Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is This Podcast Will
Speaker 1: Kill You. Welcome back, everyone to the latest installment of
Speaker 1: the tp w k Y Book Club. I hope you
Speaker 1: all are having fun so far and are learning so
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Speaker 1: you all about these episodes or the books we're talking about.
Speaker 1: What did you think? Did you enjoy these books as
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Speaker 1: You at gmail dot com. I hope you have more
Speaker 1: room on your shelves or space on your eReader, because
Speaker 1: this week's book is yet another must read. Superior The
Speaker 1: Return of Race Science, by award winning science journalist and
Speaker 1: author Angela Siiny, published in twenty nineteen, traces the origins
Speaker 1: of race science and examines its disturbing persistence in medical
Speaker 1: and scientific research today. Sayiny, whose other fantastic books examined
Speaker 1: sexism and scientific research in her book Inferior and the
Speaker 1: complex roots of patriarchy in the Patriarchs, which is just
Speaker 1: now out, joins me on this bonus episode to chat
Speaker 1: about the topics she explores in Superior. Listeners of the
Speaker 1: podcast are likely familiar with some of the story of
Speaker 1: how eugenics rose to prominence, especially in the United States,
Speaker 1: as the field of genetics provided a means through which
Speaker 1: eugenesis could classify individuals or groups as quote unquote fit
Speaker 1: or quote unquote unfit to reproduce. We've discussed eugenic laws
Speaker 1: and policies in the context of Huntington's disease, diabetes, hemophilia,
Speaker 1: and most recently, epilepsy, just to name a few. In
Speaker 1: some cases, you are forbidden to get married if you
Speaker 1: had been diagnosed with any one of a number of
Speaker 1: conditions or diseases scored within a certain range of an
Speaker 1: IQ test, were alleged to have committed a crime, or
Speaker 1: had skin color that was deemed inferior. Eugenic policies didn't
Speaker 1: stop at outlawing marriage to certain individuals. However, there was, also,
Speaker 1: of course, the incredibly frequent practice of forced sterilization. The
Speaker 1: appalling popularity and widespread acceptance of eugenics in the US
Speaker 1: often gets downplayed or omitted entirely in some histories which
Speaker 1: portray Nazi Germany as the originator of eugenics, when in
Speaker 1: fact Adolf Hitler took inspiration from the eugenic policies of
Speaker 1: the US. But while the origin of eugenics dates back
Speaker 1: decades before the Third Reich, the racist ideas and prejudices
Speaker 1: that gave rise to eugenics had existed for hundreds of
Speaker 1: years in the form of race science, and race science
Speaker 1: certainly did not die out with the fall of Nazi
Speaker 1: Germany after World War II. You can find ample evidence
Speaker 1: of race science in medical, genetic and biological research done today,
Speaker 1: helped along by the burgeoning field of genomics, with some
Speaker 1: scientists continuing to search for a genetic basis to race
Speaker 1: despite never finding one because it doesn't exist, or looking
Speaker 1: for population level genetic differences in intelligence, or promoting race
Speaker 1: based medicine. While some of these researchers make no attempt
Speaker 1: to hide their racist motivations for conducting this research, others
Speaker 1: may be well meaning but still participate in the type
Speaker 1: of research that supports the notion that racial groups can
Speaker 1: be defined biologically and classified hierarchically. In her widely acclaimed
Speaker 1: book Superior, Angela Siini explores the deep history of race science,
Speaker 1: tracing how racial categories were constructed and examining what purposes
Speaker 1: they served and continue to serve, particularly in the justification
Speaker 1: of slavery and colonization. She charts the repackaging that race
Speaker 1: science underwent as scientific knowledge about fields such as genetics
Speaker 1: and genomics expanded. As Sione reveals, this insidious repackaging has
Speaker 1: allowed for the continued presence of race science today in
Speaker 1: many forms, some of which are overtly racist and others
Speaker 1: that are unintentionally so, but harmful all the same. Superior
Speaker 1: is a compelling, eye opening, an essential read that feels
Speaker 1: increasingly relevant, chillingly so in the political and scientific landscape today.
