Maybe Haiti really is cursed.  I mean, with a history of poverty, political unrest, and then the devastating Earthquake, one might get it in their head that there was some malicious overseer pointing the finger at the aggrieved Caribbean nation.  But forget Pat Robertson and all his racist nonsense about devil worship.

(Although just to play along for a moment, if one cosmic entity answered the call and led a people to a bloody and near-impossible victory over centuries of slavery and colonialism, while the other condemns them to poverty, corruption, war, and earthquakes, I’d personally be throwing in my lot with Lucifer.)

But back to reality.  If the earthquake, on top of all of Haiti’s other numerous problems wasn’t enough, it was followed by the flood of transracial adoptions with white Americans rushing in with their savior complexes to practically kidnap children, and wrench them not only from their homes, but inevitably their cultures and identities, too.

Then hey, while we’re in the midst of saying “fuck you” to an entire country, let’s have Wyclef Jean – a goddamn musician who probably knows about as much about Haitian politics as a mushroom – run for President.

And isn’t this the same guy who was conducting “free benefit concerts”, only to use his charity foundation’s money to pay himself for doing them? This is the guy who would attempt to run for president in a country with a history of political corruption? Oh, but wait, WAIT – just to make things interesting, let’s put him up against another musician who goes by the Moniker “Sweet Mickey”.

Seriously, what the fuck is going on?

But thankfully, Wyclef’s dumb ass was denied eligibility to run in the 2010 Presidential Elections, for lack of residency.  Nevermind that he doesn’t speak either of the country’s two official languages, doesn’t know their politics from a horse’s ass, and was stupid and self-important enough in all of his American celebrity to think that he could be the leader of a country besieged by the entire spectrum of domestic issues.

All I’ve got to say to that is…phew, good lookin’ out, Lucifer.

That lead me to Scratch Beginnings, a book written by Adam Shepard detailing how he, starting with only $25 and the clothes on his back, managed to “live the American Dream”.  He started at a homeless shelter, got a job with a moving company, and by the time the whole experiment was over, had his own apartment and nearly $5,000 in savings.

Wow, right?

I found an interview with Shepard where he explains some of his experience and also his views on what it takes to live the “American Dream”.  Before I even found the article, I had some ideas about Shepard – ideas that were only affirmed the moment I saw his picture.  To sum it up in two words: white privilege.

Adam Shepard: Poster Child for White Privilege

What proponents of the “American Dream” always forget – or perhaps never even consider – is that the “American Dream” is not equally accessible to all Americans.  Shepard’s experience of being able to get that job, to rent that apartment, has much to do with his privilege as an able-bodied white male.

Before I get into that, though, there is a bit that needs to be discussed about Shepard’s background. He entered the experiment with a college education, which although he did not use the credential to help him get the job, certainly played into his ability to navigate his experience with poverty.

That he was even able to secure a college education speaks to certain advantages he had that many do not.  That he was even inclined to go to college in the first place says more still, because for the genuinely poor, foregoing four years of income for the mere possibility of a better job is often not even a consideration.  The value of higher education is easy to take for granted once you have it.

There is also the small matter of Shepard’s major in college: business management. Might that have given him an advantage that many – if not most – people do not have, with regards to handling his finances? I would say so.

Furthermore, Shepard admitted that he had a credit card in his back pocket for emergencies.  While he didn’t use it for the experiment, just knowing that it was there for him to use certainly buffered him against the harsh reality faced by actual homeless people.  Knowing that he always had a way out if he needed it would prevent despair from setting in.  The psychological cost of homelessness is one that can only be taken for granted by someone who was never truly homeless.

Now, back to his privilege.  As an able-bodied male alone, he would be considered more qualified for work at a moving company, than say the man in the wheelchair he discusses during his interview, or even an able-bodied woman.  As a woman, current statistics would suggest that she’d be getting paid less for the same job, if she had gotten it at all.

Being a white male further enhanced his opportunities, because of certain things he did not have to face.  A person of color in his same situation – especially in South Carolina – would likely have to deal with discrimination, by police who might question his right to be anywhere, by employers who would not give him the time of day, and by rental property managers who would assume that he – for his ethnicity, nevermind his financial situation – may not be able to pay.

