Opinions of Thursday, 1 November 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
Dr. James Watson Must Be Made An Honorary Ghanaian!
Yesterday (10/19/07), my sister-in-law called from London to complain about a prominent American scientist who had made the claim that verifiable scientific evidence pointed to the fact of European peoples being significantly, intellectually superior to continental Africans.
Actually, the reference had been in connection with global Africans, in general. I wasn’t home. It was my wife who had taken the call and related her sister’s message to me.
Naturally, having studied, researched and taught in the discipline of African and African-American Studies for some two-and-odd decades, I could only chuckle; for the claim sounded all too familiar and vapidly pedestrian. Couple the preceding with the fact that Dr. James Watson had recently received the Nobel Prize for a significant achievement in his discipline of expertise, Genetics, and everything began to fall smack dab in place. For not only was Dr. Watson at the end, or twilight, of whatever academic or scientific achievements he stood capable of, being 79 years old, but even more intriguingly, it ought to be recognized that once anybody has been awarded the Nobel Prize, in whatever category, the rest of his or her life almost invariably begins to register a downward spiral. The only advantage appears to be that the Nobel Prize offers the recipient a respectable bully-pulpit with which to promote his or her agenda. For the Nobel Prize comes with the sort of pontifical nobility which is traditionally associated with the Chief Executive Officer of The Vatican.
Thus, having assiduously arrived at the pinnacle of his career and, perhaps, even of his life, what else is left for Dr. Watson to do other than to fearlessly expose himself for the godforsaken racist that he appears to have been all his life to the rest of the world? Which is exactly what my fellow Long Islander (or is it New Yorker?) did when he confided to a reporter of the Sunday Times of London that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa, because all our social policies are based on the [assumed] fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really” (see “You Are Black And Less Intelligent, Says U. S. Genetic Scientist,” Africa Media Service/The New Ghanaian 10/20/07).
In essence, what Dr. James Watson is saying is not very different from what many a development scientist or economist has been saying for decades; which is that different cultures require different development strategies. Where Dr. Watson seems to diverge is that the co-discoverer of the DNA structure believes that such cultural differences are immutably predicated on genetic differences, with Africans being possessed of the most deficient genetic make-up.
If the foregoing observation has validity, then Dr. Watson’s awarding of the Nobel Prize appears to have been based on an epic hoax. This is because it was the discovery of the human DNA that permanently silenced the holy-rolling prophets of Social Darwinism. Dr. Watson himself appears to appreciate this much, which may partly explain his apologetic quick turn-around. This is not to say that this Stygian scientific faux-pas, assuming, of course, that the Cold Spring Harbor, New York, geneticist retracted his anti-African diatribe with conviction, is not without precedent.
Needless to say, Dr. Watson may be objectively seen to belong to a long line of “distinguished” Western racist intellectuals, scholars and scientists, riding herd over which is the immortalized Mr. Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father and former President of the United States of America. The difference here, at least in theory, is that Mr. Jefferson was willing to readily concede that among the gamut of global humanity, the African appeared to have been the most generously endowed by Providence with rhythm and music (see Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia).
Indeed, about a generation ago, another Nobel Laureate and co-inventor of the transistor – used in our “Akasanoma” radio sets – Dr. William Shockley, then on the staff of Stanford University, California, had the temerity to also proclaim the abject and congenital inferiority of the global African to the rest of humanity. Shockley would also, like his ideological successor, Dr. Watson, apologize for having said exactly what he was convicted of. And, needless to say, in a liberal democracy such as the United States, where free-speech is supposed to be protected, at least for that species of humanity classified as the “Mainstream,” it can be equally dangerous to pressure pathological racists to recant. For one salient objective of free-speech appears to be aimed at civically forestalling the kind of carnage engineered by Mr. Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City in 1994, or even Mr. Bin Laden’s apocalyptic horror in New York City of September 11, 2001. And it is for this reason that we had hoped that the management of London’s Science Museum had not canceled Dr. Watson’s scheduled lecture on October 19, 2007.
Maybe his British hosts were deeply embarrassed by the fact that Dr. Watson’s anti-African obloquy comes on the heels of the statuary canonization and immortalization of President Nelson Mandela in London’s Parliament Square, alongside such perennial British greats as Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
In any case, as a regular columnist and occasional visitor to the raucous chat-rooms of Ghanaweb.com, the leading Ghanaian Internet website, I can vouch without any fear of contradiction, whatsoever, that compared to the immitigably scurrilous and outright heretical remarks hurled at writers like yours truly by fellow Ghanaians, Dr. James Watson’s anti-African tirade is rather diplomatic, to speak much less of the antiseptic or the proverbial kid gloves.
In sum, the renowned American geneticist merely unleashed a few glancing blows, the kind of biffs that wouldn’t even hurt a child. And so why do so many Ghanaians appear to be so deeply hurt and offended? Perhaps it is simply because in the cockles of our hearts, Dr. Watson touched a raw nerve; Dr. Watson appears to have too boldly reminded us of what we have known, or even suspected, all along but, for some strange and quite inexplicable reasons, preferred to keep close to our vests.
The other day, for instance, an anonymous Ghanaweb commentator impugned my academic credentials and even called my sanity into question. It is almost certain that my “verbal” assailant is no expert educator or physician, from the manner of his writing and the thought contained therein. At least in Dr. James Watson, we have a world-class geneticist telling Africans to go to Hell. The only problem here is that it is Hell enough for Africans to be stuck here on Earth with the bellicose and “Evil Genius” likes of Dr. James Watson. Still, the man is too Ghanaian to be written off too readily and lightly.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
