The controversy over The Bell Curve has been manufactured for one reason. It provides the evidence that forty years of political posturing and rhetoric has been wrong. The findings presented in the book are rejected solely for the reason they take the oppressed masses and the evil ones out of the moral equation. It has ended a myth.
Casting all race differences as a matter of good and evil and being on the side of good made one a hero in one's own eyes. It permits one who believes in this simple myth to be a champion of good, truth, justice and the American way and all that. Losing that self-identification means a loss of self-importance. It is not something people are willing to give up easily.
Sanctimony has always surrounded the race issue. It was an opportunity to have a simple belief in right and wrong. It did not require any thinking as the truth was known and all complexity was easily rejected out of hand as a sign of the emergence of evil.
Even though the book does not focus on race, merely addresses it, it is unlucky chapter thirteen that bears the brunt of the fury. This is the myth busting chapter. This is the chapter that shouts, "but he has no clothes."
Beyond the loss of self-importance people have based their entire economic lives on the untruth chapter thirteen exposes. Political careers are based upon it. And this is like the Pope responding to conclusive proof Jesus Christ died of old age. So many people have simply been wrong for most of their lives.
It is part and parcel with the ideals of a color blind society being abandoned and beginning the practice of reverse racism. If we truly had a color blind society, if we truly treated everyone as an individual then there would be no problem with chapter thirteen. Were that the case the chapter would simply explain the difference in racial representation in the various social categories (which is all it does) rather than as something evil that has to be fought.
The book does nothing to anyone of any race but rather it deals a mortal wound to those who believe in race, who believe in dealing with people as members of a race rather than as individuals. And without a race issue there is no race to be championed. Don Quixote can go home can go home; they really are windmills.