Ethnicity and race: Psychological perspectives

Abstract

This article attempts to accomplish the following: (a) indicate the increasingly dangerous and troublesome disparity between biological knowledge and common practice in regards to the use of “race” to classify human groups and behavior; (b) review more than a decade of tumultuous debate among psychologists and educators on the issue of IQ and race to show how fruitless are the results of emphasizing racial taxonomies; (c) present alternatives of “ethnic group” and “ethnicity” which would more than replace race with reference to individual self‐identity and cultural‐social attachments; and (d) indicate the relationships among ethnic group identification, the “New Ethnicity,” pluralism of the U.S. and the rest of the world, and other elements of individual psychosocial schedule.