We all probably wanted to forget James Watson. Actually, you might have already forgotten him. Here's a refresher: He's a Nobel Laureate and one of the co-discoverers of DNA. He made headlines last fall when he made some very special comments about blacks
"inferior intelligence" to London's Sunday Times. It goes without saying that he was quite mistaken. Now, Henry Louis Gates has pulled Dr. Watson out of hiding for an interview on The Root. Watson told Gates that he had no recollection of making those statements, agreeing that they were wrong and offensive. But then most of what he says in the interview renders that denial and apology pretty unconvincing. Skip Gates concludes that the guy's not a racist, but he is a racialist, which pretty much boils down to "scientific racist." Check out a sports-themed excerpt from the interview after the jump.

JW: I was watching the basketball games yesterday. And I'm just trying to say, you dominate.

HLG: Oh, you mean black people?

JW: Yes.

HLG: In case you haven't noticed, I'm not exactly a basketball kind of type. But could that be genetic, the dominance that you described in the NBA yesterday?

JW: I don't know what it's due to. Because we haven't found genes. You know, genes depending on what sort of types of muscles, slow twitch, fast twitch. I don't think it's going to change things much. White runners will still try to beat black runners. And they'll largely lose. But they're gonna try. If you're a sprinter, you're going to try to run as fast as you can.

HLG: I can't run. It's a good thing I was a good student because I wouldn't have made it. … My father, though, will be 95, June 8th, God willing. And my father, every time he passes a basketball court of black boys, young black men, he will say, "If we study calculus like we study basketball, we would be running MIT." So to him, it's not genetic. It's the fact that we're in basketball laboratories instead of math laboratories, all of our lives.

JW: Yes, and that's bad. Black kids have got to get different aspirations.

HLG: Right. But even you said, "You dominate us." You see what I mean? We have this image of being dominant as natural athletes.

JW: Well, one of my rules in my books is, take courses where you can get good grades.