Review of Superior: The Return of Race Science
Why is racism such a deep rooted and lingering issue in our society even though race is not a tangible thing but a social construct?
This book by Angela Saini explains in detail about the history of scientific racism - a movement that used science to justify a person’s place in society.
“The key to understanding the meaning of race is understanding power,” says Angela Saini. The two go hand in hand.
The division of humanity into ‘races’ was born from scientific race theory around the late 1700s. Saini states that this was “The moment we were shifted into biological groups, placed in our respective galleries.”
Although humans have always tried to assert superiority over one another, this wasn’t always to do with skin colour but tribes or groups. Saini states race is different, “Race is at its heart, the belief that we are born different.”
When race was brought into the mix, this allowed for white supremacist ideas to thrive, and have scientific backing. This meant that the theories must be true. It allowed the subjugation of people of colour, slavery, colonialism, exploitation and genocide.
However, racial classifications are extremely problematic because they are not based on anything tangible. Saini says “race was always quite arbitrary.” And she gives the case of Egyptian man, Mostafa Henry, who fought the US courts to be identified as black and not white as he was being labelled because he was from North Africa. For Mostafa, he was proud of his African black heritage, and did not identify with being labelled ‘white’.
It is a well-known fact that we all originate from Africa, and have since migrated all over the world. The only reason we all look different is because of climate and the environment where we settled. Our identities cannot easily be boxed under generic categories. We have various identities including where our parents are from, where their parents are from, where we were born, our faith and so on. However, the system of race classifications has made us on the whole accept these very narrow identifiers of who we are.
Saini says, that such is the hold of this scientific racism on our culture, that people of colour are using these ineffective categories on ourselves. “Race, shaped by power, has acquired a power of its own. We have so absorbed our classifications– the trend begun by scientists like Blumenbach – that we happily classify ourselves.”
The book delves into the horrific acts carried out due to scientific racism. It legitimised white supremacy, and anyone else was subhuman and treated like animals with full justification by society.
She gives many examples of inhumane treatment to people all over the world, including the Aboriginal genocide in Australia; human zoos, dissecting of bodies, the Holocaust and even the caste system in India which precedes scientific racism, but some scientists have used to draw on as a good working example of classifications of humans and their place in society.
The birth of Western scientific racism and Enlightenment theory go hand in hand. European Enlightenment thinkers included philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, and Hegel. Saini cites Martin Porr, an archaeologist who said “’When you look at these giants of the eighteenth century, Kant and Hegel, they were terribly racist. They were unbelievably racist!’”
Enlightenment was a time of scientific and intellectual revolution, where one was encouraged to use reason and rationality rather than tradition and superstition. It was meant to champion concepts like freedom, equality and humanity. “Voltaire and Scottish philosopher David Hume, saw no contradiction between the values of liberty and fraternity and their belief that non-whites were innately inferior to whites” states Saini. Therefore these ideals which the western world is now very much based on, were not applicable to those of colour.
Scientific racism was a massive business. It propped up the subjugation of the world by western empires, and ‘legitimised’ ill treatment of people of colour all over the world. Eugenics which was a scientific study around at the same time, looked at what made the white race ‘superior’ by studying genetics. This was very much part of Hitler’s ideology, to breed a ‘pure race’ that would make his nation strong and undefeated.
Biologist Francis Colton – born in 1882, convinced University College London to set up world’s first eugenics record office at 50 Gower Street in 1904. It is now called the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment– housed in the Darwin building. The legacy of scientific racism is all around us.
Philosopher, Bertrand Russell suggested that the state might improve the health of the population by finding the wrong type of people for giving birth and stopping them. All the proponents of eugenics, including Karl Pearson promoted that since all other races were inferior, intermixing was dangerous to the health of the British population. Pearson’s argument was “that if you have uncontrolled immigration the welfare of British people is at stake.” This is now a standard argument of the far right.
Although the term ‘eugenics’ and its practice has been discredited, it has far from disappeared. Saini shows how different language is used for similar concepts. It was shocking to read that it was only in 1974 that the American state of Indiana repealed legislation that had made it legal to sterilise people.
