I posted this video without any lead-in, because I want the viewer to process it on their own, before I weigh in with my thoughts. However, I imagine that the mere title of this post prefaces the video and will make you see it in a different way. Just as the mere fact that it is Bristol Palin in the video – because of who her mother is – prefaced how I watched the video. Or how automatically any analysis of teen pregnancy in my brain necessarily intersects with my understanding of privilege.

Perspective is a funny thing.

Upon first watching the video, I felt all sorts of ill feelings. On the one hand, we have a woman talking about the importance of making good choices with regards to sex – to think before you act, more or less. There is no inherent fault in that argument, because thinking is always good.

On the other hand, the video is using class war to advocate celibacy. And class war automatically intersects with the discussion about race and privilege.  For example, when Bristol Palin’s pregnancy first became national news, there were many commentators who mentioned how there was a general demand for sensitivity towards Bristol’s pregnancy, but that the same demands would not have been made if she had been one of Obama’s daughters or any other teen mother of color.

When the mother is white, teen pregnancy becomes merely a regrettable mistake, one that must be handled with great sensitivity and care. But when the mother is a young woman of color, it becomes some sort of moral failure on her part, not only a bad decision but a symptom of the epidemic of poor decision-making by people of color in general.

Mind you, I am not saying that the video above is making any statement at all about race – at least not explicitly. But it does scream privilege loudly, if only the privilege of being wealthy over being poor. In that way it is waging class war, wherein being wealthy affords one a buffer  against the difficulties of raising a child in poverty, and suggesting that therefore only poor women need to think carefully before they risk pregnancy.

This is not incidental. It is no secret that Sarah Palin – and by extension Bristol Palin – occupy that strange gray area where they are pro-celibacy but also pro-family, which more or less translates into “Wait until you’re married, then have a bunch of babies.” They are also part of the same social conservative platform which has put forth the mythical icon of the welfare mother, the poor woman who allegedly has a lot of babies so that she might receive extra financial benefits from the government.

That being the case, the pro-family position is not one that these ideologues hold with regards to the poor. And should a poor mother become pregnant on several occasions, because she – like the Palins – is pro-family, then she should not expect any sort of support, most certainly should never consider abortion, and therefore be left with the only “reasonable” choice – to send a host of new children into the foster system.

Better yet, maybe she should just abstain from sex altogether.  It is a confusing message, for sure.

What is the poor mother to do? Deny herself the right to have a family because she’s poor? It is blatantly obvious that this piece of propaganda – I don’t even think it deserves to be called a “Public Service Announcement” – is drawing a qualitative distinction between the poor family and the wealthy family. In the beginning we see Bristol, with all of her posh clothing and furniture. By the end, we see Bristol portrayed in the way that the wealthy view the poor – as having absolutely nothing, by virtue of their lack of material wealth.  It is impossible that a poor family could be just as happy as the wealthy and privileged Bristol Palin in their choice to have a child.

At the same time that this platform calls for sensitivity towards Bristol Palin and her pregnancy, it approaches the poor with moral judgment and paternalistic mandates for what decisions these women should make regarding their bodies and their families. It is not merely hypocritical, but is nothing less than class war. And when we consider that racism and classism are inexorable – indeed the “welfare mom” is portrayed as a black woman, and people of color are disproportionately poor – we come to realize just how much propaganda can be stuffed into a mere 30 seconds.

Hilarious, right?

When asked who her audience was for the poem, the student said “Minorities, because they’re the main ones on welfare…”

Now for some demographics. The vast majority of students in this classroom were Euro-American, the exception being two African-American girls. One of these two girls was the one reading the poem. In case the gravity of that escapes you, there were three things very wrong with this scenario. First was that the girl has been given a totally skewed view of the demographics of welfare. She has bought into the idea that African-Americans receive the lion’s share of welfare benefits, to the point of believing Reagan’s myth of the “welfare queen“.

