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

by Adam Rutherford

as the Belgian colonisers left in the late 1950s, the Tutsi monarchy was replaced during a violent Hutu revolution.

It is never clear when the commonly considered benchmark for indigeneity is.

Britain has been steadily and continuously invaded throughout its history, and has become home to migrants since it became an island around 7,500 years ago.

Roman army’s conscripts were not from Rome, but from all over that expansive intercontinental empire and beyond, and their ranks included Gauls, Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africans.

Beaker folk,

arrived in Britain about 4,400 years ago,

within a few centuries they had replaced almost the entire population,

Iberian farmers with their distinctive bell-shaped pottery and cinerary urns had become British.

Happisburgh (pronounced Haze-bruh) in Norfolk,

The presentation of arguments based on who are ‘real Britons’, or the ‘indigenous people of Britain’ is an ahistorical, non-scientific smokescreen to hide racism.

The Vikings were Norwegian and Danish men, who had picked up Scottish, Faroese and Irish women on their voyage west.

Were those indigenous people a pure race by the time Columbus invaded? No,

are genetically unrelated to people from whom you are actually descended as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century. This is a point that further undermines the appropriation of genetics as a means of asserting membership of a tribe, race or other identity.

23andMe and AncestryDNA. These two now effectively have possession of the genomes of something like 26 million customers

It reveals a probability of a proportion of ancestry.

you remain 100 per cent British because that is how citizenship legally is determined. Genetics won’t change that.’

forced sterilisation of Native Americans occurring as recently as the 1970s.

Elizabeth Key in 1656.

baptised a Christian (who were not allowed to remain permanently enslaved),

Men fathering children with enslaved women was a common occurrence,

Sally Hemmings,

importation of chattel slaves was officially outlawed in the US in 1808,

millions died en route, from disease or by jumping from the ships because they knew death was better than bondage.

The messiness of human movement and the desire to reproduce, both either voluntarily or via acts of cruelty and wickedness, render the concept of a singular geographical origin nonsensical.

The desire to know something about one’s ancestry is powerful,

persecution of the diverse indigenous peoples of the Americas began in 1492

were forcibly relocated, women raped and murdered. The Trail of Tears is perhaps the best known forced migration in US history.

1830, President Andrew Jackson ratified the Ind...

long-range migration and relentless exchange of genetic material has been a ubiquitous feature of human history, and

current population structure is not necessarily a good proxy for the geographic locations of ancestral populations.

‘Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.’

Admixture with people other than Whites is an act of dilution away from the purity of White ancestry, and therefore undermines justification for a White ethnostate.

we move and reproduce with remarkable breadth.

ancestry tests may be fun, but in my opinion, mostly offer nothing much more than a gaudy bauble.

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.

few children have received mitochondrial genomes from a third genetic donor to cure diseases. ‘Three parent children’ is how the press is fond of describing them,

The last White man to win the 100 metres final at the Olympics was the Scot Allan Wells in 1980.

The men’s 100 metres final in the Olympics is the most prestigious race on Earth.

only in the last forty years that Black men have achieved total dominance in the 100 metres,

Attribution of sporting success via ancestry is a common trope, but has been applied unevenly.

increased frequencies of genes that pose higher risks for hypertension, prostate and bladder cancers, sclerosis, and lower frequency of alleles that cause sickle cell disease. There is no proposed explanation based on selection for an increase in the disease-associated genes, but the difference between African Americans and West Africans may simply be accounted for by admixture with Europeans since the introduction of slavery.

More than 150 individual points of genetic difference have been identified in eighty-three genes in elite athletes

plenty of companies have sprung up offering direct-to-consumer (DTC) tests for both ACE and ACTN3 genes, supposedly in order to steer young athletes’ basic biology towards specific sports.

International Federation of Sports Medicine identified thirty-nine companies offering these tests, and issued a statement in 2015 decrying their use: The general consensus