ABSTRACT
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) have produced a controversial and extensive study about human differences, the sources of these differences and how we should respond to them. The early reactions to the book in the popular press concentrated on the authors’ discussion of racial disparities and the genetic bases for these differences (Heckman, 1995). In his defense of his work, Murray consistently denied that the book centers around the subject of race, as only 1 of its 21 chapters focuses on arguments regarding African American “intellectual inferiority.” The Bell Curve, however, limits the eight chapters of Part Two to a discussion about whites alone, indicating that over half the book remains organized around the question of race, unless one considers the notion that whiteness is not a racial category (Giroux & Searls, 1996). The two principal premises in The Bell Curve are these: First, measured intelligence (IQ) is largely genetically inherited, and second, IQ is correlated positively with a variety of measures of socioeconomic success in society that are inversely correlated with criminality and other social failures. The authors conclude that socioeconomic successes and failures are largely genetically caused (Devlin, 1995). This chapter discusses the impact of Murray and Herrnstein’s observations regarding African Americans and IQ, as exemplified in chapter 13, within the context of a brief historical background on race and eugenics in the West. It concentrates on qualitative, not quantitative, issues regarding Murray and Herrnstein’s findings on the subject.
