THREE CENTURIES' PERSPECTIVES 397
form of argument is always the same, and always permeated by
identical fallacies over the centuries. Scratch the argument that
women, by their biological nature, cannot be effective as heads of
state and you will uncover the same structure of bad inference un-
derlying someone else's claim that African Americans will never
form a high percentage of the pool of Ph.D. candidates.
Thus, Browne's old refutation of the myth "that Jews stink" con-
tinues to be relevant for our modern struggle, since the form of his
argument applies to our current devaluings of people for suppos-
edly inborn and unalterable defects of intelligence or moral vision.
Fortunately (since I belong to the group), Jews are not taking much
heat these days (though I need hardly mention the searing events of
my parents' generation to remind everyone that current acceptance
should breed no complacency). This season's favorite myth has re-
called another venerable chapter in this general form of infamy—
The Bell Curve's version of the claim that people of African descent
have, on average, less innate intelligence than all other folks.
Following Browne's strategy, this claim can be debunked with a
mixture of factual citation and logical argument. I shall not go
through the full exercise here, lest this essay become a book, (see the
first two essays of this section). But I do wish to emphasize that
Browne's crowning point in refuting the legend "that Jews stink"—
his explication of category mistakes in defining Jews as a biological
group—also undermines the modern myth of black intellectual in-
feriority, from Jensen and Shockley in the 1960s to Murray and
Herrnstein today.
The African American population of the United States today
does not form a genealogical unit in the same sense that Browne's
Jews lacked inclusive definition by descent. As a legacy of our ugly
history of racism, anyone with a visually evident component of Af-
rica ancestry belongs to the category of "black" even though many
persons so designated have substantial, often majoritarian Cauca-
sian ancestry as well. (An old "trick" question for baseball aficiona-
dos asks: "What Italian American player hit more than forty home
runs for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1953"? The answer is "Roy Cam-
panella," who had a Caucasian Italian father and a black mother,
but who, by our social conventions, is always identified as black.)
(As a footnote on the theme of surrogacy, explanations of the
same category mistake for blacks and Jews often take the same prej-
