The Return of Determinism?
The Pseudoscience of the Bell Curve
by Rajiv Rawat
In the past few months, there has been much discussion about the book, The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. This latest incarnation of biological determinism,
where specific test scores and achievements are supposedly predetermined by genetic inheritance,
has generated much controversy. A large number of magazines and papers have covered the
authors' claims, and have perhaps unintentionally legitimized the topic in rational discussion. As a
science and technology magazine, we felt that we ought to address an issue fundamentally based on
scientific knowledge. Are Herrnstein's and Murray's ideas, in fact, as scientifically sound as they
claim? Malcolm Browne of the New York Times Book Review commented in his article that the
authors were "recognized by colleagues as serious scholars." Jeff Cowley of Newsweek further
characterized the book as follows: "As the shouting begins, it's worth noting that the science behind
the Bell Curve is overwhelmingly mainstream." Is it mainstream, or plain bunk, repackaged Social
Darwinism and eugenics masquerading as a new discovery in genetics and "statistical" truths? As in
most academic discourse, the text itself is written in a seductively ambiguous manner, claiming no
implied racism or political bias, but a definite answer can come from looking directly at the history
and background behind the Bell Curve's theories. Though the philosophical and policy issues
surrounding the subject are of greatest importance, the book's assertions will ultimately stand or fall
at the source.
The "scientists"
The first suspicions of the book's scientific worth were confirmed by an investigation into the
identities of Herrnstein and Murray. Neither of their backgrounds are in genetics or even the
biological sciences. The late Richard Herrnstein was educated in psychology and Charles Murray
earned a degree in political science. Both had histories of chronic racism. Herrnstein was picketed
at Harvard in 1971 for his racist views. In one of several incidents, a young Charles Murray held a
cross-burning in his hometown. Murray also has a definite political ideology, being a member of the
American Enterprise Institute. In the mid-1980s, Murray wrote a book called Losing Ground. In it,
he advocated essentially the same views (disadvantaged sections of the population remaining
marginalized due to their own genetic defects) as his more recent publication. He has campaigned
for the end of welfare, one of several direct policy recommendations of the Bell Curve.
As for the book's findings, none of its "research" was new or original. The authors drew on
several sources, none of whom were reputable geneticists. In fact, many were long discredited IQ
researchers such as Arthur Jensen who hypothesized in 1969 that blacks were inferior and set out
to prove it. They also cited Philip Rushton, a professor at the University of Western Ontario,
whose own pronouncements on race drew fire from geneticists across the world. His theory of
sexual-mental tradeoffs (i.e., people with larger genitalia suffered from decreased mental capacity)
expressed in human races was declared "plainly science" by Murray and Herrnstein, even though
Rushton stands alone in supporting it.
By far the most text citations originated from the Mankind Quarterly, a pseudoscientific
anthropological journal that was founded by eugenicists and assorted fascist ideologues. Its original
goals of combating communism, egalitarianism, and championing apartheid were based on a
philosophy astonishingly close to the Nazi "racial sciences". The Bell Curve cites Richard Lynn, an
associate editor of the magazine 24 times. Lynn has expounded the merits of genocide under the
guise of so-called "human evolutionary progress". Allusions like Lynn's to evolution in a Social
Darwinian fashion are frightful if not absolute scientific rubbish. That evolution determines progress
and fitness within human populations fails to consider either the enormous time span involved in
substantive evolutionary processes or the relative human genomic homogeneity in regards to race.
(Most geneticists agree that race accounts for only a small fraction (~6%) of our genetic diversity.
Other traits are much more important in determining our total genetic makeup)
Much of the funding for the work of these pseudoscientists came from a shadowy primary
source: The Pioneer Fund. Formed in 1937 during the Depression era over concerns of "dysgenic"
pressures on the American population, this New York-based foundation wishes to maintain "race
hygiene" by ending racial integration and stopping immigration, goals long sought by eugenicists and
racists alike.
Heads: Big and Small
Much of the speculation about racial intelligence differences comes from the 19th century
practice of craniometry, where samples of skulls from several races were examined for brain
capacity. Many scientists believed that such crude evaluations of people's brain sizes "apparently"
corresponded to a person's mental ability. In those days, female inferiority was taken for granted
and the smaller skull measurements of women confirmed those "findings." Also samples of skulls
from around the world confirmed Western European supremacy. The "scientists" in pursuit of these
studies always failed to clarify how typical these skulls were of their respective populations. Simple
selection of skulls easily biased results, without a scientist necessarily realizing his own subjectivity.
(19th and even 20th century sketches often depicted supposedly inferior peoples with exaggerated
ape and monkey-like characterizations. A culture based on such visualization would have great
difficulty overcoming the associated prejudices as seen by Victorian England's attitude towards its
Imperial subjects) The craniometrists also disregarded the body sizes of their subjects. Moreover,
their measurements were subjective and specious as estimated by later scientists. It was not until
ethical scientists stepped forward to discredit pseudoscientific claims did the racial and gender
theories behind these studies crumble. This style of science escaped destruction though and
continued well into the 20th century as IQ.
The IQ deception
The [children of the
poor] are catalogued,
measured and deemed
wanting the moment they enter
school; they are tested before
they are instructed. The
teacher become a judge; the
class' standing in the reading
and arithmetic is a yardstick of
collective failure; and the fear
of inadequacy pervade the
classroom, suffocating teacher
and pupil alike.
- Vera John and Eleanor
Leacock in Transforming the
Structure of Failure, 1979
The idea that IQ tests and the "g"
factor (generalized intelligence)
supposedly determine intelligence is
likewise rather dubious. Anyone who
believes that IQ has much to do with
intelligence and inheritance will find
no compelling data in the Bell Curve.
In truth, the data that deals with
heredity fails to mention any
accompanying genetic processes.
Such simplistic and inadequate
analyses are overwhelmingly represented in the works of the sources. Measuring intelligence has
long been a source of contention, yet most would agree that such a feature would prove too
complex to quantize as transferable genetic material from generation to generation. Furthermore,
Murray and Herrnstein consistently confuse IQ with cognitive ability, intelligence, and smartness as
if they were all one and the same thing. This obfuscation seems deliberate, as a thorough reading of
the text would unveil the shakiness of their IQ = intelligence based reasoning. In addition to learned
reasoning abilities, IQ measures little more than a person's ability to take an IQ test, as scores
increase dramatically as a person is trained or familiarized with the tests. Like SATs, many IQ
questions are culturally based and extensive acculturation of the test-taker to the test-giver's
background is needed (i.e., proper schooling, role models, etc...) Some questions are idiom,
expression, or historically related that are entirely dependent on the test-taker's knowledge of
general American culture. For example, this question: "Washington is to Adams as blank is to
blank" could not be answered by a non-American, or for that matter, a person who has never
heard of the Founding Fathers. The fact that such questions abound in IQ tests casts enormous
doubts over the validity of the tests' attempt to assert "intelligence" as a measurable quality.
The Bell Curve's extensive statistics do present some interesting correlations, yet Murray and
Herrnstein avoid some of the more obvious explanations. By summarily dismissing socio-economic
factors in favor of race and heredity, the authors fail to account for cultural destabilization,
demoralization, oppression, poverty, violence, fear, lack of health care, malnourishment, drug use,
and literally hundreds of other reasons for differentiable IQ scores. Most nutritionists rank diet high
as a factor in pre- and post-natal mental development, something not mentioned at all in the book.
In 1993 alone, 12 million children went hungry in the U.S. In the last 20 years, only the U.S. and
Britain fell behind the other industrialized nations in providing for their young. In developing nations,
nutritionists have long noted that poor children suffer mental deficiencies along side starvation and
deprivation, as proper physical and mental development are arrested and irreparably damaged by
years of hunger. Closer to home in Boston, malnutrition has been detected at high levels in the city's
poor. Such cruel and criminal neglect of society as a whole has no place for discussion in Murray's
and Herrnstein's book, a work more interested in writing off large sections of the American
population in a "rational" manner.
History teaches us...
Calculating the IQ was
also never meant as a test
for intelligence. At the turn
of the century, Alfred Binet,
a French psychiatrist,
devised a method of testing
for learning disabilities.
Though a former
craniometrist and proponent
of measuring intelligence
himself, Binet succeeded at
devising the first widely
accepted intelligence test,
unlike his more rabid
eugenicist colleagues. Binet
figured that by doing so, he
could design appropriate
remediation programs to
help children with
difficulties. He actually
argued that with proper
education and aid, most
students regardless of
background could catch up
and do quite well in school:
"Some recent thinkers seem
to have given their moral
support to these deplorable
verdicts by affirming that an
individual's intelligence is a
fixed quantity, a quantity
that cannot be increased.
We must protest and react
against this brutal
pessimism; we must try to
demonstrate that it is
founded on nothing."
Unfortunately, Binet did not
live to see or challenge the
eventual application of his original pedagogic ideas as eugenicists in the U.S. discovered a far more
sinister role for his scale. By testing workers, soldiers, immigrants, or students, the American
eugenicists marketed an adapted quotient-based Binet scale (IQ) so that employers, governments,
or schools could separate out the "feeble-minded", and further segregate society along racial lines.
