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

by Adam Rutherford

This book is largely focused on racism derived from Western and European cultures, partly because these are my cultures, but also because the concepts of race that we are broadly globally wedded to emerged in Europe and were enshrined in culture alongside European expansion, the emergence of science as we recognise it today and the values of the Enlightenment.

Much of our global success is a result of local adaptations, fine-tuned by evolution to best survive environments on an ecologically diverse planet. 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.

It is often easier to make a claim than to refute it, but as racism is being expressed in public more openly today, it is our duty to contest it with facts and nuance, especially if bigotry claims science as its ally.

Racism is an expression of prejudice, whereas science, in principle, is free from subjectivity and judgement. Reluctance by scientists to express views concerning the politics that might emerge from human genetics is a position perhaps worth reconsidering, as people who misuse science for ideological ends have no such compunction and embrace modern technology to spread their messages far and wide.

We have profoundly limited senses and short lives. We crave meaning, and belonging, and identity. Those aspects of the human condition are a rich soil in which prejudice can take root. The tool that grants us the clearest view of how people actually are, rather than how we judge them to be, is science.

In science, we use labels out of necessity. We try to apply rigorous criteria in our labelling to help us categorise the inherent qualities of a thing, so that we might understand its identity, its essential nature or its evolution, or so that we can design experiments that will help us understand its qualities. We call this ‘taxonomy’.

‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’, said the Russian-American scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky, a mantra that should be as widely known as any.

Eugenics and racism are not the same ideas, but they are inherently connected, and eugenics policies disproportionately affected and targeted racial minorities.

Francis Galton – a man whose intellectual legacy includes weather maps, a phalanx of essential statistical techniques, forensic fingerprints and the scientific concept of eugenics, as well as the word itself.

The British police indicated that reports of racist attacks went up in 2016 around the time of the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Even that though is not a metric that can be definitively interpreted as an increase in racism in the UK – it could be that the frequency of crime is static, but willingness to report it has increased, emboldened by positive responses from the police.

Concepts of race have always been associated with attempts to categorise humans, sometimes to simply describe them, often to create pseudo-scientific delineations, with the intention of subjugation and exploitation.

In 2018, neo-Nazis in America introduced a new way of showing off their supposed racial superiority: they filmed themselves ‘chugging milk’ – that is, gulping down cow’s milk with their shirts off in a ridiculous attempt to demonstrate their genetically encoded capacity to process lactose, a sugar in milk that cannot be digested by the majority of humans after weaning, apart from Europeans. The gene mutations that allow this enzymatic ability – known as lactase persistence – arose in Europe around 8,000 years ago, and the ostentatious showcasing of a random mutation that nature selected to allow some people to drink milk throughout life without minor tummy troubles is somehow associated with their assertion of racial superiority. They are presumably unaware that the same mutations emerged independently and exist at a high frequency in Kazakhs, Ethiopians, Tutsi, Khoisan and many places where dairy farming was a significant part of their agricultural evolution, including not just milk from cows and goats, but camel milk for pastoralists in the Middle East.

Attempts to justify racism have always been rooted in science – or more specifically in misunderstood, misrepresented or just plain specious science. It never went away, but now we stand at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, racism is making an overt comeback, revitalised by the new genetics.

We crave simple stories to make sense of our identities. This desire is at odds with the reality of human variation, evolution and history, which are messy and extremely complicated. But they are recorded in our genes.

Racism has many definitions; a simple version is that racism is a prejudice concerning ancestral descent that can result in discriminatory action. It is the coupling of a prejudice against biological traits that are inalterable with unfair behaviour predicated on those judgements, and can operate at a personal, institutional or structural level. By this definition, racism is something that has always existed, even though race as a concept has changed over time.

Race most certainly does exist because it is a social construct. What we must answer is the question of whether there is a basis to race that is meaningful in terms of fundamental biology and behaviour.

The dark skin that we most often associate with people whose ancestry is largely not from the Out of Africa diaspora some 70,000 years ago is determined by genes, as is similarly dark pigmentation in people of south India and the indigenous people of Australia, both of whose ancestors left Africa millennia earlier. No one really thinks that the versions of those pigmentation genes in African people confer the ability to run faster or longer than others. Yet a common assumption persists that there is something implicitly associated with pigmentation that translates to physical abilities. Many influential voices from European history – Kant, Voltaire, Linnaeus – believed this.

We are a rich symphony of nature and nurture – of DNA and environment – stuff we are born with and stuff that happens within us and to us. Our fundamental biology is encoded in our genes, which are inherited from our parents – and therefore ancestors – in a combination that is unique to each one of us.

People have spoken of DNA as a ‘blueprint’ for years, but this is misleading and has little explicatory value, as it implies a detailed, mapped-out plan, each instruction describing a component of our biology that is determined by its nature. Genes are sequences of coded chemicals that determine the order of amino acids that form the proteins that enact our biology. The steps from the raw written code to a lived life are extraordinarily complex. Proteins come in the form of enzymes, hormones, cellular architecture, molecular machines, transporters, and all operate in networks with other molecules, in a range of cells and organelles, in tissues and organs, expressed in time and space from conception to death. When we speak of nature and nurture, it is not useful or accurate to think of these two phenomena in opposition. Nature – meaning DNA – has never been versus nurture – meaning everything that isn’t DNA. Our genomes are the totality of our DNA, and that is where our genes are. 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.

In the twentieth century, scientists swung between poles of genetic determinism and genetic denialism. The popular eugenics movements in the pre-war years typified a belief that our successes and foibles were inbuilt and unchangeable. After the atrocities of the Second World War were exposed, research culture swung towards the ‘blank slate’ – the idea that it is the environment that shapes our character. The truth is, inevitably, somewhere in the middle, though there are ongoing debates about which is dominant. Certainly, to deny the importance of genetics in influencing our behaviours is folly.

Neuroscience, psychology, sociology and anthropology are all scientific disciplines about people that predate, yet are rooted in, genetics. If, by some impossible miracle, we had discovered genetics before anthropology and all those other disciplines, I wonder if scientific racism would never have emerged. Evolution deceives our eyes; it presents people as being similar when the underlying code says something different.

This is a terribly misguided attempt at bigotry: edible bananas are an entirely human invention, and monkeys aren’t that into bananas anyway.

It is sometimes argued that as Islam is a religion, then Muslims are not a race, therefore prejudice against Muslims cannot be racism. This is true in a very literal sense. However, for the purposes of the comparison between the 1983 and the 2017 statistics, the bigotry and prejudice against a specific group of people often resembles racism very closely, even though they might not be categorised as a traditionally defined race. Similarly, prejudice against the people of a specific country – for example, Romanians – is effectively an equivalent form of cultural racism.