thread themes on outlawing fascistic racist speech

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Fri Oct 30 10:05:11 PST 1998


In message <Pine.BSI.3.96.981030105436.4032H-100000 at pcjfn.msc.com>, jf noonan <jfn1 at msc.com> writes
>On Fri, 30 Oct 1998, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
>> Also, the question is how the Bell Curve became a bestseller
>
>
>I think this book was much more frequently purcased than it was read.
>As I mentioned, I own a copy. I actually bought *two* copies (one to
>send to my brother) at the same used bookstore on the same day. Both
>were hardbacks and in mint condition. This was about a year after it
>came out. Neither book appeared to have been read. I actually had
>the _Bell Curve Debate_ before I had _The Bell Curve_.

Yes, I suspect more people bought the book to rail against it than because they believed it. It is pointed that Murray's reputation peaked with the Bell Curve. Before then a lot of people gave his bullshit theories about the underclass more credit than they deserved. By embracing the racialised version of the underclass thesis, Murray went too far for a lot of his more liberal readers, and the critical reception was pretty hostile, as I remember it.

I, too, was one of those who ploughed through that unlovely tract to tease out it's apolgetic and racist logic, in a long review article for LM magazine.

(Listers can decide for themselves whether I fulfilled the free speech criterion of challenging prejudices rather than banning them at http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM74/LM74_IQ.html )

When my editor asked me to give it the works we both thought that it would be an important milestone in the advance of racism. In retrospect I would say that it was a milestone that marked the exhaustion of social darwinism.

-- Jim heartfield



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