Charles Murray and Albert Einstein.

In their recent book The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard Herrn stein rank the races by IQ with Asians outscoring whites and blacks bringing up the rear. Murray and Herrnstein assume a substantial genetic component for these IQ differences and assign to blacks a basically unalterable inferiority. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Murray pre-diets "a state in which high and moderate IQ taxpayers would become custodians of an underclass dominated by low IQ individuals," disproportionately black. In this new "custodial" state, the "cognitive elite" will bunch all the dummies together in a "more lavish version of the Indian reservation." It's all too reminds cent of the Warsaw ghetto, where an Aryan elite put a "subhuman" minority "in its place"

Murray and Herrnstein don't seem to worry that theories of racial inferiority have fueled the most colossal crimes in human history. Instead, with much media hoopla, they have offered an increasingly unequal and polarized nation the mes sage that the current distribution of power and money is natural, genetic, perhaps ordained by God, and therefore inherently fair and basically unchangeable. "For many people," Murray and Herrnstein cold bloodedly conclude in The Bell Curve, "there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching"

A key factor about IQ differences for Murray is "how hard they are to change" Instead of seeing racial differences in IQ as connected to centuries of slavery and continuing discrimination and as a reason to increase efforts to improve environ meets--to develop better programs in nutrition, prenatal care, education, and the like--Murray suggests the opposite: that society just throw in the towel because blacks "are different from everyone else"

What's wrong with all this is that it's the same thing that was said about the Chinese in America earlier in this century, even though now Chinese Americans lead the IQ pack. David M. Kutzik, professor at the Center for Applied Neurogerontology at Drexel University, states: "During the 1920s, IQ testers pegged the Chinese at the bottom of the intelligence pile: average IQ between 65 and 70. By the 1950s, Chinese Americans were scoring almost on a par with whites and 20 years later they were scoring higher than whites."

Until the mid 1920s, women in the United States lagged behind men by a 15-point spread. "Earlier in this century," reports Andrew Hacker, professor of political science at Queens College, "social scientists such as Henry Goddard and Carl Brigham spoke of the superiority of persons of Nordic stock, while noting the stunted faculties of Mediterranean and Alpine strains" It was common for Swedes, Scots, and English in America to consider the Poles, Italians, and Irish to be genetically challenged. To day, the median family income of Polish-Americans is $2,600 higher than the in come of Swedish families in the United States, and the Irish in the United States outearn the Scots.

Murray and Herrnstein ignore all this, as well as the significance of the con vergence of black and white IQ test scores over the past 20 years. About one third of the black white difference in IQ has been eliminated, even with the con tinuing obstacles of prejudice and unequal education.

"You have to believe in them;" says biology teacher Donna Light Donovan of the Hostos-Lincoln Academy, a high school in a poor Bronx neighborhood. "Most kids don't have anyone at home who does" The 300 minority students who were assigned to Hostos Lincoln were low performers, labeled as probable dropouts. Now, with teachers who be leave in their potential, their grades are double the city's average and 80 percent are headed for college. Studies by psychologist Craig Ramsey and others show that improved child development practices can raise IQ as much as 30 points. It's not all as black and white as Murray and Herrnstein say.

"Nothing is more fundamentally importent," says Jesse Jackson, "than your feelings about yourself." And that's the problem with the assertions of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. For black children who need a load lifted off their backs, Murray and Herrnstein just add to the baggage, delivering a gloomy message of genetic predestination and racial caste. It's a message that is guaranteed not to expand motivation, decrease discrimination, increase equality, or build self-confidence.

How much better and more con structive was the message from Albert Einstein: "Genius is 90 percent sweat." One wonders if Murray has the IQ to understand why that one sentence from Einstein is more important than every thing in The Bell Curve.

Ralph R. Reiland is associate professor of economics at Robert Morris College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.