Superior: The Return of Race Science

by Angela Saini

For him personally, it also resonates with indigenous Australian ways of defining what it means to be human. Up north in the Kimberley where he has worked most of the time, he says, rock art is not thought of as just images upon rock. “The rock is actually not a rock but it’s a formation out of the dreamtime that is alive, that is in the living world, that people inhabit. And people themselves are part of that.” Human and object, object and environment, are not separated by hard divisions the way they are in most Western worldviews.

In a sense, it shouldn’t matter. How we choose to live and treat each other is a political and ethical matter, one that’s already been decided by the fact that as a society we have chosen to call ourselves human and give every individual human rights. In reality, though, the political tentacles of race reach into our minds and demand proof. If we are equally human, equally capable and equally modern, then there are those who need convincing before they grant full rights, freedoms, and opportunities to those they have historically treated as lesser. They need to be convinced before they will commit to redressing the wrongs of the past, before they agree to affirmative action or decolonization, before they fully dismantle the structures of race and racism. They’re not about to give away their power.

And his work earned one lifelong fan in Germany. In a fawning letter to Grant about The Passing of the Great Race, Adolf Hitler wrote, “The book is my bible.”

When Rushton’s book Race, Evolution, and Behavior was published in 1994, the University of Washington psychologist David Barash was stirred to write, “Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book.” Rushton seemed to have collected scraps of unreliable evidence in “the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result.” The reality, Barash concluded, is that “the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time in the last decade paying attention to the politics of immigration in this country, which are obviously related to all of that in intimate ways, and which dominate our politics in some ways today,” Hurt tells me. He believes what happened in the past can happen again. “When Reagan came in, he didn’t have established party networks of personnel that the establishment figures in the party had. So he cast a very wide net that included a very diverse range of people, including people like Ralph Scott. Scott wasn’t, I think, representative of the sort of central policy thrust of the administration, but there was a lot of carelessness at the beginning of the Reagan administration that allowed these people to step into positions of greater or lesser significance . . . He was symptomatic of a broader problem of entryism to the Republican Party by people like this.”

Like Trump…

The attachments that some people have to places and their relics, the ancient stories they construct around who “our people” were, have to be rethought when they learn that “our people” were actually migrants into a place occupied by others. The relics belong to them. Almost everyone on the planet is the descendant of a migrant from somewhere.

David Reich tells me that he draws a sense of global kinship from his work on genetics. “I have a personal way in which genetics is meaningful to me which doesn’t involve my own ancestry,” he says quietly. “I think that one way of relating to the findings about genetics is that we’re all related to each other, and we are all part of a broadly closely related group of people over the last couple of hundred thousand years, with a lot of complexity, and with a lot of mixtures and migrations and reticulations. And we’re all part of that.”

“It’s not that the use of BiDil in black patients is immediately going to lead to the resubstantiation of slavery or scientific racism, but it’s a step down the road of re-biologizing race in a way that feeds deep strains of racism,” he tells me. “What we’re seeing now in the US and again on the rise in Europe is a sort of ethno-nationalism. And any sort of indirect or direct approval or imprimatur of using race as a biological category becomes, no matter how well intended, dangerous in those contexts.”

For all the studies that point to innate racial differences in health, the genetic evidence so far rarely tallies. Hypertension was just one case in point. Even enormous experiments looking at the genomes of thousands of people have turned up little. Although hundreds of gene variants linked to blood pressure have been found, collectively they explain just a percent or so of the variation we see, says Jay Kaufman. “We’ve had a decade of genome-wide association studies now, we’ve spent billions and billions of dollars, and we still are at the position that it looks like 97 percent of the mortality disparity between blacks and whites in the United States has nothing to do with genes.”