Legacy of racism - race and intelligence - 'The Bell Curve': A Symposium - Cover Story

National Review, Dec 5, 1994 by Pat Shipman

HUMAN intelligence is an eel-like subject: slippery, difficult to grasp, and almost impossible to get straight. Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein make a heroic attempt to lay before the public a topic of writhing complexity: the interaction of intelligence, class, and ethnicity in America. The authors have not succeeded wholly, either in presenting the information or in convincing this reader of their conclusions, but I must applaud them for the clarity and honesty of their attempt. Who else has had the audacity to try to teach a nation raised on factoids and ten-second sound bites to think in subtle terms of probabilities, correlations, and standard deviations?

The authors' conclusions are so unwelcome that many readers will find themselves, as I did, slogging slowly and carefully through each paragraph, poring over every footnote, making irritated notes to themselves to seek out this or that study from the original literature to satisfy their skepticism. The research that Herrnstein and Murray summarize is exquisitely sensitive to the way a question is framed, so that the thinking reader cannot coast for even a paragraph without paying attention. But in the end, it all comes down to three questions: What do they say? Is it true? What should we do now?

Through summaries of myriad studies, the authors paint a vivid picture of the dark side of the American dream. The United States is the country of immigrants, the country where (at least in theory) name and family mean nothing and personal accomplishment is all. You can come to America with nothing, work hard, and rise to the top. This, Murray and Herrnstein show convincingly, is true if you are smart (and if, not incidentally, you are white). The consolidation of this meritocracy throughout this century has produced a class of smart, powerful, and wealthy individuals--the "cognitive elite"--who enjoy life at the high end of the bell curve.

But the shadowy inverse, rarely seen clearly, is also true: if you are not smart, you will fall to the bottom. The book tolls funereally, in chapter after careful chapter, ringing out the stunning relationship between low IQ and the tendencies to perform poorly in school; drop out of school; live in poverty; become dependent on welfare; bear children out of wedlock; go to jail; hold, perform badly at, and often lose menial jobs; achieve only a low socio-economic status; earn little money; maintain households that score poorly in factors important in nurturing children; and even suffer disabilities that prevent working altogether. The land of golden opportunity inevitably offers the chance to fail abjectly as well.

In the latter part of the book, Herrnstein and Murray present the fearsome possibility that cognitive class and race are now coincident. They report data that, as a population, African-Americans have a bell curve of IQ scores that is shifted to the lower side of the white mean. So do Africans, while East Asians have a bell curve of IQ scores shifted slightly to the right of the white curve. The authors are quick to observe that this does not mean that all blacks are stupider than all whites; there are many highly intelligent African-Americans who perform as well as or better than their white counterparts on the various measures of achievement. Indeed, one of the brightest points in the book is the demonstration that the average annual incomes of blacks, Latinos, and whites of the same IQ fall within a few hundred dollars of each other. But there seem to be disproportionately more blacks at the lower end of the bell curve and thus disproportionately more caught in poverty, ignorance, helplessness, and depression. Furthermore, considerable data indicate that those at the lower end of the IQ scale, regardless of race, are breeding faster than those at the top. We seem trapped in a downward spiral of ever-increasing stupidity.

Having sounded the death knell, Herrnstein and Murray do not abandon their readers to this vision of doom. Since they find eugenics an abhorrent policy, they suggest we revise the affirmative-action laws to reap the economic benefits of a more intelligent and more productive work force; find a "valued place" and useful occupations for those who are not very smart; strengthen the bonds of community responsibility and interdependence by reintegrating the cognitive elite into the rest of society; and encourage breeding among the cognitive elite so that the intelligence of our nation as a whole is not swamped by the fertility of the less intelligent.

But is it true? Do the data Herrnstein and Murray report about black IQ support their conclusions about black intelligence?

Underlying their thesis are two crucial issues. First is the premise that intelligence--of whatever it may consist--can be measured accurately and reliably by various tests, including the familiar IQ test. Herrnstein and Murray discuss the debates over psychometric testing fairly and clearly, and conclude that IQ and other such measures do reflect the elusive quality or qualities we label "intelligence." This point is the basis for the authors' compelling argument for the existence of a cognitive elite and its dark twin. The second issue is the heritability of intelligence. Heritability does not mean the extent to which a particular trait, such as intelligence, is genetically determined. Rather, heritability is the faithfulness with which a trait's measured expression (or phenotype, like IQ) mirrors the underlying genetic basis (or genotype). Heritability is always time- and population-specific, which is why the heritability of intelligence in studies ranges from .4 to .8 (out of a maximum possible of 1.0). Some populations have a genuinely higher heritability for intelligence than others, which renders cross-population comparisons of IQ and its correlates problematic (as the authors know).