The Bell Curve considers a question which Murray says "often arises": "How do African-Americans compare with blacks in Africa on cognitive tests?" Murray's premise here -- "the African black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American black slavery and discrimination and might therefore have higher scores" -- is typical of his asocial, ahistorical approach.
Having set up a straw question, Murray knocks it down: "Blacks in Africa, including urbanised blacks with secondary education, have obtained extremely low scores." For proof, Murray turns to the work of one Richard Lynn (who is cited 24 times in The Bell Curve). Lynn wrote in the unashamed white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly in 1991 that the average black African IQ is 70, which -- using Murray's own hotly contested scores -- falls fifteen points below that of African- Americans and thirty below white Americans.
The direction in which Murray is heading becomes clear with this comment: "The IQ of `coloured' students in South Africa -- of mixed racial background -- has been found to be similar to that of African-American blacks." (African-American intelligence, Murray implies, was genetically supplemented through interracial sex during the era of slavery.)
To come up with the figure of 70, Lynn surveyed eleven African IQ studies dating to 1929, five of which were conducted in apartheid South Africa and one of which was conducted in colonial Zaire in 1952. Lynn's deeply racist commentary (in the same Mankind Quarterly article) helps explain why he draws such flimsy conclusions from such limited sources: "The Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contribution to civilization."
Yet upon closer examination, even the sources cited do not necessarily say what Lynn and Murray want them to, as Charles Lane has shown in the New York Review of Books. The main South African study cited by Lynn should have been interpreted, according to the original researcher (Dr Ken Owen), as evidence not of racial eugenics, as Lynn and Murray would have it, but of profound environmental factors that affect intelligence test-taking (bantu education, language, cultural bias in the test, health, and others).
The South African authors of another study which Lynn and Murray misinterpreted -- I.M. Kendall, M.A. Verster, and J.W.V. Mollendorf -- put it well: "It would be rash to suppose that psychometric tests constitute valid measures of intelligence among non-westerners. The inability of most psychologists to look beyond the confines of their own culture has led to the kind of arrogance whereby judgments are made concerning the `simplicity' of African mental structure and `retarded' cognitive growth."
Choosing to ignore such warnings, Murray still concludes, "Psychometrically, there is little reason to think that these results mean anything different about cognitive functioning than they mean in non-African populations. For our purposes, the main point is that the hypothesis about the special circumstances of American blacks depressing their test scores is not substantiated by the African data."
In reality, the main point is nothing of the sort, rather it is that Murray has no conception of the circumstances, either contemporary or historical, faced by people not of his own race, class, gender and nationality. Indeed Murray appears ready to bend over backwards to make the case that blacks are not as smart as whites, even digging out South African studies inaccurately interpreted by a noted racist, and extrapolating these to all of Africa.
Patrick Bond email: pbond at wn.apc.org * phone: 2711-614-8088 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa email: bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za phone: 2711-488-5917 * fax: 2711-484-2729