Speaker 1: I'm very excited to get to the interview itself, so
Speaker 1: we'll take a quick break here and when we get back,
Speaker 1: we'll dive right in. Angela, thank you so so very
Speaker 1: much for being here today. I loved your book, Superior,
Speaker 1: for how brilliantly you trace the problematic history of eugenic
Speaker 1: and race science and its disturbing persistence in medicine and
Speaker 1: scientific research today. So tell me what is race science
Speaker 1: and what made you decide to write a book about it.
Speaker 2: Race science is number one, the belief that there are
Speaker 2: biological races that exist, that we are not necessarily one
Speaker 2: human species, that we can be divided to some degree
Speaker 2: into separate breeds or types of person. But more fundamentally,
Speaker 2: I think throughout the history of race science, it was
Speaker 2: a belief that there was also a hierarchy between these races,
Speaker 2: that there were some populations that were genetically or through evolution,
Speaker 2: more superior to others.
Speaker 1: At what point did you say, hey, I want to
Speaker 1: write a book about this, Like, how did you first
Speaker 1: learn about it? And then how did that turn into
Speaker 1: writing a whole book?
Speaker 2: What does some degree this book has been in the
Speaker 2: back of my mind since I was a child. So
Speaker 2: I grew up in a part of London, Southeast London,
Speaker 2: in which the far right was very active in the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. There were a number of
Speaker 2: racist murders in the area broader area where I lived
Speaker 2: and the town where me and my sisters lived. We
Speaker 2: were one of few at that time, one of few,
Speaker 2: very very few ethnic minorities. It's very different now. My
Speaker 2: parents still live there and it's completely different. Demographically, but
Speaker 2: when we were growing up, racism really was the backdrop
Speaker 2: to my teenage years in ways that sometimes I think
Speaker 2: it's difficult for people to understand about Britain now. For
Speaker 2: younger people living there now, it was just, you know,
Speaker 2: all the time, this was a fact of life that
Speaker 2: you were confronted with, and that was part of the
Speaker 2: reason I went into journalism in the first place. One
Speaker 2: of the first things I remember writing for other people
Speaker 2: was about this violent racist incident that me and my
Speaker 2: sister was subjected to when we had some visitors from
Speaker 2: visiting our home and we were out with them, and
Speaker 2: I read that out in class when I think I
Speaker 2: was around eight or nine, and very quickly realized the
Speaker 2: power that the cathartic power for myself in being able
Speaker 2: to write things down and process them, but also the
Speaker 2: power that could have in helping other people understand. When
Speaker 2: I got to university many years later, I got involved
Speaker 2: in anti racism activism. I became one of the coachairs
Speaker 2: of the Anti Racism committee at Oxford, and I started
Speaker 2: writing for the student press about race and racism. And
Speaker 2: when I left university, rather than becoming an engineer, which
Speaker 2: I think I would have done otherwise if my life
Speaker 2: had been different. I went into journalism. I worked at
Speaker 2: ITN and the BBC as a news reporter TV news
Speaker 2: reporter for years, and then when I went freelance to
Speaker 2: write science books, my writing and my reporting was driven
Speaker 2: by this idea that science is a system of power,
Speaker 2: just like any other. Is an establishment that consists of
Speaker 2: people who are worried about things like their own personal
Speaker 2: status funding. It's informed by the politics of the world
Speaker 2: around it. So my books really look at that and
Speaker 2: try to understand what part does science play in helping
Speaker 2: us understand ourselves, but also how is science affected by
Speaker 2: the wider world around it. And when it came to
Speaker 2: writing Superior, you have to remember it was commissioned at
Speaker 2: a time when people still thought that we were getting
Speaker 2: past race. This is an issue for you know, previous generations,
Speaker 2: not for future generations, which is very naive of course,
Speaker 2: and it was actually quite a hard sell in that sense.
Speaker 2: It wasn't an easy one to convince people of that
Speaker 2: a book like this needed to be written. But of course,
Speaker 2: in hindsight things have only got worse. I mean, the
Speaker 2: rise of ethnic nationalism populism all around the world and
Speaker 2: the horrific ways in which scientific racism or pseudo scientific
Speaker 2: racism has been co opted by the far right, and
Speaker 2: it has entered the main stream to some degree. If
Speaker 2: you think look at things like the Great Replacement theory,
Speaker 2: which is hugely informed by these pseudoscientific ideas. It has
Speaker 2: turned out to be prescient, but it didn't feel that
Speaker 2: way when I started writing it.
