Prof Selwyn Cudjoe with his usual scholarship and erudition, frankness and absence of pretence, has opened up a can of worms with his articles and letters questioning the amazing SEA results of the Chaguanas Primary School which topped the nation. Had there been just an analysis of the raw data in an ethnically neutral context, he may not have drawn the ire and fire of so many people, not least of all the Minister of Education, who apparently was scathing in his dismissal of Prof Cudjoe's calls for an investigation. One cannot separate the results and location of the school from its context within the ethnic make-up of Trinidad and Tobago, and this appears to have clouded the issues totally. So, instead of it being a question of one school producing spectacular, extraordinary and miraculous results, it has degenerated into a question of ethnicity and what has now become the intelligence race debates.
Such broad-based classifications and categorisations of people and their intelligence according to race are always foolish, futile and facile pursuits. Take for example what happened to James Watson, the once revered father of genetics, who along with his partners Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, had worked out the structure of DNA (deoxy-ribonucleic acid), decades ago. In an ironic twist of fate, Watson was made to eat his words and was thoroughly humiliated on the world stage when he sought to use his elevated status as the "Father of Genetics," to push an utterly hollow, false and intellectually dishonest racist agenda. He came out and declared that after years of his work, he has concluded that people of African origin are less intelligent than people of Caucasian origin. Watson was criticised, embarrassed and humiliated on the world stage for such asinine remarks. He was also asked to step down from several boards and university committees. The irony of it was that it has now been established that Watson is of 16 per cent African origin and that he has 16 times more genes of African origin than the average person of Caucasian stock. This just goes to show the paucity and shallowness of the arguments of those both abroad and here in T&T who relentlessly and persistently push their racist agendas. We have had in T&T in the past, people who would sit and count how many Indo-Trinidadians or Afro-Trinidadians were working at an institution. They would then use those numbers, without more, to draw fallacious, shallow and baseless conclusions that one or another group was being discriminated against, if their numbers happened to be less than the other.
Events before the Joint Select Committee of Parliament earlier this year have shown that Trinidad and Tobago, as a whole, has rejected such shallow and baseless statistical inanities. As there would be no investigation as to how many had applied for jobs there or what were the qualification levels or criteria or the selection methods, just a blanket superficial and puerile conclusion that one group is being discriminated against. It takes a whole lot more intelligent analysis and probing in order to be able to make any accurate assessments of such situations. It just shows that once you have your own pre-conceived notions, biases and agendas, you can then disingenuously and unintelligently, skew and twist any raw data to come up with your own perverted conclusions. And then you can parade them in public as the truth while you yourself may just be masquerading as an intellectual.
Similarly, there are those who have acted as apologists for the Afro-Trinbagonian and the Indo-Trinidadian and who have sought to blame every problem, misfortune and obstacle they encounter in life on the fact that they are being discriminated against because of their race. If some of them would do some serious work and put out some dedicated effort, they would realise that in the real world of performance and merit-based economies, it doesn't matter whether you're black, white, green purple or pink...Once you can perform and get the job done. There would, of course, always be individuals who would harbour their own personal prejudices and biases and make choices based on that. But surely, it can't be that everybody you meet is against you because you're Afro- or Indo-, so get over it. The more one lives life and the more one travels and interacts with people all over the world the more you would be convinced that there are good, bad, lazy, clever, stupid, intelligent, hardworking people to be found in all races, groups and ethnicities on the planet.
Once we accept that there is no genetic foundation based on race for determining intelligence and stupidity, then we will also accept that intelligent people, average people and stupid people will be fairly distributed in proportionate amounts throughout all the races. How you apply yourself to the task of success and the steps and/or short-cuts you take to get there may make the difference. Let's get to the root causes, not just look at superficial numbers and statistics in isolations from the socio-economic, cultural and philosophical factors. To do so, is to walk the road that James Watson walked, to his peril, whereby he was impaled upon his own sword, when a genetics company in Iceland actually did a decoding of the genome map of his genes. Watson, filled with his stupid pomposity and asinine theories, had allowed his genome map to be published on the Internet. It was analysed, using methods which he himself helped to pioneer. As Sir John Sulston, Nobel Laureate for human genome discoveries has said: "We do not understand enough about intelligence, to even begin to generalise about race," so maybe we could all learn a lesson from the James Watson experience and stop wasting time on these intelligence race debates.