I am SOOOOO enjoying all these people saying all these true things about race in America

Denouncing Watson is cathartic because people can say they're not like him. Moreover, it relieves them from feeling responsible for the glaring disparities that continue to exist between racial groups. Watson was trying to offer a rationale for the relative lack of development of African countries compared with other countries. His words show racial bias. But they're also about the desire not to feel responsible for the fact that such disparities exist.

There's a knee-jerk reaction when someone uses the N-word, or suggests that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites. But these flaps are only temporary. What's more outrageous, but gets only tepid attention, is the fact that so many blacks are in prison; that the schools are so racially segregated; that blacks suffer in a wildly disproportionate way from cancer, heart disease, strokes and diabetes; and that even when blacks and whites with comparable educations work comparable jobs, whites are able to accumulate significantly greater assets, while blacks don't. These inequities are much harder to fix, and people don't get as exercised about them.

Blinded by prejudice
High-profile cases of racial insensitivity rile the nation. Yet studies affirm that a deeper bias festers, afflicting even those who seem to know better. As soon as we accept this truth, perhaps we can direct our outrage at inequities that really matter.
By Sheryl McCarthy

When James Watson, the Nobel laureate, put his foot in his highly venerated mouth by making disparaging comments about the intelligence of blacks and Africans, I was amazed by the swift and stern response.

His sold-out lecture was canceled. The scientific community denounced his views. He was relieved of his administrative duties at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, which he had developed into a prestigious research institution as the head guy. Finally, his illustrious career imploding, he resigned in disgrace.

Yet the frothy outrage masks the reality that many people share Watson's belief in the inherent intellectual inferiority of blacks, though they refrain from expressing these thoughts because it's socially unacceptable to do so....

Studies have found that ethnic and racial stereotypes become dramatically less negative over time. In a series of studies known as "the Princeton trilogy," three generations of Princeton students were asked to rate several ethnic groups on the same set of adjectives, in 1933, 1951 and 1969. There was a big decline in describing Jews as mercenary and shrewd and an increase in describing them as intelligent and ambitious. There was a dramatic decline in describing blacks as superstitious and lazy and an increase in viewing them as musical. But other researchers of stereotyping suggest these responses reflect not only changes in people's views, but also changes in how society responds to open expressions of prejudice.

Recent studies by professors Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington in Seattle and Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville found that people harbor unconscious biases, even when they believe they are prejudice-free. More than 4.5 million people have taken the professors' online test, which asks them to indicate positive or negative feelings about pictures and words that appear on the computer screen. Test takers are often shocked to learn that while they think they harbor no prejudice toward blacks, multiculturalism or fat people, something different is going on in their heads.