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Username: Tonya
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Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2008 - 01:08 pm: | 
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Is James Watson a racist?
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Special to The Washington Post
Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:07/11/2008 07:41:54 PM MDT
Is Dr. James Watson racist? After the controversy that erupted last fall when the father of DNA suggested that there are inherent, unalterable biological differences in intelligence between black people and everyone else, I wrote to Watson and requested an interview in which he could explain his remarks. Our conversation this spring underscores how America's battles with race and racism will play out in the era of the genome.
Watson and his British colleague, Francis Crick, are remembered popularly for identifying the "double helix" structure of DNA. Watson's contribution was to define how the four nucleotide bases that make up deoxyribonucleic acid combine in pairs; these base pairs are the key to the structure of DNA and its various functions. In other words, Watson identified the language and the code by which we understand and talk about our genetic makeup.
Watson was just 25 when he and Crick published their findings and 34 when he won the Nobel Prize. His youth and a certain absent-minded professorial quirkiness made him a national hero, the symbol of American enterprise and intelligence. In 1989, he was named head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health. In 1994, he became president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a lavishly funded center for the advanced study of genomics and cancer.
On Oct. 14, a former Watson assistant, Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, wrote an article suggesting that Watson believes nature has created a primal distinction in intelligence and innate mental capacity between blacks and everyone else that no amount of social intervention could ever change. She quoted him as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa," since "all of our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really" and that "people who have to deal with black employees find that (the belief that everyone is equal) is not true."
His words caused a tidal wave of shock and disgust. The father of DNA seemingly supported the most ardent fantasy of white racists (David Duke waxed poetic on his Web site that the truth had at last been revealed). One of the smartest white men in the world seemed to confirm that the gap between blacks and whites in, say, SAT results has a biological basis and that environmental factors such as centuries of slavery, colonization, Jim Crow segregation and race-based discrimination - all of which contributed to uneven economic development - are not very significant. Nature has given us an extra basketball gene, as it were, in lieu of intelligence.
On Oct. 19, Watson profusely apologized; on Oct. 25, he retired from Cold Spring Harbor.
When I read about Watson's remarks, I was astonished and saddened. Since we had met before, as alumni of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, I sent him a letter; as editor of TheRoot.com, I offered him a platform in the black world through which he could explain, defend and perhaps clarify the remarks attributed to him. He accepted, and on March 17 we spoke for well over an hour, with no holds barred.
"Well?" one of my friends asked. "Is he a racist?"
Not really. But I think that Watson is what W.E.B. Du Bois called a "racialist" - that is, he believes that certain observable traits or forms of behavior among groups of people might indeed have a biological basis in the code that scientists, eventually, may be able to ascertain; that, in the search for the basis of behaviors, we can move from correlation to causation (that genetic sequencing patterns can be linked to intelligence); and that racial differences between ethnic groups in behavior and ability reflect immutable genetic traits rather than environmental factors.
The distinction between "racist" and "racialist" is crucial. James Watson is not a garden-variety racist, as he has been caricatured, the sort epitomized by David Duke. He also seemed embarrassed and remorseful that Duke and his ilk had claimed him as one of their own. Not surprisingly, he apologized profusely, contending that he had been misquoted, at worst, and taken out of context, at best.
But Watson does seem to believe that many forms of behavior - such as "Jewish intelligence" (his phrase) and the basketball prowess of black men in the NBA (his example) - could, possibly, be traced to genetic differences among groups, although no such connection has been made on any firm scientific basis. Girded by his conviction that everyone should be judged as individuals, he blithely asserted that if a genetic basis for "Jewish intelligence" was found, it wouldn't affect anyone in the slightest: "no one should be judged by a term like 'black.' " But a phrase such as "Jewish intelligence" contradicts this claim.
Precisely because of the misuses of science and pseudo-science since the 18th century, which put in place fixed categories of "races" to justify an economic order dependent on the exploitation of people of color as cheap sources of labor, it has never been possible for a person of African descent to function in American society simply as an "individual."
Watson's error is that he is too eager to map individual genetic differences (which do exist) with ethnic variation (which is sociocultural and highly malleable), and to provide a genetic explanation for ethnic differences. Watson said he was gloomy about the prospects of Africans as a group but later insisted that people shouldn't be judged as groups. Doesn't this illustrate the persistence of race categories, of "kind-mindedness," despite his declared intention?
Abilities and behaviors, such as intelligence or basketball skills, that are popularly attributed to groups and are defined as "genetic" will continue to limit or determine the treatment of individuals who fall into those "racial" categories, regardless of an individual's propensities and achievements. In the end, visions that are racialist may end up doing the same work of those that are racist.
Having spent the past three decades studying racist discourse about the degree of reason that people of African descent possess, I know that such conclusions - say, about an entity called "Jewish intelligence" - could deleteriously affect me as a black person because it could reinforce stereotypes about Jewish people being genetically superior and black people being inherently less intelligent than other groups. If such differences in intelligence were purported to have a genetic basis, all of the social intervention in the world could have only so much effect. Why bother with costly compensatory education programs if, after all, nature is fundamentally to blame, severely limiting what these programs can achieve? Sooner or later, members of these supposedly "lesser" ethnic groups or genetic populations could find their life possibilities limited and perhaps even regulated.
I worry even more that Watson confessed to me that "we shouldn't expect that (ethnically) different persons have equal intelligence, because we don't know that. And people say that these should be the same (that is, all ethnic groups) ... I think the answer is we don't know." Later, he remarked that "we're not all the same," by which he meant genetically, across ethnic groups. Soon, some scientist somewhere will claim to have proved this, and that claim could be deeply problematic for the future of black people in this society, even if my rights to equal treatment under the law are not predicated upon the hypothesis that all human groups have the same genetic endowments. Watson's tendency to theorize about groups - a very human tendency - undermines his declared belief that humans should be judged as individuals.
Afterward, I realized what fear my conversation with Watson had confirmed: that the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table, despite all the progress blacks have made in this society, and that the last great battle over racism will not be fought over access to a lunch counter, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, under a microscope, on the battleground of our DNA. That is where we, as a society, will resolve the contentious claim that groups are, by nature, differently advantaged in the most important way: over the degree of reason or intelligence that they ostensibly possess.
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The writer, a professor at Harvard University, is editor in chief of TheRoot.com. He is working on his next book, "Race and Reason in the Enlightenment." A longer version of this article appears on www.theroot.com.
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_9855685 |
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