THE BELL CURVE:Hernstein & Murray

[Baba Ahmed]

Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and the Class Structure. New York: The Free Press

“We think something else is happening as well, with potential dangers: the converging interests of the cognitive elite with the larger population of affluent Americans.

For most of the century, intellectuals and the affluent have been antagonists. Intellectuals have been identified with the economic left and the cultural avant-garde, while the affluent have been identified with big business and cultural conservatism. These comfortable categories have become muddled in recent years, as faculty at the top universities put together salaries, consulting fees, speeches, and royalties that garner them six-figure incomes while the New York Review of Books shows up in the mailbox of young corporate lawyers. The very bright have become much more uniformly affluent than they used to be while, at the same time, the universe of affluent people has become more densely populated by the very bright, as part I described. Not surprisingly, the interest of affluence and the cognitive elite have begun to blend. Pp 514-515�

“FACING REALITY ABOUT THE UNDERCLASS"

…We fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent—not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but “conservatism� along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below. In the case of the United States, the threat comes from an underclass that has been with American society for some years but has been the subject of unrealistic analysis and ineffectual, often counterproductive policy. The new coalition is already afraid of the underclass. In the next few decades, it is going to have a lot more to be afraid of. Now is the time to bring together from many chapters throughout the book the implications of cognitive stratification for the underclass.

…What happens to the child of low intelligence who survives childhood and reaches adulthood trying to do his best to be a productive citizen? Out of the many problems we have just sketched, this is the one we choose to italicize: All of the problems that these children experience will become worse rather than better as they grow older, for the labor market they will confront a few decades down the road is going to be much harder for them to cope with than the labor market is now. There will still be jobs for low-skill labor, mostly with service businesses and private households, but the natural wage for those jobs will be low. Attempts to increase their wage artificially (by raising minimum wage, for example, or mandating job benefits) may backfire by making alternatives to human labor more affordable and, in many cases, by making the jobs disappear altogether. People in the bottom quartile of intelligence are becoming not just increasingly expendable in economic terms; they will sometime in the not-too-distant future become a net drag. In economic terms and barring a profound change in direction for our society, many people will be unable to perform that function so basic to human dignity: putting more into the world than they take out.

Perhaps a revolution in teaching technology will drastically increase the productivity returns to education for people in the lowest quartile of intelligence, overturning our pessimistic forecast. But there are no harbingers of any such revolution as we write. And unless such a revolution occurs, all the fine rhetoric about “investing in human capital� to “make America competitive in the twenty-first century� is not going to be able to overturn this reality: For many people, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of the teaching. pp 520-521

The Emerging White Underclass

The dry tender for the formation of an underclass community is a large number of births to single women of low intelligence in a concentrated spatial area. Sometime in the next few decades it seems likely that American whites will reach the point of conflagration. The proportion of white illegitimate births (including Latinos) reached 22 percent in 1991. There is nothing about being Caucasian that must slow down the process. Britain, where the white illegitimacy ratio, which was much lower than the American white ratio as recently as 1979, hit 32 percent in 1992 with no signs of slowing down.

…The white cognitive elite is unlikely to greet this development sympathetically. On the contrary, much of white resentment and fear of the black underclass has been softened but the complicated mixture of white guilt and paternalism that has often led white elites to excuse behavior in blacks that they would not excuse in whites. This does not mean that white elites will abandon the white underclass, but it does suggest that the means of dealing with their needs are likely to be brusque. pp 521-522

…Strict policing and custodial responses to crime will become more acceptable and widespread. This issue could play out in several ways. The crime rate in affluent suburbs may be low enough to keep the pressure for reform low. But events in the early 1990s suggest that fear of crime is rising, and support for strict law enforcement is increasing.

One possibility is that a variety of old police practices—especially the stop-and-frisk—will quietly come back into use in new guises. New prisons will continue to be built, and the cells already available will be used more efficiently to incarcerate dangerous offenders (for example, by eliminating mandatory sentences for certain drug offenses and by incarcerating less serious offenders in camps rather than prisons). Technology will provide new options for segregating and containing criminals, as the electronic bracelets now being used to enforce house arrest (or perhaps ‘neighborhood arrest’} become more flexible and foolproof. Another possibility is that support will grow for a national system of identification cards, coded with personal information including criminal record. The possibilities for police surveillance and control of behavior are expanding rapidly. Until recently, the cognitive elite has predominantly opposed the use of such technology. In a few years, we predict, it will not.

