Psychologists and a few sociologists have provided the academic respectability for the political rationale that the American body politic's civil rights indigestion needs a resurrected, separate but equal diet. Today, it is intellectually respectable to question the genetic equality of whites and blacks, to assert the cognitive incapacities of blacks and Chicanos, and to worry about the demise of democracy as the result of too much equality. This has its intellectual roots in the racist theories of Count Arthur Joseph de Gobineau, who wrote "The Inequality of the Human Races" in 1853. The putative relationship of the variables of racial genes and intellect as outlined by Dr. Arthur Jensen in 1969 is but a sophisticated rehearsal of a historically tired theme. Although there are a few white scholars concerned with the application of theories of cognition and pedagogy to the improvement of culturally divergent people, there are psychologists--mostly black--who are part of the solution rather than the problem. Black children can learn and achieve, even in slum environments, at the same rate as their advantaged white peers, provided multiple instructional strategies are employed to maximize the responsiveness of divergent cognitive styles. (Author/JM)