White Lies: Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse by Jessie Daniels

Author:Jessie Daniels [Daniels, Jessie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gender, Politics, Race, Social Science, Sociology, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781134716456
Google: bPpYCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01AC99MSE
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

opportunities to commit crimes, the organ’s capacity for criminal behavior has nearly doubled! ( WAR, vol. 8, nos. 5 and 6, 1989, p. 5)

Then the diagram points to different segments of the brain, one of the smallest of which is labeled “intelligence.”

White supremacist assertions of the allegedly racially based lower intelligence of Blacks are not limited to extremist publications, however, but also appear under the guise of social science research. In the fall of 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, fully credentialed academic social science researchers, published The Bell Curve, in which they argued that I.Q. is largely attributable to genetic heritage and that Blacks as a group are less intelligent than whites. The authors also suggest that if low I.Q. scores are related to poverty (as they believe they are), then whites and Blacks alike should accept the reality of Black intellectual disadvantage.

Figure IV.1

The connection between this widely discussed social science research and extremist white supremacist discourse is not a difficult one to make.

First, despite Murray’s [and while he was alive, Hernstein’s—he died just as the book was released] vehement denials of harboring racist sentiment, the discussion presented in The Bell Curve of race and I.Q. bluntly sanctions white supremacist notions about the biological inferiority of Blacks, albeit in much more sophisticated language than the extremist publications. That Hernstein and Murray inundate the reader with an avalanche of charts, graphs, and statistics to substantiate their point makes

it no less an artifact of white supremacist ideology; it merely demonstrates that white supremacy can take on a particularly pernicious form when it appears as social science.

Second, there is a more direct link to white supremacist sources in Murray and Hernstein’s work. When interviewed by The New York Times, Murray conceded that part of what he found compelling about researching I.Q. and race was that it had the “allure of the forbidden,” and that he and Hernstein were aware of this. “Some of the things we read to do this work, we literally hide when we’re on planes and trains. We’re furtively peering at this stuff ( New York Times, October 9, 1994, p. 51). Intrigued by what these publications might be, Charles Lane in an article for the New York Review of Books finds that much of the research for The Bell Curve draws on the overtly racist journal The Mankind Quarterly and on the work of avowedly racist “scholars” who regularly contribute to Mankind. While Lane contends that Murray and Hernstein should not be held accountable for the views of all the researchers upon whose work they draw, he does argue convincingly that the use of these sources raises serious questions of intellectual honesty. In the interview with the New York Times, Murray conceded that he and a group of friends had, as teenagers in Iowa, burned a cross made of scrap wood on a hillside. The teenagers were surprised when their prank was interpreted as racial harassment of the two Black families in the town. When asked about the incident, Murray remarked, “… it never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance.

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