http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_david_farley/2007/11/dna_of_the_kkk.htmlDNA of the KKK
A Nobel laureate's comments about black inferiority speak volumes about racism in American academia.
Jonathan David Farley
November 7, 2007 11:30 AM
When I was a graduate student, one episode seared on to my consciousness the very great difference between British and American academics in terms of how racism is tolerated. Oxford University awarded me the Senior Mathematical Prize and Johnson University Prize, its highest mathematics awards - something that would have been inconceivable in the United States because I am African-American.
Obviously there is racism in Britain too, but I find that there is also an intolerance for intolerance. And that is why I believe James Watson, despite years of espousing his eugenics mush in America, met his El Alamein in Britain. As you probably know, the American biologist and Nobel laureate recently stated that Africans are less intelligent than whites - it's in the genes - and, to its credit, the Science Museum in London cancelled a talk Watson was to give. By contrast, many Americans still defend the man.
Two stories illustrate the difference. In 2001, when I was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to the United Kingdom - one of less than half-a-dozen Americans to receive the award that year - I was welcomed as a visiting member of the Senior Common Room at my Oxford college. By contrast, when I visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology two years later, my greeting was somewhat different.
The first week of my first term there, I was on the underground train at the MIT stop. Outside, on the platform, I could see several policemen looking at me. I sensed what was coming next, so I held up the book I was reading, Enumerative Combinatorics (a book written by MIT professor Richard Stanley; shortly thereafter I would solve a mathematical problem that he had posed in 1981). Soon enough, the doors opened and about six policemen came in, grabbed my arm, and escorted me off the train.
On the platform, I shouted that I was an associate professor of mathematics at MIT, which I kept repeating, so that passengers could hear. I gave the police numbers of MIT personnel whom they could call to confirm that I was a professor, but the police did not release me for about 20 minutes. The reason? The police said I resembled a bank robber.
It's easy to see why they didn't believe me (and not just because Enumerative Combinatorics is the Bible for black bank robbers): in my four years as an undergraduate, I never had a black professor.
The police acted as they did, and MIT has few African-American professors, because of the same underlying reason, the same reason why a professor can assert, on the first day of class, that blacks are genetically suited to play baseball, and no one in the packed room (except me) walks out; the same reason that the late Richard Herrnstein, co-author of The Bell Curve - a pseudo-scientific diatribe that, like Watson, asserts the genetic inferiority of blacks to whites - could teach at Harvard.
(Of course, Herrnstein had a lot of data to back up his theory: I myself could only graduate summa cum laude with the second-highest grade point average in my Harvard graduating class of 1,600 students. The student with the highest average was white, in accordance with the Watson-Herrnstein thesis; the only thing he didn't have was blond hair.)
What's more alarming is that, in America as opposed to Britain, it is more likely that the academic who criticises racism will be dealt the punishing blow and not the academic who promotes it.
For instance, in 2002, I criticised the erection of a statue of a href="
http://www.blueshoenashville.com/history.html">Nathan Bedford Forrest in the city where I then lived, Nashville, Tennessee. Forrest was not only a Confederate general who, according to Harper's Weekly and other contemporaneous sources, massacred black prisoners at Fort Pillow during the American Civil War, he was a former slave trader and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
I pointed out in an essay in the local newspaper that Forrest and his fellow night-riders, had they performed these same actions today, would have been convicted of treason and crimes against humanity, and hence would have faced the same penalty as their ideological descendants at Nuremberg. Neo-Confederate organisations with over 30,000 members, and local and national media, said I was advocating genocide against whites.
I received a few dozen death threats, but that didn't stop my employer, Vanderbilt University, from calling me the extremist. As Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee admits in the book University Presidents As Moral Leaders, "[a]rdent devotees of the Confederate cause demanded Farley's job ..." and, "[e]ventually I had to write an editorial piece ... covering Professor Farley's hellraising" and "clean up in his wake".
Vanderbilt spokesman Michael Schoenfeld wrote that my criticism of the Klan leader was "rightly offensive to, and rejected by, most people" without, however, specifying whether he had found even one black person who was offended by my statements, and without specifying what statements in my essay, if any, were factually incorrect. Vanderbilt and the media, from the Washington Times to Fox News with Brit Hume, with the sole exception of The Nation's John Nichols, failed to criticise in any way Nathan Forrest, slave-owners, the Confederacy, or the groups that had targeted me. (A typical one of the threats sent to me read: "Hey, communist nigger monkey!!! Another worthless jigaboo hasn't killed your worthless ass yet? Too bad. I hope someone rapes and kills your white, race-traitor wife and/or girlfriend as well ... Heil Hitler!!! Hail the Reich!!! Death to all niggers and all other nonwhites!!!")
I learned later through The Chronicle of Higher Education that Princeton historian James McPherson had received similar treatment in 1999 for discussing what he called the "thinly-veiled support for white supremacy" of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. But the point is that, in the United States, this kind of persecution is possible, and can be career-killing when the "offender" is African-American. In contrast to what just happened to James Watson in Britain, the losers in America are generally not the racists, but the anti-racists.
AuthorTopic: Africans not as intelligent as whites: Nobel laureate (Read 2158 times)
October 13, 2006, 02:51:27 PM