Many state governments adopted eugenics laws in accordance with these tests. Over several
decades, 60,000 American citizens and Native Americans were deemed "white trash" or mentally
retarded (i.e., genetically inferior) and forcefully sterilized for race hygiene purposes. The preamble
"Whereas heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy, and imbecility"
recurred in all the sterilization laws. New Jersey added "feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, criminal
tendencies, and other defects" while Iowa accounted for "the prevention of the procreation of
criminals, rapists, idiots, feeble-minded, imbeciles, lunatics, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics,
syphilitics, moral, and sexual perverts, and diseased and degenerate persons." Beginning in 1911,
the tests were administered to immigrants with predictable results. After long sea voyages filled
with hunger, deprivation, and fear, immigrant groups were tested immediately upon disembarking at
Ellis Island. To their bewilderment, the people were asked questions they had never seen before, in
a language they did not speak, and under conditions that were traumatizing. Predictably, most
scored very poorly. A modern day legacy of these tests is the "Polish joke", as Poles scored the
lowest of all groups in these trials. Over 80% of Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians were also
found to be feeble-minded. Later, the results of these "studies" generated so much concern that the
U.S. government passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. One of the most appalling
effects of this act is detailed by Stephen Jay Gould in the Mismeasure of Man:
The quotas stood, and slowed immigration from southern and eastern Europe to a
trickle. Throughout the 1930s, Jewish refugees, anticipating the Holocaust, sought to
emigrate, but were not admitted. The legal quotas, and continuing eugenical
propaganda, barred them even in years when inflated quotas for western and northern
European nations were not filled... We know what happened to many who wished to
leave but had nowhere to go.
The full consequences of that act will forever remain unknown.
End remarks
Without offering any data on all that occurs between conception and the age of
kindergarten, they announce on the basis of a few thousand questionnaires that they
are measuring the hereditary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously this is
not a conclusion based on research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe...
If the impression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, that they
constitute a sort of last judgment on the child's capacity, that they reveal "scientifically"
his predestined ability, then it would be a thousand times better if all the intelligence
testers and all their questionnaires were sunk without warning in the Sargasso Sea.
- Walter Lippmann
The disinformation masquerading as "sound science" in the Bell Curve should be particularly
challenged by scientists. It is dismaying to see the subject return as a legitimate topic of discussion
to academic circles. Long put to rest by both the aversion to past atrocities and scientific progress,
the Bell Curve heralds a possible return of biological determinism in our era of mean-spiritedness
and hard choices. As the authors claim the scientific mantle to expound outright racism and
prejudice, those with a deeper understanding of statistics, evolution, genetics, and sociology must
respond. Analyzing the data point by point as many have tried would do little good if we do not
understanding the underlying scientific fallacies of the book's arguments. Such a detailed
examination based on false assumptions would emesh the reviewer in a quagmire of statistics,
charts, and equivocal statements, a trap that could muddle and confuse a simple issue. As scientists
and critical thinkers, it's up to us to firmly debunk such studies. The task is somewhat similar to
exposing paranormal hoaxes, yet in this case, the fate of millions of people hang in the balance. To
see so-called "science" become a tool of oppression and discrimination would be shameful and
tragic.
About the Author...
Rajiv Rawat is an Ecology & Evolutionary Biology major in the Arts college. Oddly enough,
he'd take tests over writing papers any day.
"Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" or "Ghosts of Eugenicists past"
Here's a sampling of quotes (with a mean score of nasty and within two standard deviations
of evil) from the ideological forerunners of Herrnstein and Murray. These are typical of the
thinking of a great number of psychologists and IQ researchers during the high-water mark of
eugenics theory early this century. (drawn from Gould, 1981 & Kamin, 1974)
[low IQ] is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest
and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks
which they come... Children of this group [low IQ] should be segregated in special classes... They
cannot master abstractions, but they can often make efficient workers... There is no possibility at
the present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a
eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.
-Professor Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University, introduced and popularized the
Stanford-Binet Scale, the precursor of all subsequent IQ tests.
The Nordics are... rulers, organizers, and aristocrats... The Alpine race is always and
everywhere a race of peasants... The Alpine is the perfect slave, the ideal serf... the unstable
temperament and the lack of coordination and reasoning power so often found among the Irish...
our army sample of immigrants from Russia is at least one half Jewish... Our figures, then, would
rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is intelligent...
We must face a possibility of racial admixture here that is infinitely worse than that faced by any
European country today, for we are incorporating the negro into our racial stock ... The decline of
American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national
groups, owing to the presence here of the negro.
-Assistant Professor Carl Brigham of Princeton University in A Study of American
Intelligence. Dr. Brigham also served as secretary of the College Entrance Examination Board
and the American Psychological Association. He designed the first Scholastic Aptitude Test.
The thesis is carefully worked up to by a logical and careful analysis of the results of the army
tests... we shall certainly be in hearty agreement with him when he demands a more selective policy
for future immigration and a more vigorous method of dealing with the defective strains already in
this country.
-1923 Journal of Educational Psychology's review of Brigham's landmark book.
[It would be wise] to further restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe... A large
proportion of this immigration consists of the Hebrew elements... some of their labor unions are
among the most radical in the whole country.
-Francis Kinnicut of the Immigration Restriction League, testimony to the U.S. Senate
Committee on Immigration, 1923.
We have been overrun with a horde of the unfit... We shall degenerate to the level of the Slav
and Latin races... pauperism, crime, sex offenses, and dependency...we must protect ourselves
against the degenerate horde... We must apply ourselves to the task with the new weapons of
science... it is now as easy to calculate one's mental equipment as it is to measure his height and
weight... this new method... will enable us to select those who are worthy and reject those who are
worthless.
-Dr. Arthur Sweeney, appendix to the hearings of the House Committee on Immigration and
Naturalization, 1923.
Sources & Recommended Reading:
Gould, Stephen J., The Mismeasure of Man., W. W. Norton, 1981.
A book often cited as the definitive debunking of the pseudoscience of craniometry and
intelligence testing. Gould also contrasts biological determinism with biological potential.
Kamin, Leon J., The Science and Politics of I.Q., John Wiley & Sons, 1974.
An interesting analysis of IQ test methodology and the eugenicists of yesteryear.
Mensh, Elaine & Harry Mensh, The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality,
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
The authors of this book delve into the use of IQ in the past few decades as a justification for
racism in the U.S. and Africa. This book also scrutinizing the works of Gould and others who have
addressed the issue.
Jensen, Carl, Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News and Why, Four Walls Eight
Windows, 1994.
One of the articles in this fascinating resource deals with the malnourishment and impoverishment
of America's inner cities.
Tucker, William, The Science and Politics of Racial Research, University of Illinois Press, 1994.
A new book that unlike the Bell Curve, has not been given much media attention, but is definitely
a far better read.
Curbs on Violence Research:
Impeding Science or Preventing the Next Tuskegee?
Paper from the Violence Research Session at the 1999 APHA Annual Meeting
The Coalition Against the Violence Initiative by ELLEN ISAACS, MD
The New York chapter of the Coalition Against the Violence Initiative
(CAVI), a group of health professionals and community activists, was begun
18 months ago in response to the publication of a study by NYSPI, and a
similar one at Mt. Sinai Hospital, in major psychiatric journals. The NYSPI
study involved indirectly measuring the serotonin levels in the blood of 34
six to ten year old boys to look for a correlate with aggression. The boys,
who had no medical or legal history themselves, were chosen because they
were the younger brothers of boys known to the Probation Dept, which gave
their names to the researchers. Only minority boys were included in the
experiment. The children were kept fasting for 18 hours, were given a high
dose of oral fenfluramine (which is known to cause microanatomical brain
damage in animals) to stimulate serotonin release, and had blood drawn from
an intravenous line in place for six hours.
The fallacies in this study are many. On what basis could these children
even be said to display aggression or be likely to do so? All that can
really be said is that black and Latin teens are much more likely to end up
in the hands of the justice system than their middle-class white
counterparts. How could a scientist possibly attempt to correlate the level
of a neurotransmitter at one point in time with complex behavior in the
present or future? How can one draw conclusions even about serotonin levels
when there are no control groups? There were no boys who were subjected to
the stress of the experiment and not given fenfluramine and no group of
children said not to be prone to aggression.
Although this particular research project is over, the ideas and practices
it represents are ongoing at NYSPI and at many institutions around the
country. The psychiatrists at NYSPI subscribe to the view, now widely held
in the psychiatric community, that about 8 million children out of the 50
million in the US are mentally ill and in need of treatment at some point
in childhood. The most common diagnoses are Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder(ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder(ODD), Conduct Disorder(CD),
anxiety and depression. Indeed it is controversial whether ADHD exists at
all, being so vaguely defined as inattention and restlessness. And the
conduct disorders involve behavior which almost every child demonstrates at
one time or another, especially if under stress, such as grabbing other
children's things, irritability, resistance to adult authority. Moreover,
the NYSPI doctors believe that nearly all so-called mental disorders are
biological in nature and thus subject to a biological cure. When we met
with them, they told us that in their child mental health clinics, any
problem than remains unresolved after four weeks, is treated with drugs.
That means treatment with Ritalin, Prozac or its congeners, and perhaps
more potent drugs like Depakote, often for many years. This year, the Child
Psychiatry Department has opened clinics in 9 schools around the hospital,
in the poor back and Latin community of Washington Heights. We worry that
many children will be labeled, put on long term medication and/or be made
the subject of drug experiments of no benefit to themselves.
We in CAVI have some disagreements about the definition and treatment of
mental illness, but we are united in our opposition to reclassifying human
responses to adverse social conditions as medical diseases and subjecting
ever larger numbers of people, especially children, to mind-altering drugs.
It is also evident that the victims of the medicalization are largely poor,
black, and Latin. Our strategies to oppose this bad science have included
extensive writing and leafletting in the area around Columbia-Presbyterian,
where the present and potential research subjects live. We have also had
quite a few spirited demonstrations at NYPSI and at locations where they
are speakers. When possible, we have registered for meetings and confronted
them during the question period. We held a large forum on the issue at
Riverside Church, in which the NYSPI scientists refused to participate, and
we have circulated a petition to the State Research Review Board. We are
currently continuing our opposition to the exoneration of Columbia by the
Office of Protection From Research Risks, despite the clear violation of of
consent guidelines and rules prohibiting the use of normal children as
research subjects. We have had some success in generating exposes in NY
newspapers. Most importantly we are continually seeking to broaden our ties
with the community and have published a parent guide if their children are
approached as subjects.
