The late ‘60s and early ‘70s saw a dangerous upsurge in attempts to provide an “academic” justification for racism. In 1969, Arthur Jensen of the University of California, Berkeley argued in the Harvard Education Review that most Black people in the U.S. inherited lower intelligence (I.Q.). In
The Unheavenly City, Edward Banfield of Harvard argued that poor workers were lazy, prone to criminality, uninterested in education, and disinclined to plan for the future, so that poverty in slums and ghettos are inevitable, not caused by racism and exploitation. William Shockley of Stanford University advocated sterilizing persons with IQ scores lower than 100.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members know that racist pseudo-science must be fought. We helped to form the Committee Against Racism (C.A.R.) in order to unite with antiracist students, academics, and workers. In alliance with non-communist students and faculty we organized teach-ins against racism at dozens of colleges and universities.
PLP’s independent communist position was and remains: “No free speech for racists.” We refuted the thinly-veiled gutter racism of these pseudo-scientists in a militant, scholarly book-length pamphlet Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class. We organized shutting down talks by Jensen, Shockley, and, beginning in 1974, by Richard Herrnstein of Harvard, whose book The Bell Curve argued that “intelligence” was genetically determined and poverty had nothing to do with racism or capitalist exploitation.
Expose racist pseudo-science
On November 17–18, 1973, hundreds of faculty, graduate students, and intellectuals attended a two-day conference at New York University sponsored by the Committee Against Racism. By then the nationwide teach-in movement against racism was involving masses in the discussion of racist ideas and practices, their inter-relation, and how to fight against them.
The October 28, 1973, issue of the New York Times carried an antiracist advertisement signed and paid for by 1400 professors, teachers, and others. It read, in part: “Racist theoreticians have recently sought sanction and protection in the concept of academic freedom. This is a subterfuge ... (Academic freedom) is not a license to justify oppression. It was no more intended to protect racism than verbal assault of libel, with which racism has more in common than it has with free intellectual inquiry ... The use of the academy to further racist oppression must be halted.”
The ad called for specific action against racism and the racists and endorsed the N.Y.U. conference. Organizers at the C.A.R. Storrs, Connecticut headquarters received hundreds of responses to the ad and call for the conference, many with substantial contributions.
PLP’s line of “no free speech for racists” was attacked by liberal anticommunists and confused many honest antiracists as well. In response, PLP and CAR organized a debate at Columbia University. Nat Hentoff, who had attacked PLP and CAR in his column in the Village Voice, represented the view that freedom of speech was “absolute” and “guaranteed by the Constitution.”
Racist ideas not welcome!
Finley Campbell, national chairperson of CAR and professor at U. Wisconsin, who with scientist Toby Schwartz of the University of Connecticut and PLP, founded CAR, represented an antiracist but non-communist stance. Campbell also exposed the ‘‘neo-racists”’ as scientific charlatans and said that academic freedom did not apply to their type of pseudo-‘research. He pointed out that no university would give a professor tenure to teach ideas that science had disproved for centuries, and that the same limits should be applied to racist pseudo-science.
Bob Leonhardt put forward PLP’s ideas on racism. All history—particularly the history of Nazi Germany—shows that racist ideas mean death and genocide. Racism isn’t only the affair of those who are most directly attacked by it: ultimately, it devastates everyone but the ruling class. Free speech and academic freedom are not an abstract question but a class question—who has the money to own newspapers and TV stations, to publish racist theories in the Harvard Education Review, to fund racist research.
The only long-range strategy for destroying racism is working-class revolution to get rid of all bosses. Capitalists’ class existence requires racist super-profits as well as their apologists like Shockley. Communists and workers should learn from history. We must fight racism harder than ever in order to advance the revolutionary process.
