Angela Saini is one of the bravest science journalists I know. In Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, which she spoke about at Stevens last year, she confronts sexism in science. She’s returning to Stevens on November 4 to talk about her compelling new book Superior: The Return of Race Science, which exposes scientific racism.
Sexists and racists have viciously attacked Saini online, but that hasn’t stopped her from speaking out. Racism, like sexism, is a personal topic for Saini, who is of Indian descent. Growing up in London, she endured abuse from white children, who hurled insults and stones at her and her sister. Racism is hardly unique to white Westerners, she acknowledges. Indians, after all, have long engaged in discrimination against each other, as reflected in their notorious caste system. “Every society that happens to be dominant comes to think of itself as the best, deep down,” Saini comments.
But scientific racism — an oxymoron if ever there was one — is a relatively recent, localized phenomenon. It emerged in Europe during the so-called Enlightenment and accelerated after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. “It is no accident that modern ideas of race were formed during the height of European colonialism,” Saini writes, “when those in power had already decided on their own superiority.”
White, male Europeans used race science — embodied in ideologies such as social Darwinism and eugenics — to justify their nations’ conquest, enslavement, and extermination of non-white people. The association of the Nazis with scientific racism complicated its marketing after World War II. Racist individuals and organizations have nonetheless fueled the recent resurgence of science that supposedly establishes the innate superiority of certain groups.
Those who espouse this ideology call themselves “race realists.” They insist that racial injustice and inequality “isn’t injustice or inequality at all,” Saini explains. “It’s there because the racial hierarchy is real.” Race realists claim that “they are challenging the politically correct wider world by standing up for good science and that those who oppose them are irrational science deniers.”
But race, as Saini shows, has always been an arbitrary way to categorize people, motivated primarily by political rather than scientific goals. She herself can be categorized as black, brown, or Caucasian. Yes, some genetic markers and heritable diseases, like sickle cell anemia, tend to be associated with certain populations, a fact exploited by 23andMe and Ancestry.com and by scientists tracing human evolution.
But numerous studies have revealed far more genetic variation within than between races, however they are defined. Given this enormous variability, it is absurd to make gross generalizations, as racists do, about the character and capabilities of certain groups. The concept of race “is useless, pernicious nonsense,” geneticist Mark Thomas tells Saini.
Many scientists doing race-related research claim they want to help victims of racism. For example, researchers have long sought a biological basis for African-Americans’ relatively high rates of hypertension, which is associated with higher rates of heart disease, stroke, and death. I had assumed this to be a case in which race science could be beneficial, because it could lead to improved medical treatments for blacks.
But Saini presents evidence that environmental factors — including stress and poverty resulting from discrimination — are the primary causes of African-Americans’ elevated hypertension. The claim that black Americans’ hypertension stems from their genes “lays the blame for inequality at the feet of biology,” Saini writes. “If poor health today is intrinsic to black bodies and has nothing to do with racism, it’s not anyone’s fault.”
Saini envisions a world in which race really does not matter, in which individuals are judged, as Martin Luther King put it, by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Saini thus worries about the insidious effects of identity politics and of ancestry testing, which has “helped reinforce the idea that race is real.” “Have pride in where you live or where your ancestors come from if you like,” she says, but “don’t be sucked into believing that you are so different from others that your rights have more value.”
But race poses a paradox. Race should not matter, and yet it does, profoundly, as long as racism endures. As the case of black hypertension shows, race might not be a legitimate biological category, but in a racist society, it has measurable biological as well as social consequences.
Superior left me pondering hard questions: Can scientists study race in a way that doesn’t exacerbate racism? Or does all such research, no matter how well-intentioned, subtly reinforce the idea that an individual’s race matters? If scientists do research with the explicit goal of countering racism, are they really scientists, or are they social activists? Finally, can we take pride in our ethnic heritage without being racist? If you are interested in these urgent issues, please come to Saini’s talk on Monday, November 4, 3-4 p.m., in Babbio Auditorium.
John Horgan directs the Stevens Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
Be First to Comment