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The recent appearance of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life has again drawn attention to die debate about the relationship between inheritance and intelligence, a debate which in the American context is read as a comment on "race" (read: Blackness) and lower intelligence.1 (In my discussion of the idea of the "bell curve," it is important to understand diat die very existence of such a "curve" can be drawn into question once the definition of what is being plotted on it is examined.) There is no question that The BeU Curve was (and is) read as a book on race and intelligence. When the book appeared, Charles M. Madigan of the Chicago Tribune noted that "it adds a layer of scientific glaze to a collection of racial attitudes that seems to have escaped from the 19di century. In that sense, this huge tome is the perfect Thinking Bigots' Beach Book. If you're looking for data to back up your prejudices, it's all here; David Duke will find much to borrow."2 Madigan clearly read the book as a book about race, and race in die American context is defined by Blackness. In The Bell Curve, intelligence becomes a discussion of character and virtue. And it is this red thread throughout the debates about race and intelligence that has been litde acknowledged over the past decades. While this debate about the relationship between "race" and "IQ" has been sporadically carried out over the past three decades around die work of Arthur Robert Jensen, William Shockley, and J. Philippe Rushton, litde attention has been paid to the ethical and moral questions that adumbrate these studies.3 As Richard Lacayo noted in a Time magazine essay on the book (October 24, 1994) :
The Bell Curve's explosive contentions detonated under a cushion of careful shadings and academic formulations. Even so, they explode with a bang. To give credence to such ideas - even when doing so with loud sighs of alas! - is to resume some of die most poisonous batties of die late 1960s and '70s, when die sometimes cranky outer limits of die IQ debate were personified by Ardiur Jensen, die Berkeley psychologist who stressed die link...