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

by Adam Rutherford

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge,”

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

I am outlining what we can and cannot know according to contemporary science on the subjects of skin color, ancestral purity, sports, and intelligence.

Attempts to justify racism have always been rooted in science—or more specifically in misunderstood, misrepresented, or just plain specious science.

Racism has many definitions; a simple version is that racism is a prejudice concerning ancestral descent that can result in discriminatory action.

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Race most certainly does exist because it is a social construct.

If race is a social construct, there is a biological basis to that, too: The crude categorization of peoples is done by physical traits such as pigmentation or physiognomy, and we have to acknowledge that these are characteristics that are determined in large part by the expression of genes, which vary between people and populations in ways that we can scrutinize with more depth and accuracy now than at any time in history.