Never saw that textbook and would've raised a little hell about it if I had.
Nice to imagine so but you probably wouldn't, being a child and absorbing that information like hundreds and thousands of others in schools across the land. It was presented as the scientific orthodoxy of the time, not the crazy notion of some 'yahoo.' Just as well established 'facts' are sometimes challenged, eh?


And again I have to point out that the people who see the differences and treat others negatively because of them don't care about the legitimacy of the science, so they'll misuse the concept of evolution to come up with crap like that to support their point -- through either ignorance or malice. They will use every study in a twisted way to justify their beliefs and actions, regardless of the facts.
Again, it was the orthodoxy of the day and plenty of decent, non racist folk would have thought this must be true if scientists say so. People who discriminate in a nasty way can't justify their malice with any reasonable arguments - there aren't any. But they can maintain a 'racial difference' rationale for cultural hatred. The rest of us needn't buy into that.

It's a statistical fact that there are more blacks than whites in prison in the United States, despite there being more whites than blacks in the overall population. A racist is going to take that study and argue that blacks are predisposed to be criminals, despite the fact that there's nothing in the study to support the claim. So do we not do the study, try to determine the cause and address the societal and cultural issues that cause it just because the data is going to be misapplied by the ignorant?
The data I cited is out of date and discredited already - it's not some sort of recent rogue study. My point in presenting it was to show an example of the scientific orthodoxy of the day. Right thinking people can look back on that now and see that 'science' was actually erroneous and discriminatory. Perhaps we also may decide that the 'neutral,' 'unproblematic' scientific language we use today may be less neutral and more problematic that we imagine.