Trying to make race science the “civil” science: charisma in the race and intelligence debates

Abstract

When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen – a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve – and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious.

Building on racism: The Porteus Hall controversy at the University of Hawai‘i.

“…Expanding on the APA Apology's partial focus on (de)coloniality, we can choose to learn the value of acting upon hearing. Instead of rerouting social critique into corrupting channels of acrimonious defense of charismatic (sub)disciplinary figures (Dasgupta et al, 2022), the original message needs to be amplified: We have celebrated and profited from violence. Writing about the settler (dis)possession of Polynesians through whiteness, Maile Arvin suggests decolonization as an ongoing resistance that sustains practices and life (Arvin, 2019).…”

Charismatic Mimicry: Innovation and Imitation in the Case of Volodymyr Zelensky

“…. procedural and gatekeeping channels” (Dasgupta, Panofsky, and Iturriaga 2022:26–27). This path-breaking activity will feel like a “cruel trick” (Joosse 2018a:930) to institutional elites because the very skills that legitimated them in the past—their mastery of established leadership customs and protocols—become the reason for their delegitimization in the new charismatic context.…”