(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your servant has now read scores of reviews of The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein. Most have fiercely criticized the book's thesis, which emphasizes the centrality of IQ in lives and careers, and most have dwelt insistently on race and the 15-point black-white IQ gap. But, oddly, we have yet to read a review noticing the racial news built into a table on page 324. In a rational world, the news would be on the front pages. The table describes the employment experience of a large (about 12,500) representative sample of relatively young Americans whose lives and careers -- and IQs -- are being tracked in the so-called National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The survey began in the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, when the group was mostly in its teens; today it is mostly in its 30s. The news is about racial discrimination in America. As we all keep reading, blacks earn a lot less than whites, even when you compare workers of similar ages and educational backgrounds. The table confirms this finding. But it points to something else one has never before read: that when you control for age and IQ, the black-white earnings gap just about disappears. Taking nine different job categories together, you find that with age and IQ held constant, blacks earn 98% as much as whites. Obvious implication: At least so far as younger workers are concerned, employers no longer engage in irrational discrimination based on race. They discriminate based on IQ -- which is rational, given the avalanche of data linking IQ to performance in many different job markets. Fascinating question: How can it be, in a world where racial discrimination is (properly) an object of enormous concern, that we are ignoring powerful evidence of its decline?