Support the Writers' Strike + James Watson, Nobelist, Octaroon

I rarely am watching TV these days, save for The Amazing Race and Project Runway, but I do support the Writers Guild of America strike. If you support the writers, here's a great way (from Firedoglake) to demonstrate it: you can click on the link and let the producers of your favorite shows (or just all the shows, which would be even better) know that you want them to stop digging in and negotiate better terms with the writers. All the other staff people who're being laid off or fired will also appreciate the gesture. Ah, the Internets!


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One of the first stories I saw this morning made me fall out of my chair. But of course Nobel Laureate and confirmed sexist and racist boor James Watson's genome would reveal that, in fact, his ancestry contained more than 1/6th African heritage (16%), meaning that short of one Black great-grandparent, there was some mixing of various sorts along the line, and that he has 16 times more genetic material than "most people" of European descent (though I wonder if this changes for people from the Mediterranean, for example, or those many British descendents of the urban Blacks of the 16th-19th centuries, who were at least numerous enough that Elizabeth I called twice, I believe, for them to be expelled).

But then anyone who reads more than a little on how these texts works as well as a little US history knows that Watson isn't the only one with more direct African ancestry than he thinks. Adrian M. S. Piper made this point around two decades ago, even incorporating it into a performance piece that caused a stir. Let me be clear that I'm not suggesting that Watson is Black or anything of that sort, "one-drop" rule (which in any case has always been more complicated than it's popularly portrayed) be damned, just that it's about as fitting an irony as one could envision. Also of interest are the genetic risk percentages his genome shows.

Watson's offensive comments from earlier this year meet their match, however, in the ignorance-laden sewer of comments after the Times UK article, and are the kind of discourse that regularly turns up in comment sections, and which underlines that the vast majority of us are lot less intelligent than we might care to admit.