Second, whatever little bit of privilege she’s experienced out here in the desert (more on that later), she apparently has no concept of the historical inequalities that created the need for socioeconomic support for minorities. Third, she felt comfortable enough in a room full of white peers to perpetuate this vicious stereotype. As if when lines of class and race are drawn, she would stand with them, and they’d all laugh together.

A little while ago I intuited that the African-Americans in this state had mostly “assimilated”, for their lesser numbers (measured versus the national proportion and especially the east coast), and for the fact that the much larger Mexican minority serves as a greater threat to the white majority.

So my speculation has been that African-Americans in the West, much like Latinos and Asians in the east, for their non-threatening numbers and significantly improved socioeconomic distribution, have been afforded a sort of “hostility waiver”. In other words, they are acceptable so long as they do not grow too large, act too radically, or cost the average taxpayer too much in social programs. A controlled minority is a tolerable minority. Those Hispanics on the other hand…

In plain speech, because there are so many Mexicans in the state, they are the group that white people fear, hate, and resent, rather than African-Americans.  So African-Americans out here decided to throw in their lot with the white people.  And why not?  Because as long as the Mexicans are the focus of white fear and rage, they can slip in under the radar and point the finger, too.  It’s just good politics, right?

What this situation highlighted for me was the overall misconception about so-called “welfare” in the United States.  As this young lady and many others around the country seem to think, people of color gorge from the national bosom, having excessive amounts of children while refusing to work, so that they might benefit from so many “hand outs”.  The contention, especially for white Americans, is that their hard-earned tax money is being spent disproportionately on undeserving minorities.

This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of welfare, in terms of the allocations by ethnicity, and just how much welfare takes away from the overall federal budget.  From 1935 to 1996, that which we call welfare fell under the federal assistance program known as Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).  From 1996 onward, after welfare reform by President Clinton, the program was renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), reflecting a new policy of limiting assistance to a maximum of five years.  The statistics of AFDC recipients by race varied from year to year throughout the life of the program, but a brief from the census bureau provides a snapshot:

About 1 in 4 Black mothers of childbearing ages (1.5 million) were AFDC recipients, higher than the 7 percent of corresponding White mothers (2.1 million). Despite these differences in recipiency rates, Black AFDC mothers did not have significantly more children than their White counterparts.¹

I selected African-American families for my comparison for two reasons – first, because the “welfare queen” was portrayed as a black woman, and because the statistics for “Hispanics” are troublesome, in that linguistic classification may apply to families who are also categorized as white for the purposes of the census.  These numbers show that, contrary to popular misconceptions, there were a larger number of white welfare recipients than African-American families.  This goes against any idea that welfare is a particularly “black” problem, or even that African-Americans form the majority of people on welfare.  Now here someone might point out that a higher proportion of African-American families received welfare, which is true, but it is a fact taken without consideration for historical inequality – from hiring to housing, part of the greater socioeconomic legacy of racism throughout this country’s history.

The demographics of AFDC or TANF are hardly the main thrust of my argument, however.  That comes with how we even define “welfare”.  If the issue is the federal government providing funding to people who have not earned it, then our definition of welfare must be expanded to include all of the corporations who received subsidies through the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (otherwise known as the “bailout”).  These corporations together – and lest we forget, corporations are recognized as “people” – were allocated tens of billions of dollars.  So here I ask you, who is more “deserving” of assistance – a poor family, irrespective of ethnicity, or a corporation whose executives directly facilitated our current economic meltdown?

The primary opposition to welfare comes from conservatives.  And at least we can say that they are consistent in their stance, critical of both social welfare provided to families, and the bailout.  Until we consider another major recipient of welfare, who they almost unanimously support: the state of Israel.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, a site amicable to Israeli interests and continued U.S.-Israeli cooperation, “Israel has received more direct aid from the United States since World War II than any other country…”, nearly $100 billion since 1974.² The point of mentioning this is not to make a political statement against U.S. Aid to Israel, although in the interests of full disclosure I must admit that I am opposed to this financial assistance. The point is to put things in perspective, as it concerns just how much money the U.S. spends on “welfare” as a whole.

