Scientist keeps up the tradition of pseudo-scientific racism

In an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine of London he stated that ‘‘he’s ‘‘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.”

His statement was based on research gathered, he said, ‘‘working with blacks and test scores from sources he did not name.”

Since the Nazi program of extermination based on this kind of common sense-street-pseudo-science, which I wrote about in my last column, public expressions of racism have become bad taste among those who think of themselves as members of the ‘‘better class.” These are things that one expresses among like-minded friends at dinner parties and at the country club. Public expressions are for the less well bred.

This is a sign of some progress. Those over a certain age, especially if they were reared in the South, remember a time when such expressions were common.

Watson seems to be part of a pattern, following in the footsteps of people like William Shockley, engineer and inventor of the transistor, in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. At the end of their career, with nothing left to lose and too old to censor their thoughts, they go public with their secret passion – the inherent inferiority of people of color, especially Africans.

Like Dr. Shockley and a few others, 79-year-old Watson had to take one last parting shot before he is lowered into the grave.

Watson did not apologize in his resignation press release nor did he claim he was misquoted like others have.

The human family may be one but, in his opinion, some siblings are inherently superior to others.

Scientific racism is the attempt to use science, or more accurately pseudo science, to prove that the group one belongs to is superior to other groups. I do not know of any case where anyone claimed to have done research and found they were members of the inferior group.

It flourished in America and other Western nations in the last half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, it was the science taught at major universities around the world.

It was used to justify everything from slavery and colonialism.

There is hope, however, that the better qualities of our nature will prevail. Dr. Watson did not really retire but was fired from every position he held, sending the message that his expressions of street-common-sense-pseudo-scientific racism was the nothing more than verbally defecating in public and not to be tolerated.

All, especially Africans and those of the African Diaspora, need to know this history of pseudo-scientific racism starting with Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82) to Dr. Arthur Jensen, professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Once again, the majority of those coming to our defense are European scientists, which for me raises the issue of the shortage of Ph.D.s in science and math among people of color, especially African Americans, who are usually the objects of this defamation.

The Prince George’s County school board must make ‘‘raising” Ph.D.s in math and science as one of its goals. Let’s call it the FPHD (Future Ph.D.s) Program.

Nothing need be changed except the emphasis and a public statement of goals to raise the percentage of Ph.D.s in science and math to match the percentage of African-American players in the NFL (82 percent) and NBA (92 percent). It would be open to all and students, who could enroll in elementary school.

Finally, to paraphrase David Sloan Wilson in his book, ‘‘Evolution For Everyone: How Darwin Theory Can Change The Way We Think About Our Lives”: We might not be fated by our genes to [be racist] but we are most certainly prepared by them ... . There is ample replicated research that we are hard wired to distinguish between ‘‘us” and ‘‘them” and to behave inhumanely toward ‘‘them.”

Van Caldwell, a lawyer, lives in Kettering. He can be e-mailed at wvcaldwell@comcast.net.