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.

It’s not easy to accept when you’ve grown up in a society that tells you concrete skyscrapers are the symbols of advanced culture, but when viewed from the perspective of deep time – across millennia rather than centuries, in the context of long historical trajectories – it becomes clearer. Empires and cities decline and fall. It is smaller, indigenous communities that have survived throughout, those whose societies date to many thousands rather than many hundreds of years.

‘Archaeology shows us that all societies are incredibly sophisticated, they are just sophisticated in different ways,’

A number of Enlightenment thinkers, including influential German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, defined humanity without really having much of an idea how most of humanity lived or what it looked like.

‘A universal understanding of human origins was actually created at the time by white men in Europe who only had indirect access to information about other people in the world through the lens of colonialism,’

when they went out into the real world and encountered people who didn’t look like them, who lived in ways they didn’t choose to live, the first question they were forced to ask themselves was: Are they the same as us?

They didn’t necessarily share the same aesthetics, political systems or moral values, let alone food or habits. In universalising humanity, Enlightenment thinkers had inadvertently laid the foundations for dividing it.

What Europeans saw as shortcomings in other populations in the early nineteenth century quickly became conflated with how they looked.

For more than a century the word ‘Neanderthal’ had been synonymous with low intelligence. In the space of a decade, once the genetic link to modern Europeans was suspected and then confirmed, that all changed.

Neanderthals have been drawn into the circle of humankind by virtue of being just a little related to Europeans – forgetting that a century ago, it was their supposed resemblance to indigenous Australians that helped cast actual living human beings out of the circle.

‘You can either use the present to explain the past. Or you can use the past to explain the present,’ John Shea tells me. ‘But you can’t do both.’

But the stories we’re raised on, the tales, myths, legends, beliefs, even the old scientific orthodoxies, are how we frame everything we learn. The stories are our culture. They are the minds we inhabit. And that’s where we have to start.

She notes that there was a brisk trade in black corpses in the nineteenth century, some exhumed by their owners for a quick profit. It’s ironic that much of our modern scientific understanding of human anatomy was built on the bodies of those who were considered at the time less than human.

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.

‘You have to call Galton a racist because the work that he did is fundamental in the story of scientific racism. So not only is he a racist, he is part of the way we invented racism, and the way that we think about it.’

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

Managing reproduction was the linchpin of eugenics, even attracting a fan in women’s rights activist and birth control pioneer Marie Stopes.

To support her first clinic, Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.

British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley argued that privilege and upbringing could surely more accurately explain why some people were successful and others weren’t. He noted that many remarkable people had unremarkable relatives.

‘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.’

‘Namibia was the first place that the Germans built a concentration camp. Depending on where your hair fell on the scale was the difference between life and death.’

Similar methods would be used again, of course, a few decades later. Fischer’s work would also go on to inform the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, outlawing intermarriage between Jews, blacks and other Germans.

One reviewer raised an eyebrow at Grant’s claim that Italian artists Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were of the Nordic type, and that – stretching the geographical parameters even further – so was Jesus. But the views of experts didn’t matter to Grant’s readers. His fake assertions were enough for those seeking some apparently intellectual support in their opposition to immigration.

In a fawning letter to Grant about The Passing of the Great Race, Adolf Hitler wrote, ‘The book is my Bible.’

What was the Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute in 1989. In 2016, the institute established the Artemis Trust, which according to its own promotional leaflet, handed to me at a conference, distributes grants of up to £15,000, partly with the aim of assisting in the provision of fertility control, and particularly to those from ‘poorer communities’.

The science of inheritance, once it was better understood, didn’t support the idea that humans could breed themselves to perfection, whatever perfection meant.

Investigations by reporter Corey Johnson in 2013 uncovered that doctors working for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had continued the practice, sterilising as many as 150 women inmates between 2006 and 2010, possibly by coercing them into having the procedure.

Other anthropologists who had studied human diversity had already suggested that differences between humans were not only marginal, but also sat on continua, each so-called ‘race’ blurring into the next. What really made people and nations seem different was culture and language.

What he found was that there was far more variation among people of the same ‘race’ than between the supposed races, concluding that around 85 per cent of all the genetic diversity we see sits within local populations, and 8 per cent more if you widen the net to continental populations.

