How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

by Adam Rutherford

Our quintessential nature as wanderers, hunters, farmers and social creatures meant that, over the last few thousand years, Earth has become smaller, and peoples from around the world have met, traded, mated, fought, conquered and a whole lot more. In these interactions, we engage with people who are different from each other. These differences are rooted in biology, in DNA, and also in our behaviour as social animals – in our dress, our speech, our religions and our interests. In the pursuit of power and wealth, the fetishisation of these differences has been the source of the cruellest acts in our short history.

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

Nurture – meaning the non-genetic environment – does not mean whether your parents cuddled you or ignored you as a child; it means every interaction between the universe and your cells, including how you were raised, but also everything from the orientation of you as foetus in utero, to the randomness of happenstance, chance and noise in a very messy system.

Attempts to categorise humans by such seemingly simple traits are not easy, and the underlying genetics wickedly complicated.

When all you’ve ever known is privilege, equality feels like oppression.