A firestorm errupted on the Rutgers University campus in February when university president Francis L. Lawrence told a meeting that "the average S.A.T.s for African-Americans is 750. Do we set standards in the future so we don't admit anybody? Or do we deal with a disadvantaged population that doesn't have that genetic, hereditary background to have a higher education?"
This was not a "slip of the tongue" as President Lawrence quickly claimed. Rather it represents the pervasive racist viewpoint that African-Americans are biologically inferior, a view widely promoted in a vicious recent racist book, The Bell Curve by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray. This book quickly shot into the best-seller list for "non-fiction," and has been widely touted as the missing "scientific proof" of the racial inferiority of Blacks.
The theses of The Bell Curve are simple, and simplistic. The book maintains 1.) that the varying mental capabilities of humans can be effectively reduced to a single number - IQ; 2.) that IQ accurately predicts performance in just about every human endeavor from success in business to parenting, law abiding, and "civility"; 3.) that IQ is primarily an inherited characteristic; 4.) that there are significant differences in IQ between races; and 5.) that no forms of improved environment or remedial education can effectively change IQ and hence performance in life.
This book was commissioned and written, and its appearance orchestrated, to coincide with the war on the poor currently being unleashed by the government through the "Contract on America" and a host of other reactionary measures. The relation of the book to the wave of cutbacks is simple: programs for poor and disadvantaged - from Headstart, to open admissions, to affirmative action - are not only "useless", but "a waste of taxpayers' money" and a "drag on the economy as a whole."
The Bell Curve is supposed to provide the "scientific justification" for a mean-spirited and racist snatch and grab campaign of the rich, designed to deal with economic crisis by preserving the profits of the rich by driving down the living standard of the poor.
Of course the authors of The Bell Curve wonder out loud about the implications of their study. If racial disparities are unalterable, what will the future society based on high technology look like? What social role will there be for those who can't make it? The authors lay out one scenario which they call a "custodial state" for the poor and oppressed: "In short, by custodial state, we have in mind a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business. In its less benign forms, the solutions will become more and more totalitarian."
Just how scientific is The Bell Curve ? The book consists of over 800 pages of charts, graphs, and statistics, and looks very scientific. But it makes the most fundamental mistake in the use of statistics. The authors (deliberately) confuse coincidence with causality. Just because two phenomena always seem to occur together, that does not mean that one is the cause of the other. For example, if it has rained every time your Aunt Mabel visited, that doesn't mean that Aunt Mabel causes rain.
In The Bell Curve , the authors seek to show that every "undesirable" social trait is associated with low IQ, which in turn is always associated with being African-American. But most educated people understand that poverty is caused by social and property relations in society, and not by inheriting a "poverty gene." So the authors try to mystify their readers with statistical tricks that supposedly "correct for environmental factors."
In the end, their argument is about as scientific as the following argument: 99% of the children of people who write from left to right also write from left to right. 99% of the children of people who write from right to left (for example, Arabic) also write from right to left. If we "correct" for the influence of socio-economic status, this still remains true. Hence the direction in which we write is obviously genetic.
Columnist Bob Herbert, writing in the New York Times , remarked that The Bell Curve "is just a genteel way of calling somebody nigger." He is right, and The Bell Curve comes right out of the genre of Nazi race theory.
This essay was originally published
in the May '95 issue of Counterattack.
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