The Bell Curve and the mainstreaming of race science
The publication of political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein’s bestselling book
The Bell Curve in 1994 took the ideas about the genetics of race, intelligence, behavior and crime held by Pioneer Fund recipients and
Mankind Quarterly contributors from the outskirts of public debate to the mainstream.
The nearly 1,000-page tome — built on the scholarship of race scientists supported by the Pioneer Fund — introduced the broader public to the ideas circulating in racist academic circles. And, because they presented their work as mainstream scientific consensus, the book lent white supremacists a hand in their quest to change the way Americans discussed the issue of race.
In
The Bell Curve, Herrnstein, a Harvard professor who first broached the issue of race and IQ in a 1971 article in
The Atlantic, teamed up with Murray, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, to examine racial and social stratification in America. The two social scientists argued that those who made up the American “underclass” were there not because of racial or socioeconomic disadvantage, but because of genetic deficiencies passed down through generations. The gap between the underclass and the “cognitive elite,” they insisted, was growing, and soon the problems posed by those who occupied the bottom of the intellectual ladder would worsen because “addiction, violence, unavailability of work, child abuse, and family disorganization will keep most members of the underclass from fending for themselves.”
[35][36] Poor black people, they argued, fell into their low social and economic position because of differences in IQ.
All of this rested on scientifically questionable research. As
Charles Lane pointed out in his critique of
The Bell Curve for
The New York Review of Books, “No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of
The Bell Curve have contributed to
Mankind Quarterly.”In all, 13 scholars cited in the book received support from the Pioneer Fund, including Rushton, Lynn, Gordon and Jensen. It was thus, unsurprisingly, welcomed warmly by academic racists. Linda Gottfredson — a Pioneer Fund recipient cited by Herrnstein and Murray whose work on race and intelligence won praise from David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People — penned a statement in support of the two social scientists in
The Wall Street Journal. “We’d have funded Murray at the drop of a hat. But he never asked,” Pioneer Fund president Harry Weyher told
GQ.
Scholarly reviews of
The Bell Curve were
[38]overwhelmingly negative. One critique, from three researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, plainly pointed to its central flaw: “Herrnstein and Murray give the impression that IQ is highly ‘heritable,’ but it is not.”
[39] Instead, as researchers explained, IQ is not solely or even predominantly biologically determined, but shaped by a number of variables including education and environment. Critics noted that the book failed to mention the contextual factors that contributed to the growing ranks of the black underclass, including deindustrialization and the flight of jobs from American cities, the quality of education and the lack of wealth and resources black parents could pass on to their children.
The Biggest Lie in the White Supremacist Propaganda Playbook: Unraveling the Truth About ‘Black-on-White Crime'
So we see academic racists further perpetuating this racist lie in MODERN times. And we have seen in this thread posts by people who believe these false racist academic theories.