Co-written by recognized consumer culture historian Stuart Ewen, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality is a plain-terms, no-holds-barred look at the long-running practice of science warped to serve prejudice. Though the word "typecasting" refers to a common practice in cinema and mass-media to pick certain types of actors for certain roles, Typecasting covers discrimination in all aspects of human society. From Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, King George's court physician who subdivided humanity into five unequal categories during the Declaration of Independence era, to early twentieth-century birth control advocate Margaret Sanger's view of birth control as a means to curb the procreation of "socially degenerate" populations "unfit" for democracy, to the 2005 president of Harvard University's claim that "issues of intrinsic aptitude" explain the under representation of women in the sciences and mathematics, Typecasting leaves no stone unturned from ancient taxonomies of human difference to modern-day battlegrounds of ideas. Of particular interest is the elucidation of how religion is often dragged into prejudice, with inequality or second-class citizenship depicted as God's will in past centuries and the current century. An absolute "must-have" for sociology shelves, enthusiastically recommended for public and college libraries alike.
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