- Description
Author Charles Murray talks about his controversial book about race, class, and intelligence, "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life". The book claims that there exists a "cognitive elite" who have a significantly higher-than-average chance of succeeding in life.
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CarlEllison 02/12/2012 11:42 AM Report
I watched this interview, prepared to hate it and the author. While I watched this interview, I was tugged many times to jump to the wrong conclusion and had to force myself to consider precisely what the author was actually saying. He wasn't talking about race or eugenics. Yes, earlier racists used arguments that sounded like his, but that must not poison us, keeping us from looking rationally at the world as it really is.
However, this does not mean that I am an acolyte for The Bell Curve. I haven't read it yet, but plan to.
Mr Unbiased 02/14/2008 09:11 AM Report
I will never recover those wasted ~20 minutes. Slightly reminiscent, though, of 19th century race-dividing pseudo-scientists that used information selectively in their campaigns to establish, for instance, that blacks were naturally designed for slavery.
Cartwright identified a disease, the so called dysaethesia aethiopica, claiming (with a straight face) that "nearly all [free negroes\ are more or less afflicted with it, that have not got some white person to direct and to take care of them."
Curiously, it involved "lesions of the body discoverable to the medical observer, which are always present and sufficient to account for the symptoms."
In a debate as open as 'nature/nurture', and in a system as rife with inequality as ours still is, I can't help but recognise the panoptic wisdom of Bertrand Russell, the Great 20th century Philosopher:
"It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions." - 1951