Maybe it’s because I’m a white man and thus not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, but I’m still having some trouble getting my head around the whole James Watson…race-and-intelligence scandal thing from the end of last year there. There’s a raggedness to the preceding sentence that I’m dimly conscious of—though frankly I’ll be jiggered if I know how to fix it. Much as I’d hope you wouldn’t ask a dog to land an airplane, I would hope you’d cut some slack to a slope-headed Caucasian trying to grapple with the intricacies of sentence structure. If it’s proper sentences that light your fire, I suggest you ask someone smarter. Don’t worry about me. I’ll just sit here slapping at the keyboard with my big fat stupid white buttocks.
James Watson, for those of you who are reading this magazine by accident, won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for figuring out the structure of DNA, went on to head the Human Genome Project, and then talked himself into trouble and out of a job last year when, in an interview with The Sunday Times of London, he made one of the more outlandishly racist remarks in history. Amid a freewheeling discussion of genes and human nature with Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, a former lab assistant of his, Watson chanced to comment that it would certainly be nice if the world’s different racial groups had all evolved to be equally intelligent, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
