How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference

When you have only ever experienced privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. Neither race nor racism has foundations in science. It is our duty to contest the warping of scientific research, especially if it is being used to justify prejudice. If you are a racist, then you are asking for a fight. But science is my ally, not yours, and your fight is not just with me, but with reality.

When all you’ve ever known is privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every white supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, Native American, aboriginal Australian ancestors, as well as everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy. For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.

Race is a social construct. This does not mean that it is invalid or unimportant.

Scientific racism’ or ‘race science’ are both misnomers. These are pseudoscientific domains.

demonstrates quite clearly Swift’s maxim that you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.

As Jonathan Swift said in 1721: ‘Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.

It behoves us all to confront racism wherever we find it, especially when it is covert or normalised in stereotypes and myth, and science is a weapon in that contest. The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that ‘in a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

The nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker said that the moral arc of the world tends towards justice,

Anti-Semitism is one of the only forms of racial bigotry that punches upwards to perceived power

For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.

Imagined differences between individuals and between populations have been used to justify the cruelest acts in our short history. Learned prejudices fuel bigotry, which will inevitably continue. What is important for science is that we recognize and study the reality of biological diversity in order to understand it, and consequently to undermine its bastardization.

You are not your genes, and you are not your ancestors. Most of your ancestry is lost, and can never be recovered. We can be clear on this with absolute certainty: you are descended from multitudes, from all around the world, from people you think you know, and from more you know nothing about. You will have no meaningful genetic link to many of them. These are the facts of biology.

There may well be evolutionary and psychological reasons for these prejudices, such as to protect ourselves and kin from invaders who want to kill us and take our stuff.

Migrations from the Middle East and into central Europe seem to play a significant role in the development of Ashkenazi as a distinct cultural group within Judaism, especially into southern Germany, Italy, and France; in some of those places during medieval times, there was compulsory wearing of the yellow badge to identify Jews. Expulsions from those countries and Britain also contributed to the pushing of Ashkenazi Jews east, into Poland and Prussia. These centers of Jewish populations were relatively stable and would form the basis for the majority of the six million Jews systematically murdered during the Holocaust.

IQ testing in the US in the first half of the twentieth century was applied as part of the assessment for state eugenics policies, which resulted in the forced sterilization of more than sixty thousand people.

you have the potential to be a Formula 1 champion. It is easier to measure something than to understand what it is you are measuring.

Alice is sixteen, and is four times older than Ben; how old will Alice be when Ben is half her age?

Our brains are large for our body size, but that ratio is much greater in ants and shrews.

In science we look to Occam’s razor (or scientific parsimony) to understand phenomena, the concept that the best hypothesis is the one that requires the fewest assumptions.

The American Nazi Party asserts that they are not White supremacists, merely separatists. They also specifically want to ban modern art and rap music. So it goes.

Go back to where you come from,” someone told me on Twitter last year, and I did indeed drive up the highway to Ipswich to visit my folks for the weekend.

What we can also say with an arsenal of scientific ammunition is that though skin color is the first and most obvious way we see humans, it’s a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people.

Not only were we diverse in our skin color long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin color before we were our own species.

Of all the attempts over the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds.

Every one of these ideas though must be considered in the cultural context and time in which it was authored. All are by European men being exposed to the peoples of the world as a result of expanded trade routes, colonialization, and empire building, and in many cases the conquering and enslavement of the people they encountered. The invention of race occurs in an era of exploration, exploitation, and plunder, an era when the othering of people from colonies extended to actual human zoos.

It is far easier to sell the case for occupation and enslavement if you are persuaded that the indigenous people are different, have different origins, and are qualitatively inferior to colonists.

The earliest references to Ethiopia are in The Iliad and The Odyssey—the word itself is a compression of aitho and ops: “burnt” and “face.

In contrast, the governments of the US, Sweden, Nazi Germany, and other countries had active eugenics policies that resulted in the forced sterilizations and deaths of millions.