Was George Washington Carver a hopeless scientist? Nope. Are black people so uniformly unintelligent that it's astonishing that one can be a scientist at all? Nope.
We're not talking about ability to do science, though. The question is which people should be considered notable, or unusually successful due to their achievements. And it's rather obvious that, e.g. Norman Borlaug (considered by some as "agriculture's greatest spokesperson") is a lot more notable than G. Washington Carver. Indeed, if we're looking for someone worthy of being compared with Albert Einstein or even Marie Curie, Borlaug seems especially appropriate.
I completely agree: George Washington Carver seems to have been a smart and interesting guy but doesn't belong on any list of the world's greatest scientists, and if some school textbook chooses him as one of a small number of scientists to profile then I bet it is indeed largely because he was black.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. It would be bad if they claimed "here are three scientists of comparable greatness" (or "comparable prominence" or "comparable brainpower") and then listed Einstein, Curie, and Carver. I haven't...
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: