Superior: The Return of Race Science

Nothing is more seductive that a nice string of data, a single bell curve, or a seemingly peer-reviewed scientific study. After all, it can’t be racist if it is a “fact.

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. One day there will be nothing left to reach for.

Enjoy your culture or religion, have pride in where you live or where your ancestors came from if you like, but don’t imagine that these things give you any biological claim. Don’t be sucked into believing that you are so different from others that your rights have more value, that your blood is a different color. There is no authenticity except the authenticity of personal experience.

If it had turned out that Aboriginal Australians were the ones to possess that tiny bit of Neanderthal ancestry instead of white people of European descent, would our Neanderthal cousins have found themselves quite so remarkably reformed?

There is actually no guarantee that two beautiful and brilliant parents will produce brilliant and beautiful kids. Genetics is bit more of a crapshoot.

When we claim ethnic or racial pride, what are we doing but trying to piggyback on the achievements of those who went before us?

Nobody has ever found any genes linking ethnicity or race to school results. Like Henry Garrett half a century earlier, [Gerhard] Meisenberg chooses to skip over the social, historical, and economic aspects of racial inequality. Rather, he believes that scientific evidence that doesn't yet exist will explain the gaps eventually. He takes it as given that the answer must be biological.

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.

The well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others in his regime drew their plans for ‘racial hygiene’, leading ultimately to genocide, didn’t originate in Germany alone. They had been steadily supplied for more than a century by race scientists from all over the world, supported by well-respected intellectuals, aristocrats, political leaders and women and men of wealth.

Schaffer recounts one especially bad experience, in 1948, when Gates was working briefly at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, DC. “A petition was got up to remove him because of allegations that he was a racist—which he was. But he was stunned by that,” Schaffer says. “He articulated his understanding of that as a manifestation of an international Jewish conspiracy, as opposed to just understanding that, in a historically black university, the kind of work that he did and the kind of things that he said were always going to be challenged.” Even when he agreed to leave Howard, Gates grumbled in private that only a few “ignorant Negroes” were fit to be in a university at all.

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.

Race science had always sat at the intersection of science and politics, of science and economics. Race wasn’t just a tool for classifying physical difference but was also a way of measuring human progress, of placing judgement on the capacities and rights of others.

They explain how a sense of inevitability gets attached to a social routine until it comes to be seen as natural. The idea of race didn’t make people treat other people as subhuman.

Many people with perfectly good intentions end up committing a lot of statistical errors because of lack of training and something we call wish bias, which is this idea that you want to find something interesting so you keep sifting through the data and fishing around until you find something interesting.

It takes some mental acrobatics to be an intellectual racist in the light of the scientific information we have today, but those who want to do it, will.