Washington Post opens its pages to discredited Bell Curve author…again | Media Matters for America
On October 25, the Washington Post published an op-ed by white supremacist favorite Charles Murray, the discredited author of The Bell Curve—which argued racial differences in intelligence. Murray took the opportunity to follow up on arguments he made in The Bell Curve, by claiming that there’s a “New Elite” in this country that is concentrating their genetic intelligence in a “New Elite” bubble, just like he predicted would happen when he wrote The Bell Curve…or something like that.
First a refresher: Back in 1994, Murray and co-author Richard J. Hernstein published a book called The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which purported to prove that intelligence was a greater indicator of economic success than the socio-economic class one is born into; therefore, the reason minorities are over represented in lower classes was because they were less intelligent than their white, upper class counterparts. Of course, their book was extremely controversial, and didn’t hold up to academic scrutiny. As Nicholas Lemann summarized in Slate, “The Bell Curve, it turns out, is full of mistakes ranging from sloppy reasoning to mis-citations of sources to outright mathematical errors. Unsurprisingly, all the mistakes are in the direction of supporting the authors’ thesis.”