America Is Not a Racist Country
Tom: As I understand it, you really stopped speaking about race and IQ after The Bell Curve. Now you ve returned to the subject. How come?
Charles: The reason I stopped was very simple. The Bell Curve s subtitle was intelligence and class structure in American life. My co-author Richard Herrnstein and I argued that a profound change had occurred in America s social structure because of the increasing value of IQ in the marketplace and the concentration of high-IQ people in relatively few elite colleges. I stopped talking about race and IQ because I didn t want to lend any more fire to the accusation that The Bell Curve is the book that tries to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.
It s also the case that in the early 2000s and the last half of the 1990s black-white relationships were relatively good, and I didn t feel that I had to talk about it. But in 2020 there came the Black Lives Matter movement, and wokism exploded. I said to myself at this point, Come on, you cannot call us a systemically racist society. Blacks were a large portion of the prison population not because of racism but because blacks commit violent crimes at 10 or 12 times the rate that whites do. So too, the lack of representation of blacks in, say, high tech companies is not a function of white racism and white privilege, but merely the expression of patterns in cognitive ability among different populations.
America was undergoing a major attempt to ignore reality, which was devastating the country. This, of course, is why the book is called Facing Reality.
Tom: What changed? Why do you now think we must talk about race and IQ?
Charles: Because of the charge, of recent vintage, that America is systemically racist. If we do not answer this charge we shall be led directly to government interventions to ensure equality in group outcomes and from there to race wars and totalitarianism. To answer the charge that America is systemically racist means establishing that the cause of outcome differences is not racism, but something else.
Tom: And that something else is IQ?
Charles: In the case of differences in academic and job performance, group differences in IQ is the major explanation. In the case of group differences in criminal activity, it s a combination of group differences in IQ along with group differences in personality characteristics such as impulsiveness.
The Charles is Charles Murray.
All of the Black people I have known were my intellectual equals or superiors. Presumably that’s because I never even met a Black person until I went away to college at Cornell. The next Black people I met were at Yale Law School and later at my big DC law firm. Some of them were not only smarter but had markedly better social skills than I. So the idea that Blacks on average have a lower IQ than whites does not resonate with me on an intuitive level. On the other hand, I have met many, many white people who were intellectually normal or below normal. That’s my “lived experience.” Not that I think that counts for much.