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

by Adam Rutherford

very slight increased risk in all people: Vitamin D deficiency also more significantly affects men than women, people with obesity and type 2 diabetes,

science and of history arms us against preconceptions and prejudice.

We crave meaning, and belonging, and identity.

The tool that grants us the clearest view of how people actually are, rather than how we ju...

‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’,

we desire membership to clans, tribes and families,

The melanin that pigments hair and skin is not a protein itself,

linking the basic genetic code to the shape and function of a protein is tricky.

the physical manifestation of the gene that encodes it –

The genetic code has remained static for billions of years, but evolution has incessantly tinkered with how it is used to build a life.

we traded hair follicles for sweat glands.

melanosomes – that migrate towards the light and sit atop other skin cells. In doing so, they simply absorb and block the UV rays before they can deplete folate levels in cells beneath.

Traditional racial categories are not consistent in their taxonomic boundaries.

There is little evidence for class or social structure relating to skin tones in ancient Egypt, though variation is acknowledged in their art.

earliest references to Ethiopia are in the Iliad and The Odyssey – the word itself is a compression of aitho and ops: burnt and face.

eleventh-century philosopher Avicenna, who believed that people exposed to extremes of climate (relative to the Middle East) were more suited to slavery due to regionally determined differences in temperament: pale-skinned Europeans were ignorant and lacked discernment, dark-skinned Africans were fickle and foolish. Both, therefore, were suited to oppression

with the birth and growth of the era of scientific revolution, pigmentation became essential to the character of humans.

It is far easier to sell the case for occupation and enslavement if you are persuaded that the indigenous

all humans were children of Adam and Eve. This idea, monogenism,

Afer were lazy, cunning females without shame and ruled by caprice;

Caucasian (meaning White Europeans);

conquering and enslavement of the people they encountered. The invention of race occurs in an era of exploration, exploitation and plunder, an era when the othering of people from colonies extended to actual human zoos.

Sara Baartman died aged twenty-six in 1815, possibly from

We could eventually cluster all humans into 7 billion individuals, because every human genome is unique.

‘tyranny of the discontinuous mind’. We yearn to categorise things and fail to recognise continuity.

Of all the attempts over the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds. Genetics refuses to comply with these artificial and superficial categories. Skin colour, while being the most obvious difference between people, is a very bad proxy for the total amount of similarity or difference between individuals and between populations. Racial differences are skin deep.

the sequence of DNA itself changes over time and space, and pay less attention to what phenotype might have emerged from the genotype

research suggests that they had more versions of genes that today we associate with explosive energy rather than stamina

if you want to know what colour eyes a long-dead person had, we can give you probabilities, not answers:

The idea that we were ancestrally dark skinned before diversifying as we crept around the globe is now known to be incorrect. Not only were we diverse in our skin colour long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin colour before we were our own species.

The pigmentation we see in reconstructions of Neanderthals on TV and in museums are speculative.

DNA is a bewilderingly inscrutable predictor of skin colour.

skin colour is the first and most obvious way we see humans, it’s a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people.

They fantasise about a persecution of their people that will end in their extinction or an erosion of their rights

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

The past is blurred by paucity of records, by myth and lore.

in every generation back through time, the number of ancestors you have doubles.

genetic isopoint.

This is the time in history when the entire population is the ancestor of the entire contemporary population today.

global isopoint – the year in which the population of the Earth were the ancestors of everyone living today.

Everyone alive today is descended from all of the global population in the fourteenth century BCE.

ideas of how ancestry and family trees actually work makes pure mockery of the concept of racial purity.

White supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, Native American, aboriginal Australian ancestors, as well as everyone else,

Racial purity is a pure fantasy.

For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.

there has also been some European and Middle Eastern backflow, where, in the last few thousand years, people have meandered back into Africa and spread some of their genes into African genomes.

charismatic king called Shyaam,

a capital, an oral constitution, a tiered legal system, trial by jury, taxation and a police force.

When Belgium took over in the early twentieth century, they sowed and cultivated seeds of racial disharmony.

Adopting racialised pseudoscience derived from the contemporary eugenics movement, Belgian officials asserted that Tutsis had larger brains, and lighter skin colour,