@istudymemory shared an article with me from 1977 by A. Wade Boykin called "Experimental Psychology from a Black Perspective". It reveals some wild racism in the field in the 60s and 70s that I was completely oblivious to..(THREAD)

One being that in free world recall tasks, white psychologists believed Black people weren't smart enough to cluster words into implicit conceptual categories. Think about that for a second.

The clapback in Boykin's paper is awesome. He talks about a paper by Franklin and Fulani (1974) that responds to this:

"Franklin and Fulani essentially employed the standard free recall paradigm with one very significant departure. They did not rely exclusively on words that were derived from norms 'standardized' on a White middle-class population"

"Instead, they also employed words that were obtained directly from a sample of Black youths. These words and their corresponding categories were of course more phenomenologically pertinent to these youths cultural and experiental frame of reference."

"Three of the cate­gories and their corresponding words were more directly pertinent to the experiences of Black youths e.g. soul-food with instances such as
"greens" "chittlins" and "ribs"."

"The remaining categories were taken from ones used in the typical work, e.g. clothing with instances such as "shirt"; "hat", and "shoes". Black and White adolescents were asked to recall the list of 30 words which were presented in no particular order."

"The clustering performance of Black youths in this study was signifi­cantly superior to that of the White youths. Further analyses revealed that the depression of categorized behaviour by the White sample was directly a function of the Black related items".

You can draw your own conclusions about links to similar race/SES based studies today. Thanks for sharing, @istudymemory! The Boykin paper is here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009579847700300209