As The Bell Curve was making its way through the nation’s political circles, it was also making waves in the white nationalist movement. Members of the movement saw it as a legitimation of their long-held ideas. They took the reception of Murray and Herrnstein’s research as a cue that they could safely broach the topic of genetic differences in order to change public discussion of race. As Leonard Zeskind, an expert on white nationalism, recounts in his book Blood and Politics, the longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke openly celebrated the ideas contained in The Bell Curve. The “scientific community is moving in our direction,” he told a room of white nationalists in 1994, “The ideas of The Bell Curve can’t be suppressed anymore.”[45]

Murray also received praise from American Renaissance (AR), a publication and website supported by the self-styled think tank the New Century Foundation. According to American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor, The Bell Curve said “something AR has been saying for years: The races do not have the same average intelligence.” “[T]he rules of dialogue in America may have finally changed,” he wrote hopefully. Maybe, people could now openly admit to their neighbors, “No, I don’t want blacks moving into the neighborhood because they are not like us.” The book, he concluded, had “done the country an enormous service.”[46]

The problematic publication American Renaissance

Taylor founded American Renaissance and the New Century Foundation in 1990, two years before the Yale-educated writer began to make a name for himself in conservative circles with the publication of his book Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. At the time, conservative consensus assumed that the problems plaguing many black communities in American stemmed from a dysfunctional black culture, but Taylor echoed the biological frame by placing the blame squarely on black people themselves. He laid out his argument in a debate about the “black-crime problem” in a 1994 issue of National Review: “the United States has neither a unique ‘culture of violence’ nor inadequate gun laws,” he concluded simply, “It has a high rate of violent crime because it has a large number of violent black criminals.”[47]

While the book earned him space in the foundational publication of conservative thought, Taylor turned his attention more fully toward American Renaissance, which promised to be a “literate, undeceived journal of race, immigration, and the decline of civility.” With the help of a large cadre of racist intellectuals, the publication presented white nationalist ideas in a disinterested, journalistic style, and no idea received more space on its pages than black crime.

American Renaissance’s inaugural issue warned white people not to be “silent accomplices” to their own “dispossession.” He told readers that white people should not be ashamed to discuss their group interests. “Others—sincere, thoughtful, concerned Americans—have been convinced that it is improper, even immoral, for white people to think of themselves as a group or to speak out as white people,” Taylor wrote, “We believe that in the pages of American Renaissance these people will find reasons to think that it is not only moral but necessary.” He included a note of caution: “If we continue to permit the erosion of the essential conditions of nationhood, and indeed, of any healthy sense of neighborhood and community, the frictions that torment us today will be as nothing compared to the chaos that will come. The squalor of Detroit, the violence of Washington (DC), and the savagery of New York City must not mark the way to the future.”[48]

The list of contributors at American Renaissance overlapped considerably with that of Mankind Quarterly, and both publications contained many of the same “race realist” arguments. Richard Lynn, for instance, wrote a 2002 cover story arguing that black people were “more psychopathic than whites,” rendering them unable to control their own impulses. As a result, African Americans engaged in reckless sexual behavior, had unstable relationships, committed more crimes and had lower credit scores.[49]

Taylor’s cohort of professional racists repeated these same fallacies at American Renaissance conferences, faux-academic affairs held biannually beginning in 1994 that have attracted a wide variety of characters from the racist far right. At a 1998 meeting, Glayde Whitney, a behavioral psychologist at Florida State University, gave a presentation in which he argued that black women developed larger buttocks — the “human equivalent of a camel’s hump” — to survive in harsh African climates. He also stated that black people possess an innate tribal tendency, and that the “many rapes of white women by blacks is a typical expression of dominance.”[50]

American Renaissance uses Hurricane Katrina to push its narrative

Hurricane Katrina, which decimated the majority-black city of New Orleans in 2005, seemed to confirm all that American Renaissance had purported to be true about African Americans, namely that they would resort to “barbaric behavior” if removed from the protective rails of white society.

In his longform essay “Africa in Our Midst,” Taylor described the city as a “jungle.” “[T]he most serious damage,” he wrote, “was done not by nature but by man.” The hurricane provided an excuse for the city’s black residents to “loot, rob, rape and kill” — alleged actions he described in graphic detail. The lesson? “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears.”[51]

Taylor’s accounting of events turned out to be false. “It now appears that press reports on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exaggerated the mayhem in the New Orleans Convention Center and at the Superdome,” he conceded in a second piece. He nevertheless defended his original conclusions, insisting that the chaos he described easily could have taken place. News outlets reported gruesome accounts because they seemed “entirely plausible.” “In their bones, even writers for the New York Times believe crowds of blacks can easily descend into anarchy,” Taylor wrote.[52]