We have formulated 5 demands as the basis of our program:
No more research be done on childhood behavior which does not fully
consider the environment and is not part of a program to better the
socioeconomic conditions of the child.
No studies be done on children which do not include subjects of all ethnic
and socioeconomic groups.
No studies be done on children which do not fit the criteria of minimal
risk or without fully informed and non-coerced consent, and without
community review.
Researchers, such as Pine, Wasserman, and Halperin, who have not adhered to
the above principles, must be banned from further research on children.
Mayor Giuliani and Chancellor Crew must reveal how and why the names of
children known to the Probation Dept. and the Special Education Dept. were
given to NYSPI, and they must desist from releasing the names of any
children in the future.
There is a national trend, of which this research is but a small part, to
attribute behavior to biological or genetic cause, especially behavior
which is not desirable to those in power. This is not a new phenomenon, but
a resurgence of old ideas which many thought or hoped were dead. During
slavery, slaves who ran away were diagnosed with a mental illness called
"drapetomania." For the first half of this century, the eugenicists in this
country proposed that poverty, feeble-mindedness, and crime were genetic,
and on the basis of this so-called science, sterilization laws and
immigration quotas were imposed. In the late 1960s, following widespread
urban rebellions, a collaboration between the Justice Dept and the NIMH
began which funded hundreds of projects aimed to predict who might become
violent and study methods of behavior control. Perhaps the most notorious
of these proposals came from three neurosurgeons from Mass General who
declared that urban rebels acted violently because of abnormalities in
their temporal lobes, for which psychosurgery was said to be the cure. The
Nazis used such "science" to justify genocide of Jews and other minorities
and their political opponents. The legitimization of biodeterministic
theories in medical and academic institutions, when married to the
propaganda of the fascist state, allowed millions of Germans to be won to
the idea of aiding or abetting mass murder. We should not forget that it
was doctors, psychiatrists to be specific, who first carried out Nazi
policies as they selected deformed, retarded or mentally ill people for
extermination.
In the early 1990s, the NIMH, with the support of the CDC and the Justice
Dept., proposed that research again be increased into the biological causes
of violence, and this so-called Violence Initiative became, for a time, the
most heavily funded NIMH project. Many pharmaceutical companies and private
foundations have also funded such research.
But let us look at the real sources of the violence which we see around us
-- behavior which results in wide spread death or injury. In a four week
period this summer, the NYC police shot and killed 5 people, including a
mentally ill man holding a hammer and a young, unarmed man who hadn't paid
his taxi fare. In NY, 6 people have died of encephalitis and 4 from E Coli
contaminated water because the Health Dept. budget was cut so drastically
in this decade that insect and water control measures are no longer
effectively implemented. Meanwhile, American bombers bomb Iraq daily,
killing a steady stream of civilians, not to mention the estimated half
million children who have died because of US sanctions. Over the past few
decades, our government has been responsible for the death of untold
thousands in Vietnam and Central America. However, no scientists are
investigating the brains of the police or the military or the politicians
for violent tendencies, for these perpetrators are merely carrying out
public policy.
However, we are supposed to be frightened of young children and teenagers
who live in urban ghettos. Despite the fact that violent crime amongst
youth has decreased 39% since 1993, we are said to be in an unprecedented
era of youth violence. The massive publicity around the recent school
shootings has created a climate of alarm and fear which is being used to
justify the increased presence of mental health and police in the schools.
But I believe it is obvious to all of us that children's behavior is highly
influenced by the environment in which they find themselves. A young child
in a poor neighborhood, in dilapidated housing, whose parents may not be
steadily employed, who may not be well nourished, have enough books to read
or a place to study, who encounters hostile police on the street and in his
school, who is in a class of 30 children in a crumbling building is
justified in being unhappy with his nvironment. But a young child does not
sit and analyze the situation and join our Coalition -- he or she expresses
that dissatisfaction in childish ways. He may not pay attention, she may
talk too much, he may not do his homework, she may not cooperate well with
other children or the teacher. In our current environment, that child will
likely be referred by the teacher for "evaluation" and intervention, which
is very likely to result in the child being labeled as ill with depression
or Conduct Disorder or ADHD and placed on Ritalin or Prozac. It is
noteworthy that the majority of children involved in the recent school
shootings were already on Ritalin or Prozac (or a related drug).
Why is the medicating of children happening today with greater and greater
frequency? Clearly it is easier and less expensive to give out pills than
to attempt to fix the myriad of problems that afflict poor youngsters. It
is also more expedient to blame defects in children for their problems than
to address flaws in children's environments. And it is true that the drug
companies are making millions of dollars from this vast new market and that
the psychiatrists at NYSPI and all other institutions are heavily supported
by the drug companies. But I believe that the most important reason behind
drugging millions of children is to control them, and the powerful have
more and more need for this control because there is more and more for
children, especially poor and minority children and their families, to be
angry about.
The globalization of the world economy, with jobs and factories galloping
around the world with ever increasing speed in search of the lowest wages
and production costs, has forever changed the status of American workers.
They are now just another cog in this planetary machine, competing with
workers in much less developed countries, which explains why the wage gap
between the rich and poor is widening in America and even the middle class
must struggle to get by, as documented by recent articles in the NY Times.
Despite claims of the "strong economy," most middle and low income people
are working longer and longer hours for less, while others have only
minimum wage, part time work. Fewer and fewer have health insurance or
enough savings to retire. Although the US is still the greatest military
power in the world, it is also the biggest debtor nation in the world and
desperate to maintain access to cheap sources of raw materials, especially
oil. Thus a continued series of wars to control resources in the Middle
East, Eastern Europe, and South and Central America is to be expected, with
the possibility of escalation to nuclear war always present.
People respond to deteriorations in their conditions of life or the
threat of war in which they don't believe by fighting back, be it through
strikes, demonstrations, or rebellions or just individual resistance. From
the point of view of those in power, there are time tested remedies to
quell such disturbances or the potential for them. One is racism, to
convince people that their problems are the fault of another racial,
ethnic, or national group and not the fault of the system under which they
live. Another is to convince people that their problems are their own
fault, their own inability to make it in a complex world, because they are
too stupid or lazy or incompetent.
The present wave of medicalization of social problems is a major tactic in
this effort to deceive us about the source of our problems. We can see the
reason behind the spate of books and articles claiming that "bad genes"
lead us to be addicts or thrill seekers or unintelligent or criminal.
Recently, an op-ed piece in the NY Times by Alvin Poussaint argued that
"extreme racism" should be declared a mental illness rather that a
reflection of the racism in society. The research at NYSPI and other
institutions that looks for the causes of violence and aggression and crime
in the defective brains of young children is part of the same process. But
it is even more sinister, because these doctors propose not only to
diagnose but to drug large numbers of children for years to come, to rob
them of their energy and sense of well-being and label them as defective.
This is truly genocide against our children, genocide against the poor and
black and Latin children of Washington Heights. If we allow this trend to
continue, we are facing the spectre of a society where the poor and the
rebellious may be the victims of social control through massive
pharmaceutical intervention, all in the name of biomedical progress.
.
Updated November 13, 1999.
kpomeran@gwu.edu
Racism, Intelligence and the Working Class
(4th Edition, February 1995)
published by the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY
In the fall of 1994, the newsletter of the Los Angeles chapter of Mensa (an organization for people with high IQs) published an article calling for the
sterilization of individuals with low IQs. This open advocacy of Nazi-style fascism coincided with the outrageous anti-immigrant racism centered on
California's notorious Proposition 187. In the wake of Prop. 187, organizers had also begun to push the so-called "California Civil Rights Initiative."
This would bar affirmative action programs for women and minorities in all state government jobs, contracts, and schools. Nationally, Democrats and
Republicans alike were converging on a plan for "welfare reform." This campaign justified brutal cutbacks in vital services by using vile racist and
sexist stereotypes of black women having "too many babies."
The pending welfare bill would make recipients work 35 hours per week for their checks, at a median wage of $2.43 an hour. In the wake of Prop. 187,
employers slashed wages in garment and other California industries based on immigrant labor. Prisoners in the US are increasingly serving as virtually
slave labor, sometimes even for private enterprises. "Three strikes and you're out" will swell their ranks. These measures -- all justified by racism --
drive down wages across the board. It is no exaggeration to say that racism is the cutting edge of a very sharp attack on the lives and livelihoods of
the entire working class.
This racism is fueled by professors who dress up their prejudices in the language of science and wrap themselves in the cloak of "academic freedom."
Traits such as criminality, alcoholism, intelligence, and homosexuality, we are told, are biologically determined. Daniel Koshland, editor of the
influential journal Science, even suggested a genetic basis for homelessness. The federal "Violence Initiative" seeks biological "factors" in crime and
proposes drugging large numbers of young children (mainly black boys) in the name of "violence prevention."
Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's book The Bell Curve (1994) is the most alarming recent example of this trend. The authors assert that the
government should reduce the number of children born to poor "low IQ" mothers by eliminating welfare and tightening immigration. Otherwise, they
say, it will have to set up a "virulently racist custodial state" to control urban "high tech Indian reservations." That's some choice: eugenics or fascism!
Although they present nothing new or scientific, they are given wide exposure by the mass media, from "Nightline" to Newsweek, from the New York
Times to The New Republic, from Discover to the Rolling Stone.
Murray and Herrnstein explain in their preface why they wrote their slick and revoltingly racist book. In the late twentieth century, they say, "the
principle of equal rights triumphs" but the US has become increasingly polarized. On one side are the "fortunate ones [who] commonly have six-figure
incomes" while "in the other group, life gets worse, and its members collect at the bottom of society." And "pressures from these contrasting
movements at the opposite ends of society put terrific stress on the entire structure." They want to influence policymaking in the face of this social
crisis. To be blunt: they are among the leading theorists for the fascist agenda.