Statistically this means that, although I look nothing like the white British woman who lives next door to me in my apartment building, it’s perfectly possible for me to have more in common genetically with her than with my Indian-born neighbour who lives downstairs. Being of the same ‘race’ doesn’t necessarily mean we are genetically more similar. In the long run, then, Ashley Montagu’s position on race has been vindicated.

By the end, both for his abhorrent views and his weak research, Gates had few supporters left in the scientific community. Reportedly, when his death was announced in 1962 at a meeting of American anthropologists, there were cheers.

For racists who didn’t welcome this shifting tide, now was the moment to assert their position. And the Mankind Quarterly was happy to oblige. It waded deep into the politics of the time, using science – even if only in a loose way – as its weapon of choice.

Škerlj was particularly insulted by Gates’s accusation that his mental outlook – and presumably his objectivity – was affected by the fact that he had been imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp during the war. Gates noted, revealingly, that he would never have considered Škerlj for the position in the first place had he known about his internment.

Tucker tells me. Cash gifts were routinely made to scientists who echoed Draper’s political sentiments, while thousands of copies of the Mankind Quarterly containing their work were sent out to a list of American political conservatives. The science and the politics operated hand in glove. Unsurprisingly then, according to Tucker, the journal made no concessions to political correctness. ‘This was going to be a publication frankly written by racists for racists,’ he writes.

The target audience didn’t appear to be the academic community at all, but racist movements searching for evidence that their prejudices might be rooted in scientific fact.

‘Few of the contributions have any merit whatsoever, and many are no more than incompetent attempts to rationalise irrational opinions … it is earnestly hoped that The Mankind Quarterly will succumb before it can further discredit anthropology and do more damage to mankind,’ he concluded.

When Rushton’s book Race, Evolution and Behaviour was published in 1994, the University of Washington psychologist David Barash was stirred to write, ‘Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book.’ Rushton, he added, seemed to have collected scraps of unreliable evidence in ‘the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result’. The reality, Barash concluded, is that ‘the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit.’

On the following page, he printed a tribute to Charles Darwin. He had made it his goal to awaken people to what he saw as the existential threat of immigration and racial intermixing, referring to anti-racists as ‘cosmopolitans’.

In April 1982 a letter even arrived for Pearson from the White House, bearing the signature of President Ronald Reagan, praising him for promoting scholars who supported ‘a free enterprise economy, a firm and consistent foreign policy and a strong national defense’.

Mehler, who is Jewish, found it particularly disturbing. ‘I have a lot of relatives who survived the Holocaust,’ he tells me. ‘When they flip the light switch and the light goes on, for them it’s like “oh wow!”. They are prepared for the world to collapse. They are prepared for things to cease to be normal very quickly because that was their experience.’

was a person that felt that racism and anti-Semitism were predominant, and that the United States could easily become vicious, racist, and go back to its racist history when push came to shove, if people were threatened enough.’ The past, he reminds me, is always capable of repeating itself.

The lack of public interest reflected how many people assumed they no longer had anything to fear. Neo-Nazi political parties and white supremacists were thought to exist only on the irrelevant margins of real life.

‘I compiled a list of every academic or scientist I could think of who had been outspoken about racial differences and then searched the web or contacted their institution … Then I travelled to each of these places, fully expecting that some trips would be a waste of time and research money, because there would not be any Pioneer connection.’ He was wrong. ‘In fact, I never struck out. Every one of these persons had been contacted and usually supported either by Pioneer or by Draper.’

For those on the political extremes, it’s a waiting game. As long as they can survive and maintain their networks, it’s only a matter of time before society swings around and provides an entry point once more.

American political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein suggested that black Americans were less intelligent than whites and Asians. A review at the time in the New York Review of Books observed that they cited five articles from the Mankind Quarterly, and no fewer than seventeen researchers who had contributed to the journal.

They don’t call themselves racists but ‘race realists’, a euphemism that reflects how they like to believe the scientific facts are on their side.

Meisenberg’s tactic is simple: using people’s gut prejudices and casual observations to undermine trust in mainstream science. If you feel it to be true, it must be.

Ultimately, politics is always a feature of the science, just as it was in the very beginning. Once there was the backdrop of slavery and colonialism, then it was immigration and segregation, and now it is the right-wing agenda of this age.

Nativism remains an issue, but there is also a backlash against greater efforts to promote racial equality in multicultural societies.

writes Meisenberg. How tragic it would be to have the whole world look exactly the same. On a logical level he fails to explain how, if races are fixed and immutable in the way he thinks they are, we could all end up the same just by migrating.