The Bell Curve Wars

The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America, a collection of essays edited by Steven Fraser, attempts to demolish almost every aspect of the earlier work The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class structure in American Life, by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray. The latter book set forth the notion that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidenced by comparative IQ scores, and that the class structure, crime, unemployment, unwed mothers, and almost every social or economic problem in the country was an inevitable result of the allegedly lower IQ scores of blacks. The two authors presented their arguments in a dispassionate and statistics-immersed approach which delighted conservatives and enraged liberals. All we can do, suggested Hernstein and Murray, is accept the fact that blacks are inferior and do what little we can to reduce "the fertility rates of the 'cognitive underclass'":

Here [Hernstein and Murray] are more sanguine about the efficacy of public policy [which they reject as a solution to correcting socioeconomic inequities], suggesting, albeit with some tentativeness, given the extreme delicacy of

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Category: Psychology - T