In 1950, theDenver Catholic Registerpublished an article describing and challenging the varieties of “prejudice” that a military pilot moving from base to base in the United States might encounter. To “successfully transact business” in the vicinity of various “metropolitan landing fields,” the writer admonished, the veteran must:Remember to be not too sanguine about people of Oriental ethnic origin when talking with a merchant in Seattle, that he must speak about the Jew with a slight sneer in Eastern cities, that the Colored person must be “kept in his place” in Houston, that in reservation country the Indian must be treated as a man would treat a child and that in the San Antonio-Los Angeles-Denver triangle it is wiser to remember that the Mexican-American is a second-class citizen.
In his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence, Lewis Terman presented the first version of the Stanford-Binet scale and his testing results for groups of California children. Singling out a few children whose scores fell in the range he categorized as "feeble-minded," Terman commented: [They] represent the level of intelligence that is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they came. The fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. 1
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