When Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published ``The Bell
Curve'' last fall, one theme was prominent in the howling storm of
hostile commentary that crashed over the book.

``Even if what they say about race and intelligence is true,''
critics asked, in a mixture of anger and anguish, ``why is it
necessary to talk about it?''

Actually, racial differences in intelligence, and particularly the
long-persisting gap of about 15 points in IQ test scores between
American blacks and American whites, are a relatively minor part of
``The Bell Curve,'' which is subtitled, ``Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life.''

But that doesn't faze commentators who are sure they know Murray's
motives better than he does himself. (Co-author Herrnstein died in
September.)

``Despite Murray's protestations,'' said Diane Halpern last week,
``this is a book about race.'' Halpern, a professor of psychology
at California State University, San Bernardino, was a panelist at
a symposium on the book sponsored by the Skeptics Society, held
Sunday at Caltech in Pasadena.

At least, that seems to be the only part of it anyone wants to talk
about. And the discussion is long overdue. If social policy refuses
to come to terms with reality, reality is likely to bite back, and
last week it administered a sharp corrective nip through the
unlikely person of Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia.

Appearing on the MacNeil-Lehrer show, Nunn explained that he
couldn't support the balanced-budget amendment unless it included
an iron-clad constitutional guarantee that federal judges would not
be able to use it to compel authorities to raise taxes without
either the consent of the taxpayers or the votes of the legislators
they elect.

Nunn was worried, and with very good reason, about cases like one
in Kansas City, Mo., where federal courts imposed enormous tax
increases to pay for lavish new schools as a remedy for past
discrimination.

The implication is that racial differences in test scores, which
occur in Kansas City just as they do everywhere, cannot possibly
result from any cause other than discrimination, and therefore the
people of Kansas City have to pay and pay until those differences
disappear.

Of course, the differences are not disappearing. Whatever the
effect of discrimination on school achievement, and it is
undoubtedly still large, it is not going to be eliminated by
sending children to schools equipped with planetariums and Olympic-
sized swimming pools. The cost of complying with the courts'
requirements so far, according to Missouri officials, has been $1.3
billion.

The state has appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed last
September to hear the case. Missouri argued that the imposition of
an ``outcome-based standard wholly foreign to traditional equal-
protection analysis'' exceeds any constitutional protection of
equal opportunity.

To put the Missouri case in a California context, it's as if a
federal judge should decide to suspend Proposition 13, and require
taxpayers to spend more and more money on their schools -- however
much it took -- until every population group, including whites
qualified for the University of California at the same rate as
Asian-Americans.

Californians should not preen themselves that such things only
happen in places like Missouri. It was a California judge, noting
that African-American children were disproportionately assigned to
classes for low-performing pupils, who decided to define the
problem away by decreeing that schools were prohibited from giving
IQ tests to African-Americans.

These are rational decisions only in the context of implicit faith
that there are no underlying group differences. To the extent that
``The Bell Curve'' makes that belief untenable, it is indeed about
race. (It's irrelevant whether those differences are cultural or
biological, environmental or hereditary; what matters is whether
they're real.)

But what Murray and Herrnstein say about racial differences isn't
new, and even harsh critics like Halpern agree their data are
correct. Their contribution to this debate has been to blow it
open; after the media frenzy of the last six months, it ought to be
hard for anyone to maintain with a straight face that the subject
of racial differences in intelligence is taboo -- that is,
something that can't be talked about.

What Murray and Herrnstein did that is new is to look intensively
at the white data. They used a massive study sponsored by the
Department of Labor, the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, to
look at a whole range of social indicators, both desirable and
undesirable. The study is big enough -- 12,686 people selected in
1979 -- and detailed enough that after controlling for the effects
of socioeconomic background, they can still show that intelligence
matters enormously in how likely people are to find themselves in
fortunate or distressing circumstances.

Some of the correlations are expected. Who would find it surprising
that people with low IQ's (85 or lower, one standard deviation
below the average) drop out of high school more frequently than
those equally far above the average? But the size of the difference
is startling -- 24 percent, versus 1 percent.

Other correlations are less obvious -- with physical disability,
for instance, or with child neglect.

Intelligence is not exactly the same as IQ tests, IQ scores are not
identical with academic achievement, and success in school doesn't
automatically translate into success in life, however you want to
define it. But they all hang together, and unless we learn how to
talk about these topics, we are all too likely to hang separately.