I Say Watson Please Put Down Your Crack Pipe

First, let me say James Watson is a racist. His comment that 'just ask those who work with Black people' is a cowardly attempt to slander a group through a thinly veiled insinuation. Most offensive is the way the sentence hangs there unfinished and begs each of us to fill in our own prejudice and receive his validation.

It really is a remarkably insidious bait and switch. Watson is conflating a discussion about the genetic determinants of intellect with social situations that are pervasively impacted by issues of class, culture, and society. Intelligence is a product of biophysical structures, which are the product of genetic blueprints. There exist heterogenious gene pools, therefor intelligence must be heterogenious. I - and you - know a Black guy that is like, you know, THOSE people. Therefor since you and the mythical THAT guy are of different intellect/social temprament/ worth and different gene pools that difference must be generalizable to all black and white people.

My last point to Watson is that the notion that we would develop in a genetically homogenous way that produced a cingular blueprint for the genetic determinants of intellect is no more surprising than the fact that white, black, yellow, and red people all AMAZINGLY! Managed to develop with a singular blueprint for the number of fingers on a hand.

All that said, I think a far too often overlooked point is that there is no reason except the vestages of neo and historical colonialism that African schools should be modeled on the Western system. Intelligence may have a genetic determinant, but we know it has a social and experiential component. While Africans may or may not have a different genetic predisposition, we know they have a totally different social and experiential upbringing than kids in Omaha, Orange county, or Oslo.

Anyone who wants to argue otherwise I would just point you to THE benchmarks in the educational sector of the development industry - primary school enrollment and literacy rates. I do not consider myself of the out there radical anti-Western intellectual movement. But I think it is a huge mistake to uncritically embrace Western models of economic and social development.