PERHAPS because I’m congenitally optimistic, I think The Bell Curve’s message is already widely understood, by the American people if not by the elite. Ordinary citizens know that some people are in significant ways more intelligent than others, that only a relative few are extremely bright or extremely dull, and that intelligence bunches up at the center. They know that intelligence is not randomly distributed among members of different identifiable racial and ethnic groups. These are lessons that are taught in everyday life, and you have to undergo a pretty sophisticated indoctrination and enlist in a tightly disciplined ideological army to believe otherwise.
Of course, most of our university and media elite have signed up for those forces. They have done so, I think, because they believe that ordinary people would take the admission that there are differences in average intelligence among the races as a license for racial discrimination. They evidently believe that many or most Americans long to return to the system of legally enforced racial segregation that prevailed in the American South until the mid 1960s. But that is nonsense. Ordinary people understand quite well what Herrnstein and Murray, mindful of their elite audience, feel obliged to state explicitly: that differences in average intelligence among the races do not justify discrimination against or for individuals of those races. Ordinary people know—everyday experience makes it quite plain to them—that some blacks are extremely bright and some non-blacks are extremely dull. They know that it is not rational to discriminate by race.
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