CHARLES MURRAY, BOSSES' MOUTHPIECE
The Bell Curve fits squarely in the sordid tradition of American Eugenics. Amid growing labor militancy of the 1910s-1920s, US leaders used IQ tests
and Eugenics to weaken class unity with anti-immigrant racism. When anti-racist rebellions rocked the country in the mid-1960s, soon followed by a
strike wave, Arthur Jensen's anti-Black update on Eugenics -- also centered on IQ -- took center stage. Now along come Murray and Herrnstein,
warning that class conflict will tear the country apart and encouraging white middle-class readers to blame "less intelligent" Black and Latin workers
for everyone's problems.
The first edition of this pamphlet appeared nearly twenty-five years ago. It was a response to the resurgence of academic racism encouraged especially
by the work of a Berkeley psychologist, Arthur Jensen. Students and teachers distributed thousands of copies of three editions on campuses across the
US. They helped to organize mass, often militant, protests that put the academic racists on the run.
"Letters I have received from professors at Berkeley and elsewhere lead me to believe that there may have been voices which might have been heard in
the controversy had they not been silenced by fear," Jensen whined in 1972. "In the 1970s," Murray and Herrnstein complain, "scholars observed that
colleagues who tried to say publicly that IQ tests had merit, or that intelligence was substantially inherited, or even that intelligence existed as a
definable and measurable human quality, paid too high a price. Their careers, family lives, relationships with colleagues, and even physical safety could
be jeopardized by speaking out."
To that we say: "Hooray!" Imagine how much harder it would have been for the Nazis to carry out their program of genocide if anti-racists had driven
Nazi professors underground in the 1920s and early 1930s instead of vice versa. The PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY is proud of the role we played
in helping to organize the International Committee Against Racism to galvanize the opposition to the academic racists. But Herrnstein and Murray add:
"Research on cognitive abilities continued to flourish, but only in the sanctuary of the ivory tower." Anti-racist students, workers, and professors
must step up the fight against academic racism so there will be no sanctuary anywhere for the Nazi theorists of today.
The present edition of "Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class" has two main goals. The first is to arm our readers for the fight against racist
ideology. The second is to explain why we believe that this fight can only be won, finally, by destroying the capitalist system that relies on and nurtures
racism.
EUGENICS: 75 YEARS OF RACIST IDEOLOGY
The "Old" Eugenics: From IQ Tests to Gas Chambers
Stanford professor Lewis Terman was a leader in the Eugenics movement seventy-five years ago. According to Eugenics, the so-called "inferior races"
included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Mexicans and black people. Eugenicists said they had too many children, and the
so-called "superior white race" didn't have enough. That, they said, caused social problems such as poverty and crime. "Inferiority" and "superiority"
were measured with Terman's Stanford-Binet IQ test. Eugenicists successfully campaigned for restrictive immigration laws and forced sterilization.
Government and business leaders supported eugenics. The Carnegie steel fortune, Harriman railroad money, and Rockefeller's oil profits backed
institutions like the Station for Experimental Evolution and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Together with the US Public Health Service, the ERO
set up an inspection station at Ellis Island in 1912. Here most new immigrants to the US were given IQ tests. Over 80% of those from southern and
eastern Europe were declared "feebleminded." The Second National Conference on Race Betterment, held in 1915, included representatives from the
Rockefeller Foundation, US Steel, Ford Motor Company, Aetna Life Insurance, Metropolitan Life Insurance, National Cash Register Company, and
the Carnegie Foundation.
During World War I, the US President was Woodrow Wilson, who had segregated all federal civil service jobs and had given his official blessing to
the pro-KKK movie "Birth of a Nation." He appointed racist Harvard psychologist Robert Yerkes to the position of Chief of Army Testing. Yerkes
and his eugenics colleagues gave IQ tests to tens of thousands of new recruits. They concluded (of course) that their tests proved black and immigrant
people to be inferior. Yerkes' protégé was Carl Brigham, founder of the Educational Testing Service (the outfit that runs SAT tests today). Brigham
reported that "Negro," "Alpine," and "Mediterranean" people were inferior to "Nordics." His report helped persuade Congress to pass the Immigration
Restriction Act of 1924. This law cut off almost all immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Many who were locked out of the US by this law
later died in Hitler's gas chambers.
The main impact of Eugenics was to spread racist ideas far and wide. Big businessmen and the government officials who served them feared the
working class movement that was gaining in numbers and militancy during the 1910s and 1920s. Their fears intensified when capitalist intervention
failed to crush the 1917 Russian socialist revolution. Immigrants were among the strongest and most radical leaders among workers in the US. They
helped to organize the Communist Party. Thousands were deported as "dangerous aliens." The US rulers used eugenics, along with the Ku Klux
Klan and other fascist organizations, to weaken the unity of the industrial working class and to build support for the racist and anti-communist
terrorism perpetrated by the government itself.
By 1930, thirty-four states had laws against marriages between whites and blacks (and sometimes Asians as well). Twenty-four states had passed laws
calling for sterilization of the "feebleminded," criminals, and paupers. By 1927, Terman's home state of California had sterilized nearly 4,000 people,
mostly from immigrant families. Some 80,000 were eventually sterilized in state institutions across the country. In Lynchburg, Virginia alone, 8,000
children were sterilized between 1927 and 1972. When the Nazis passed the racist German Sterilization Law in 1935, they modeled it on laws already
on the books in the United States. The Nazi "final solution" was a logical extension of the ideas of Terman, Yerkes, and Brigham.
Allan Chase in The Legacy of Malthus, William Tucker in The Science and Politics of Racial Research, and Stefan Kuhl in The Nazi Connection:
Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, have all demonstrated the close ties between American eugenicists and German Nazis.
Among Hitler's American supporters was the textile magnate Wickliffe Draper. He paid for the establishment of the Pioneer Fund in 1937 to support
"race betterment" in the United States. Draper wanted to send black Americans "back" to Africa. He distributed the Nazi eugenics propaganda film
"Hereditary Defective" to high schools and churches across the US. Later, the Pioneer Fund began to bankroll professors and journals (notably
Mankind Quarterly) dedicated to racism and eugenics. As we will see, virtually all the research seeking cause-and-effect links between IQ, social
behavior, and race in the US from 1937 to the present has come from the fascist Pioneer Fund-Mankind Quarterly network.
Jensenism: Bosses' Response to Anti-Racist Rebellion
In the ten years following the 1954 US Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools, racist theoreticians (with the help of the Pioneer Fund)
carried the Eugenics flag in the southern states. Then anti-racist rebellions began to rock the rest of the country: Harlem (New York City) in 1964,
Watts (in LA) in 1965, Detroit in 1967, and almost everywhere in 1968. Black workers began to give important leadership in strikes that united black
and white in sharp struggle against the bosses: the Newport News shipyard, General Electric, General Motors, the US Post Office, and many more.
Re-enter Eugenics! In 1969, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen published an article in the Harvard Educational Review entitled "How Much Can We
Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Its main point -- that black children are genetically less intelligent than white children -- was broadcast over the
length and breadth of the land by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and Life, among other media. The Pioneer Fund
bankrolled Jensen's work to the tune of over $1.1 million dollars. For 22 years, Jensen collaborated with Nobel-prize physicist William Shockley, also
a Pioneer Fund beneficiary. "Nature has color-coded groups of individuals," Shockley wrote in 1972, "so that statistically reliable predictions of their
adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably be used by the pragmatic man in the street."
In 1992, the unabashed Nazi Roger Pearson -- with the help of Jensen -- edited Shockley's collected ravings on "Eugenics and Race." Murray and
Herrnstein do not even try to distance themselves from this fascist confederation. Of Shockley they say only that he was "as eccentric as he was
brilliant" and that "he seemed to relish expressing sensitive scientific findings in a way that would outrage or disturb as many people as possible."
The same Richard Herrnstein followed Jensen's suit in 1971 with "IQ," published in the Atlantic Monthly at the urging of editor Robert Manning. (As
Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from 1961-64, it had been Manning's job to lie about the early stages of the Vietnam war.) Three other
magazines began pushing the Jensen/Herrnstein/Shockley theme with particular energy: Commentary, Encounter, and The Public Interest. All three --
and Irving Kristol, who at one time or another edited all three -- had been exposed in 1967 as being controlled by the CIA. Their heavy involvement in
"Jensenism" shows clearly that the government was behind it. Around the same time, too, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the US
Public Health Service began giving lavish grants for a whole new field of Jensen-style research known as "human behavioral genetics." David
Rosenthal, Chief of Laboratories at NIMH, joined Jensen, Herrnstein, and 47 others in signing a statement in American Psychologist endorsing the
"hereditarian" view of human behavior.
No wonder, then, that Fortune magazine praised the "hard-headed realism" of the new "nativists" (that is, racists), singling out Jensen and Herrnstein as
their leaders. No wonder that, in the words of then-White House advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "the winds of Jensen were gusting through the
capital at gale force." You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the US ruling class was promoting Jensenism to whip up racism and to
build support for cuts in education and social services.
The consequences of Eugenics, new or old, are disastrous. Whether it leads to the repression characteristic of the US in the 1920s, or to the brutality of
Hitler's Germany, is but a matter of degree. When eugenicist thinking starts to become popular in the press, and in the thinking of government officials,
and when it is taught in the schools, the working people and students are in for trouble.
But as thousands, and then millions, join the fight against racist eugenics, it will be the racists and their bosses (the big capitalists) who are in for
trouble. Through the struggle against academic racism, students and workers come to understand better the thoroughly racist nature of capitalism itself.
Many will become communists and join the fight to smash capitalism and build a new society based on equality and cooperation. In spite of the rise of
fascism around the world, a bright future is waiting for us to seize it.
THE IQ ARGUMENT
For the last 75 years, IQ tests have been the main pseudo-scientific justification for racism against immigrant and black workers. The racist argument
goes like this:
Lie #1. IQ measures some important trait that can be called "general intelligence." This trait (called "g") differs significantly from person to person. It
correlates highly with success in school and later life.
