MOTHER'S SONS

To the Editors of the Crimson:

The cloak of academic freedom in which so many in the Harvard community seek to conceal their real feelings in the continuing debate as to whether Professor Richard Herrnstein's writings on "I.Q." are racist, was inadvertently pierced last week by Psychology Department chairman, Edwin Newman. According to the March 10 Crimson, Newman refused to give a definite answer as to whether he personally thinks blacks are inferior because "all the facts aren't in."

Like most black people here, I have watched with detached interest as student groups like SDS and UAG evidence willingness to risk expulsion and possible prison in bold--and likely futile--efforts to convince the world (and perhaps themselves) that white Americans are not as insensitive to the centuries of white racist oppression as Herrnstein's writings suggest.

Among other things, these students fight ambition and tradition, two qualities hallowed at Harvard. Scholars, and particularly scientists, have served as the well-rewarded apologists for this country's racial policies ever since slavery days.

Typical of Harvard faculty in this group was Dr. Louis Agassiz who in 1863 wrote (obviously without the facts) that Negroes were "indolent, playful, sensual, imitative, subservient, good-natured, versatile, unsteady in their purpose, devoted and affectionate...nowhere do they appear to have been capable of rising by themselves, to the level of the civilized communities of the whites..."

That was over a century ago, but as the more sophisticated if no less odious writings of the Herrnsteins and Arthur Jensens show, the magnetic attraction of power, prestige, and profit, for justifying a nation's racial conduct, which is no less unjustifiable because stated in academic terms, remains irresistible.

Rational response is wasted here. And yet continued silence is impossible. All the facts may not be in on black inferiority, but there is a ghetto slang game that might assist the Herrnsteins, Jensens, and Newmans uncover the missing data. Simply stated gentlemen, why don't you ask your mothers? Derrick A. Bell   Professor of Law