Projections for U.S. financial assistance to Israel were $2.55 billion for fiscal year 2009, and $2.7 billion for 2010, totaling $5.25 billion across the two years. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the payout for TANF is capped at $5 billion for the same two years.³ So, it is nothing short of hypocritical for politicians, pundits, and ignorant citizens to condemn poor families – particularly the disenfranchised poor – while directly or implicitly sanctioning U.S. aid to Israel, all of which is used by their military, not for any financial hardship.  Average citizens may be excused for not knowing about these allocations to Israel, but in these cases their hypocrisy revolves around the rigor with which they condemn poor minorities while not investigating the full scope of U.S. “welfare”.

This imbalance in focus undoubtedly stems from racism, with the idea of minorities disproportionately leeching from the national coffers just another affirmation of already negative preconceptions.  Such ignorance is common enough amongst white Americans, especially in a conservative state, and bears relatively little impact.  But where a young African-American student can buy into the stereotypes levied against girls much like her -  even the girl herself under slightly different circumstances – the situation becomes grave.  It provides a sobering insight into just how institutionalized and deeply entrenched racism has become.

Dear Mr. Steven Sailer,

You are a very dangerous man.

Most of the time, people I argue with about race (and the alleged qualitative differences between races) are ill-equipped for the fight, and their arguments are easily defeated. This is mostly because they argue from an emotional platform — justifying venomous preconceptions because of personal grievances without examining the non-facts that underpin them. The pretentious and self-proclaimed intellectuals amongst them argue on the basis of ancient and obsolete scholarship — indeed straight out of the Carleton S. Coon school of anthropology.

You, on the other hand, seem to be a member of that intellectual elite who have studied to some degree the current biological/genetic/anthropological literature, and who comes out on what I’d consider the “wrong side” of the debate. But because you have studied the literature, your arguments — probably wasted on the majority of your audience, who lack the intelligence to understand them — are difficult to defeat because the jury is still out on the real genetic differences between groups

I am not a geneticist, or a biologist, or an anthropologist, although I studied each of these subjects superficially. But like you, I have read enough to sustain my argument against the lesser of those who purport qualitative differences between races, and have launched something of a crusade against the entire institution of race. However, when I cross paths with people like you, I recognize that my relatively meager knowledge of genetics, biology, and anthropology may not hold up in a debate. I may be called on the actual scholarship that supports the concept of race and any necessary differences between them. I am not yet up to the task, and would probably call upon Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Ashley Montague to bolster my defense, only to get lost in the details.

So, rather than argue with you about whether I am somehow genetically inferior as an “African-American”, whether or not my “race” makes me inherently less intelligent, lazier, or more prone to violence as you have suggested both implicitly and explicitly at different times, I will pose these questions instead.

For all the studies that purport to show the statistical differences in test scores, school performance, degrees held, income, and whatever other American contrivance believed to determine a person’s worth — between African-Americans, Euro-Americans, Asians, and other groups, what is the end goal? Let’s say that the arguments about race and genetics and intelligence come to an end in the face of irrefutable proof that African-Americans (or Mexicans or any other “group”) are on the whole “less intelligent” than Euro-Americans.

Okay, fine. Then what? What will that finding have accomplished? Is the ultimate goal — as seems to be the case in books like The Bell Curve — to justify racism?

And if we’re going to cite genetic/biological/otherwise-inherent reasons for apparent intelligence deficiencies corresponding to race, then shouldn’t we start examining other things, too? Like the far more widespread — spatially and temporally — tendencies of “white people” to conquer, plunder, rape, oppress, steal, exploit, and destroy anything they come into contact with? The “evidence” for this is far more robust than what ill-motivated intelligence testing demonstrates. There is literally no place on earth where Europeans expanded that they did not do one or all of the above — except for Anarctica — which escaped on the basis of its uninhabitability. There were no people to destroy there.

