Slate’s Will Saletan has backed himself into a corner by
coming to the defense of James Watson – the
eccentric DNA pioneer who found himself pontificating on how Blacks’
separate evolutionary patterns conferred genes to them that depresses their
intellects. Like any liberal-minded person, Saletan disavows white supremacy as
an idea. But when it comes to cold hard data on race and intelligence, he
becomes transfixed; any true effort at egalitarianism, he believes, must engage
with reality rather than ignore it. This is the basis of Saletan’s exhaustive three-part series
that tries to separate the empirical question of race and intelligence (vis
a vis genome sequencing and IQ tests) from the inherent racism that gives
legs to this conversation.
Suffice it to say that Saletan’s foray into the
“hereditarian theory of intelligence” debate has been disastrous. (Those
interested in seeing his argument taken apart piece by piece can click here and here.)
Saletan has been rightly attacked for the racist nature of his commentary, but
less attention has been paid to a similarly troubling aspect of his rant:
advocating eugenics.
After reciting rather weak data correlating certain genes with intelligence and
misusing data from the International HapMap Project to ostensibly
show that West Africans disproportionately lack the so-called “intelligence
gene," Saletan passionately argues:
“Don't tell me those Nigerian
babies aren't cognitively disadvantaged. Don't tell me it isn't genetic. Don't
tell me it's God's will. And in the age of genetic modification, don't tell
me we can't do anything about it.”
Saletan seems to be saying that not only are Blacks genetically
inferior, but that they should be genetically
modified in order to keep their genomes up with the Jones’. This twisted
logic – made under the guise of leveling the genetic playing field – reveals
the very real danger of a 21st century eugenics, where the explicit
bias and state coercion that characterized last century’s eugenics is replaced
by the soft bigotry of fetishizing technology as the remedy for all social
ills.
Saletan’s arguments also show how this new eugenics, like
the old, is likely to prey upon disadvantaged minorities – all while claiming
to help them. For example, he notes that “2.2 percent of the project's
Chinese-Japanese population samples, 5 percent of its European-American
samples, and 10 percent of its Nigerian samples lack the [intelligence] gene.”
Yet, he only proposes subjecting Nigerian children to genetic engineering and
not the Whites who, by his own logic, are also “cognitively disadvantaged” in
comparison to Asians.
Funny how that works.