Speaker 1: Before we get into the insidious ways that race science
Speaker 1: is still done today, I want to start at the beginning.
Speaker 1: How and when did the concept of race originate and
Speaker 1: how did the growth of science, especially disciplines like systematics
Speaker 1: or anthropology deepen racial categories.
Speaker 2: Well, we have to understand that the development of modern
Speaker 2: Western science happened at a particular point in time. And
Speaker 2: that's not to say that science didn't exist before that.
Speaker 2: It did. I mean, it may have been called different things,
Speaker 2: and it may have looked different. It may have not
Speaker 2: involved the empirical method or you know, the kind of
Speaker 2: rigor or establishment that evolved later. But science was practiced
Speaker 2: all over the world in lots of different ways. But
Speaker 2: during the development of modern Western science in the sixteen
Speaker 2: seventeen eighteenth centuries in Europe and later in North America,
Speaker 2: The political reality was one of a growing imperialism, imperial force,
Speaker 2: and then later the development of slavery, the Transatlantic slave trade.
Speaker 2: Now slavery, of course, also has been practiced all over
Speaker 2: the world for as long as we can we have records.
Speaker 2: But the nature of that political reality necessarily informed the
Speaker 2: way that science developed, because as European Enlightenment naturalists were
Speaker 2: looking at the natural world and saying, can we codify it?
Speaker 2: Can we start placing boundaries and develop a taxonomy around nature?
Speaker 2: You know, different plants and animals, different types of creature,
Speaker 2: and how they're related to each other. Can we do
Speaker 2: the same for humans? Which sounds like a perfectly logical
Speaker 2: thing to do. But of course, as they were doing this,
Speaker 2: they didn't have a very thorough understanding of how human
Speaker 2: variation worked all over the world, and they certainly weren't
Speaker 2: fully convinced at that point that we were just one
Speaker 2: species as we know we are now, or that we
Speaker 2: are very homogeneous species as we know we are now,
Speaker 2: And so a lot of this understanding came from sometimes
Speaker 2: just myth and legend or travelers' reports, folk ideas that
Speaker 2: they had about how human difference played out. Very superficial things,
Speaker 2: but particularly the political hierarchies of that time. So for example,
Speaker 2: Europeans would have looked at the Transatlantic slave trade. They
Speaker 2: would have encountered people in states of subservience and other
Speaker 2: people who had power over them, and then started to
Speaker 2: equate that in their imaginations with some idea of a
Speaker 2: racial hierarchy or some idea of you know, that there
Speaker 2: are groups that are better than others, which, as I
Speaker 2: said before, societies have always done. The powerful have always
Speaker 2: done that to the less powerful in different ways. You know,
Speaker 2: men have done it to women, the free have done
Speaker 2: it to slaves, citizens have done it to non citizens.
Speaker 2: Natives have done it to foreigners. This is, you know,
Speaker 2: part of how humans operate when it comes to think
Speaker 2: about their own status and the status of others. But science,
Speaker 2: which we imagine to be this subjective project, was affected
Speaker 2: by this too. So for example, last year, I remember
Speaker 2: I was in the New Orleans on holiday and there's
Speaker 2: a beautiful little historical museum there, and in that museum
Speaker 2: you can see a book from around the middle of
Speaker 2: the eighteenth century called the Black Code. This is a
Speaker 2: very thick book produced by the French authorities there, which
Speaker 2: was a guide for how the black residents of the
Speaker 2: city should behave with respect to the white systens of
Speaker 2: the city, and vice versa. Now, why was it called
Speaker 2: the Black Code? Earlier that book would have been termed
Speaker 2: the Slave Code. But because of the Transatlantic slave trade
Speaker 2: and the demographics around that, blackness began in the eighteenth
Speaker 2: century to be associated with subservience and slavery. And so
Speaker 2: when you read these early taxonomies of race where they
Speaker 2: divide people up by color, and that's not just one
Speaker 2: you know, that's just one arbitrary way of dividing people.
