Paul Revoir and Niall Firth, Daily Mail (London), October 15, 2009
Channel 4 is facing a race controversy after deciding to give a platform to scientists who claim that white people are more intelligent than those who are black.
A documentary, fronted by former BBC News correspondent Rageh Omaar, will interview professors who claim brain power is linked to racial grouping.
It will include claims that the most intelligent people in the world are North-East Asians from parts of China, Japan and North and South Korea.
The Australian Aborigines will be said to have the lowest average IQ.
The broadcaster has decided to air the comments, which will be abhorrent to many of its viewers, as part of a series of programmes about race and science, aimed at busting ‘science’s last taboo’.
Bosses at the channel claim the season will strongly challenge these opinions and ‘explode’ the myth that science can support ideas of racial superiority.
But the decision to air the issue at all could prove incendiary and is in danger of throwing the channel into another race row.
The broadcaster was inundated with complaints in 2007 after it aired the alleged racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother.
To promote the series, Channel 4 has altered photos of Baroness Thatcher, The Beatles, England’s 1966 World Cup winning football team and U.S. President Barack Obama to change their racial appearances.
In Race and Intelligence: Science’s Last Taboo, Omaar talks to academics who believe that aspects of the human brain are linked to race.
He interviews Richard Lynn, emeritus professor at the University of Ulster, who has amassed data which he believes shows there is a global league table of intelligence between the races.
He is seen claiming that ‘the top rate’ are North-East Asians who have an average IQ of 105, followed by North and Central Europeans with a score of 100.
He claims American Indians have an IQ of 87, and that sub-Saharan Africans ‘pretty well on either side of the equator’ have IQs of around 70. He says Aborigines have the lowest scores of around 65.
He says: ‘When sub-Saharan Africans come and live—and even several generations of them come to live—in European or North American countries, their IQs increase because of course their environment is improved, their schooling is better and their nutrition is better.
‘But their IQs don’t rise up to the same level as Europeans.’
British-born J Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, is also interviewed.
Professor Rushton claims the differences between black and white and East Asian brains is due to general intelligence.
He says black people have smaller-sized brains than white people and are not as intelligent as white people.
In the programme a range of academics line up to criticise the views of the two men.
Oona King, Channel 4’s head of diversity, said the programme will show conclusively ‘that you cannot link race to IQ’.
Miss King, a former Labour MP, added: ‘Even people who know the race agenda inside out will learn a lot from these programmes.’
She called for a ‘heated debate’ about race, saying: ‘This series will change the terms of the debate.’
Dr Watson sparked controversy in 2007 after claiming in a newspaper interview that black people were less intelligent.
His views prompted London’s Science Museum to scrap a planned talk by him, saying the opinions went ‘beyond the point of acceptable debate’.
The 79-year-old American geneticist—who does not appear in the show—said he was ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa’ because ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really’.
He added that he hoped that everyone was equal, but then alleged that ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this not true’.
In the interview he claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.
Dr Watson was hailed as achieving one of the greatest single scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, forming part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA.
He has been director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, in the U.S., a world leader in research into cancer and genetics, for 50 years.
Dr Watson has been at the heart of several scientific furores over the years.
He once reportedly said that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.
He has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos.
And he also claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: ‘People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.’
In his book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, he writes that ‘there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.
‘Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so’.
Oona King, Channel 4’s head of diversity, said the programme shows conclusively ‘that you cannot link race to IQ’.
Omaar also said in a clip of the show that views society found offensive ‘are not defeated by being ignored’.
King was asked about Strictly host Bruce Forsyth’s views that the nation should treat Anton Du Beke’s ‘slip up’ of calling his dance partner Laila Rouass a ‘Paki’ more light-heartedly.
The diversity boss said that when Forsyth was growing up, people believed that race was an indicator of intelligence.
Speaking generally, King said: ‘What’s surprising is how those views directly impact us today and how those views persist.’
She continued: ‘Sweeping racist views and opinions under the carpet will not make those views go away.’
Asked whether Forsyth had a place on television, she said: ‘I think of my white grandmother when I think of Bruce Forsyth.’
She said her grandmother was a ‘very, very lovely woman’ who was upset about her family members being ‘half-caste’ and had to deal with her world being turned on its head.
She said: ‘My view is that we need to open up the terms of the debate, not close it down. I think there’s room for people questioning people’s responses to the debate.
‘The key for me is that when people say: ‘You don’t have a sense of humour’, they’re not taking the context into account.
‘The context for a black child being bullied day-in, day-out is entirely different from an off-the-cuff remark about ‘limeys’.’
King also spoke of her own experiences as a child, when her ‘black, 6ft 2ins dad’ arrived to pick her up from primary school in front of four white girls.
‘The four of them burst into tears and started crying because they were terrorised by this black man,’ she said.
She called for a ‘heated debate’ about race, saying: ‘This series will change the terms of the debate.’
Other films in the series will be presented by BBC presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy alongside Channel 4’s Aarathi Prasad.
A two-part documentary, Plastic Surgery and Race, will look at how Michael Jackson’s face changed over the years and will speak to six people who want to ‘westernise’ their bodies and faces.
The Event: How Racist Are You?, will see a former US schoolteacher Jane Elliott recreate a controversial exercise she first tried 40 years ago to teach nine-year-olds about prejudice.
Presented by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, the experiment will ask 30 British adults to experience what it is like to be discriminated against based on the colour of their eyes.
The Human Zoo: Science’s Dirty Secret will tell the poignant story of Ota Benga, a Batwa pygmy from the Belgian Congo, who was first put on display at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair and then the Bronx Zoo where he was labelled as the ‘missing link’.
The final film, Is It Better to be Mixed Race? will ask whether there could be biological advantages to have parents of different races.
A Channel 4 spokesperson said: ‘This new season of programmes sets out to explode some of the myths about race and science and to cast light on the history and consequences of scientific racism.
‘The Season debunks the myths about science and race—science has been misused to legitimise racist beliefs and practices—these programmes are the antidote to that.
‘Season roundly dismisses the ideas: that race is a predictor of intelligence; that racial purity has scientific benefits and that any one race is superior to another.’
The season was commissioned by C4 science commissioning editor David Glover and will run for two weeks from 26th October, starting with Race and Intelligence: Science’s Last Taboo.
