In our genes

Maybe racism is in white people’s genes.\nGeneticist and Nobel laureate James Watson of the famous DNA double-helix duo Watson and Francis Crick made waves worldwide, but not for his genetic genius. In an interview with London’s Sunday Times on Oct. 14, Watson explained that black people are not as intelligent as white people.\nWatson told the Times “there are many people of color who are very talented” but he is “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.” Perhaps attempting to sweeten his remarks, Watson said he hoped everyone was equal; unfortunately, he explained, “People who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”\nWatson has been suspended from a longtime post as Chancellor at a prestigious research laboratory. His British book tour and appearance at the London Science Museum were cancelled because the museum believed that his comments had “gone beyond the point of acceptable debate.”\nHow many high-profile eruptions of racism does it take before we’re willing to acknowledge we have a problem? More specifically, how much racial rancor caused by white people will it take before white people realize that race and racism is our problem more than anyone else’s?\nMichael Richards and Don Imus made racist remarks and after briefly dogging them, the conversation became an indictment of the black community for using the word “nigger” and for demeaning portrayals of black women in music videos. These men’s mistakes were opportunities to take stock of white attitudes that remain hidden by the masks of polite civil society, but white people largely refused self-reflection and made it a black problem instead.\nIn Jena, La., white students hung nooses from a tree where black students sat the previous day; a white school board dismissed it as a prank. A school fight then broke out among six black students and a white student, and the white District Attorney brought second-degree murder charges against the black students and planned to try them as adults. An all-white jury took only three hours to convict the first black student. Despite obvious racial unrest and injustice, white people aren’t eager to use Jena as a case for self-reflection about how racism is white people’s problem.\nDon’t look to Watson to model this self-reflection. He was “mortified” by his comments and explained, “I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said.” Watson acts baffled at how these words came from his mouth, as if an alien ventriloquist spoke through him. Like all white people, he has the privilege to dismiss and deny his racism.\nInstead, we’d all do better to acknowledge these racist beliefs and use these incidents to take stock of our problem. Until white people finally own and challenge the racial problems we created and keep alive, we’ll keep getting hit in the face with these ugly reminders of our complicity in this collective problem.