Black intellectual giant and white intellectual giant meet!

The worthless but self-important Henry Louis Gates interviews the terminally frivolous James Watson. The exchange between the two lights is markedly inconsequential, with Gates repeatedly raising a single obsessive concern, that science will find that there is a genetic basis for racial differences in intelligence, and that these findings will be used to bring back discrimination against blacks, and with Watson vaguely denying that such differences exist and saying that we should only look at people as individuals and that knowledge of genetics will be beneficial to everyone. Here’s a sample:

HLG: Imagine if you were an African or an African-American intellectual. And it’s 10 years from now. And you pick up The New York Times and some geneticist says, A) that intelligence is genetic, and B) the difference as measured on standardized tests between black people and white people, is traceable to a genetic basis. What would you, as a black intellectual, do, do you think?

JW: I don’t think I can answer, because I don’t think it will change things much

HLG: You don’t think that all those people [who] want to see black people subjected, wouldn’t use that as …

JW: No, no, no. Because in my lifetime, I’ve seen less and less discrimination. And I think it’ll continue that way.

HLG: But some people would argue, particularly my friends in the university, that one of the reasons we’ve seen less is that we’ve gotten rid of biology, that we’ve started talking about race as a social construct. And now, biology is back, bigger and badder than ever.

JW: I am convinced that the movement towards personalized genetics is going to improve their lives. Black people and white people, we’re going to both be better because of this knowledge. Everyone should be judged [as] individuals. No one should be judged by a term like “black.” So I’m optimistic about where we’re going. I don’t think it’s going to lead to people being just discriminated. I see them being helped by knowing what genes might affect your health, and also in understanding when you don’t fit in.

HLG: Well I’m terrified that it will lead to more discrimination.

Gates’s anxiety finally leads him to this:

HLG: Let me ask a moral question. If we found out 10 years from now, I come back and I interview you, and geneticists have found a biological basis of intelligence. And the worst of all nightmares is that some people in the human community are genetically different in terms of their intelligence and thoughts. Should we prevent that kind of discovery, given it’s—

Gates says he fears a new age of systematic discrimination against blacks. But of course any such discrimination is illegal, and the whole spirit of modern society militates against it. No, the prospect that makes Henry tremble is not that the discovery of inherently lower black mean intelligence will lead to a return of discrimination against blacks, but rather that it will lead to the end of racial preferences for blacks. No more hiring and promotion of unqualified blacks, the abandonment of the very system that made his own star academic career possible, is for Gates a return of white racist dominance. And to head off the emergence of any truthful knowledge that might make people question the rightness of giving blacks jobs and other benefits for which they are not qualified, Gates makes it clear he would consider suppressing—who knows, perhaps criminalizing—such information.

By the way, it is standard jargon in the “civil rights” community to describe the absence of undeserved benefits for blacks as discrimination and bigotry. For examples of such rhetoric, see the early part of my article on the Grutter decision.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 02, 2008 07:34 PM | Send