“On Oct. 14, 2007, one of Watson’s former assistants, Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, wrote an article about him in London’s Sunday Times that quoted him making racist comments about black people by suggesting there are inherent, unalterable biological differences in intelligence between black people and everyone else. The response was swift and impressively devastating. The father of DNA had spoken the unspeakable. Echoing racist remarks that have been used to justify the enslavement and colonization of black people since the Enlightenment (think Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Hegel), Watson’s comments implied that he believed that nature had created a primal distinction in intelligence and innate mental capacity between blacks and whites, which no amount of social intervention could ever change.

He had uttered the unutterable, the most ardent fantasy of white racists (David Duke would wax poetic on his Web site that the truth had at last been revealed, and by no less than the discoverer of the structure of DNA). His words caused a ripple effect of shock, dismay and disgust among those of us who embrace the range of biological diversity and potential within the human community. It was as if one of the smartest white men in the world had confirmed what so many racists believe already: that the gap between blacks and whites in, say, IQ test scores and SAT results has a biological basis and that environmental factors such as centuries of slavery, colonization, Jim Crow segregation and race-based discrimination—all contributing to uneven economic development—don’t amount to a hill of beans. Nature has given us an extra basketball gene, as it were, in lieu of native intelligence….”

More at The Root by a scholar of race theory, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.