In a way, homelessness and poverty are associated with people of color, and indeed people of color are disproportionately poor.  White Adam may have been looked upon with sympathy, or with the assumption that he must genuinely be in a tough spot and that he’ll pull himself up if only he’s given the chance.  Black or brown or red Adam’s condition would’ve only affirmed what the property managers, employers, and police already expect of such people, that even if given a chance he probably wouldn’t do anything with it.

Perhaps here one would be inclined to criticize me for injecting race into an issue that has nothing to do with race.  Except that of course it does, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, and because Adam Shepard himself indicates that it does – whether he intended to or not.  He says in the interview:

I’ve got child care. I’ve got a probation officer. I’ve got all these bills. Now what am I going to do? Am I going to continue to go out to eat and put rims on my Cadillac? Or am I going to make some things happen in my life…?

Who will most people picture when they imagine someone driving a Cadillac with rims on it?  Who, according to stereotypes, drives Cadillacs?  A black or brown person, undoubtedly.  And I am certain that it was a black or brown person that Adam himself envisioned when he made that statement.  Urban dictionary is hardly a scholarly or reputable source of information, but it is useful in providing some insight into the ways that racism can be packaged within subjects that ostensibly have nothing to do with race.  The first definition of Cadillac reads:

A car which is bought with crack money, that must have D’s thrown on it. Sometimes referred to as a bitch.

“Just bought a Cadillac, Throw some D’s on that bitch!”

“D’s”, in case you’re wondering, is short for “Dubs”, another term for rims.  A second definition rams the point home more explicitly:

Once classy brand which my doctor neighbor owned in the 80’s but has now transformed and became popular amongst gangster wannabees…

…Cadillac brand has now become a joke since the only people who like them now are gangstas, poor blacks from the hood…

About rims:

The chief expenditure of African Americans

And:

The subject of every “crunk” rap song, along with “twunny foes”, and prostitution and strippers.

So maybe – maybe – Adam Shepard wouldn’t have been thinking about black or brown people if he had only mentioned Cadillacs, but tack on the rims bit and it’s pretty clear that he was.

Considering all of this, how should I interpret the quote above?  That contrary specifically to what poor black and brown people are doing with their money, with only some “hard work” and “common sense”, anyone can achieve the American Dream.

What Shepard fails to consider is the presumption built into the ideal of the American Dream that one should be white, able-bodied, and male – as is Shepard himself.  It is a presumption that rings true as we see many people, unequipped with white male privilege but exerting the same amount of – or more – hard work and common sense, unable to shatter the various glass ceilings set above them for reasons of gender, race, class, and physical ability. Interestingly enough, Barbara Ehrenreich highlights some of these disparities as they relate to race in a recent article she co-wrote for the Huffington Post.  In it she writes:

The longstanding racial “wealth gap” makes African Americans particularly vulnerable to poverty when job loss strikes. In 1998, the net worth of white households on average was $100,700 higher than that of African Americans. By 2007, this gap had increased to $142,600. The Survey of Consumer Finances, which is supported by the Federal Reserve Board, collects this data every three years — and every time it has been collected, the racial wealth gap has widened. To put it another way: in 2004, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family had only one 12 cents. In 2007, it had exactly a dime. So when an African American breadwinner loses a job, there are usually no savings to fall back on, no well-heeled parents to hit up, no retirement accounts to raid.

Do these statistics reflect an entire population foolishly choosing to put rims on their Cadillacs?  Or do they perhaps reflect a serious socioeconomic disparity based in the institutional racism of American society?  The last sentence in the above excerpt corresponds to Shepard’s ability at any time to fall back on his credit card and the wealth of his parents if and when he needed them – something he was able to take for granted because he did not, in fact, use them.  That is, until he decided the experiment was over and went back to his normal life – again, a luxury that a genuinely poor person does not have.

Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings is in part a criticism of Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which was about her struggle (and failure) to work her way out of poverty as a Wal-Mart employee.  His criticism does not consider how Ehrenreich’s experience might have been different for the fact that she was a woman.  And while Ehrenreich is white, a disproportionate number of Wal-Mart employees are people of color, a fact that is related to the uneven distribution of wealth along racial lines.  Those employees likely have an even more difficult time than she did.

In that Shepard is able to criticize the poor Wal-Mart employee by proxy through Ehrenreich, for her inability to achieve the American Dream as he did, and invoke the image of the poor black or brown person choosing extravagance over fiscal responsibility, he makes his white male privilege very evident.  He also shows how from that position of entitlement it is easy to condemn those who do not have it – invariably women and people of color.

Finally it shows how white male privilege underpins the American Dream and how implicit within that ideal is the utterly racist, classist, and sexist assumption that it is for their own shortcomings – laziness, irresponsibility, stupidity – that anyone does not live the dream.

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.

Let me be clear that any venomous edge or tone to this post is reserved exclusively for Nadya Suleman, not for any of her fourteen children, who are unwitting participants in a profane human experiment.  Under normal circumstances, the birth of a child or multiple children should be a celebrated occasion, but all too often where they are unexpected or unwarranted, it becomes a conundrum.  Children demand so much time and so many resources that their arrivals should be planned so that they can be properly accommodated.  Because this is often not the case, we have a swelling adoption system, an excess of abortions, and/or children raised in unsatisfactory conditions – something that invariably echoes into the future as they become members of society.

For this very reason, Nadya Suleman is a moral deviant.  She has not only brought one child into the world under unsatisfactory conditions, but she has brought in eight of them – in fact a brood – merely to satisfy the desire to have more children.

Undoubtedly the birth of the Suleman octuplets was to the applause of many pro-life advocates, but her case also highlights exactly why every pregnancy should be preceded by extensive thought and planning, and why the option for a woman to not follow through to birth must always be available. After all, life is more than a heartbeat and air pumping through the lungs; there must be consideration for quality of life as well.

Even before the inadequate financial circumstances into which Suleman’s children were born, there was the high risk involved with bringing octuplets to term in the first place.  History shows that the risk is high, as before Suleman there were seven reported cases of octuplets, each with tragic results.

• September 13 and 16, 2000 – Four boys and four girls born to Mariella Mazzara of Italy. Four died within a month.
• December 8 and 20, 1998 – Six girls and two boys born to Nkem Chukwu of Houston. The smallest died within a week.
• December 5, 1996 – Four boys and two girls born alive to Rosario Clavijo in Spain. Two other fetuses were stillborn.
• September 30 to October 2, 1996 – Six boys and two girls born to Mandy Allwood of England. All died.
• December 20, 1985 – Five boys and three girls born to Sevil Capan of Turkey. All died.
• August 16, 1979 – Five girls and three boys born to Pasqualina Chianese of Italy. Six died within two weeks.
• March 10, 1967 – Four boys and four girls were born to Maria Teresa Lopez de Sepulveda, 21, of Mexico City. All died within 14 hours.

In light of these odds, Nadya Suleman’s actions were so selfish and careless that it can barely be understood, and can truly only be attributed to some sort of psychological malfunction.  I am sure it will come out at some point that Ms. Suleman suffers from some obscure disorder, at which point the nation’s shock and awe will necessarily change into at least disgruntled neutrality and perhaps even sympathy.

But she will get no sympathy from me, because outside of whatever psychosis she suffers from, she has showed the clear cognizance and presence of mind to arrange for the national welfare system to support her bizarre pathology, to conduct multiple interviews, and to have a website constructed to exploit people’s concern for her children in order to solicit donations.  She was supposedly even in talks to be paid up to $2 million for an interview and to star in her own reality television show.  Whatever illness Ms. Suleman may suffer from, it does not seem to have rendered her incompetent, leaving her completely responsible – morally and legally – for her perverse actions.

Although Nadya’s Suleman’s moral compass is clearly off center, the needle also necessarily points to the physician or medical team.  He, she, or they – aware of the situation, allowed her to take fertility drugs despite protests by Nadya’s own mother.  One can scarcely imagine the flight of judgment required for a highly educated medical professional to condone such a thing, which naturally leads to speculation that there may have been a more sinister motivation behind it.  Recent reports indicate that the care Nadya received reached costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Newly grounded from the euphoria of pulling off an octuplet delivery, her medical team is looking expectantly to California’s Medi-Cal system for compensation.