Speaker 2: There is no natural way of doing it. But that's
Speaker 2: just one way you can see. You know, blackness is
Speaker 2: associated with slavery, that brownness is associated with something else,
Speaker 2: yellowness is associated with something else. And love and behold,
Speaker 2: you know, whiteness is always elevated. Is this perfect special
Speaker 2: category of human that is just superior to everyone. So
Speaker 2: it's very self serving, it is very political. And this
Speaker 2: is something I like to remind people of is that,
Speaker 2: you know, during the Black Lives Matter resurgence after the
Speaker 2: murder of George Floyd, there were some scientists that came
Speaker 2: out and said, you know, stop politicizing science, Why are
Speaker 2: you bringing anti racism into science? Well, if we did
Speaker 2: not have anti racism in science, trust me, we would
Speaker 2: be perpetuating the pseudoscientific myths. It started off political, and
Speaker 2: that's why it's so important to continually think about these
Speaker 2: things and how we might interrogate them and challenge them
Speaker 2: and correct them in order to have a better science
Speaker 2: of human difference going forward. But that original sin, if
Speaker 2: you like, or those original mistakes around race, the development
Speaker 2: of this idea of race came to form the bedrock
Speaker 2: of the science of human difference for hundreds of years.
Speaker 2: So by the time you get to the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: by which time these pseudoscientific beliefs are deeply rooted in
Speaker 2: the Western scientific establishment, you have serious physicians and biologists
Speaker 2: claiming that black people have thicker skin than white people,
Speaker 2: that their bones are denser, that they don't feel pain.
Speaker 2: In the same way legitimizing slavery and colonialism on the
Speaker 2: basis that races are just different and that some races
Speaker 2: have a right to control others or to civilize others.
Speaker 2: Ideas about the primitive or the modern what it meant
Speaker 2: to be civilized became kind of fed into all of this,
Speaker 2: and we still live with the legacy of it to
Speaker 2: this day.
Speaker 1: We often still talk about other kinds of early humans
Speaker 1: or harmonyms in a way that places us humans at
Speaker 1: the very top, using words like faster, or smarter or stronger.
Speaker 1: And one of my favorite parts of your book is
Speaker 1: when you discuss how this hierarchical language recently disappeared, specifically
Speaker 1: for Neanderthals. Can you take us through this public image
Speaker 1: makeover that Neanderthals underwent.
Speaker 2: It was fascinating for me. I spent a portion of
Speaker 2: my research time when I was writing Superior in Australia,
Speaker 2: which is one of the most fascinating countries in the
Speaker 2: world culturally because of the depth and length of different
Speaker 2: Aboriginal communities and their kind of cultural ideas about the
Speaker 2: world and time and space. And it's just incredibly mind blowing.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's difficult for me to put into wards
Speaker 2: how revolutionary it is for someone raised in the West
Speaker 2: to be witnessed to a system of thought that is
Speaker 2: so diametrically different from what you're used to. And we
Speaker 2: have to remember the racial history of Australia was one
Speaker 2: in which these entire cultures were you know there was
Speaker 2: an attempt to wipe them out. One of the very
Speaker 2: first pieces of legislation to pass in Australia in the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century was the White Australia Act, which essentially tried
Speaker 2: to breed out the color from Australia. It forcibly took
Speaker 2: children away from their parents raised them in boarding schools,
Speaker 2: something that in North America. Of course, the story we're
Speaker 2: also familiar with because of the story of Indigenous Americans,
Speaker 2: to whom this was also done. And it's only relatively
Speaker 2: recently we're starting to understand the scale of the horrors
Speaker 2: of what went on in these institutions. But it does
Speaker 2: mean that while not destroyed, cultures were undermined, all in
Speaker 2: the name of this idea of white supremacy, that the
Speaker 2: white settlers in Australia had a right to that territory,
Speaker 2: that the communities that had lived there for tens of
Speaker 2: thousands of years did not, this idea that they were
Speaker 2: primitive and doomed to die out. Now, in the nineteenth centuries,
Speaker 2: also when the first bones of Neanderthals were discovered and
Speaker 2: identified in the Neandervalley in Germany. Let's remember one of
Speaker 2: the first things archaeologists and scientists did when they discovered
Speaker 2: those bones was to go and compare them to the
Speaker 2: bones of living Aboriginal Australians. Why did they do that
Speaker 2: to people living on the other side of the world.
