it was clearly a topic for historians. Winston argues, correctly I think, that until the appearance of an organized subdiscipline of scholars interested in writing history as more than "hagiography and triumphant visions of progress" (p. 5), there was little critical interest in race as a problem for psychology. In the case of race and racism in psychology, Winston argues that the flash point for attention to race was Jensen's (1969) Harvard Educational Review article, arguing that black children would not benefit from compensatory education (p. 5).
What is refreshing about Winston's selection of materials for this collection is that it goes beyond the tedious debates over racialized differences in intelligence to the more interesting historical questions of who is interested in a psychological science of race and for what intellectual, social, political, and economic ends. Winston has started from the premise that race psychology has not met its demise. As a result, those contributing to the volume offer "a more complex history in which racial research does not disappear but survives and resurfaces with changes in the social landscape" (p. 7).
In the first section, Weizmann introduces us to one of several recurrent themes running through the collection. He explores the long history of defining race over the course of centuries in ancient civilizations, concluding that "race is neither a timeless idea nor an inevitable one" (p. 43). Weizmann traces those multiple strands of history that find their way into nineteenthcentury racialized doctrines such as the one Fancher provides in his essay on the concept of race in the life and thought of Francis Galton. Fancher is a subtle historian of "intelligence men" (Fancher, 1985) and means to challenge us to think of Galton not in morally redemptive terms but rather in historically significant ones.
Galton was a coiner of lasting psychological vocabulary: nature vs. nurture, eugenics, and the normal distribution. If we are to have an honest history of racism in psychology, Galton will have to be read, no matter how distasteful. I struggle as a white woman of some privilege with how to present these texts in classroom settings as both primary and secondary sources in a way that does not revictimize the targets of race psychologies. The task is facilitated by the balance struck in this collection between presenting evidence of both racist and antiracist projects in the history of psychology.
In the second section, both Teo's and Tucker's essays on race mixing challenge the reader to consider hybridity not as a natural but as a social, historical, and cultural phenomenon. In the former view, "race mixture was against nature, it meant the end of culture, and it lowered