If this is a truism all across the globe and all throughout history, perhaps we should examine “white people’s” genetic predispositions towards complete and utter savagery. And in the end, if the purpose of evaluating “intelligence” is to then make a qualitative assessment between perceived races, or worse to dehumanize one or the other, then let us ask ourselves which is less “human” — being “less intelligent” or being savage and hateful destroyers of peoples and the environment?

Being someone who wishes to abolish the entire concept and institution of race, these can’t be positions that I hold with any conviction. However, within the context of the discussion of race’s validity and qualitative differences between groups, are these not fair questions? I think so.

These questions mandate some new perspective, particularly on what our individual intentions are in even debating race issues. Mine are to see a world where human relationships are defined by our common values, our common goals, our common humanity. And where we differ to learn to understand, appreciate, or at the very least accept those differences.

How about you, Mr. Sailer? What are your intentions?

As noted, neither Murray nor Herrnstein are geneticists, yet they herald biological differences, i.e. “ethnic” or “racial”, as a primary cause of intellectual differences. One has to wonder then, how do they define these racial differences?

“How are we to classify a person whose parents hail from Panama but whose ancestry is predominantly African? Is he a Latino? A black? The rule we follow here is to classify people according to the way they classify themselves.” (p. 271)

What? How is that scientifically viable? There is relatively large genetic/biological diversity amongst the population of people who identify themselves as “black”. I say “relatively” because ALL genetic differences amongst all human beings account for less than one percent of the common genome. The socially recognized relationship between genetics and racial self-identification is a manifestation of culture, and is entirely subjective. Race itself is a social construct, not necessarily a reflection of genetic makeup. To remind you, Herrnstein and Murray are NOT geneticists, do not anywhere in The Bell Curve cite genetics literature, and yet use genetics as the foundation of their argument!

Furthermore, if race is qualified by self-identification, then this suggests something other than a biological correlation to intelligence. It suggests that something about self-identification itself – which is a reflection of one’s surrounding culture – is the correlate to intelligence. What is it, then, about self-identifying as “black” that decreases one’s performance? Could it be awareness of low expectations for one’s race, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy? Could it be that all people who self-identify as black necessarily experience the hardships of discrimination, manifest at least in diminished access to the same resources as people from other groups?

Similarly, the term “Latino” is almost exclusively a United States classification, meaning that the subjects of the Bell Curve study focused on people who speak Spanish or come from Spanish-speaking families or cultures in the United States. It is a given that second only perhaps to physical appearance and gender, a person’s language becomes justification for those in the majority culture to discriminate against them – the assumption being that an inability to communicate signifies some intelligence deficiency, rather than the obvious truth of there being a language barrier. Because there are people of many nationalities and ethnic backgrounds who upon assimilation into North American culture took on the “Latino” classification, we must assume that any correlation between Latino and intelligence has to do with the conditions of that assimilation and not any common biological traits.

Conversely, does self-identification as “Asian” force upon one the stereotype that they should excel academically, or sacrifice all else for the approval of the family? Does self-identification as Asian create for people some sort of obligation – implicit or explicit – that they should perform at a high level?

Finally, does self-identification as “white” leave one in a sort of untethered middle ground, a place of privilege where no expectations are placed on one for their race or their culture, but only on one’s individual merit? So-called “white people” have countless advantages, to do with their position as the dominant culture – in the United States, Europe, and in current and former states once colonized by people from Europe. Invariably, white people – by default – have greater access to education, wealth, and political power. Not to mention the simple benefit of being a constituent of the cultural “mainstream”, placing them in a position to be well-informed of those aspects of the mainstream culture that are likely to be featured in “standardized” (i.e. based on a white standard) tests.

All of these things should have been considered by Herrnstein and Murray, in order for us to even consider the legitimacy of any correlation between how they classified race (as self-identified) and intelligence. Least of all should the discussion have turned towards biological reasons for the achievement gap.