Lie #2. According to the methods of population genetics, IQ is highly heritable. As much as 80% of the difference among people's intelligence may be
genetically determined.
Lie #3. Racial differences are also inherited. So, though nobody claims to have absolute proof, genetics probably explains black-white differences in
average IQ scores.
Lie #4. Success in modern society depends on intelligence.
Lie #5. That's why liberal social programs have failed to create equality.
We don't have room in a short pamphlet to itemize everything that's wrong with these arguments. For those who wish to learn more about the IQ
controversy and the history of scientific racism, we have included a list of publications that have demolished these lies. The issues are really not very
complicated.
All of us should be prepared to expose and attack the bosses' racist lies, especially when they come up in classrooms and textbooks. But we will not sit
on a platform with a Charles Murray or an Arthur Jensen and debate the equality of billions of non-white people. The struggle against these racists is
not solely or even mainly an intellectual one. We must build a mass movement uniting students with workers and youth to stop the Nazi ideologues --
along with all other Nazis -- in their tracks.
Lie #1: "IQ Tests Measure Intelligence"
IQ tests are supposed to measure an inborn trait called "g," or "general intelligence." Murray and Herrnstein's phrase "cognitive ability" means the
same thing. But defining "intelligence" is a political question .
In a capitalist society (like ours) that is based on a struggle between opposing classes, the answer will depend on where you stand in that struggle.
What's smart for capitalists is the opposite of what's smart for workers. For example, business professors from the University of Wisconsin, UCLA,
and Harvard are now developing a theory of "agile management." This means eliminating job categories and using more temporary workers and
part-timers in order to reduce labor costs and increase profits. It is smart for the US capitalists, because it helps them to compete internationally. But to
workers -- for example, at Boeing, where "agile management" is being introduced -- it seems like a pretty dumb idea. As of February, 1995, it has
already meant the loss of 6500 jobs, or 6% of the Boeing work force. It will mean more work for less pay for those who remain. What's smart for
workers is to organize and fight back.
It is smart for bosses to promote racism and individual competition among workers, but it is smart for workers to overcome these divisions and unite as
a class against the bosses. From the point of view of the communist Progressive Labor Party, rebellion and revolution are the most intelligent kinds of
behavior working people and students can adopt. Obviously Murray and Herrnstein -- and the makers of IQ tests -- disagree.
Every type of measurement assumes some form of distribution of intelligence. For example, it would be scientifically valid to develop a test that 99% of
the population would pass. Then we would "find" that 99% of the population is intelligent and 1% or so is mentally defective. Such a test would
assume that intelligence is simply an attribute of the normal functioning human. It would not be useful at all for those wishing to defend social
inequality. After all, if pretty much everyone is intelligent, why should a few be richer and more powerful than the rest?
Existing IQ tests assume that intelligence is a single thing that can be measured with one number. They assume there are large differences in
intelligence, that most people have a mediocre amount, a few have a lot, and some very little. By the definition of these tests, half the population is
"below average" in intelligence. Only a few (Murray and Herrnstein's "cognitive elite") are smart enough to make decisions and run things.
Some influential psychologists, notably Howard Gardner, deny that "g" really exists . But Murray and Herrnstein blow them off by claiming that its
existence is "beyond significant technical dispute" within the "classical tradition" of their field. This is like arguing that astrology and fortune-telling
are scientific because astrologers and psychics all agree. The whole tradition of psychometrics (IQ testing) was built up around the same assumptions
about intelligence that Murray and Herrnstein believe in. This whole tradition is racist and elitist to the core. The crucial research in this field for the last
50 years has been funded primarily by the pro-Nazi Pioneer Fund.
The early testers loved and admired the ruling class. Listen to Terman: "Moral judgment, like business judgment, social judgment, or any other kind of
higher thought process, is a function of intelligence." Or E.L. Thorndike, one of the most important figures in the history of US educational
psychology: "Our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves." But it
took many tries before they came up with a test on which the rich would come out on top and the poor on the bottom. In fact, it took a lot of work to
come up with a test that would serve its stated purpose: to correlate well with other measures of "success" such as class background and performance
in school.
Here is Herrnstein's own account of how Binet constructed the prototype IQ test: "He took some children rated by their teachers as the brightest and
the dullest ... and subjected them to a lengthy series of tests.... A number of the tests worked, which is to say they distinguished between the two
groups of children." The testing manual for the Stanford-Binet Scale says, "Many of the so-called performance test items tried out for inclusion in the
scale were eliminated because they contributed little or nothing to the total score." That is, when checked with teachers' ratings, they did not match, so
they were dropped. The IQ tests were designed to reflect a racist and elitist school system that was itself designed to reproduce a grossly unequal social
system.
Much has been written about just how the tests reflect their makers' biases. They are heavily weighted toward language: not just everyday language, but
the sort of vocabulary found mainly in literature. They put a high premium on speed, on motivation, on willingness to cooperate with the tester. Many
questions require that the child either believe in bourgeois values like patriotism, or be cagey enough to give the answer the tester wants. But the main
point is that if they weren't biased, they wouldn't serve their intended purpose: to justify inequality.
One way to see this is to look at the history of gender differences in IQ. On Terman's original (1916) Stanford-Binet, the average score for women was
about 10 points less than for men. Twenty years later, the political climate had changed. The 1937 version was standardized for sex. Some questions
were added and some dropped, equalizing the means for men and women. Presto! All of a sudden, the tests showed women to be as "smart" as men.
Testmakers could easily use the same procedure to eliminate average differences between black and white people, or between the working class and the
capitalist class.
If the testmakers did that, the "predictive value" of the tests would be lessened. Those who did well on the tests wouldn't be as likely to do well in
school or to make a lot of money. That's what happened when women's scores were equalized. It was no longer cool to say that men were smarter. But
the US was (and is) still a very sexist society. Women were (and are) not treated equally in the workplace, so the test lost some of its ability to predict
who would do well in later life. In just the same way, as long as racism keeps black and immigrant workers in the worst jobs at the lowest pay, attempts
to equalize "racial" differences in average test scores would lower the "predictive value" of the tests.
All this "prediction" is really after-the-fact rationalization. Capitalism requires inequality and competition. The whole idea of "intelligence" as
something that people have in different amounts exists only to justify capitalist inequality and competition.
Lie #2: "IQ Is Highly Heritable"
There's no reason to assume that "intelligence" is a trait that varies widely from one person to another, and certainly no reason to think that IQ
measures anything of the sort. But even if we cared about IQ, the argument about "heritability" would still be bogus.
You can measure how much a trait varies among the individuals in a population. "Heritability" is a statistical method of estimating how much of the
variation can be accounted for by genetic variation in that population, but only in a given environment. The heritability of a given trait might be
extremely high and yet have (as Lewontin, Rose and Kamin point out) "absolutely no predictive power for the result of changing the set of
environments." To illustrate: several diseases (such as phenylketonuria and Wilson's disease) are known to be single-gene disorders. However, whether
or not possessors of that gene develop the symptoms of the disease depends entirely on whether or not their environment includes appropriate medical
or dietary interventions. Popularizers, and sometimes researchers themselves, confuse the statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept
of "genetically determined" and the social concept of "unchangeable." These things are not at all the same. We all have genes for hair color, but people
change the color of their hair all the time!
In any case, the studies generally cited to "prove" the heritability of IQ are either seriously flawed or totally fraudulent. The main so-called "evidence"
for the heritability of IQ comes from the studies of identical twins Jensen cited twenty years ago. The Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin has shown
that Jensen's whole argument depended on fraudulent "data" collected (or made up) by Cyril Burt over a 40-year period. Others have confirmed
Kamin's findings.
Murray and Herrnstein have two things to say about this embarrassing fact. First, they tell us -- without citing arguments or evidence -- that we should
believe two other writers who claim they have vindicated Burt. Second, they say, new studies by Thomas Bouchard have come up with a figure for the
heritability of IQ that is almost identical to Burt's.
Bouchard was Jensen's student. His team has received more money from the Pioneer Fund than any other recipient -- well over a million dollars to
date. In 1979 he began his "Minnesota Twins" study with a pair of separated identical twins named Jim, whose first and second wives had the same
names, who both drove Chevys and who had given their dogs the same name. Mass media publicity rounded up other pairs of separated twins who
were eager to show off their identical tastes for particular brands of beer or cigarettes. This whole circus would be laughable except for the fact that
Bouchard's "findings" are cited in current human-genetics textbooks to show that social behavior is "in the genes."
And the third authority Murray and Herrnstein cite for the literature on heritability of IQ is Penn State professor Richard Plomin -- yet another Pioneer
Fund recipient! Other critics have already deconstructed in detail the pseudoscientific hocus-pocus of this neo-Nazi cabal. Stephen J. Gould, for
example, has pointed out that the correlations Murray and Herrnstein report between AFQT (Armed Forces Qualifying Test) scores and NLSY
(National Longitudinal Study of Youth) data are extremely weak. With all the funds and resources at their disposal, Murray and Herrnstein were
unable to do little more than cobble together 800 pages of pathetic lies. The Bell Curve is no more scientific than Hitler's Mein Kampf. In the next
section we will show the direct links between these two monuments of master-race theory.
One final point about statistics. Murray and Herrnstein, like Jensen and the others, make much of correlations between IQ and other statistics, such as
rates of poverty or crime. Correlation is often confused with causation. Correlation simply means finding that two characteristics tend to be found
together. Causation is a much stronger claim that the two are interconnected in such a way that one leads to the other. One of the first lessons in
statistics is that correlation does not imply causation, or even a common cause. For example, your age over the last ten years shows a strong statistical
correlation with the size of the national debt: both have been increasing steadily. But did one cause the other?
