Charles Murray, who in a decent media universe (one that didn't suck up to right-wing conservative racists) would never get so much as a letter to the editor printed, once again cons the persons behind a nominally-respectable paper into letting him use its paper to spew stuff even he must know is utter bollocks. Yes, that Charles Murray. The racist crossburner Charles Murray. Didn't know about the crossburning, eh? Well, check this out: It's from the very end of an article by Steve Perry in the Twin Cities weekly paper CityPages, January 15, 1997:
THIS FRIDAY BELL Curve perpetrator Charles Murray will be in town to speak at the Center of the American Experiment. I mentioned this to a friend the other day, and he reminded me of a little-told story from Murray's past. 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.Whenever the name of Charles Murray comes up, it is my sacred duty to bring this up as well.
No one mentions that Murry and Herrnstein's data shows white and black IQs rising over the last century-- with black IQ rising faster than white.
ReplyDeleteThat either proves that whites are inferior, or that Murray and Herrnstein are wrong about the role of environment in intelligence.