Superior: The Return of Race Science

by Angela Saini

The key to understanding the meaning of race is understanding power. When you see how power has shaped the idea of race and continues to shape it, how it affects even the scientific facts, everything finally begins to make sense.

knowledge is not just an honest account of what we know, but has to be seen as something manipulated by those who happen to hold power when it is written.

Race science had sat, always, at the intersection of science and politics, of science and economics. Race wasn’t just a tool for classifying physical difference, it was a way of measuring human progress, of placing judgement on the capacities and rights of others.

science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out.

We associate eugenics today with the fascists who perpetrated the Holocaust, but before the 1930s, many on the left saw it as socially progressive.

‘The world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight,’ he warned. ‘Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft.’

In 1972 a landmark paper exploring the true breadth of human biological diversity would appear in the annual edition of Evolutionary Biology. It was written by geneticist Richard Lewontin, who later became a professor at Harvard University.

Scientists had already known for a few years, from analysing the skeletons of other hunter-gatherer bones found in western Europe, that dark skin pigmentation could well have been common back then. After all, light skin was likely an evolutionary adaptation, one that helped people living in northern climates absorb more vitamin D when there wasn’t enough sunshine. The first human pioneers didn’t arrive in Europe or Asia looking white, because they had originally migrated from Africa, where there was little or no survival advantage in having lighter skin pigmentation.

The true human story, then, appears to be not of pure races rooted in one place for tens of thousands of years, but of constant mixing, with migration both one way and another. The cherished belief that people in certain places have looked the same way for millennia has to give way to the understanding that migration made the world a melting pot long before the last few centuries, long before the multicultural societies we have today. Our roots are not an orderly family tree but instead are tangled, according to Reich, more like a climbing plant on a trellis. Our ancestors branched out but then came back, and remixed, again and again throughout the past.

That desire to belong is powerful, I know. I was raised between cultures, and there’s nothing quite so disruptive to your sense of belonging as not fully belonging anywhere, as being brown when everyone else is white in a place that notices these things. But don’t be fooled. When they play on those feelings, when they tell you they can return you to a glorious past, offer a community of people just like you, who share your values and your dreams, a common history, they are selling you a myth. Enjoy your culture or religion, have pride in where you live or where your ancestors came from if you like, but don’t imagine that these things give you any biological claim. Wear your identity lightly. Don’t be sucked into believing that you are so different from others, that your rights have more value, that your blood is a different colour. There is no authenticity except that of personal experience.