The Racist Gene

Bruno Maddox's Blinded by Science column (as of this posting, not yet online) in Discover Magazine this month, raises the whole question of a genetic basis for intelligence that exploded last October, when James Watson remarked that blacks are just not as smart as whites. Watson let his tongue get ahead of his brain, and it was too late to take the words back. He got sacked, and his entire career would never be viewed the same again. That being said, in Maddox's column, a myth continues to be perpetuated. The myth of race and a genetic basis for it.

The human species may be varied on the outside, but inside, at the genetic level, we're all the same. Race is a social affliction that the best of us seems to find a difficult hurdle to get over. There is more evidence that race is a byproduct of our environment, not our genes. Our environment determines how our genes express themselves -- and while this may have been obvious from early genetic studies, evidence is now being accumulated to support that view. Race should never be part of a genetic dialogue, other than to state that the two don't belong together -- and that's a mistake I find surprising in a science magazine.

The other point raised by Maddox is on intelligence, and I fear it may have been missed because of the column got muddied with race. Intelligence -- what is it? Isaac Asimov remarked that scoring high on IQ tests simply mean that people are "very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests." Nothing more. There are a good deal of people, who may score high on standard IQ tests, but may appear brilliant in their execution of assessments of their own devising. A car mechanic; a carpenter; a chef; they would no doubt be very successful when testing their acumen in repairing a vehicle; building something from wood; or cooking their favourite meal. Adversely, being academically smart, could just mean being dumb as a stump -- as evidenced by James Watson's remark on race and intelligence.

Related reading:

• Does Race Exist? -- Scientific American
• Race, Evolution and Behaviour -- J. Philippe Rushton

Are You Prejudiced?

Harvard has an Implicit Association Test (IAT) online, to measure the association with white and black Americans. The IAT is used social psychologists "to measure the strength of association between mental representations of objects in memory. The IAT requires the rapid categorization of various stimulus objects, such that easier pairings (and faster responses) are interpreted as being more strongly associated in memory than more difficult pairings (slower responses)." The aggregated responses from those who've taken the test online is captured in the image above. Take the test and see where you land.

The result doesn't necessarily reflect racial prejudices towards whites or blacks -- but definitely a bias -- although there is controversy in the use of the test.

"You fucking Arab!"

Something stinks in Joliet, IL. An officer from the local police force, noticed a van parked on the driveway of Kuldip Singh Nag's house with expired registration tags. The officer instructed Nag, a Sikh, to move the vehicle into his garage. The van was inoperable, and Nag had the audacity to point out that on his private property, he could actually park the van wherever he wanted to -- including his driveway.

According to Nag and his wife, what followed was bizarre. The officer pulled out a can of pepper spray, sprayed Nag in the eyes, then proceeded to beat him with his baton, while yelling, "You fucking Arab! You fucking immigrant, go back to your fucking country before I kill you!" Nag stayed in the hospital a few days to recover, after suffering head injuries, bruises and temporary blindness.

Now clearly, something is just not right here. Even I'm having a hard time believing this. But I can't see the motivation for the cop to do what he did. WTF? Even if Nag was asking for it -- police brutality? And the words? True? Actually, after reading about similar police brutality episodes -- and seeing the clips first hand on YouTube, maybe this bizarre episode did happen. But how stupid of a cop do you have to be to pull this one off? Was an episode of America's Stupidest Cops being filmed at that moment?

To make matters worse, Nag is a bronze star vet of the US Navy, who served his country during the first Gulf War.