Followers of scientific racism still exist, but it was initially thought to only be in small circles. However, Saini’s investigations in this book expose a frighteningly powerful network of proponents of scientific racism within policy makers, governance and thinkers in today’s world. On one hand it is not surprising to see that link, but also stark to be presented with a huge body of evidence.
Saini links the present-day rhetoric around immigration, the rise of the far right including at government levels, and the re-emergence of white supremacy to the legacy of scientific racism. These ideas that are in society now, have not come forth in a vacuum. Saini states that some of these right wing scientists and academics “were just repackaging the old ideas that they had been nursing, the entire time, the same racial assumptions that had been around for decades.“
In 1991, the Human Genome Project launched with the aim to build a map of genetic data for the purposes of studying humans. Not all the scientists were racist, and were convinced that they just wanted to learn more about the world. However, Saini’s argument is that they were reinforcing this belief of race and that we are biologically different. A report on the human genome diversity project in 1995, by UNESCO‘s international bio ethics committee said that “the committee was concerned that by bringing genetics to the fore in telling the human story, people would ignore culture and history, and return to the kind of simplistic biological thinking that propelled the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century.“
The project backfired because the scientists wanted to take DNA samples from isolated communities and many protested on an ethical front against this. It didn’t receive funding and was disbanded. However, this project was basically the precursor to what we now have with ancestry.com and similar.
DNA and ancestry science is a way to track people and to make assumptions on them and their heritage based on this data, and the main success has been that the DNA is voluntarily offered. Saini says: “What ancestry testing has done is take the work of well-meaning scientist, who only tried to do good in the world, and inadvertently helped reinforce the idea that race is real.”
Saini’s point is that “By forcing people into categories, even if that means dividing our individual bodies into so much European, so much African, so much Asian and so on, the tests fortify the assumption that race is biologically meaningful.” It can also be used to project racist ideas, such as using the results of the test to provide how white you are, or how ‘pure’ your bloodline is.
The other problem with focusing and building an identity around race, is that it is contrary to the reality- which is that we are all mixed. The story of Cheddar Man, an early Briton who lived 10,000 years ago and had dark brown skin, highlights this.
“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.” ”
Race categorisation can lead us down dead and does not offer meaningful solutions. We have health projects that are focused around trying to show race as being a factor for certain illnesses like high blood pressure, heart disease and so on. These can imply that weaknesses and health issues are something biological and inherent in certain races. However, Saini argues that this takes the focus away from the real issue of social and economic inequality which impacts our health, and absolves people in power of blame. She says: “Black people in poorer neighbourhoods live with worse levels of transportation, waste disposal and policing, and environmental hazards such as bus garages, sewage treatment plants and highways are more likely to be located near them. The areas where they live are also targets for cigarette and fast-food marketing.”
Saini quotes Academic, Dorothy Roberts who “agrees that there’s no logic in expecting black Americans to be so medically unusual. ‘How could it possibly be that a group called black people, which first of all is defined differently around the world…how could it possibly be that that group for an innate biological reason could have a particular health outcome? That just doesn’t make sense,’ she says with a laugh. ‘The most plausible, to me the only possible explanation could be because of inferior social conditions.’”
Conclusion:
Race has become the normative way of understanding differences even when most people including scientists cannot really understand it. Saini states that scientists are constantly looking at statistical differences between racial groups. However, when scientists working on a project in Harvard in 2007 to understand genetic differences amongst how ‘races’ respond to drugs, were asked to define race, but they couldn’t answer the question. “Race was their bread and butter, the entire premise upon which they were doing their research, but they were unable to tell her what it was.”
Saini states that race as a concept flourished because “the desire to belong is powerful.” Racists, tried “to appeal to that dark corner of our souls that wants to believe human difference runs deep, making entire populations special.” She adds that trying to understand human difference through biology is wrong “for the simple reason that it’s history that has the answers. Science can’t help you here.”
““If we truly want an end to racism, we need to understand the past, to have more equitable education and healthcare, to end discrimination in work and institutions, to be a little more open with our hearts and maybe also with our borders. Maybe they know that the answers are not in our blood, but in us. They are in our actions, in the choices we make, and in the ways in which we treat each other.” ”
