There you go again with that whites are smarter than Blacks crap!

By Sinclere Lee

Washington D.C. (BNW) —Are white people smarter than Blacks? This is a question you have to live with everyday if you’re a Black person in western society. In the past, it was the mismeasurment of man, when scientists went so far as to reason that measuring the size of the head and brain to determine intelligence was scientific. Next, in the 90’s it was the “Bell Curve,” a book by Charles Murray that suggested that whites were smarter than Blacks.

In a recent interview a Novel prizewinner appeared to suggest that Africans were less intelligent than whites. But after his remarks caused a furious backlash he said there was "no scientific basis" for believing that Africa was "genetically inferior". With so much pressure on his comments, he blinked!

While Dr. James Watson, the controversial DNA pioneer who sparked a controversy over his belief that Africans are 'genetically inferior' has defended his position despite apologizing for causing offence.

This belief is widely held but softly spoken in the academic community. However, a university lecturer who was suspended after claiming black people were intellectually inferior to whites has taken early retirement for his remarks.

Frank Ellis, of Leeds University, whose comments are being examined by West Yorkshire Police, told the student newspaper at Leeds University that he supported a theory that whites were generally more intelligent. He was suspended in March and yesterday the university said the Russian and Slavonic studies lecturer had left permanently, on 30 June.

The university disclosed that the 53-year-old Ellis had retired on the same standard terms available to his colleagues but indicated that it had agreed to pay him a year's salary and to make a contribution towards his legal costs, in return for his agreeing to bring forward his retirement a year sooner than he had wanted.

The Associate Press reported that, Nobel laureate biologist Jim Watson apologized "unreservedly" for stating that Black people were not as intelligent as whites, saying he was "mortified" by the comments attributed to him.

Watson, 79, an American who won the 1962 Nobel prize for his role in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, told the “Sunday Times” he was "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."

"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," Watson said during an appearance at the Royal Society in London.

"I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways that they have."

"To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief," he said.

Watson also asserted there was no reason to believe different races separated by geography should have evolved identically, and he said that while he hoped everyone was equal, "people who have to deal with Black employees find this is not true."

Many persons were sent to the death camps or denied marriage or work as a result of this "mismeasurement" of man, as has the prominent American evolutionary biologist and author Stephen Jay Gould named this unfortunate investigation of pseudoscientific knowledge of white supremeness to harm people.

“The Mismeasurement of Man,” showed that over the years, from antiquity to modernity, scientists have tried to prove that whites are smarter than Blacks.

Who can forget Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve?” Recently, when Jim Naureckas of “Fair and Accurate Reporting” asked why the “New Republic” devoted almost an entire issue (10/31/94) to a debate with the authors of “The Bell Curve,” editor Andrew Sullivan justified the decision by writing, ‘The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.’

In fact, the idea that some races are inherently inferior to others is the definition of racism. What the “New Republic” was saying — along with other media outlets that prominently and respectfully considered the thesis of Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein's book — is that racism or is that a respectable intellectual position, and has a legitimate place in the national debate on race.

The Bell Curve was accorded attention totally disproportionate to the merits of the book or the novelty of its thesis. The book and its dubious claims set the agenda for discussions on such public affairs programs and comments on religion and race is even more focus. Now it’s the "achievement gap" in education that is signaling that whites are somehow smarter than Blacks.

Back to Dr James Watson; while his comments were met with an avalanche of criticism, and the London's Science Museum canceled Watson's planned Friday appearance, saying his remarks had "gone beyond the point of acceptable debate."

The British government's skills minister, David Lammy, who is Black, called the comments "deeply offensive."

"It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices," Lammy said.

Watson's remarks to the Sunday Times were the latest in a number of controversial comments from the eminent biologist, but why did he choose to make is hurtful remarks to a paper in London England, and not in America, if he didn’t mean it or have anything to hide?

In 1997, Britain's Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion.

During a lecture tour in 2000, he suggested there might be links between a person's weight and their level of ambition and between skin color and sexual prowess.

"That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to The Associated Press, which cited people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."

And in a British TV documentary that aired in 2003, Watson suggested stupidity was a genetic disease that should be treated.




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