With regards to that biological argument, it is never mentioned which genes correspond to intelligence, probably because the authors (like myself) simply do not know. If that connection was made, then they would have to show how those genes differ between ethnicities so as to manifest as differing intelligences. They would also have to show that these genotypical differences are exclusive of the phenotypical differences, which are either the results of environmental influence (e.g. mutation) or random manifestation. The authors never bother to explore the issue in such depth, yet are quick to draw the line between genetics and intelligence, basing their thesis on equally superficial data. Were they to go so far as I’ve suggested they must, the question of “Why?” emerges. What will it mean if it was determined that the differences in intelligence between one “race” or another is based on the random selection of biochemical configurations? This is a moot point, however, since the authors can’t seem to be bothered with actual science.

Once again, it needs to be noted that there are often greater genetic differences amongst people who identify themselves as “black” than there are between people identifying themselves as different “races”. The question of “what determines blackness” needs to be asked, and yet it isn’t. If “blackness” were defined as “of African ancestry”, then there are a number of people who do not identify themselves as black, but who have this in common – amongst them the “Dalit” of India and Sicilians. In dealing only with “self-identified” black people, the authors are removing a vast number of people from the study who share those genetic characteristics that one may use to identify a person as “black”. Therefore the study is misrepresentative of the whole continuum of so-called “black people”, if “black” is defined by genetics.

I could also mention how everyone on earth is of African ancestry, and yet at some point during the prehistoric diaspora all of these so-called differences emerged. These differences came about due to the varying selection pressures placed on people by the different environments to which they migrated. Are not, then, all of these supposed differences the result of environmental factors? At what point, then do we regard these differences as inherent? Upon the institutionalization of racism.

The Bell Curve also glosses over some of the strongest cases for non-biological factors in determining intelligence.

“Other kinds of bias discussed in Appendix 5 include the possibility that blacks have less access to coaching than whites, less experiences with tests (less “testwiseness”), poorer understanding of standard English, and that their performance is affected by white examiners. Each of these hypotheses has been investigated, for many tests, under many conditions. None has been sustained.” (p. 285)

These three factors – less access to education, poorer understanding of English, and less experience with tests are of great importance in determining the validity of these intelligence tests, yet only a paragraph is devoted to them, regarding them as negligible. More interesting is that the book is heavy on citations everywhere, but in this paragraph, there are no works cited, and the reader is expected to accept this conclusion at face value. MANY tests, under MANY conditions, and yet not one citation? Strange, isn’t it?

Herrnstein and Murray do NO testing of their own, and rely entirely on intelligence testing statistics already performed, most of which did not occur even within ten years of the writing of the book. Also, the literature is considered valid without considering the possible bias/racism underlying the research itself.

The authors go on to make another incorrect statement:

“Everyday experience suggests that the environment confronting blacks in different sectors of American life is not uniformly hostile” (p. 286)

What do they mean by this? I take it to mean that the authors disregard the fact that American life IS inherently more difficult for black people than for white people, be it through overt racism or covert conspiratorial agendas. The general idea of this book, that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites is one prevalent throughout American culture, whether based on this kind of “research” or on related stigmas. That alone engenders a more “hostile” or disadvantaged environment for blacks people. Affirmative action wasn’t created to inconvenience white people. The Civil Rights Movement was not the end of racism. In its [racism's] submersion beneath the public radar (i.e. ever since overt expression became taboo) it has in many ways become more dangerous, because it is easier to ignore, yet still manifests in unfair practices. There is no public sphere in American life in which this is not true; that is to say that racism and disenfranchising practices exist in every sector of American life.

With regards to the role of socioeconomic status, they state:

“The trouble is that socioeconomic status is also a result of cognitive ability, as people of high and low cognitive ability move to correspondingly high and low places in the socioeconomic continuum. The reason that parents have high or low socioeconomic status is in part a function of their intelligence, an their intelligence also affects the IQ of the children via both genes and environment.”

