James Watson and America’s Tolerance of Intolerance

What does the recent uproar over James D. Watson’s controversial comments about the intelligence of Africans say about how intolerance is tolerated in America? Quite a lot, according to Jonathan David Farley.

Last month Watson sparked widespread outrage for some remarks he made to a British newspaper. Watson, a Nobel laureate who co-discovered the structure of DNA, ultimately resigned as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and from his position on the New York institution’s board.

Farley, a visiting professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, thinks it is significant that the Watson episode occurred in Britain rather than America, where Watson spent “years espousing his eugenics mush.”

Farley uses his own experience as an African-American scholar as evidence for his claim that black scholars are accorded more respect in Britain than America. “In 2001, when I was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to the United Kingdom,” Farley writes, “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.”

Farley describes being pulled off a train by several policemen who claimed he resembled a bank robber. “On the platform, I shouted that I was an associate professor of mathematics at MIT, which I kept repeating, so that passengers could hear.”

“It’s easy to see why they didn’t believe me,” Farley adds, “In my four years as an undergraduate, I never had a black professor.”