Superior: The Return of Race Science

by Angela Saini

‘Race is a story we tell ourselves,’ adds Richard Cooper. If you believe racial difference is biological, you will look for biological explanations. ‘Everybody has a general belief in race and then they have stories about it, either something they’ve seen or something they’ve experienced. And the two reinforce each other. History, psychology, politics, we all have our belief systems and myths and things which a hundred years from now are not going to be true.’

American medical experts claimed at the time that black people were naturally more robust, more resistant to diseases that killed others, including gallstones, tuberculosis, pneumonia and syphilis. It was a narrative that served slavery, allowing slaveholders to subject people to harsher labour and living conditions on the assumption that this couldn’t harm them.

‘So you have at one time a literature saying that black people are especially robust, and at another time you have a literature saying that black people are especially predisposed to illness,’ says Kaufman. ‘It’s a contradiction, but each one serves its own purpose.’

If poor health today is intrinsic to black bodies and nothing to do with racism, it’s no one’s fault. ‘It says it’s not our organisation of society that’s somehow unfair or unjust or discriminatory. It’s not that we treat people badly. It’s not that we give people worse life chances,’ he says. ‘It’s just that these people have some genetic defect and it’s just the way they are.’

One study published in Schizophrenia Bulletin in 2012 found that patients with psychosis were almost three times as likely to have been exposed to adversity as children. That’s not to say the disorder doesn’t have a genetic component, but it does demonstrate that it can’t be quantified by looking at genes in isolation. If there are racial differences in diagnoses, it may be life experiences, perhaps even the negative experiences resulting from racial discrimination, that tip some people over the edge while rescuing others. This is without even considering that schizophrenia diagnosis itself is known to be notoriously subjective.

an observation by Nazi scientist Otmar von Verschuer more than half a century ago. A year before the outbreak of the Second World War, he wrote, ‘Schizophrenia is strikingly more frequent among Jews. According to statistics from Polish insane asylums, among insane Jews schizophrenia is twice as common as among insane Poles.’ He went on: ‘Since it is a matter of a hereditary disease … the more frequent occurrence of the disease in Jews must be viewed as a racial characteristic.’ At that moment in time in that particular place, then, it wasn’t a black disease; it was a Jewish one.

His hypothesis hasn’t changed, even though he has no more evidence to support it than he did before. Yet Lahn sticks firmly to the line that he is guided by science, wherever this may take him. ‘Before there is data, these are just possibilities,’ he says. ‘My nose follows the scientific method and data, not politics. I am willing to let the chips of data fall where they may, as any self-respecting scientist should.’

Having studied responses to the General Social Survey, which is carried out every two years to provide a snapshot of public attitudes, Byrd tells me they found that ‘whites see racial difference in more biologically deterministic terms for blacks.’ Yet they tend to view their own behaviour as more socially determined.

policy measures such as affirmative action are needed to improve the lot of black Americans. There’s a slippery slope here, he warns. ‘The slipperiness is that they believe that because it’s genetic, they can’t help themselves, that it’s innate, that they’re going to be in a worse social position because of their race.’ In other words, they want society to help black people, not because they believe we’re all equal underneath, but because they believe we’re not.

Nineteenth-century ideas about race that have gone out of fashion take on an almost magical quality when they’re freshly rewritten in the language of modern genetics. Today there is technical jargon, charts and numbers. Suddenly the old ideas seem shinier and more plausible than they did a moment ago.

This is not because Indians make better medics, of course, but because culture acts as a silent funnel. In the same way, women get channelled into caring professions such as nursing because this is what society expects. Culture moulds people, even subconsciously, for certain lives and careers.

As people and nations prosper, the racial prejudices move target. Just as they always have.

‘A hundred years ago, people were quite convinced that Greek people had low IQs. You know, people from southern Europe? Whatever happened to that? Did somebody do a big scientific study and check those Greek genes?

All we can do is wait for the world to change and what seemed like hardwired differences melt away and human flexibility just overwhelms it.’ But the waiting is hard. And as we wait, it remains all too easy for researchers to allow their assumptions about the world to muddy the lens through which they study it, and for the research they then produce to impact or reinforce racial stereotypes.

he continued, in the manner of a drunk uncle.

American sociologist Karen Fields has compared use of the idea of race, like this, to witchcraft – it’s the phenomenon that she calls ‘racecraft’. Race is commonly described by scientists, politicians and race scholars as a social construct, as having no basis in biology. It’s as biologically real as witches on broomsticks.

Jason Richwine expressed the possibility that ‘Hispanics’ might never ‘reach IQ parity with whites’, ignoring that nobody considers ‘Hispanics’ a single genetic population group since they have such diverse ancestries. Most Argentinians, for instance, are of European ancestry, just like white Americans. Having created the illusion that Hispanics are a distinct biological race, Richwine made it real. He had performed a sleight of hand.

‘We can’t sidestep the fundamental problem that biological systems are systems, they are collections of organisations of matter that interact with each other and each of their environments,’ explains biologist Martin Yuille.

We automatically translate the information our eyes and ears receive into the language of race, forgetting where that language came from. ‘I think that scientists, they are trapped by the categories they use. They will either have to jettison it or find different ways of talking about this,’ says Hammonds. ‘They’ll have to come to terms with that it has a social meaning.’

BARRY MEHLER’S WORDS ring in my ears. ‘I have a lot of relatives who survived the Holocaust,’ the historian told me. ‘They are prepared for things to cease to be normal very quickly because that was their experience.’ I never imagined I might live through times that could make me feel this way, that could leave me dangling on a precipice afraid for my future. Politics is moving at such breakneck speed, taking such random turns, anything seems possible, and the worst of things feels likely. It’s the suddenness of it all that makes it so strange. The cancerous surge in nationalism and racism around the world has taken many of us by surprise.

This is a twisted ideology that deliberately makes no appeal to a shared humanity, but instead rests on shadowy myths of belonging, on origin stories offering an umbrella to some but not others, sheltering them with false comfort. What nationalism stresses, as the late political scientist Ernst B. Haas wrote, is ‘the individual’s search for identity with strangers in an impersonal world’.

Intellectual racism has always existed, and indeed for a chunk of history, it thrived. I believe it is still the toxic little seed at the heart of academia. However dead you might think it is, it needs only a little water, and now it’s raining.

The problem is that, even when people know the facts, not all of them actually want an end to racial inequality or even to the idea of race. Some would rather things stayed the way they are, or went backwards. And this means that those committed to the biological reality of race won’t back down if the data proves them wrong.

If skin colour can’t explain racial inequality, then maybe the structure of our brains and bodies will. If not anatomy, then maybe our genes. When then this, too, throws up nothing of value, they will reach for the next thing. All this intellectual jumping through hoops to maintain the status quo. All this to prove what they have always really wanted to know: that they are superior. Well, keep reaching, keep reaching, keep reaching. One day there will be nothing left to reach for.