The bell curve is a very controversial work because of its supposedly racist and classist commentary. However, through what I have read so far there had been no evidence of objectionable comments regarding race and class. That changed party-way through the book when the authors claimed that if you control for IQ most of the US's minorities do as well as whites. The implication of this statement is that the academic and income-based performance of blacks, latinos etc. is as high as their IQ would suggest. In other words that the achievement gap is as wide as it should be. The insidious corollary to this theory is the minorities are less intelligent than whites and "deserve" to do less well based upon their intelligence. Hernstein and Murray provide statistical justification for this theory through the analysis of the educational attaiment of the top 5% of the population by IQ. According to their statistics more blacks than whites achieve post-graduate education (and almost as many latinos do) among the various segments of each group in the top 5% of IQ for the population. The theory posited by Hernstein and Murray is offensive, racist and highly controversial. I find it hard to credit and I wish to simply dismiss it out of hand. However, Hernstein and Murray are (or were in Hernstein's case) highly respected scholars and Harvard University and the American Enterprise institute respectively. Therefore their work does merit closer analysis. The basis of their claims are their analysis of educational performance, race and IQ scores. The data they provide do back up their assertions. I find it hard to believe that they simply invented it so I attempted to discover its source, which was buried under 150 pages of endnotes. I eventually discovered that it had several flaws. First of all, IQ scores are not available for the majority of the population as a result Hernstein and Murray converted SAT scores into IQ scores using a homemade formula. It seems likely to me that SAT scores are more influenced by educational background than IQ scores. Secondly, the sample size of blacks (10% of the population) in the top 5% of the population in a 10, 000 person sample is microscopic and extrapolating to the entire US population from such a small group is ridiculous. The inclusion of this section in the bell curve was unfortunate. Earlier in the book that made insightful, brilliant observations on educational inequities and possible solutions. However, those observations will be forever overshadowed by their racist and repugnant claims later on.