The individual and “the general situation”: The tension barometer and the race problem at the University of Chicago, 1947–1954

✍ Scribed by Leah N. Gordon

• Book ID: 102339198
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 120 KB
• Volume: 46
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.20408

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

This article explains how social theories that posited white attitudes as the root of racial injustice gained traction in postwar social thought. Examining the production of a “tension barometer,” an attitude survey that scholars from the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations created to predict interracial violence, I chart vigorous debate over the nature and causes of racial oppression in the critical postwar decades. Available—and unavailable—social scientific frameworks, activists” interests, and emerging anticommunism, the Committee's history shows, created an environment where individualistic conceptions of the race problem won out, despite critique. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.