Speaker 2: And the reason, of course, is that here was this
Speaker 2: form of human or species of humans it was conceived
Speaker 2: of then, that had gone extinct. And in the racial
Speaker 2: hierarchy or taxonomy of that time, there was a belief
Speaker 2: that other races were also doomed to go extinct, among
Speaker 2: them the indigenous Australian communities of Australia and New Zealand.
Speaker 2: And so if anyone was going to share some resemblance
Speaker 2: to Neanderthals, scientists, you know, in this ridiculous pseudoscientific myth
Speaker 2: that they had created, thought it must be them. This
Speaker 2: comparison was made, and even to this day, if you
Speaker 2: look up the dictionary definition of Neanderthals, of course it's
Speaker 2: not just this extinct form of human, but also kind
Speaker 2: of a brutish, oafish, stupid man. He's a Neandertal. So
Speaker 2: for years this association had been made. What's fascinating for me,
Speaker 2: as a journalist who writes on this topic is that
Speaker 2: in the last few decades, as it became clear that
Speaker 2: perhaps there was some mixing between the Antertals and humans,
Speaker 2: to the extent that we share some Neandertal ancestry. Many
Speaker 2: of us on the planet share some Neandertalle ancestry, but
Speaker 2: particularly in Europe, of course, because Neanderthals lived in Europe,
Speaker 2: that those of European heritage share, particularly this Neanderthal ancestry.
Speaker 2: The language around Neanderthals began to shift, and it's palpable
Speaker 2: in the scientific literature, but also in the popular press.
Speaker 2: You know, people started saying that Neanderthals were smarter than
Speaker 2: they then perhaps we thought they were, that they were
Speaker 2: more human, just like us, and that I find particularly
Speaker 2: galling this idea that here is this extinct form of
Speaker 2: human of whom we know very little about, you know
Speaker 2: very little, and the rehabilitation that Neanderthals have gone through
Speaker 2: drawing them into the circle of humanity, when one hundred
Speaker 2: years ago or more, living people, living modern humans were
Speaker 2: driven out of the circle of humanity by virtue of
Speaker 2: this idea that they were closer to in Neanderthals. No
Speaker 2: scientist or geneticist or archaeologist will now paleontologists will ever
Speaker 2: admit that there is anything you know, racialized about this,
Speaker 2: that there is anything racist going on in the way
Speaker 2: that they frame these things. But I think it's impossible
Speaker 2: to look at that the kind of speculation that went
Speaker 2: has gone on over the last hundred years and not
Speaker 2: see that of course there is how can there not be?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And since this rehabilitation of the Neanderthal image, there
Speaker 1: have been many scientific studies trying to link bits of
Speaker 1: Neanderthal DNA to functional rules like immune function or sleeping
Speaker 1: patterns or brain shape. What are some of the problems
Speaker 1: with these types of studies.
Speaker 2: They don't have a problem with people doing whatever research
Speaker 2: they want. What I don't understand is why anyone would
Speaker 2: imagine that these tiny portions of that genetic legacy will
Speaker 2: somehow reinforce the idea of race, which is what some
Speaker 2: on the far right are hoping that it will. That
Speaker 2: it will somehow show that Europeans are fundamentally different at
Speaker 2: a genetic level because of this association with the Andanderthals.
Speaker 2: That is impossible. As I said before, we are genetically
Speaker 2: more homogeneous than chimpanzees.
Speaker 1: We are very very.
Speaker 2: Genetically homogeneous species. There are no black genes, there are
Speaker 2: no white genes. There is no gene that exists in
Speaker 2: all the members of one population and not another. But
Speaker 2: there is an undercurrent here in this research that perhaps
Speaker 2: we can isolate something that makes some people different from others.
Speaker 2: And of course that's what a lot of population genetics
Speaker 2: is about, is about finding differences, genetic differences between populations.
Speaker 2: And while I don't have kind of a theoretical problem
Speaker 2: with that, a lot of my work is about asking
Speaker 2: scientists what are they trying to achieve here, what is
Speaker 2: the end goal of all of this, And is it
Speaker 2: really about improving health or improving our understanding of humanity?