Murray and Herrnstein, like Jensen, admit all this. In fact, they go out of their way to say that we can't assume that Eugenics and IQ testing actually
influenced immigration policy in the 1920s just because they accompanied each other in time and goals. But if correlation doesn't imply causation, then
their whole book really says nothing at all. Since when do Nazis care about consistency -- let alone the truth?
Lie #3: "Black People Are Not As Smart As Whites"
This centuries-old racist slander is behind the whole IQ charade. And there's not a shred of a reason to believe it.
Jensen, in the mid-1970s, accepted as fact a grotesque list of physical differences long cited by ardent racists as supposedly distinguishing black from
white people. Like him, Murray and Herrnstein just assume that there are biologically distinct "races." "Some ethnic groups differ genetically for sure,"
they write, "otherwise they would not have differing skin colors or hair textures or muscle mass." This is just plain ridiculous. Skin color is only
skin-deep. Some people who are socially "black" have fairer complexions than some who are socially "white." Quite a few "white" individuals have
recent African ancestry (less than 400 years) and may not even know it, while many "black" individuals have as many Europeans as Africans in their
family tree.
Racial categories are not a fact of biology. There is no single physical trait, or combination of traits, that separate human beings into "races" as they
are commonly understood. There never was. All humans originated in Africa. Even after they dispersed, warfare and trade guaranteed intermarriage
and the mingling of population groups over thousands of years. It does not even make scientific sense to speculate about the evolution of distinct
human "races."
Seventeenth-century scientists invented the division of humanity into "races" in order to justify the domination of European ruling elites over people in
other parts of the world. As Martin Bernal showed in Black Athena, racist European "scholars" systematically rewrote human history in order to invent
a "white European" race that was not "contaminated" by any intermingling with Africans and Asians. They could not then, and have not since, even
come to agreement among themselves on how many "races" there are, let alone how to distinguish them.
In colonial America, judges and legislatures created legal definitions of "black," "white," and "red" people. These suited the convenience of plantation
owners eager to control and exploit a large and potentially rebellious workforce. Since that time, bosses (whether plantation owners or industrial
capitalists or the politicians who represent them) have maintained racial segregation in a variety of forms for exactly the same reason. That's why "race"
is a nasty fact about our society, not a biological fact of any sort.
Laboratory evidence now coming in on human variation indicates that genetic differences among human beings are even smaller than previously
supposed. For example, the genetic differences between two people coming from different continents are much less than those between two lowland
gorillas from the same valley. Black Africans are genetically closer to white Swedes than to black Australian aborigines, who are genetically closer to
East Asians. The more research is done, the more obvious it is that "race" is not a valid biological concept.
There is no relation (even a statistical one) between heritability within groups and heritability between groups. Suppose someone chooses to believe, in
spite of the best scientific evidence, that "races" are distinct populations. Suppose they choose to believe the shoddy (or outright fraudulent) "evidence"
that IQ is heritable. They still can't legitimately conclude that "racial differences" are genetic in origin, because heritability only measures the extent to
which variation within a population comes from genes. It says nothing about whether variations among different populations are genetic.
Murray and Herrnstein know this; they even say so. However, they insist that social environments for black and white people in the US just aren't
different enough to explain differences in average IQ test scores. In other words, their whole argument hangs on denying the depth and extent of
racism in US society today. When you cut through pages and pages of statistics and references, Murray and Herrnstein's position is no different from
that of the Ku Klux Klan: "the problem isn't racism; it's the black people themselves."
Murray and Herrnstein's monstrous lie that racism is all but gone sets up their attack on affirmative action programs. They push the slander that black
people are getting into schools and jobs instead of supposedly smarter white people. This pits white workers and students against black workers and
students. Racism like this divides and weakens the whole working class!
Hitler bragged about his "Big Lie" technique: if you say something often and loudly enough, people will begin to believe it. He might have added:
especially if you buy some professors and have them write it up in scientific journals. Charles Murray has fed at the capitalists' trough for decades.
The whole field of alleged hereditary racial difference in intelligence has been bought and paid for by outright Nazis. If you believe them, you might
as well believe that the Holocaust never happened.
"There are differences between races, and they are the rule, not the exception," say Murray and Herrnstein at the outset. One of their favorite experts on
"racial and ethnic differences" is an Irish psychology professor, Richard Lynn. Lynn has hauled in $325,000 from the Pioneer Fund. Leon Kamin's
review of The Bell Curve in Scientific American does an excellent job of tearing apart Lynn's so-called research and exposing his fundamental
dishonesty and exceptionally gross racism. ("Who can doubt," Lynn wrote, "that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have
made any significant contribution to civilization.")
Murray and Herrnstein claim that black Africans have lower IQs than African-Americans. This, they say, shows that genes determine black-white IQ
differences in the US. This comes from Lynn, who scrounged up eleven studies to "prove" it. Five took place in apartheid South Africa and a sixth in
1952 in the Belgian Congo, where colonial rulers had slaughtered millions of black people. The best study Lynn could find was one which even the
author said did "not at all" indicate that intelligence is inherited. The author himself pointed to poorer schooling for black students and difficulty with
English as a second language as reasons for the subjects' poor performances.
For an overview on "race and intelligence," Murray and Herrnstein recommend two books by three Pioneer Fund recipients: Audrey Shuey, Frank C.
J. McGurk, and R. Travis Osborne. McGurk is the main authority they cite to "prove" that IQ tests are not racially biased. He was one of the
"scientific" mainstays of the segregationist movement in the southern US. In 1959 McGurk and Shuey became leading members of the International
Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, first publisher of Mankind Quarterly. Other members included Senator Jesse Helms and
the oil billionaire Hunt brothers. Arch-racists in the South introduced Shuey's book in court during the 1960s to argue for continuing school
segregation and denying the vote to black people. University of Georgia professor Osborne also testified in court against school integration. Osborne
was still, in 1992, trying to prove the long-discarded theory that brain size is somehow related to intelligence.
A Newsweek review of The Bell Curve (Oct. 24, 1994) called its scholarship "overwhelmingly mainstream." If that's true, it only serves to
prove that fascism is now the mainstream for the US ruling class.
ROGER PEARSON AND THE MANKIND QUARTERLY KLAN
LIE #4: "Success depends on intelligence."
Capitalism defines success as making a lot of money. But only a few can be really rich, because the only way to make a lot of money is to exploit the
labor of a lot of other people. A somewhat larger number get to be middle-level bureaucrats and professionals who make more money than workers but
much less than the big bosses. This has nothing to do with the distribution of "intelligence." It has everything to do with the fundamental nature of
capitalist society.
Since few of us will ever be successful in capitalist terms, schools and employers use so-called intelligence and achievement tests to sort and select
people. This promotes competition among workers and youth. Instead of uniting, we just try harder to climb over our class sisters and brothers. The
tests also lead many to believe the lie that it's your own fault if you don't "make it." This can make us passive. Elaine and Harry Mensh document an
important point in The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality. They show that IQ tests exist to "prove" that most people -- workers, and
especially black and women workers -- are not smart enough to be leaders or thinkers or deserve a lot of money. IQ tests thus legitimize capitalist
inequality.
Liberal reformers want more money for schools. They say that more people should have the chance to be successful in capitalist terms. This is an
illusion. A college education is no guarantee even of a steady job, let alone riches. Middle-level managers and technical people are losing their jobs like
crazy. About 14% of recent university graduates with Ph.D. degrees in math are unemployed. Is that evidence that they have low intelligence? Many
professionals have come to the US fleeing poverty and political repression, but their credentials don't count here. Teachers, nurses, and doctors are
scrubbing floors, driving cabs, and working in factories. Did they lose their "intelligence" when they crossed the border? Black workers (including
those in professional or technical positions) earn less, on the average, than white workers even when you control for age and level of educational
attainment. We live in a racist system of class oppression, not a "meritocracy" where the "cream" rises to the top.
Fortune magazine made an interesting point when Herrnstein first came up with his "IQ and the Meritocracy" nonsense. In general, it noted, college
professors have higher IQs than business leaders. But business leaders are richer and (in that sense ) more successful.
If anything, it's the scum that rises to the top. Those who are willing to exploit others, or to help the bosses do their dirty work, are rewarded for it.
The more ruthless the exploitation -- for example, the rip-off of black, latino, other immigrant, and women workers in the U.S., or the horrors of child
labor in India, Pakistan, and Thailand -- the more successful the capitalist. Much of what passes for college "education" is designed to convince
students that they deserve better than most workers because they are "smarter." The "better" jobs they hope to get -- as teachers, social workers,
managers, etc. -- would often put them in positions where the bosses will expect them to help keep workers down. Students and professionals have to
choose sides in the class struggle between capitalists and workers. Do you have a particular fondness for racism, sexism, gross economic inequality,
imperialist war, and all the cultural degeneracy and political repression that comes with fascism? If not, it's "smart" to choose the side of the working
class.
Eugene Debs, a socialist labor leader who lived in the early part of this century, put it well. "I want to rise with the working class, not from it," he
declared. The capitalist definition of "success" serves only the capitalists. For the rest of us, real "success" means smashing capitalism itself.
Trying to "make it" under capitalism is like scratching for the biggest crumbs from a shrinking loaf. We all want a better future for ourselves and our
kids. But success in school isn't the way to go. Communism is. The working class, once united, can take over the whole bakery. We will build a new
society without "races," without "nations," without money. Our principle will be "from each according to commitment, to each according to need" -- not
"the market rules." No one will be better or worse off than anyone else. Social inequality, the material basis for racism, sexism, and other divisive
ideologies, will disappear. We will struggle hard against these bosses' ideas among the people. And we will allow no "free speech" or "academic
freedom" for professional racists and neo-nazis, no matter how many letters of the alphabet trail after their names.
