Simply being stopped but not charged by the police becomes evidence of an IQ-graded tendency to criminality. (White men who never have been stopped have an average IQ of 106; those who have been schlep along at 103.) Instructively, they restrict their analysis of white criminality to a male sample and parenting to a female sample. "Parents"=mothers. And while they examine abuse and neglect of children among this female sample, spousal abuse is mentioned nowhere in the book, much less considered a discrete form of male criminality.
The analysis of supposed white variation in IQ, though, is ultimately a front to fend off charges of racism. What really drives this book, and reflects the diabolical power of the Murray/Herrnstein combination, is its claim to demonstrate black intellectual inferiority. They use IQ to support a "twofer": opposition to affirmative action, which only over-places incompetent blacks, and contention that black poverty derives from the existence of an innately inferior black underclass. (They actually waffle on their key claim, that IQ is inherited and fixed by nature, but, having granted in passing that it may not be, they go on to treat it as immutable.)
As has been conventional to a stream of racism claiming scientific justification since Thomas Jefferson, Murray and Herrnstein feign a posture of neutral, if not pained, messengers delivering the indisputable facts. Since the book's publication, Murray has insisted that he and Herrnstein in no way want to be associated with racism, that the book is not even about race, which is the topic of only one of the book's twenty-two chapters. Beneath his distinctively sibilant piety, here, as elsewhere, Murray is a liar.
In addition to the infamous Chapter Thirteen, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability," three others center on arguments about black (and, to varying degrees, Latino) inferiority. The very next chapter, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ," is a direct attempt to explain existing racial stratification along socioeconomic lines as the reflection of differences in group intelligence. The other two chapters in Part III seek to pull together claims about racial differences in intelligence and behavior. Those four chapters set the stage for the book's only two explicitly policy-driven chapters, "Affirmative Action in Higher Education" and "Affirmative Action in the Workplace," both of which are about initiatives directed toward blacks and slide into stoking white populist racism with hypothetical cases of poor or working class whites shunted aside in favor of under-qualified, well-off blacks.
Murray's protests suggest something about his views of race, however. The Bell Curve makes a big deal of restricting the eight chapters of Part II to discussion of whites alone. Whites, presumably, are also a "race," as much as blacks, Latinos, and Asians are. Therefore, well over half the book is organized consciously around race as a unit of analysis. Moreover, the theme of racially skewed intelligence runs through the entire book. And how could it be otherwise in a book whose point is that the society is and must be stratified by intelligence, which is distributed unequally among individuals and racial groups and cannot be changed in either.
Despite their attempts to insulate themselves from the appearance of racism, Herrnstein and Murray display a perspective worthy of an Alabama filling station. After acknowledging that genetic variations among individuals in a given race are greater than those among races, they persist in maintaining that racially defined populations must differ genetically in significant ways, otherwise they wouldn't have different skin color or hair texture.
Most tellingly, however, they attempt explicitly to legitimize the work of J. Philippe Rushton, the Canadian psychologist who resuscitates classic Nineteenth Century scientific racism in its most literal trappings - measuring cranial capacities, brain weights, and penis sizes to argue for racially separate rates and patterns of evolution. They announce self-righteously that "Rushton's work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot, as many of his critics are given to charging." This about a man who attempts racial rankings on "Criteria for Civilization" (only "Caucasoids," naturally enough, have met all the twenty-one criteria on his checklist) and "Personality and Temperament Traits," in addition to erect penis size (by length and circumference, no less) and who computes an "Interbreeding Depression Score" to help clarify his statistical findings!
The Rushton connection reflects a particularly revealing and sinister aspect of the Herrnstein/Murray collaboration. It is embedded in the intellectual apparatus of the cryptofascist right. The central authorities on whom they rely for their claims about IQ, race, and heredity are nearly all associated with the Pioneer Fund, an ultrarightist foundation that boasts of having been almost entirely responsible for funding IQ and race and heredity research in the United States in the last twenty years, and much of it worldwide. (Rushton, along with almost everyone else who writes jacket blurbs for his book, is a major recipient of Pioneer grants.)
The Fund is also deeply implicated in the movement to restrict immigration (see Ruth Conniff, "The War on Aliens" in the October 1993 issue of The Progressive) and has helped bankroll California's nativist Proposition 187. Wealthy American eugenicist racists created the Fund in the 1930s, as Stefan Kuhl recounts in The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, to "'improve the character of the American people' by encouraging the procreation of descendants of `white persons who settled the original thirteen colonies prior to the adoption of the constitution.'"
Professor Barry Sautman of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology notes that this international network of racist scholars, quite like Herrnstein and Murray, recently has converged around tentative claims that Asians, especially Northeast Asians, rank above whites on the scale of competence. The researchers hold up this thesis, which is gaining adherents among Asian reactionaries, as a way of deflecting charges of racism.
What makes this international vipers' nest so dangerous is that many of its members have maintained academic respectability. Rushton, for instance, as recently as 1988 won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Others routinely do contract research for the U.S. military. Most hold respectable university appointments. I can't account for the others' legitimacy because their academic precincts are far enough away from mine that I don't have a sense for the protocols that govern them or what other kinds of scholarship they may do.
But Murray is a different matter. He has been an intellectual Brown Shirt since he first slithered into public life. He has neither changed nor done anything else that might redeem his reputation as a scholar. We can trace his legitimacy to the spineless opportunism and racial and ideological bad faith of the liberals in the social-policy establishment. They have never denounced him. Instead, across the board they have acquiesced in his desire to be seen as a serious and careful, albeit conservative, scholar. They appear on panels with him and engage him as a fellow worker in the vineyard of truth. They have allowed him to set the terms of debate over social welfare and bend over backward not to attack him sharply. Take a look, for instance at the first chapter of William Julius Wilson's catechism of liberal underclass ideology, The Truly Disadvantaged, and compare the way that Wilson treats liberal and left critics of the culture of poverty notion and the way he treats Murray.
Indeed, their response to The Bell Curve should give us important insight into just how bankrupt the new technicians of dispossession are. There's not much reason for optimism on this score. This past July, Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced at his Senate Finance Committee hearing on welfare reform that we could be witnessing the processes of "speciation" at work among the inner-city poor. And he did so with the assent of Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, and her two world-class liberal poverty-researcher under secretaries, Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood (the originator of the "two years and off" policy who, incidentally, shows up in The Bell Curve's acknowledgements). Just how different is that from Rushton or the Aryan Nation or the old White Citizens Council?