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sensation in psychology circles, and it has often been applied to diverse contexts by serious academic psychologists and . . . ahem . . . pop-psychology writers. One such application occurred in a controversial book called The Bell Curve. In the book, psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray argued that human intelligence is hereditary, that poor people are dumber than rich people, and that average intelligence varies significantly among races. Though Murray worked for a conservative think tank, the authors maintained a detached scientific objectivity in their statistical analysis. For example, the statistics proved that affirmative action was “leaking a poison into the American soul” and that welfare encouraged “the wrong women” to inject their low-IQ, prison-bound babies into the nation’s deteriorating gene pool.4

A discussion of The Bell Curve and its critical reception is beyond the scope of this book, but there is one relevant conclusion that Herrnstein and Murray tossed out almost as an aside. They suggested that members of the “white elite” live in denial of the obviously inferior minds of certain minorities and that the denial has produced mass cognitive dissonance that may one day explode with fearsome consequences:

Racism will emerge in a new and more virulent form. The tension between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it is actually thinking about race will reach something close to breaking point. This pessimistic prognosis must be contemplated: When the break comes, the result, as so often happens when cognitive dissonance is resolved, will be an overreaction in the other direction. Instead of the candor and realism about race that is so urgently needed, the nation will be faced with racial divisiveness and hostility that is as great as, or greater, than America experienced before the civil rights movement.5

The authors speculate that this overreaction could lead to a “custodial state” in which the nation’s cognitively inferior minorities would be moved to “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation.” In other words, the only way to save the black and brown people from being stuck in moron-reservations is to be honest about how stupid they are and discourage them from having babies.

Only that’s not the way cognitive dissonance works. The UFO cultists didn’t respond to their rude reality check by overreacting in the opposite direction. They didn’t become fanatical anticultists—they became more fanatical cultists. Festinger’s idea is striking because it explains why cognitive dissonance produces a reaction so contrary to logical explanation. If denying race-specific intelligence variations leads to cognitive dissonance, then people should produce elaborate rationalizations to defend the idea that the races are intellectually equivalent.

But let’s draw this line out further. There is no doubt that many Americans, including the “white elite,” harbor racial prejudices, but not because of genetic intelligence differences among races. The Newsweek article “See Baby Discriminate” that so infuriated Rush Limbaugh in 2009 argued that humans are biologically predisposed to racial prejudice.6 And even without such a predisposition, the fact that certain minorities have disproportionately high dropout and crime rates would lead many people to make negative inferences about their intelligence and ethics. This is what Obama meant by his “typical white person” comment about his grandmother—“If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, well there’s a reaction that’s in our experiences that won’t go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way. And that’s just the nature of race in our society.”7

So maybe you see a black man on the street, and you hug your purse a little closer. If you think of yourself as a tolerant person, that nervous feeling may be uncomfortable to you. You may even scold yourself. That’s cognitive dissonance. You harbor two inconsistent beliefs—that the black man is dangerous and that it’s wrong to judge someone