Who's the Idiot?

Back to My Little Pony, the racial achievement gap:

It appears to be that time once more for the race and IQ debate to rear its foolish head by dint of something said or published by a person of purportedly high intelligence.

We were last here in 1994, with the release of "The Bell Curve," in which Charles Murray, a historian, and Richard Hernstein, a behavioral psychologist, argued that black people, on the whole, are of lower intelligence than whites as a whole.

A firestorm erupted, with loads of dissenters and critics on one side and loads of defenders and believers on the other. Murray swam through the turbulence, laughing all the way to the bank as the book climbed the bestseller lists. . . .

Now comes the chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a scientific research facility in New York, telling a British audience that he sees a dire future for Africans 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.”

If you are using a measurement tool, and the results look screwy time and time again, might one not question the accuracy of the measurement tool and therefore investigate the process whereby it is created and the methodology used in the measuring and a whole host of other related factors?

Let's not linger, though, there is more to see. Sex, baby! Yeah! Because the good Dr. Watson (most famous perhaps for being one of those who discovered the DNA molecule) also fantasizes that the Black people be getting they groove on:

Hunt-Grubbe also reports that Watson has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, hypothesizing that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos. In 2000 Watson shocked an audience at the University of California, Berkeley, when he advanced his theory about a link between skin color and sex drive. His lecture, complete with slides of bikini-clad women, argued that extracts of melanin — which give skin its color — had been found to boost subjects' sex drive.

Don't take it personally; although Watson may seem racist at first glance, a more thorough examination reveals he is batshit crazy.

Among the screws that are not only loose, but rolling around freely looking for a brain to which to attach in the echoing dark cavern of his haid are his fantasies of creating a Watson World in which all the ladies please his palate:

He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

In this best of all possible worlds (in the immortal words of Leibniz and then Voltaire), there are no--gasp!--gays:

He has been quoted in The Sunday Telegraph as stating: "If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't want a homosexual child, well, let her."

And by the way? Fuck the fat people, too:

On the issue of obesity, Watson has also been quoted as saying: "Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."

UPDATE: From the 10/26/07 NYT:

James D. Watson, the eminent biologist who ignited an uproar last week with remarks about the intelligence of people of African descent, retired yesterday as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, and from its board.

Education Requires Integration

Or at least it should.

School integration is good for everybody:

Wells’s [Amy Stuart Wells, of Columbia University's Teachers College --ed.] brief primarily focuses on the long-term benefits of school integration. She cites social science data that shows integrated schools have a strong, positive effect on students’ racial attitudes and ability to interact with others in multiracial settings. The data show that minority students receive long-term benefits from integrated schools: they tend to move into more racially integrated settings in their lives and careers; they experience greater social mobility; they have higher occupational aspirations; and they develop intergroup skills that benefit both the graduates and their employers.

At the same time, research shows that white students who attend racially integrated schools have fewer racial stereotypes and prejudices, even controlling for other relevant social factors. Not only do integrated schools help the life chances of minority students, they also lessen the discrimination they face in society. Furthermore, Wells presents research showing that schools are often the only place that children are exposed to the multicultural experiences that lead to these benefits.

But there is so much opposition:

MILTON, Mass. -- Last spring, town officials in this affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary-school assignments for 38 streets -- and sparked outrage. Some white families had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly black school which has historically had Milton's lowest test scores.

Among those reassigned is Kevin Keating, a white parent who is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I "just don't feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school," he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional.

Some work for integration in an attempt to reduce the racial achievement gap in test scores:

Although the push to integrate public schools is often associated with the civil-rights movement, these days many school administrators want to integrate schools for a more practical reason: to raise test scores. Studies show black and other minority students tend to perform better academically when they learn alongside white classmates. Districts face the threat of losing government funds if school test scores fail to meet a certain threshold.

Even though closing the achievement gap is ostensibly a significant goal of the No Test Publisher Child Left Behind legislation, really, are we surprised that to learn that

the Bush administration and various organizations have filed briefs opposing the integration policies.

The real issue is that school segregation is a basic human rights violation:

[According to a UN Human Rights Commission report] the state of segregation in U.S. schools may violate an international human rights treaty to which the United States is a signatory.