Charles "Bell Curve" Murray bestows his purebred racism on WSJ re: NOLA

[BurtWorm]

According to Ezra Klein of TAP:

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/09/index.h...


Which brings us to today's Wall Street Journal atrocity. Penned by Charles Murray, he of The Bell Curve fame, it argues that what we're seeing post-Katrina isn't poverty but a once-again visible "underclass," a sort of shadow society of unsocialized black men with no appetite for work, no capacity to hold jobs, and no ability to be helped through conventional methods. They are, quite literally, savages, unable to function in the world the rest of us inhabit. They are, as he puts it, the "looters and the thugs," not to mention the "inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children." And government attempts to craft helpful policy will fail because, after all, it doesn't matter if you give a gorilla a college loan, it's still a gorilla.

I've no idea where Murray got the idea that the New Orleans evacuees lacked jobs rather than cars and social skills rather than transportation -- from deep within his own prejudices, I'd guess. And where he got the concept that these men and women are somehow incapable of holding jobs and unwilling to send their children to school -- that's all similarly obscure. The absence of autos affects the social and the unsocialized alike; the folks you see on buses are often en route to jobs they hold, contra Murray, perfectly well.

But if his argument is flawed, its aim is clear. All those stories of urban anarchy were, to Murray, accurate, everyday manifestations of the Black people we'd hidden from sight. The normal explanation, that their assumed bad behavior was a reaction to extraordinary circumstance -- that was the wrong part. This had nothing to do with Katrina; it was part and parcel of an inferior race, an incorrigible culture.

[Lone_Wolf_Moderate]

1. Murray's argument is nothing more than old-line white supremacy.

It is clothed in the veneer of scholar-speak, but at its core, Murray's argument is pure racism. Nothing else need br said.

[bemildred]

2. Murray is a good example of inbreeding and degenerate evolution

from lack of racial pruning.

[Pithy Cherub]

3. Grand Wizard Murray is calling his fellow rascits via the WSJ!

What was the WSJ saying by putting that crap in their republican fishwrap. Recruiting black people was never the goal for the republican party. Between KKK members, VirtueLESS Bennett and Murray rascism is still prevalent among republicans.

Hello Kanye, please add these overtly racist assholes Murray and Bennett to your list!

[ismnotwasm]

4. You know what?

I hate that motherfucker. He needs to shut the fuck up. I can refute his bullshit with decent language, but I was hoping to never hear from him again. He's an evil bastard who got otherwise half way intelligent people to believe his crap. I remember the whole bell curve days. It's was pretty damn ugly. It took a while for decent folks to refute his bullshit statistics, to show that he rigged everything. I don't remember all the details, but he caused a lot of harm. People like him are in the * category as far as I'm concerned

[Tomee450]

7. I remember those days, too.

They were simply awful. I was so happy when other noted scholars refuted his so called statistics. Many people purchased his book and believed what he wrote.

It is so important that the media not report rumors. A lot of damage is caused when unverified reports are reported as facts, giving ammunition to the likes of Murray.

[bobbieinok]

5. NYReview of Books had a very well documented rebuttal of TheBellCurve

I had a student who heard (hope he wasn't told by a prof) that the book was reliable.......I loaned him the review; he thanked me and said it had indeed opened his eyes

[bobbieinok]

6. discussion of Bell Curve that describes the NYReview of Bks article

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/steverbc.html

....

..."BY THE COMPANY THEY KEEP"
Because there is no scientific basis for the claims they make in The Bell Curve, HM rely primarily on some highly "tainted" sources for most of their arguments. In "The Tainted Sources of The Bell Curve," an article in the New York Review of Books, (12/1/94), Charles Lane painstakingly analyzes the sources of HM's claims of inherited racial and class differences in intelligence. Lane demonstrates that the authors of The Bell Curve are closely tied to a group of writers who have edited and contributed to a journal called The Mankind Quarterly and received research money from the Pioneer Fund. What are The Mankind Quarterly and the Pioneer Fund?

The Mankind Quarterly is a journal founded in the late 1950's by opponents of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement to publish articles asserting the inferiority of Blacks. Its authors defended the racial policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, championed apartheid in South Africa and opposed independence for African countries. Since 1978 the editor of the journal has been Roger Pearson, an organizer of neo-Nazi groups both in Europe and the U.S. In 1982 President Reagan wrote a letter to Pearson to thank him for publishing the works of "scholars" who uphold the "ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad." (The letter is reproduced in Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, by Russ Bellant.


"HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER CALLS THE TUNE"
The Pioneer Fund, as Lane points out in "The Tainted Sources of The Bell Curve," is a New York foundation established in 1937 with the money of Wycliffe Draper, a textile magnate who admired Nazi Germany and favored sending U.S. Blacks back to Africa. The Pioneer Fund is committed to eugenics, that is, policies of selective breeding for purposes of "race betterment." In the late 1930's the Pioneer Fund gave financial support to both U.S. and German "scientists" who advocated and carried out forced sterilization and later outright genocide against populations deemed to be genetically inferior.

The Pioneer Fund bankrolls the journal The Mankind Quarterly. Even more importantly, it has provided millions of dollars in research grants to all the "scholars" in the U.S. since the 1930's who have asserted that there are inherited racial differences in intelligence and who have called for "eugenics" policies to decrease the numbers of "inferior" groups and increase the numbers of "superior" groups. Recent and current recipients of Pioneer Fund grants include Arthur Jensen and William Shockley who a quarter century ago revived racist arguments against Black intelligence; Philippe Rushton, South African born Canadian racist who claims that Blacks have smaller brains and larger penises than whites in order to breed larger numbers of inferior children; Thomas Bouchard, U. of Minnesota professor who studies twins in order to claim that IQ is mainly inherited; Richard Lynn, from Northern Ireland, who asserts that Africans have lower intelligence than African Americans; Robert Gordon, Johns Hopkins sociologist who blames low IQ Blacks for crime; and Linda Gottfredson, U. of Delaware professor who opposes affirmative action for low IQ Blacks. (For further information on the Pioneer Fund, see Adolph Reed's column in the Progressive (December, 1994), and Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection.

HM cite no fewer than thirteen such "scholars" supported by the Pioneer Fund. Lynn's work alone is cited twenty-four times in the Bibliography of The Bell Curve. Virtually every important claim HM make is based on citations of works by Pioneer Fund supported, Mankind Quarterly published authors. What this means is that The Bell Curve is a vehicle of Nazi propaganda wrapped in a cover of pseudo-scientific respectability. It is an academic version of Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf.

more....

[Johonny]

8. Stephen J. Gould

His "Mismeasurement of Man" is an excellent rebuttal to the Bell Curve.