It’s Murray’s flippant treatment of this history that makes some scholars so angry at his work. He doesn’t even take the widespread existence of racism seriously
as a hypothesis. After all, a black-white IQ score difference, combined with evidence that IQ is in some degree heritable, is actually consistent with the idea that black people are genetically
superior to white people in intelligence, and that their scores are depressed by early exposure to a society that devalues them from the earliest years of their lives (recall Malcolm X’s teacher
responding to his aspiration toward being a lawyer by telling him carpentry was more realistic). To put it differently: Black people could inherit average IQs of 110, while white people inherit average IQs of 100, but the disadvantages of living in a racist society from birth could mean that by a young age, black people end up with average IQs of 95 and white people stay at 100. As Ned Block
explains, there is a hidden premise that a role for genetics must necessarily disadvantage blacks, but that’s not necessarily the case.
Murray evidently considers the hypothesis of black genetic superiority too laughable to be worth disproving, even though the only reason for ignoring it is if one has already assumed the conclusion one is seeking to demonstrate; namely that racism doesn’t matter very much. The only reason why you wouldn’t even entertain the hypothesis of black genetic superiority is if you felt it couldn’t exist, something you would only think before examining the evidence if you were… a racist. (And no, Murray’s scanty and unsystematic data on Africa doesn’t help. People in the Congo, for example, probably had a difficult time holding their pencils to take IQ tests after the Belgians
cut off all their hands. If you haven’t considered the history of colonialism, war, and starvation in Africa, you haven’t even
begun to control for the variables necessary for any conclusion about genetics.)