No it is not true and you're putting words in Watson's mouth to make him more palatable than he is. If Watson had said that blacks scored lower on standardized IQ tests than whites he would have been on firm ground but he doesn't say that. He claims blacks are less intelligent than whites and then offers standardized IQ tests as evidence for that assertion. He claims Africans cannot run their respective countries as well as whites run theirs because they are less intelligent. That is garbage and needs to be identified as such. Don't make excuses for a hateful misinformed racist like Watson.
[WS:] Let's just think analytically here.
Assuming that "intelligence" is always context dependent and there is no such a thing as "generalized intelligence" (which is the basis of IQ testing), it follows that there are many different types of intelligence that re not reducible to each other.
It is also likely, or at least probable, that these types of intelligence have different distributions in different groups of people. It is so, because different groups of people live in different environments that shape their cognitive capacities differently (neuroplasticity.) For example, trait X may be more prevalent in group A than I group B, because that trait has been cultivated in group A, either in response to the natural environment or by cultural norms and values.
It furthermore follows that members of group B will _on average_ find it more challenging to function in the institutional environment created by group A, which requires the trait X. _On average_ is the key word here - it simply means that if we randomly select people from both groups, there will be a greater number of those drawn from A with the trait X than the number of those drawn from B with the same trait. It does not mean that members of B simply do not have X. It is a very important distinction that follows from our initial assumption that intelligence traits are shaped by the environment.
With that in mind, it is legitimate to say that Africans, who grew in a different environment than Europeans, have _on average_ different set of cognitive skills than Europeans do. That difference may, furthermore, make it more difficult _on average_ to survive in the environment that Europeans created. The same can be said about Europeans - the set of cognitive skills that they developed would make it more difficult on average to function in the environment in which Africans do.
To illustrate that with an example, Africans in South Africa did not have the access to public welfare services that the whites did. As a result, they developed skills (cooperation, networking, entrepreneurship) that helped them create a social safety net. After the fall of apartheid, when the bottom of the whites-only welfare state fell out, many whites were forced to deal with the same challenges as their African compatriots did. However, they did not develop the same coping skills as the Africans did, and as a result they resorted to panhandling. The above explanation was offered to me by my South African associate, when I asked why there were so many white panhandlers on the streets of Pretoria.
I do not think that the above reasoning is racist in any way. It becomes racist only if one claims that the differences in cognitive traits are permanent and unchangeable. That belief itself is an article of faith, unsupported by any data.
Therefore, an anti-racist argument should focus on that racist article of faith that between-group cognitive differences are permanent and unchangeable, rather than on the observation that such differences exist. This, I believe, was the point that Sandy Harris tried to make.
Wojtek