Dear Reader,

The statement made by American Nobel Prize Winner James Watson, in which he suggested that blacks are inferior to whites due to evolution, comes as no surprise to me. Quite frankly, this latest public display of racism and bigotry fits perfectly into the ever-deepening and widening culture of neoconservatism and intolerance spreading across the United States. Watson's utterances cannot be divorced from the case of the "Jena 6" - the six Louisiana black teenagers incarcerated for beating up a white boy while the white students who precipitated the incident, by placing hangman nooses in the tree in the schoolyard, got off scot-free - nor can it be divorced from the mounting anti-immigrant sentiment enveloping that country.

Essentially, what we are witnessing is what I call "The New Post-9/11 American World Order", in which all the latent racists, bigots and the like have been awakened and afforded ample space to crawl out of the woodwork and to make their opinions heard. Leading the pack is the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) which now has close to 158 chapters across the United States, and whose recruitment levels are growing every day. There is no doubt that the doctrine of white supremacy is gaining currency and, in the case of James Watson, represents the philosophy that underpins the so-called theory of evolution.

Watson's opinion is not new. It represents a public resurrection of Darwinism - a school of thought to which the Nobel Prize winner has strong ties. Watson is past director and current chancellor of the prestigious biological research lab at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island - a lab described as one that has "deep connections to Darwinian racism of years gone by". A report states that, "Early in the twentieth century it was the headquarters for one of the most virulent American eugenics groups, the Eugenics Record Office, which promoted forced sterilisation and opposed immigration to America by ethnic groups considered lower on the evolutionary scale than Anglo-Saxon whites. Back then the lab was directed by Harvard-trained geneticist Charles Davenport. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Davenport held views about blacks and evolution hauntingly similar to Watson."

As offensive as Watson's statement is, it is important that we don't become so emotional that we get caught in the trap that is being set for us, and either fall into it, or become immobilised by it.

The first trap we should avoid is that we must not equate Darwinism with science. Plainly put, Darwinism is racism, and the sordid chapter of that book that I have given my own title, Lying Through Your Teeth to Enslave a People, should have been closed a long time ago. Actually, it may be a good thing that this discussion has re-emerged at a time such as this when many of us have become complacent, thinking that the enemy had been slain, and a time when our young people, blinded by a consumerist ideology, need to be whipped into consciousness.

It is important for us to understand that Darwinism formed a part of the total package of the tools of enslavement. There was already the economic imperative for slavery as well as the religious justification. Darwinism provided that third and perhaps most critical component - the so-called scientific explanation.

What must be clear is that slavery was first and foremost an economic institution, in which racism was used as the vehicle of subjugation and control. In other words, a group of white men gathered together and figured out that the most effective way to control and thus enslave an entire race of people was to use every means available to let them believe that they were inferior.

The religious justification was especially advantageous. Using the Bible story of Noah's son, Ham, who saw his father naked and was cursed by him, Negroes became known as the descendants of Noah's cursed son, the "Children of Ham". Having been told that you are cursed by God, it was easy for the slave to "turn the other cheek" - the most popular sermon preached on the plantation. The most remarkable thing was that the very gospel that whites manipulated and used to subjugate African slaves was the very gospel that the slaves used to liberate themselves, spiritually and emotionally.

Darwinism provided the scientific justification. According to the theories, there are significant evolutionary differences between the races, and essentially the race (Blacks) that was closer to apes and with the smallest brain size was far less intelligent and inherently inferior to whites, the race with the biggest brain size. Darwin at one point was quoted as saying, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."

The other trap set for us is our belief in the all-embracing power of science. While we owe much to that discipline, the theory of evolution is plainly and simply a case of scientific racism. If I had my way, I would not only revoke Dr Watson's Nobel Prize, I would give it instead to the four young men from Northern Caribbean University in Mandeville who placed third in the world, ahead of all the G8 countries and many more, for their remarkable innovation in distance education. So much for James Watson's theory!

With love,
bab2609@yahoo.com

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