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James Watson fired for being a racist
We were pleased to see in today’s New York Times (registration required) that James Watson has been fired from his directorship of Cold Spring Harbor lab. Well, technically, he “retired”. But he is quoted in the article as saying that
the circumstances of his resignation “are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired.”
Oh, really? He didn’t think that making racist comments might upset some people? Since the NYT article refers only to a “controversy” over “racial remarks” made by Watson, perhaps it’s useful to go back to the original interview with Watson in the Times of London, written by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe and published October 14.
He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.
The emphasis is ours. So pretty much he’s saying “I am begging to be fired. Please, please fire me.” And he really thinks he couldn’t have anticipated this?
We really love the idea that any problems in Africa (yes, the whole continent) must be due to the low IQ of Africans and not to poverty, disease, or oppression.
Another part of the NYT article we like:
Rockefeller University has cancelled a lecture Dr. Watson was to have given Wednesday at a ceremony honoring him and “The Double Helix,” the book he wrote about the elucidation of DNA.
It’s nice that Rockefeller realized that having Dr. Overt Racist speak is not the best plan. But they’re still giving him an award for The Double Helix. It remains astonishing to us that anyone would still want to give him an award for that book, which has been extensively criticized for its sexism.