How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference

by Adam Rutherford

In the pursuit of power and wealth, the fetishization of these differences has been the source of the cruelest acts in our short history.

Structural racism is everyday—and rooted in the everyday. It is rooted in indifference to the lived experience of the recipients of racism.

As Jonathan Swift said in 1721: “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.”

Swift’s maxim that you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.

You are not your genes, and you are not your ancestors. Most of your ancestry is lost, and can never be recovered. We can be clear on this with absolute certainty: You are descended from multitudes, from all around the world, from people you think you know, and from more you know nothing about. You will have no meaningful genetic link to many of them. These are the facts of biology.