The assumption here seems to be that socioeconomic status is based on intelligence, and intelligence is based on race, so therefore socioeconomic status is somewhat negligible in determining intelligence differences. This is the same as saying that proof that the chicken came first is because it came from an egg, and only chickens lay eggs. This is the kind of circular logic present throughout the book.

Also, there are a few important underlying points to be found in this paragraph, that the authors completely fail to recognize. Socioeconomic status, particularly amongst black people, is not a condition created in one or even two generations. Socioeconomic inequality goes at least as far back as slavery. Starting with the prohibition of education for slaves, seguing into the widespread lack of education amongst them after Reconstruction, then leading into the institutionalized racism of post-Reconstruction America up to the present, there has never been a level “playing field” for black people so as to be able identify intelligence as the primary determinant of socioeconomic status. There is no control group.

Where socioeconomic status – however such a thing is measured – is the “same” between races, they may share many common disadvantages. However, there is always a uniquely black dilemma, fostered by racism and a long history of inequality. Even if two families – one black and one white – had equal incomes, living in identical houses in the same neighborhood, with the same amount of children, the same jobs for both parents, in fact all things identical with the exception of “race”, the black family would still be at a disadvantage, not because of genetics, but because of the aforementioned dilemma. It is the very dismissal of this dilemma, the downplaying of racism’s impact, that allows it to propagate. This is not to say, however, that all disadvantages amongst the black population are the solely the result of racism, or even of socioeconomic status. There most definitely are genetic determinants of intelligence, but they exist mutually exclusive of race, which as anyone with any sense knows is a social construct, one that real science dismisses.

The authors also ask the question: “How do African-Americans compare with blacks in Africa on Cognitive tests?” Their conclusion, again based on raw statistics, is that “African blacks are, on average, substantially below African-Americans in intelligence test scores.”

Furthermore, they state:

“…the main point is that the hypothesis about the special circumstances of American blacks depressing their test scores is not substantiated by the African data.” (p. 289)

In most cases, Africans are MORE disadvantaged in terms of socioeconomic status, which includes education and access to resources (e.g. technology), which can account for the differences between them and African-Americans. If anything, this data strengthens the argument for socioeconomic status being a major determinant in intelligence differences!

The book cites work by the “controversial” Arthur Jensen, who argued that black people were intellectually inferior in terms of “g”, which stands for general intelligence, i.e. that value which transcends all the other sub-types of cognition such as spatial or reaction time. Jensen said that where tests were “better” at measuring g (and it is not specified how one test can be better than another in this regard), the disparity between black and white scores was higher. This indicates that in terms of overall intelligence, black people are inferior. Herrnstein and Murray go on to argue that although there were philosophical arguments against the need for such testing, no experts who reviewed the data could refute it. What’s peculiar, however, is how Herrnstein and Murray automatically see these results as evidence of the intelligence differences being determined by genetics, as opposed to the possibility that all the black people tested shared a common environmental disadvantage.

The Bell Curve is also rife with contradictions. If intelligence is determined mostly by genetics, and genes do not change in a person from birth to death, this means that IQ cannot change either. However, on page 303, the authors cite research by Arthur Jensen, saying:

“[Jensen] found that in black families in rural Georgia, the elder sibling typically has a lower IQ than the younger. The larger the age difference is between the siblings, the larger is the difference in IQ. The implication is that something in the rural Georgia environment was depressing the scores of black children as they grew older.”

Really? THAT is the implication? Are they serious? When I read that data, I interpret it to mean that due to gradual improvements in the environment, such as improvement of socioeconomic status or decreasing racism, later generations are less inhibited and thereby have more fertile ground for their IQs to develop. Their conclusion, on the other hand, contradicts their assertion that environmental factors are a smaller factor than genetics. As has always been the case everywhere throughout the United States, this rural Georgia environment will not be equal between black and white people; black people will still have a relative disadvantage, mired in discrimination.

As an aside, I would like to put forth a few interesting observations I’ve made. From 1986 to 1989, Murray was given an annual grant by the Bradley Foundation of $90,000, rising to $113,000 by 1991, and then to $163,000 following publication of The Bell Curve. (source: Wikipedia) Why is this significant? The Bradley Foundation is a wealthy, influential, right-wing foundation known for – amongst other things – researching potentially damaging information on President Bill Clinton with regards to his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Before that, they sought to discredit Anita Hill, the woman who brought sexual harassment charges against Clarence Thomas. At the time Thomas was being nominated by President George H.W. Bush for the Supreme Court. There are a few interesting things to note here.

On one hand, the Bradley Foundation worked hard to dismiss charges of sexual harassment, as they confliced with the conservative agenda. Clarence Thomas, despite being a black man, is someone whose personal ethics and politics are regressive in ways that are destructive to black people. He is simultaneously a weapon for conservative agendas and “proof” that those agendas are not racist in nature, making him doubly dangerous. On the other hand, the Bradley Foundation sought to exacerbate the negative sentiments towards Bill Clinton, in line with the conservative platform and its purported moral highground. Clinton is renowned for being a favorite amongst liberals and especially African-Americans. Interesting how their attitude towards sexual harassment changes to fit their agenda.

According to an ABC news report, $3.5 million was contributed to researchers cited in The Bell Curve, and almost half of the research cited to support the most controversial racial conclusions of the book, came from the Pioneer Fund. Now what is the Pioneer Fund? “The Pioneer Fund is a controversial non-profit foundation established to, in their words, “aid in conducting study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race” (source: Wikipedia).

By and large, the prospect of eugenics has been used to further ideas of “racial purification”, the general idea – although not stated explicitly – being that that certain races are inferior, and therefore should be “weeded out”. Now here’s a curious coincidence. The Bell Curve and similar literature was funded by a group pushing conservative political agendas that aim to further disenfranchise and inconvenience minorities, justifiable on the basis of social Darwinistic ideology. At the same time it is funded by a group that implicitly suggests that minorities should be artificially selected out of existence, using eugenics. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I will say that perhaps all of these connections truly are a coincidence, although the thesis of the book would suggest otherwise. I will leave that open to interpretation.

In that the focus of the book is the difference between so-called “blacks” and “whites” (these two terms ignoring The many differences within each “race”), it could be seen as a case for white superiority, rather than a holistic argument for genetic cognitive differences across the spectrum of all humanity. Perhaps the authors didn’t feel like investing the time and effort it would take to compile such a massive study. Perhaps a truly comprehensive look at these supposed differences would’ve have become too large and too technical for the lay reader. If this book was intended for the lay reader, then the streamlining of the research is even more destructive, because then it becomes a mainstream reference. If “The Bell Curve” is one of the only books accessible (in terms of ease of reading for the average person) by the general public, while more comprehensive texts are mostly accessible by the academic sphere, The Bell Curve becomes the standard.

Also, I would say that I am more inclined than the average person to read this kind of literature, and yet even I feel it to be a chore to read the book in its entirety. How easy, then, is it for the average person predisposed to the underlying racist ideologies of the book, to gloss over the text and draw from it only those “facts” needed to support their preconceptions?

In the end, given the authors’ plethora of oversights, conclusion jumping, assumptions, and circular logic, a person can draw one of two conclusions about The Bell Curve. Either the motivation behind it is the propagation of racism, or racism is the transcendent context in which it was written (perhaps to some degree unbeknownst to the authors themselves). Herrnstein and Murray are either very determined and very clever racists (clever because they toss in enough seeming “objectivity” to deflect accusations), or grievously ignorant, a possibility that brings their very credibility as academics into question. Whatever the truth is, it is clear that “The Bell Curve” is not a dependable reference on the differences between people – in terms of intelligence or otherwise.