Dear old Watson…. no, not that Watson, the Nobel laureate Watson who has no standing in the sciences relating to intelligence, IQ, and “race”, …. has aired his prejudices again so those who harbor suspicions about the lesser intelligence of some groups can portray themselves as scientists rather than bigots.
According to an article or two I’ve read, Watson made a comment about social policy in Africa being based on the notion that Black Africans’ intelligence is the same as “ours” – I guess he means Europeans and therefore Caucasians – bu that all the testing shows otherwise.
Contrary to what some have advocated, I am all for having these folks speak their piece. They’re all around us, esp in the teaching profession. They have no scientific arguments on their side but they insist on citing “evolutionary science” and “psychology” as the bases for their assertions. In reality, as Watson revealed in part of his comment, their belief in the idea of race itself and in racial hierarchies for abilities and skills is based on their daily experiences. One comment even cited Blacks’ dominance in certain sports; that’s how crude and shallow these people’s arguments are. Remember when basketball was a “Jewish” game b/c Jews lived in the ghetto?
No amount of scientific evidence is going to persuade them that they need to rethink their notions of hierarchy. They apparently feel it is wrong to place students of a less intelligent “race” (it never ever ever dawns on them how one’s “race” is determined – that both Whites and Blacks in this country are a mixture if they’ve been here more than 3 or 4 generations) in classes where their test scores do not place them. That is, other methods of determining someone’s qualifications just don’t count. That was Bakke’s argument.
Well, that one’s been turned on its head. Charles Murray himself, author of the Bell Curve and a proponent of race-based intelligence averages, states quite clearly that Asians are more intelligent than Caucasians by his criteria and that Jews (a race???) are more intelligent than anyone else. So someone like me, half Italian and half Hill-Billy, should just roll over and forget college. We’ll put the Asians and Jews in charge of the country and we’ll get…… John Yoo and Henry Kissinger. Anyone want to rethink this?