LSAT-Section-2-Reading-Comprehension – Section Two : Reading Comprehension

Thurgood Marshall's litigation of Brown v. Board of Education in 1952 – the landmark case, decided in 1954, that made segregation illegal in United States public schools – was not his first case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Some legal scholars claim that the cases he presented to the court in the sixteen years before his successful argument for desegregation of public schools were necessary forerunners of that case: preliminary tests of legal strategies and early erosions of the foundations of discrimination against African Americans that paved the way for success in Brown.

When Marshall joined the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1936, the organization was divided on how to proceed against the legal doctrine that for forty years had promoted "separate but equal" facilities for African Americans in educational institutions, in public transportation, and various other civic amenities. One approach was to emphasize that facilities were not in fact equal and to pursue litigation whose practical goal was the improvement both of opportunity for African Americans and of the facilities themselves.

A second, more theoretical, approach was to argue that the concept of separate but equal facilities for the races was by its very nature impossible to fulfill, rendering the doctrine self-contradictory and hence legally unsound. Marshall correctly believed that the latter approach would eventually be the one to bring repeal of the doctrine, but felt it necessary in the short term to argue several cases using the former approach, in order to demonstrate the numerous ways in which segregation prevented real equality and thus to prepare the courts to recognize the validity of the theoretical argument.

While Marshall enjoyed several successes arguing for the equalization of facilities and opportunities in such areas as voting practices and accommodations for graduate students at public universities, it would be twelve years before he evolved a strategy for arguing against pervasive discriminatory practices that enabled him to make the leap from individual instances of inequality to the broader social argument needed to later invalidate "separate but equal."

In 1948, Marshall litigated Shelley v. Kraemer, in which he convinced the court to outlaw housing discrimination practiced by private parties. Although the court had previously supported such practices implicitly under a doctrine that excused private dealings from the legal requirement for equal protection of citizens under law, Marshall presented sociological data demonstrating that, in sum and over time, these individual transactions constituted a pattern of insupportable discrimination. Marshall later used this strategy when arguing against individual schools' enrollment restrictions in Brown; scholars argue that his successful use of the strategy in Shelley prepared the court to accept such data as convincing evidence for finding "separate but equal" insupportable on its face.

The primary purpose of the passage is to

Donna Haraway's Primate Visions is the most ambitious book on the history of science yet written from a feminist perspective, embracing not only the scientific construction of gender but also the interplay of race, class, and colonial and postcolonial culture with the "Western" construction of the very concept of nature itself. Primatology is a particularly apt vehicle for such themes because primates seem so much like ourselves that they provide ready material for scientists' conscious and unconscious projections of their beliefs about nature and culture.

Haraway's most radical departure is to challenge the traditional disjunction between the active knower (scientist/historian) and the passive object (nature/history). In Haraway's view, the desire to understand nature, whether in order to tame it or to preserve it as a place of wild innocence, is based on a troublingly masculinist and colonialist view of nature as an entity distinct from us and subject to our control. She argues that it is a view that is no longer politically, ecologically, or even scientifically viable. She proposes an approach that not only recognizes diverse human actors (scientists, government officials, laborers, science fiction writers) as contributing to our knowledge of nature, but that also recognizes the creatures usually subsumed under nature (such as primates) as active participants in creating that knowledge as well. Finally, she insists that the perspectives afforded by these different agents cannot be reduced to a single, coherent reality – there are necessarily only multiple, interlinked, partial realities.

This iconoclastic view is reflected in Haraway's unorthodox writing style. Haraway does not weave the many different elements of her work into one unified, overarching Story of Primatology; they remain distinct voices that will not succumb to a master narrative. This fragmented approach to historiography is familiar enough in

historiographical theorizing but has rarely been put into practice by historians of science. It presents a complex alternative to traditional history, whether strictly narrative or narrative with emphasis on a causal argument.

Haraway is equally innovative in the way she incorporates broad cultural issues into her analysis. Despite decades of rhetoric from historians of science about the need to unite issues deemed "internal" to science (scientific theory and practice) and those considered "external" to it (social issues, structures, and beliefs), that dichotomy has proven difficult to set aside. Haraway simply ignores it. The many readers in whom this separation is deeply ingrained may find her discussions of such popular sources as science fiction, movies, and television distracting, and her statements concerning such issues as nuclear war bewildering and digressive. To accept her approach one must shed a great many assumptions about what properly belongs to the study of science.

The passage is primarily concerned with discussing which one of the following?

Donna Haraway's Primate Visions is the most ambitious book on the history of science yet written from a feminist perspective, embracing not only the scientific construction of gender but also the interplay of race, class, and colonial and postcolonial culture with the "Western" construction of the very concept of nature itself. Primatology is a particularly apt vehicle for such themes because primates seem so much like ourselves that they provide ready material for scientists' conscious and unconscious projections of their beliefs about nature and culture.

Haraway's most radical departure is to challenge the traditional disjunction between the active knower (scientist/historian) and the passive object (nature/history). In Haraway's view, the desire to understand nature, whether in order to tame it or to preserve it as a place of wild innocence, is based on a troublingly masculinist and colonialist view of nature as an entity distinct from us and subject to our control. She argues that it is a view that is no longer politically, ecologically, or even scientifically viable. She proposes an approach that not only recognizes diverse human actors (scientists, government officials, laborers, science fiction writers) as contributing to our knowledge of nature, but that also recognizes the creatures usually subsumed under nature (such as primates) as active participants in creating that knowledge as well. Finally, she insists that the perspectives afforded by these different agents cannot be reduced to a single, coherent reality – there are necessarily only multiple, interlinked, partial realities.

This iconoclastic view is reflected in Haraway's unorthodox writing style. Haraway does not weave the many different elements of her work into one unified, overarching Story of Primatology; they remain distinct voices that will not succumb to a master narrative. This fragmented approach to historiography is familiar enough in

historiographical theorizing but has rarely been put into practice by historians of science. It presents a complex alternative to traditional history, whether strictly narrative or narrative with emphasis on a causal argument.

Haraway is equally innovative in the way she incorporates broad cultural issues into her analysis. Despite decades of rhetoric from historians of science about the need to unite issues deemed "internal" to science (scientific theory and practice) and those considered "external" to it (social issues, structures, and beliefs), that dichotomy has proven difficult to set aside. Haraway simply ignores it. The many readers in whom this separation is deeply ingrained may find her discussions of such popular sources as science fiction, movies, and television distracting, and her statements concerning such issues as nuclear war bewildering and digressive. To accept her approach one must shed a great many assumptions about what properly belongs to the study of science.

Which one of the following best describes the attitude of the author of the passage toward Primate Visions?