The underclass will vecome even more concentrated spatially than it is today. The expanded network of day dare centers, homeless shelters, public housing, and other services will always be located in the poorest part of the inner city, which means that anyone who wants access to them will have to live there. Political support for such measures as relocation of people from the inner city to the suburbs, never strong to begin with, will wither altogether. The gaping cultural gap between the habits of the underclass and the habits of the rest of society, far more impassable that a simple economic gap between poor and not poor or the racial gap of black and white, will make it increasingly difficult for children who have grown up in the inner city to function in the larger society even when they want to. p. 524

…As time goes on and hostility toward the welfare-dependent increases, those policies are likely to become authoritarian and rely increasingly on custodial care.

Racism will reemerge in a new and more virulent form. The tensions between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it is actually thinking about race will reach something close to a breaking point. This pessimistic prognosis must be contemplated: When the break comes, the result, as so often happens when cognitive dissonance is resolved, will be an overreaction in the other direction. Instead of the candor and realism about race that so urgently is needed, the nation will be faced with racial divisiveness and hostility that is as great as, or greater, than America experienced before the civil rights movement.
{bold lettering added by Baba}

…In short, by custodial state, we have in mind a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business. In its less benign forms, the solutions will become more and more totalitarian. Benign or otherwise, “going about its business� in the old sense will not be possible. It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the state.

…If we wish to avoid this prospect for the future, we cannot count on the natural course of events to make things come out right. Now is the time to think hard about how a society in which a cognitive elite dominates and in which below-average cognitive ability is increasingly a handicap can also be a society that makes good on the fundamental promise of the American tradition: the opportunity of everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life. That is the task to which we no turn. pp. 526

…How should policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault, and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how well people do in life?

The answer of the twentieth century has been that government should create the equality of condition that society has neglected to produce on its own. The assumption that egalitarianism is the proper ideal, however difficult it may be to achieve in practice, suffuse contemporary political theory. …

…Until now, these political movements have focused on the evils of systems in producing inequality. Human beings are potentially pretty much the same, the political doctrine has argued, except for the inequalities produced by society.

…Nonetheless, millions of Americans have levels of cognitive ability low enough to make their lives statistically much more difficult than life is for most other people. How may policy help or obstruct them as they go about their lives? Our thesis is that it used to be easier for people who are low in ability to find a valued place that it is now. p. 536

…The broader goal is a society in which people throughout the functional range of intelligence can find, and feel they have found, a valued place for themselves. For “valued place,� we offer a pragmatic definition: You occupy a valued (sic place?) if other people would miss you if you were gone. The fact hat you would be missed means that you were valued. Both the quality and quantity of valued places are important. Most people hope to find a soulmate for life, and that means someone who would “miss you� in the widest and most intense way. The definition captures the reason why children are so important in defining a valued place. But besides the quality of the valuing, quantity too is important. If a single person would miss you and no one else, you have a fragile hold on your place in society, no matter how much that one person cares for you. To have many different people who would miss you, in many different parts of your life and at many levels of intensity, is a hallmark of a person whose place is well and thoroughly valued. One way of thinking about policy options is to ask whether they aid or obstruct this goal of creating valued places. p. 535

,,,Government policy can do much to foster the vitality of neighborhoods by trying to do less for them. p. 540

…Our policy prescription in this instance is to return marriage to its formerly unique legal status. If you are married, you take on obligations. If you are not married, you don’t. In particular, we urge that marriage once again become the sole legal institution through which rights and responsibilities regarding children are exercised. If you are an unmarried mother, you have no legal basis for demanding that the father of the child provide support. If you are an unmarried father, you have no legal standing regarding the child—not even a right to see the child, let alone any basis honored by society for claiming he or she is “yours� or that you are a father. p. 546

…Our fourth answer has been that group differences in cognitive ability, so desperately denied for so long, can best be handled—can only be handled—by a return to individualism. A person should not be judged as a member of a group but as an individual. With that cornerstone of the American doctrine once again in place, group differences can take their appropriately insignificant place in affecting American life. But until that cornerstone is once again in place, the anger, the hurt, and the animosities will continue to grow. p. 550

…It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not admire, competencies and incompetencies, assets and debits; that the success of each human life is not measured externally but internally, that all rewards we can confer on each other, the most precious is a place as a valued fellow citizen. p. 551-552


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Sometimes major policy pieces reach the public, as did the book by Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve. It is also the case that some of the critical ideas are not noticed in the excitement. This book is a part of a
genre that prepares the way for domination and genocide. It should be read
with the 1946 book by Weinreich, [/u]Hitler's Professors:The Role of
Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People.[/u] Attached are key excerpts from the Bell Curve that reflect and support the ideology of white supremacy.

Please please read, and then read the policy chapters, especially 21 and 22 from which these excerpts have been taken. Then find out who Charles Murray is and who his associates are in the network of conservative foundations.

[i]Baffour,/i]
(Baba note: also know as Dr. Asa G. Hilliard of Georgia State U.}

[Baba Ahmed]

rebelafrika - distinguish Latinos/Latinas and Hispanics...

medaase
baba ahmed