LIE #5: "That's why liberal social programs have failed"
The social agenda of the academic racists has changed little over the last eighty years. Eugenicists in the 1910s and 1920s hoped to keep "undesirable"
immigrants out of the country and to coerce the "unfit" (mainly, the poor) into having fewer babies. Nazi intellectuals in the 1930s wanted to justify
imperialist war and genocide. US racial theorists in the 1950s fought to uphold segregation and "white supremacy." Jensen in 1969 argued for
cutbacks in Head Start and other educational programs for workers' children. Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson, in Crime and Human Nature (1985)
pushed for more cops, jails, and "tough on crime" legislation.
Murray and Herrnstein make parts of their agenda for the `90s very clear. They want to keep "undesirable" immigrants out of the country. They think
welfare programs should be slashed to force poor women to have fewer babies. They suggest that programs like Affirmative Action, which helped to
integrate workplaces and colleges, should be dropped. They link crime with genetically low intelligence, lending support to "tough on crime" policies
and to the racist "violence initiative" of the National Institute for Mental Health and other agencies. They say that the poorest quarter of the US
population is a "net drag" on society and that there is "nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching" them. Funds "wasted" on the
"disadvantaged" should be reallocated "to programs for the gifted" -- meaning, of course, mainly the well-to-do.
Murray and Herrnstein seem to be testing the limits of the present political climate with their assertion that the ruling class should choose between
their eugenic policies and a "custodial" fascist state with "high tech reservations" (concentration camps) for the "underclass." Their "logic" thus
leads directly to the gas chambers.
Murray and Herrnstein have one thing going for them that their predecessors, by and large, did not. That is the indisputable fact that thirty years of
liberal reform programs -- the legacy of the Johnson's "Great Society" -- have failed to create social equality. In fact, income gaps between black and
white workers, which decreased somewhat between 1965 and 1975, have been increasing ever since. Real wages for all workers have at best held
steady, and more often have fallen, especially for younger workers. The gap between the richest and the poorest continues to grow. Thirty years ago, a
4% unemployment rate was considered recessionary. Today government economists consider at least 6% to be necessary. They raise interest rates to
"slow the economy" if it drops lower.
True, the anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-sexist, and labor movements of the last few decades won some significant reforms. When Jensen attacked
education programs such as Head Start in 1969, many anti-racists responded with studies showing that such programs did raise IQ scores and enhance
children's prospects for success in school. Similarly, it is easy to show that Affirmative Action programs, limited as they have been, did go part of the
way toward knocking down racist barriers that historically kept black and other "minority" individuals out of more skilled and better-paying jobs.
Social programs like WIC, AFDC, Medicaid, and Medicare have meant the difference between survival and starvation for many.
But the "War on Poverty," which Murray has made a living on criticizing, was never meant to create equality. Its few reforms mainly produced an
illusion of change while maintaining the reality of class inequality. It was meant to pacify the militant rebels who were rocking US cities, and the many
more who supported them.
Now these reforms have mostly been cut back or dismantled altogether. Many are on the chopping block as this pamphlet goes to press (February
1995) amid congressional debates over welfare "reform" and the balanced-budget amendment. President Clinton has made it clear that Democrats
differ from Republicans only over the details of this massive attack -- spearheaded by racism -- on the whole working class. Asked about Murray's
1993 Wall Street Journal article advocating cutting single mothers off AFDC, President Clinton responded: "I think his analysis is essentially correct."
(Nation's Business, August "94)
In the same way, as Adolph Reed, Jr. noted in his Nation review of The Bell Curve, "we can trace Murray's legitimacy directly to the spinelessness,
opportunism and racial bad faith of the liberals in the social policy establishment. ... Most of those objecting to Herrnstein and Murray's racism," Reed
continued, "embrace positions that are almost indistinguishable, except for the resort to biology." These liberals agree with Murray that IQ tests
"prove" black people (and workers generally) are less intelligent. They simply offer different excuses. "Lack of prenatal care," they say. "No
breastfeeding. Not enough mental stimulation for infants." What a phony debate! Both sides are just building support for racism and class inequality.
Liberal reformers promoted cultural theories of racial and class inferiority to push government programs such as the "war on poverty." They wanted to
change the alleged inferior values and lifestyles of impoverished workers so their children would be "smarter." Workers and our children don't need to
be smarter. We need to be more class-conscious. We need to fight harder to unite our class across the bosses' lines of "race" and "nationality." We
need to become clearer on the fact that you can't help people by becoming part of the system that is grinding them down. The way to help the working
class is to fight to smash that system.
ONLY COMMUNISM CAN DEFEAT RACISM AND FASCISM
Liberal social programs have failed, and will continue to fail, because of the fundamental nature of capitalism. Even in its heyday, capitalism required a
large pool of unemployed and impoverished workers to drive wages down. The present era is one of ever-sharpening international capitalist
competition (imperialism). This competition demands that the bosses turn the screws ever more tightly on the workers in order to maximize profits.
This, in turn, demands fascist rather than liberal-democratic forms of rule in order to suppress the anger inevitably developing within the working class,
and especially among the most exploited, oppressed, and impoverished.
The choices are narrowing. Murray and Herrnstein, advocates of the Violence Initiative, and other academic racists offer us fascism as a solution to the
profound crisis in contemporary capitalism. With liberalism less and less appealing as an option, many potential anti-racist activists are simply
wallowing in despair. This passivity gives aid and comfort to the fascist enemy. But there is another alternative: to build a revolutionary party and a
mass movement with the goal of smashing capitalism and building an entirely different system, communism.
"But hasn't communism failed?" many ask. We say it hasn't really been tried. From the Soviet Union to eastern Europe, from China to Cuba, socialism
was tried. And socialism failed to lead to communism, as revolutionary leaders had promised. Instead it maintained fundamental capitalist institutions
such as wage-labor and nation-states. So in the end it reverted everywhere to open capitalism.
A big part of the reason that revolutionary leaders thought they needed to build socialism rather than communism right from the start was that they
didn't think the masses of people (workers and poor peasants) were "ready" for communism. In effect, these leaders bought into the idea that the
masses weren't smart enough to recognize that communism was in their best interest. They thought they needed to "buy off" intellectuals and people
with technical training because the workers wouldn't be able to run society by themselves.
We disagree. If "intelligent" means "fit to rule," then no group in the world, no "cognitive elite," is more intelligent than the working class acting
collectively in its own interest as a class. The fight against racism is the key to developing this class unity.
Under communism we will do away with the foolish idea of judging people on the basis of a test. We will do away with the ruthless judgments of the
marketplace that say you and you are "worth" more and you and you are "worth" less (or even, according to fascists like Murray, "worthless"). Instead
of setting ourselves up in judgment on people, we will dedicate ourselves to assessing and meeting their needs.
Call us "idealistic" if you will -- but we are convinced that there is nothing more realistic than fighting for a communist world of comradeship and
equality.
Intelligence and leadership
HOW TO FIGHT ACADEMIC RACISM
To cut off the killer weed of racism at its root, we need to destroy the capitalist system that nourishes it. Thousands, then tens of thousands, then
millions of workers, students, and youth must join the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY and help to win millions more to fight to make egalitarian
communist society a reality worldwide.
Such a movement cannot develop without an all-out fight against racism. Racism is the cornerstone that supports all class exploitation. It drives down
wages and the quality of life for "white" workers and students as well as for the super-exploited and super-oppressed "minority" workers and students.
In the present period, racism is the cutting edge of a growing fascism that could turn every bit as horrible as German Nazism.
But for this very reason racism is capitalism's Achilles heel. The fight against racism (academic and otherwise) will grow and sharpen. Workers,
increasingly looking toward communist leadership, will reject racism and nationalism in favor of class unity. Students and youth will see in this united
working class movement a real alternative to capitalist dictatorship.
What You Can Do:
* Form study-action groups to discuss the ideas in this pamphlet Bring these ideas to clubs and organizations of all sorts, on and off campus. Hold
forums, teach-ins, and rallies to expose and attack racist ideas. Build real grass-roots unity among students of different "races" and "nationalities" --
not just a top-down "rainbow coalition" of groups.
* Use all available media, from leaflets to school radio stations and newspapers to `zines and the Internet, to attack racist ideas and to promote
anti-racist action. Try to get teachers to use this pamphlet and other anti-racist materials in the classroom. Set up regular literature tables as centers for
anti-racist agitation and organizing.
* Sign, circulate, and collect funds for the nationwide ad/petition campaign "Oppose the Resurgence of Academic Racism."
* Find out which teachers and textbooks at your school do racist research or push racist and anti-working class theories. Challenge them in class,
protest them, try to get rid of them. No academic freedom for racism and fascism!
* Join with workers on and off campus to fight racist programs like the Violence Initiative and welfare "reform." Support strikes and anti-racist
rebellions whenever they happen. Attack corporate recruiters for companies which support academic racists like Murray as well as exploiting their
workers.
* Write up your experiences for Challenge newspaper, and sell Challenge to your friends, classmates, and co-workers. Contact the Progressive Labor
Party to be in touch with others involved in the campaign against academic racism.
We can't afford to be passive in the face of the present racist onslaught. No racist incident is too small to fight over. No racist movement is too large to
take on. Organize, organize, organize!
Return to list
Return to Home Page
GET IN TOUCH WITH THE PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY
Please send me the following literature:
____ "Biological Determinism Feeds Fascism: Smash Racist Violence Initiative" (50 cents each)
____ "Smash Racism: The Bosses' Tool" ( new pamphlet -- coming soon!)
____ Challenge-Desafio, communist newspaper reporting and analyzing workers' struggles internationally (25 cents/issue; $15/year)
Please send me _____ additional copies of "Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class".
Enclosed is a donation of $_______ .
___ Please contact me about PLP activities in my area.
Name______________________________ Job or school ________________________
Address _________________________________________________________________
Phone (______) ___________________ e-mail ______________________________
*************************HOW TO CONTACT PLP*************************
PO Box 808, Brooklyn NY 11201 e-mail: 75000.547@compuserve.com
Phone: NY (212) 629-0002 Chicago (312) 663-4138 LA (213) 293-4538
Recommended Reading
Joseph Graves, Jr. and Terri Place. Race and IQ revisited: Figures nerver lie, but often liars figure. SAGE Race Relations Abstracts.