Could the sanctioning of a poor woman taking fertility drugs and subsequently giving birth to eight children really be based on something so trite as personal profit?  Or perhaps for the  acclaim a hospital would receive in being one of the only hospitals in history to safely deliver octuplets?  Either way, there was a major lapse in personal and professional integrity.

For Suleman’s part, she has cashed in – figuratively and literally – on her overnight celebrity, appearing in several interviews to defend her decision.  So this was no momentary failure of judgment, but a conscious and sustained commitment to moral bankruptcy.  At the same time as she makes the audacious claim that she is not taking advantage of taxpayers, she continues to pull in $500 per month in food stamps, which are of course paid for by taxpayers.  While the welfare system is necessarily in place to support the poor and disadvantaged, especially children, it was never intended to support those who would intentionally put themselves in a disadvantaged position.

Any vitriol towards Ms. Suleman has nothing to do with the fact that my taxes are helping to support her deviancy, because her situation has not increased my taxes, and I doubt that even one penny from my income goes directly to her.  And I completely support the welfare system, in spite of the fact that my family managed through poverty without it.  I would even see it expanded, if it ensured that the poor and disadvantaged were provided some relief.

Most people participating in the system – exceptions made for other exploitative deviants like Ms. Suleman – are in genuine need, and it is because of that need that I have no objections to contributing to that system.  Ms. Suleman, in creating her need voluntarily, is taking from those who find themselves at an unexpected disadvantage.  That she would deny that this is the case, and that she would be unrepentant, only compounds upon her disgrace.  That she gave birth to eight children she cannot support is a problem in itself, but that she has no concept or conscience of how she affects others is completely unacceptable.  It only becomes a greater trangression when we consider the state of the U.S. economy, and that the needs of the legitimately disadvantaged have only increased.

Things only get worse when we consider that more than half the world’s population lives in absolute poverty.  In very few places, and perhaps only in the United States, can – or would - a person willfully subject themselves and their children to poverty, and then look expectantly to the rest of the world with an open hand.  In most cases, with poverty comes humility, and reservations about receiving aid from others.  The people of the world’s poorest countries eke out a living as best they can with what little they have, and are invariably grateful – never expectant – for those who assist them.

Nadya Suleman is not only ungrateful – for the privilege of living in a country where her situation is even possible – she is indifferent to the fact that there are those who are suffering around her, and in the world at large.  This becomes clear in how she has embraced her sudden fame, making a public spectacle of herself and her children, even having the audacity to hire a publicist, as if to formally legitimize her celebrity status.

Reports are coming in that Ms. Suleman has gone into hiding, due to a number of people making threats towards her and her children.  She has allegedly checked into a hotel, leaving her publicist to interface with the public.  The welfare system does not cover the fees for a publicist, nor does it cover hotel costs.  Word also has it – and picture evidence affirms – that she had some sort of plastic surgery performed on her face.  Yet she has had to rely welfare system and the donations of strangers for support.  The people who have offered or made donations to the Suleman brood almost certainly did it for the sake of her children, and considering her need.  They probably did not – do not – intend to fund her public relations campaign.

It is not only a physical problem, as Nadya Suleman takes from the collective mouth of the poor, and the hand of the generous, but an ideological one, as she strengthens the case of those who criticize the welfare system as one of waste and excess.

It is for these reasons that Nadya Suleman – and the medical professionals who have explicitly endorsed her deviancy – are deserving of any vitriol that comes their way.  Instead of her actions being celebrated in the media, they should be examined by a mental health professional, and on proof of competence, examined in a criminal context.

Whatever the outcome of the situation, however, it is important to separate the Suleman children from the indiscretions of their mother, and proceed in matter that protects and provides for them as new members of society.  Even if it means their mother is deemed unfit – all evidence seems to point to this – and that they need to be placed in another’s care.

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.