Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined.

Abstract

Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined, edited by Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, and Aaron Gresson, III. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. 454 pp. $24.95, cloth. Reviewed by Susan Clark Studer, California Baptist College. In 1994, Harvard professors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published the widely read (and widely discussed) book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Lie. ln it, they disingenuously quoted statistics and research studies in an to persuade readers of the purported role of IQ in determining an individual's social status. Herrnstein and Murray fallaciously equated the generally lower IQ test scores observed among racial minorities with low intelligence and antisocial behavior, and decried the level of taxes necessary to pay for the welfare and education of individuals deemed to be of low intelligence. Measured Lies includes responses from authors representing a variety of academic disciplines, who each recount Herrnstein and Murray's erroneous assumptions and inaccurate use of statistics. The contributors also unveil what they identify as the duo's hidden agenda: to buttress right-wing perspectives on race and class in American society. In their opening essay, the editors critique Herrnstein and Murray's cowardly use of white cultural knowledge as the basis on which standardized measures of achievement are based (p. 8). They also ascertain that the point of The Bell Curve's thinly veiled propaganda is very clear: that collective stupidity and corruption, not racism and class bias, produce poverty, crime, and social despair (p. 9) and account for the lower socioeconomic status of minorities in America. Accordingly, editors and contributors alike point out that The Bell Curve is not only racist and lacking in academic fairness, but it was also funded by an organization that has long supported the racialized research of Herrnstein and Murray and others. Measured Lies is divided into four parts, the first of which is a brief introduction that outlines the many fallacies contained in Herrnstein and Murray's work. Most notable among these is Herrnstein and Murray's insistence that their research is not about race, a claim they make even while citing and extending the earlier work of race-baiting eugenicists, Social Darwinists, and other far-right ideologues. Part II, appropriately entitled Situating The Bell Curve, positions the book firmly at the forefront of ultraconservative attacks on egalitarian social and economic policies. Author Michael Apple places The Bell Curve into a larger institutional context, commenting that the generally favorable reception given the book by policymakers is strongly related to historical dynamics that have played a large part in this nation's past and current treatment of gender, race, and class and the poor in general (p. 66). Henry Giroux, concerned with the book's lack of vision and meanspiritedness, writes that underlying The Bell Curve is a race agenda that is fundamentally at odds with any viable notion of (p. 76). Although he claims that he is not calling for the censorship of the book, Giroux stresses that educators and others should attempt to understand and confront those economic, political, and social conditions that provide the pedagogical and political contexts for [its] success (p. 76). Giroux continues, writing that The Bell Curve is symptomatic of a larger and more dangerous crisis of democracy in the United States (p. 88). The 22 chapters comprising Part III and the bulk of Measured Lies approach and deconstruct The Bell Curve chapter by chapter, exposing its authors as the latest in a long line of intellectual charlatans. …