Breggin, Peter and Ginger Ross. The War Against Children. (documents current racist Violence Initiative)
Chase, Alan. The Legacy of Malthus (an encyclopedic history of scientific racism)
Gould, Steven J. The Mismeasure of Man (includes detailed critique of IQ testing movement)
Hubbard, Ruth, and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth (more general analysis of recent trends in genetic determinism)
Kamin, Leon. The Science and Politics of IQ (exposes Burt's fraudulent "research")
Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (documents collusion between US and German
eugenicists during the 1930's and Pioneer Fund financing of Nazi "research" from 1937 until the present.)
Lewontin, R. J., Stephen Rose, and Leon Kamin. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (excellent scientific overview)
Mensh, Elaine and Harry. The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality (demonstrates that IQ testing is a pseudoscience that legitimizes
inequalities in the US and imperialist exploitation in Africa.)
Tucker, William. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. (excellent historical critique of racist research in the US from the 19th century to the
present.)
Smash Racist "Violence Initiative"
*In 1992 a top federal mental health administrator, Frederick K. Goodwin, compared black urban youth to violent, hypersexual monkeys, declaring that
"some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing
evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles."
* The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Research Council (NRC) issued a 400-page report, Understanding and Preventing
Violence (1992), backed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Justice Department, and the National Science Foundation, that called for more
attention to alleged "biological and genetic factors" in violent crime, for research on "new pharmaceuticals that reduce violent behavior" and on whether
"male or black persons have a higher potential for violence than others, and if so, why?" The study proposed in this report is now being carried out in
Chicago under Harvard professor Felton Earls.
* Chicago Tribune science writer Ron Kotulak won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-day front page series "Aggression: The Monster Within" (December
1993). Kotulak wrote that "simple screening tests will be developed to determine levels of serotonin and noradrenalin. Anti-violence medications
conceivably could be given, perhaps forcibly, to people with abnormal levels." Dozens of studies along these lines, financed by the National Institute of
Mental Health, currently target black and Latin youth.
* The Human Genome Project plans to sponsor a new version of a University of Maryland conference originally titled "Genetic Factors in Crime" that
was postponed amid charges of racism but is now tentatively scheduled for October, 1995.
Put these developments together and you have the "Violence Initiative." This is racist ideology in action. It must be stopped! See the PLP pamphlet
"Biological Determinism Feeds Fascism" for more details.
A Century of "Crime in the Genes"
One of the most fertile fields for eugenics was the search for biological causes of crime. In 1887, the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso claimed
he could identify criminals by physical characteristics. For example, he said thieves had small, restless eyes while sex criminals had bright eyes and
cracked voices. In general, Lombroso said, the more "apish" a person was (thick skull, large jaw, long arms, darker skin) the more likely he or she was
to be a criminal. This racist garbage was introduced in criminal trials and did a lot of damage in its time.
The Harvard anthropologist E. A. Hooton set out in 1926 to update Lombroso's techniques with financial support from the Social Science Research
Council. Unlike Lombroso, Hooton categorized his 17,000 research subjects according to nationality and race. By the time his book Crime and the
Man appeared in 1939, English and American critics found Hooton's views to be uncomfortably similar to those of the Nazis. However, he had
meanwhile promoted his racist ideas among his students, a whole generation of physical anthropologists and physicians.
Pro-Nazi "race hygienists" held their Fourth Congress of Criminal Biology at Hamburg in June 1934, building on two decades worth of "research" on
the supposed genetic basis of crime. Two years later, the Nazi "Justice" minister funded fifty research centers nationwide to investigate links between
genetics, race and crime, especially in young offenders. In 1939, Nazi boss Himmler ordered that genetic examination be a routine part of criminal
investigation.
Undeterred by this precedent, Columbia professor W. H. Sheldon tried to link crime with individual variations in physique during the 1940s. He
concluded that 200 Boston delinquents were preponderantly "mesomorphic" (square, muscular) in contrast to a group of 4000 college students. The
New York Times recently exposed the fact that Sheldon's eugenic experiments continued throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. The bosses' elite
colleges and universities -- including Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Wellesley -- forced first-year students to pose nude for Sheldon and his associates in
the name of "screening for poor posture." Sheldon, a stone racist, wrote in a 1924 paper that "Negro intelligence" comes to a "standstill at about the
10th year," with "Mexican intelligence" stopping at age twelve.
Wilson and Herrnstein cited Sheldon's conclusions in Crime and Human Nature (1985) as evidence of the "constitutional" underpinning of the
criminal personality "trait." As critic Leon Kamin noted, however, they omitted mention of later studies such as one that showed a sample of Princeton
students to be more "mesomorphic" than the Boston delinquents. In the words of historian Elazar Barkan, Herrnstein and Wilson's book was
"testimony that Hooton's ideas have been rejuvenated at Harvard."
Fight Builds Against Racist "Violence Research" in Chicago
Harvard's most recent contribution to crime "research" is euphemistically called the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. It is
run by child psychiatrist Felton Earls, from the Harvard School of Public Health with funds from the US Department of "Justice" and the McArthur
Foundation (i.e., insurance profits). This project hopes to study over 11,000 children between 1994 and 2002 and to find ways to predict which ones
will become violent criminals. Researchers say that "special attention will be given to conditions that develop before birth (during the mother's
pregnancy), as well as in infancy and early childhood." This project has been in the works for over a decade, and its entire history involved searching
for biological causes of crime.
The Earls study is also racist to the core (even though Earls himself is black). It is designed to analyze the interaction of "community characteristics"
and individual traits. Chicago is one of the most segregated large cities in the world. "Neighborhood" boundaries are almost always drawn along
"racial" or "ethnic" lines. Studying "neighborhoods" in Chicago is a code-word for studying "racial differences." It is a slick way to claim the project is
studying both the individual and the "environment" while ignoring the real cause of crime (and its biggest perpetrator), the capitalist system itself. For
example, a high unemployment rate will be taken as characteristic of a "neighborhood" when the truth is that it comes from decisions made by business
people and bankers downtown to close factories in the "neighborhood."
The Chicago Coalition Against the Violence Initiative is organizing against this racist mega-project. For more information, call (312) 761-0580 or write
to P.O. Box 268287, Chicago IL 60626.
EUGENICS: 75 YEARS OF RACIST IDEOLOGY
1916 -- "Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such
extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will
have to be taken up anew." -- Lewis Terman, author of Stanford-Binet IQ test
1969 -- "There are intelligence genes, which are found in populations in different proportions...The number of intelligence genes seems lower, overall,
in the black population than in the white." -- Arthur Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
1994 -- "A substantial difference in cognitive ability distributions separates whites from blacks. ... Latino and black immigrants are ... putting some
downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence." -- Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve, pp. 315; 360-61.
Return to text
Charles Murray, Roger Pearson and the Mankind Quarterly Klan
Much of The Bell Curve's racist drivel comes from Mankind Quarterly, whose principle is that the "Negroid" race is inferior to all others, and from
professors funded by the pro-Nazi Pioneer Fund (PF). Behind this fascist gang stand important members of the US ruling class.
Seventeen authors cited in The Bell Curve are Mankind Quarterly (MQ) contributors. Ten are former or present editors or members of its editorial
advisory board. MQ's avowed purpose is to counter "Communist" and "egalitarian" influences in anthropology. From its start in 1960, its founders
and funders believed that white people were genetically superior. Robert Gayre was the founder of MQ and its editor-in-chief until 1978. As a
champion of South African apartheid and a member of the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia, he testified in court in 1968 that black
people as a group are "worthless." Other MQ contributors have included Henry Garrett of Columbia University, who wrote pamphlets for the
pro-segregation White Citizens Councils; Corrado Gini, the leader of fascist Italy's eugenics movement; and Ottmar von Verschner, a leading Nazi
race-scientist and academic mentor of the concentration camp butcher Joseph Mengele.
The key figure in the PF network is Roger Pearson, who is close to Jesse Helms. Sam Crutchfield, a lawyer for Helms, has been the lawyer for
Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man. The PF has given Pearson over $787,400, mostly for editing Mankind Quarterly and The Journal of Social,
Political and Economic Studies. The last publishes articles by PF recipients, notably Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, and Richard Lynn. Thomas Ellis, a
PF director, is a long-time friend and campaign manager for Helms.
In 1958, Pearson, living in London, led the Northern League. This white-power organization included former Nazi SS officials. Willis Carto, founder
of the anti-black and anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, arranged a 1959 U.S. speaking tour for him. Pearson soon moved to the U.S. to edit the neo-Nazi
publication Western Destiny. In Eugenics and Race he asserted: "If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior set of
genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide. "
This track record won Pearson influence in Washington, DC. In 1975 he became editor of the journal of the American Security Council. Retired
military officers, corporate executives and conservative politicians formed this outfit. It promoted big military spending, cold war policies, and aid to the
Nicaraguan contras and UNITA in Angola. The ASC was very influential during the Reagan and Bush administrations. It was closely tied to the
military, the National Security Council, and the State Department.
Pearson also headed the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). In 1977 he became the international chair of this nest of fascist
vipers. He organized its 1978 convention, which featured two U.S. Senators as keynote speakers. Then he was exposed as having recruited open
neo-Nazis to WACL, and was forced to resign. Four years later, President Reagan personally thanked Pearson for his "substantial contributions to
promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad."
Return to text
Charles Murray: Bosses' Mouthpiece
Murray is on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative public-policy research outfit which has also employed Richard
Herrnstein's other pal, James Q. Wilson. Founded by the industrialist Lewis Brown in 1943, it has spent a half-century promoting social policies
favorable to big business: tax cuts for the wealthy, dere
