The stunning dishonesty of Charles Murray - By Joan Walsh

[DonViejo]

Paul Ryan’s “inner city” expert explains why insisting blacks and Latinos have lower IQs isn’t racist. He's wrong

JOAN WALSH

I should no longer be shocked at the intellectual dishonesty of Charles Murray, but I am. On Tuesday Murray made a brief reply to his critics, most notably Paul Krugman, who have accused Murray of racism for much of his work, but especially his 1994 book, “The Bell Curve.” Murray rejoined the news cycle last week, when Rep. Paul Ryan cited him as an expert on poverty and the troubles of “inner city” men, who, in Ryan’s words, are “not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”

Krugman – and I and Josh Marshall and lots of other people – explained why citing Murray got Ryan accused of racism. The New York Times columnist stated flatly that Murray is “most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.” Josh and I and others spent a lot more time and energy explaining Murray’s pernicious race and class biases, but of course Murray replied only to Krugman. And to do so, he cherry-picked a few sentences from “The Bell Curve” in which he and his late co-author Richard Herrnstein acknowledged there remains debate over whether the lower IQ scores of blacks and Latinos are genetic or environmental.

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify an estimate.

Let me grant this to Murray: That paragraph is indeed in his book. But the rest of its 800 pages are devoted to arguing that blacks and Latinos have lower IQ than Asians and whites (whites are inferior to Asians, by the way); that IQ is largely (though not exclusively) hereditary; that lower IQ means these groups are more likely to commit crime and drop out of school and have illegitimate (and lower IQ) babies and live in poverty, and that there’s not much to do to help those groups rise. In fact, Murray and Herrnstein argued, American welfare policies that provide aid to women with children “inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women.”

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/18/paul_krugman_demolishes_charles_murrays_stunning_racist_dishonesty/

[greatlaurel]

1. Great post!

Love Joan Walsh, she really points out these guys outrageous lies and fertilizer they love to spread around so generously.

[Yavin4]

2. I love this excerpt from Joan's article

Murray ends his self-defense with this last remarkable piece of dishonesty:


I’ll leave you with this thought: In all the critiques of The Bell Curve in particular and my work more generally, no one ever accompanies their charges with direct quotes of what I’ve actually said. There’s a reason for that.

That’s absolute bullshit.

I love how she just cuts right to it. Sometimes you just have to call bullshit on something.

[Gothmog]

3. Murray wants to whitewash his racist positions

Walsh is correct to call this man out on his attempts

[dionysus]

4. Charlie Murray!

whoops, I thought you meant Charlie Murphy...