Though it is not remembered principally for this reason, Hillary Clinton’s best-selling book of 1996, It Takes a Village, devoted considerable space to a discussion of brain science and early child development. The headline claim—that “a child’s character and potential are not already determined at birth”—clearly took aim at accounts of human identity that assume it is hardwired from the start. Yet Clinton still cautioned that a child’s “first few years” were the most crucial, because “by the time most children begin preschool, the architecture of the brain has essentially been constructed.”
Clinton’s biological language was telling, and it was not merely metaphorical. More than a generic intervention into the perennial debate about nature versus nurture, it represented a critical rejoinder to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s infamous argument about race and intelligence in The Bell Curve, which had been published two years earlier—and has cast a shadow over the politics of race and science ever since.
In Clinton’s view, The Bell Curve had simply been wrong to imply, as she summarized it, that “if nothing can alter intellectual potential, nothing need be offered to those who begin life with fewer resources or in less favorable environments.” This erroneous position, Clinton wrote, went hand in hand with the book’s other “politically convenient” ideas, including that “intelligence is fixed at birth” and that intelligence is “part of our genetic makeup that is invulnerable to change.” Herrnstein and Murray had hijacked the national conversation on the political implications of human biology, putting genetics back on the table as an explanation of enduring “cognitive differences between races.” It Takes a Village sought to rescue the discussion.
This effort both reflected and reinforced a wider attempt to put findings from biology to work as politics and public policy—an attempt that echoes the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century, was deployed through the invidious long career of scientific racism, and endures in various ways to this day across the political spectrum, from the “born this way” logic of one strain of the gay rights movement to fetal heartbeat abortion laws on the right. Even as critics found the The Bell Curve infuriating, they often bought into its methodological premise, that one could draw a clear connection between scientific facts and political conclusions.