Saturday, August 27, 2005
Charles Murray, Crossburner
In all the recent hullaballoo over the not-so-subtle efforts by Andrew Sullivan and other right-wingers to rehabilitate him, let's not forget that Charles "Bell Curve" Murray is also a known cross-burner. As City Pages editor Steve Perry wrote back in the last century:
...Near the end of his high school days in Newton, Iowa, Murray and some of his pals went out one night and burned a cross next door to the police station. To my knowledge, the reams of coverage accorded Murray for his pseudo-scientific apologia on behalf of racism have produced only two mentions of this incident. One was in a 1994 New York Times Magazine profile, the other a bit later on the Donahue show. In both instances Murray protested that he had no idea as to the racial significance of cross-burning. There were only two black families in Newton in those days, an old school chum of his added in the Times piece. Well. As it happens, I grew up just 30 miles away from Murray's central Iowa hometown, in an even smaller farming town with no black families at all. But somehow I managed to learn what cross-burning meant by the time I finished high school, and I expect Murray did too.Please keep this in mind whenever you see any attempts to pretend that Murray isn't a racist pig.
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