The history of the race taboo

There have been two events in which race, genes, and intelligence have became an extremely pressing issue in academia and media. The first was the publication of Jensen’s 1969 article How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?, where he argued that differences between individuals and races in intelligence were largely due to hereditary mechanisms, based on classical twin models and how family similarity in intelligence scales with relatedness.

The second was Murray’s and Herrnstein’s publication of the Bell Curve in 1994, which was so controversial that people wrote books about the debate: the Bell Curve Debate and The Bell Curve Wars.

These two situations overlap in various ways:

• Both works were very long. Jensen’s piece was 124 pages long, which is extremely long for an academic article, and the Bell Curve was 845 pages.

• Jensen had tenure and Murray was working at the AEI — both stable positions. Herrnstein had already been working for a while at Harvard, and died soon after publishing the book.

• All had success in their careers prior to this: Murray had written Losing Ground before this, Herrnstein was an established psychologist, and Jensen had already written close to a fifth of his 565 papers and books. All had attended Ivy league universities: Murray went to Harvard/MIT, Herrnstein to Harvard, and Jensen to Columbia.

• Jensen and Murray’s views on race, if public at all, were not common knowledge at this point. Only Herrnstein had published on the topic previously.