The Council For Afrika, a UK-based think-tank has commemorated the third global campaign to combat scientific racism, reiterating its commitment to counter the marginalisation and dehumanisation of Africans.
The council used the anniversary, which coincided with the first decade of the 21st Century, to draw attention to the escalation of afrophobia, attributed to the global recession.
A statement issued to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, by Dr Koku Adomdza, President of the council, said: "Afrophobia has escalated based on discrimination against name, ascent, physical appearance, ethnicity and African ancestry in all spheres of life in the Global North."
The campaign against the ideology of scientific racism was launched in October 2007 in response to the fateful racist remarks by Dr James Dewey Watson, then Chancellor of the 48 million annual turnover Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York, United States and Nobel Prize Winner for Science.
Dr Watson had flown to the United Kingdom to promote his new book "Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science," and to lecture to a sold-out audience at the prestigious science Museum, and other venues across the country.
In a media interview, he proclaimed "(I am) inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa (because) all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours-whereas all the testing says not really."
Dr Watson said he hoped everyone was equal, but added: "People who have to deal with black employees find this not true."
"Responding to Watson's stated views about Africans and Africa, Steven Rose, Professor of Biological Sciences at the Open University, said: "This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically."
Other scientists including Baroness Greenfield, Neuro-scientist and Director of the Royal Institution, Jan Schnupp, a lecturer in neuro-physiology at Oxford University, and British Labour Party politicians Keith Vaz and David Lammy joined in criticising Dr Watson's racist and afrophobic insults.
Dr Adomdza, then Executive Director of the UK's race group- equality group, working with a team demanded that Dr Watson should unreservedly apologise to all persons of African ancestry and to Africa within 48 hours.
The team also asked Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, where Dr Watson is Chancellor, to take appropriate action against him.
In response to the pressure, Dr Watson told a press conference: "To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly, there is no scientific basis for such a belief. I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people reading those words have reacted in the ways they have."
Dr Watson's lectures were cancelled, while his tour was terminated. His 40-year tenure as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island also came to an end.
Amidst the storm, Dr Watson flew back to New York, whilst across the globe he was being denounced as the scientific Hitler of the 21st century.
The statement said: "A vicious cycle of virulent anti-africanism is discernible - dehumanisation through scientific racism, sustained by academic and recently cyber racism."
"In consequence Africa stagnates, regresses and Africans impoverished ad infinitum, and Africa remains a dumping ground for manufactured products from the Global North, which monopolises industrialisation, science, engineering and technology.
"You do not need to be a rocket scientist to understand that this is an unsavoury bloody model of perpetual genocide which must be stopped for good and with deliberate haste.
"Over the three years, campaign members have been to different parts of the world and our findings establish that Dr Watson spoke not only for himself, but rather expressed the mentality of a wider cortege of international interest and lobby, to keep Africa and Global Africans perpetually impoverished and subjugated respectively in keeping with scientific racism.
"For instance, a clear fact is that though African presence in Europe dates back to the Roman times, the majority of Diaspora Africans in Europe are discriminated against through official policies, are targets of right-wing extremist groups, and are sometimes murdered as a result of who they are."
The statement noted that scientific racism is adversely and devastatingly applicable and relevant not only to Africans in Africa, but to Diaspora Africans - it is an attack on Global Africans and must be exposed, resisted and eliminated for what it is.
"The supremacist ideologies and diabolical mindsets that underpinned foreign invasions into Africa, the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid and separate development continue to determine mainstream thinking that is easily passable for ignorance.
"There is the tendency to move on from the past, yet the reality is that the past bequeaths people of African ancestry with a burdensome legacy of multiple-disadvantage, not the least post-traumatic slave syndrome and post-traumatic colonialism syndrome within an institutionally afrophobic world political and economic framework.
"We are at the end of a historic first decade of the 21st Century in 2010, and have made some progress, but the global recession has relegated African equality matters to the back burner," the statement said.
It stressed: "Simultaneously, scientific racist agencies continue to rake in tens of millions of financial resources. It is time for the global community of conscientious citizens, regardless of location, to join forces with us in an ethical cause to right the wrongs against Africans, Diaspora Africans and the African Continent which also puts human civilization into disrepute."