Taylor’s pieces on Katrina were emblematic of the way his outlet discussed the issue of black crime. But perhaps no other American Renaissance contributor and conference mainstay more fully explored the issue of race and criminality than Michael Levin, a philosophy professor at City University of New York since 1969. While his early work focused on the philosophy of mathematics, by the 1980s he was predominantly interested in writing philosophical critiques of feminism and affirmative action (he argued in an Australian publication that the most troubling aspect of the American educational system was “the staggering energy expended to bring American Negroes into the educational mainstream”).[53]

The question of race and intelligence came to dominate his work, leading to widely publicized showdowns between Levin and his university and, eventually, to CUNY offering students alternatives to Levin’s classes.[54]

Michael Levin, with Pioneer Fund backing, pushes his ideas on race

In 1997, with the financial support of the Pioneer Fund, Levin published Why Race Matters, a treatise against government efforts to remedy racial inequality. Levin argued that “race differences, far from being neutral, undermine almost everything that has been said about race for the past 60 years, and the many policies based on this conventional wisdom.” Whites, he insisted, “owe blacks no compensation in any form because the limitations of blacks are byproducts of genetic differences, not injuries done by whites.” Even vastly higher rates of black infant mortality, Levin wrote, could be explained as a biological phenomenon.[55]

A great percentage of the material appearing in Why Race Matters was recycled from other Pioneer Fund grantees, including Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton. However, Levin’s condemnations of black character, morality and values were considerably more overt, and he linked these shortcomings to a propensity to commit crime. White people, he argued, were wasting energy on “white guilt” over social conditions that could not be remedied and should forgive themselves for harboring a “rational” fear of black violence.[56]

Through statistics and lists of crimes, Levin insisted that whites should be “alarmed not only by the frequency of black crime, but by the extremes of depravity and indifference to human life.” As a remedy, he proposed harsher systems of punishment — corporal punishment, the death penalty and chain gangs — as well as race-conscious policing and the use of technology that could identify potential criminals.[57]

The book sold poorly in its first printing, but Taylor swooped in to improve its sales, republishing it in 2005. Taylor, Jensen and Rushton supplied blurbs on the book’s back cover to give it the appearance of scholastic respectability and support.[58]

With its scientific jargon and lengthy footnotes, Levin’s book provided scholarly heft to the racist argument that black people were natural-born criminals. It was, however, an unwieldy volume for the average reader to wade through.

Spinning crime statistics

To reach a wider audience, Taylor produced The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Violence in America, a brief 1999 report that relied on a sloppy interpretation of crime statistics linking race and IQ, and thus claiming that crime has a racial and biological basis. It purported to provide indisputable proof that not only did black people commit more crimes, but also that there was an epidemic of black-on-white violent crime that went unreported.

The findings of the report drew on an authoritative source: the “1994 Crime Victimization Survey” released by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. While Taylor’s reporting of the statistics was accurate — there were, in fact, higher rates of violent crime committed by black people, and crimes committed by blacks against whites than the reverse — his interpretation of the data was flawed.

By taking crime statistics at face value, Taylor made the same mistake Frederick Hoffman did in 1896: blaming higher rates of black crime on an innate black criminality, when in fact those disproportionate crime rates could be explained by poverty and related structural disadvantages. On average, African Americans were — and remain — far poorer and more likely to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods than whites. Concentrated poverty has a criminogenic effect: lack of access to jobs, increased idle time and poorer educational opportunities all increase one’s chances of engaging in criminal behavior, and the effect is the same for black and white people. One study, released three years before The Color of Crime, found that when sociologists controlled for structural disadvantages, there were no significant differences between crime rates in black and white communities.[59]

A 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics study showed that persons from poor households experienced the highest rates of violent victimization, and that rates were consistent for both blacks and whites.[60] When sociologists asked “Is Poverty’s Detrimental Effect Race-Specific?” they found the answer was no: policies aimed at reducing poverty effectively reduced violent crime and the crime reduction rates were similar in both black and white neighborhoods, meaning it was poverty — rather than race — that contributed to the violent crime rate in the first place.[61]

Taylor’s claim that blacks consciously targeted whites and were, in fact, committing “hate crimes,” presupposed that all interracial crimes were acts of racial malice. While Taylor suggested interracial crime was a rampant problem, the vast majority of violent crimes are intraracial, meaning victims and perpetrators are far likelier to be of the same race. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report from 2000, among white victims of violent crime, 73 percent were attacked by other whites. Among black victims, 80 percent were victimized at the hands of another black person.

The argument that black people who commit crimes are specifically seeking out white victims is simply not true. In an article in the American Journal of Sociology, for example, sociologist Robert M. O’Brien pointed out that population size and the impact of segregation help explain why overall rates of black-on-white crimes are higher than white-on-black crimes. Essentially, black people are far more likely to come into contact with white people in the course of their daily life than the other way around.[62]

Despite its many methodological errors, Taylor released updated versions of The Color of Crime in 2005 and 2016, which feature new sections on discriminatory policing. It continues to be a standard text within white nationalist circles.