Several writers have pointed out that the Frenchman Alfred Binet invented the first workable I.Q. test in 1905. The only purpose of the test was to help identify children with special learning needs. Binet warned that his test should never be used to argue for the idea that I.Q. is immutable.

My, how times have changed! Some White scholars make a fetish out of I.Q. scores and use them to argue that some races are less intelligent than others. Moreover, some claim that I.Q. is fixed or unchangeable. They further maintain that I.Q. is the main determining factor in earning power, class, status, etc. This implies that less intelligent races are destined to be on the bottom of society socially and economically, as Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele argue in Race: The Reality of Human Differences.

As I pointed out in part one, The Bell Curve was a much-talked about book in the 1990s. Now seems to be a great time to talk about some of the problems with the book, including its tainted sources. Murray and Herrnstein, predictably, made the obligatory complaints about alleged political correctness whenever people harshly critiqued their work. Many of their apologists insisted that their research was for the most part mainstream and accepted by most experts in the field of social science.

However, Murray told the New York Times Magazine in the October 9, 1994 issue that “Some of the things we read to do this work, we literally hide when we’re on planes and trains.” This is not surprising because practically all of their research on race and intelligence was funded by the Pioneer Fund, a thoroughly racist outfit dedicated to the promotion of eugenics. According to an article by Jim Naureckas in the January/February 1995 issue of the journal EXTRA!:

The Pioneer Fund was set up in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a millionaire who advocated sending blacks back to Africa. The foundation’s charter set forth the group’s mission as “racial betterment” and aid for people “deemed to be descended primarily from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States.” (In 1985, after Pioneer Fund grant recipients began receiving political heat, the charter was slightly amended to play down the race angle - GQ, 11/94.) (From “Racism Resurgent: How Media Let The Bell Curve’s Pseudo-Science Define the Agenda on Race,” p. 13)

Draper went on to note:

“The fund’s first president, Harry Laughlin, was an influential advocate of sterilization for those considered genetically unfit. In successfully advocating laws that would restrict immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Laughlin testified before Congress that 83 percent of Jewish immigrants were innately feeble-minded (from Rolling Stone, 10/20/94). (ibid.)

Herein lies another problem. Those that argue that some races are less intelligent than others ignore or downplay the fact that those that made similar arguments in the past look like fools today.

In 1912, esteemed psychologists Henry Goddard, Robert Yerkes and their cohorts used intelligence tests to demonstrate that people of Nordic stock were genetically superior to all others. In an editorial written in The New York Times at the height of The Bell Curve frenzy, Brent Staples related:

Not surprisingly, Goddard’s testing of what he called a representative sample of immigrants showed that 80 percent of all Jews, Italians and Hungarians and nearly 90 percent of Russians were “feeble-minded.” As a result, hundreds each year were deported….At the start of World War I, two million draftees were also tested….Once again, British immigrants were classified as first-rate, with Poles, Italians and Russians labeled stupid and undesirable. The data were published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1921, and contributed to the introduction of temporary limits on immigration. I.Q. hysteria also resulted in sterilization laws that were enforced only against the poor. (From “The ’Scientific’ War on the Poor: The Ugly Politics of I.Q.”)

Indeed, according to the Army Alpha and Beta tests, Blacks had an average mental age of 10 years, while Poles, Italians and Russians registered in at a slightly more respectable mental age of 11 years. According to Yerkes, 37% of American Whites were morons, compared to 89% of Blacks.

Not surprisingly, race scholars do not deal very well with these embarrassingly erroneous data. Black conservative Thomas Sowell, who gave a mostly positive review of The Bell Curve in the February 1995 issue of The American Spectator pointed out:

Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to “folklore” that “Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence.” It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in army and in civilian life.

For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results - during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews. (From “Ethnicity and IQ: A leading scholar on the interplay of race and culture opens a new avenue in the debate launched by The Bell Curve over the inheritability of intelligence,” p. 34.)

Is this very strange, or is it basically a matter of intellectual dishonesty? In any case, what about those Poles who have been the butt of bigoted jokes? By the 1950s, they had an average I.Q. of 104, and by the 1960s, Italians had an average I.Q. of 103, both surpassing the national average.

What actually happens in the real world, far away from the cloistered ivory tower, is that people - especially poor people - that are stigmatized as mentally unfit are sterilized, deported, discriminated against, victimized in acts of violence such as lynching, etc. Yet those obsessed with race and I.Q. cowardly and disgracefully try to distance themselves from the consequences of their ideas. What is especially sad is that, as we will continue to see, there is much strong evidence that I.Q. is not fixed by God or nature; yet those obsessed with race and I.Q. continue to make life hellish for Black people all over the globe.