Speaker 2: Or is there something else going on that it may
Speaker 2: be subconscious, I don't know, but something else going on here.
Speaker 1: In the second half of the nineteenth century, the introduction
Speaker 1: of the theory of evolution and then the rise of
Speaker 1: genetics paved the way for eugenics to be widely accepted. First,
Speaker 1: what is eugenics? And second why do you think it
Speaker 1: gained so much traction, especially in the US.
Speaker 2: Well, in some sense, the groundwork had been laid for
Speaker 2: the ideology of eugenics for a very long time, because,
Speaker 2: as I said, if you start with the premise that
Speaker 2: the human species can be divided into breeds, that some
Speaker 2: people are better than others by nature. Eugenics is the
Speaker 2: belief that some people should be allowed to have children
Speaker 2: and some people shouldn't, or some people should be allowed
Speaker 2: to have more children than others based on their genetic fitness,
Speaker 2: that the child of beautiful, clever parents is more likely
Speaker 2: to be beautiful and clever, which, of course, as we know,
Speaker 2: is not true. But leaving aside the fact that eugenics
Speaker 2: as itself is flawed in that heredity doesn't work that way,
Speaker 2: it was popular because it spoke to that kind of
Speaker 2: scientistic belief that society could be improved if we just
Speaker 2: managed reproduction, which is an idea to some degree that
Speaker 2: we still live with. It's an idea that is woven
Speaker 2: through popular culture. Even now that you know, why are
Speaker 2: some people having loads of kids and the clever people
Speaker 2: are not having loads of kids? And what will that
Speaker 2: mean for the future. Well, necessarily it won't mean anything.
Speaker 2: But we have at the back of our minds this
Speaker 2: eugenically informed idea that we want everyone in the world
Speaker 2: to be the best that they can possibly be. We
Speaker 2: want them to be the smartest, the fittest, the strongest,
Speaker 2: the tallest, and that we can somehow engineer a society
Speaker 2: like that through selective breeding or by encouraging reproduction in
Speaker 2: some than others. And it was very popular on the
Speaker 2: left and the right. I have to add. It wasn't
Speaker 2: just we associate it now with the Nazis in Germany
Speaker 2: in their program of racial hygiene, which of course led
Speaker 2: to the Holocaust. But it was very popular among progressives
Speaker 2: social progressives who believed very much that this was a scientific,
Speaker 2: a technological solution to society's problems. If people who were
Speaker 2: criminally indigent over generations or intellectually deficient over generations, if
Speaker 2: they could just be wiped out somehow, then society's problems
Speaker 2: will be fixed. But of course, as I said, it
Speaker 2: doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1: And in your book you discuss several modern misconceptions about eugenics,
Speaker 1: one being that eugenics was born with the fascists and
Speaker 1: Nazis of World War two, and another being that it
Speaker 1: died after the war. But what is the truth behind
Speaker 1: these misconceptions and why do you think the sanitized version
Speaker 1: of events has persisted?
Speaker 2: Well, it is the big events in history that we remember,
Speaker 2: and the Holocaust is, you know, the culmination of eugenics
Speaker 2: style thinking. So of course we do associate it with
Speaker 2: Nazi Germany, and perhaps it's normal that we should that
Speaker 2: we would, But it actually started in London at University
Speaker 2: College London with the cousin of Charles Darwin Francis Galton.
Speaker 2: It was developed with this wholehearted support of politicians at
Speaker 2: Winston Churchill and thinkers like Virginia Wolfe. Virginia wolf very
Speaker 2: much believed in this idea of class superiority and inferiority.
Speaker 2: So this was a popular view at the time across
Speaker 2: parts of Europe, but particularly taken up in the US.
Speaker 2: So the UK itself didn't in the end carry through
Speaker 2: with any eugenic style policies government policies, but the US did.
Speaker 2: There were sterilization policies here, there were anti immigration policies
Speaker 2: which were certainly informed, I think by the eugenics movement.
Speaker 2: And there was an overlap, a very solid overlap, between
Speaker 2: the American eugenic society and mainstream science and genetics that
Speaker 2: continued for a very long time. There were attempts even
Speaker 2: after the Second World War to rehabilitate genics to create
Speaker 2: a kind of signs of positive eugenics. There were attempts
Speaker 2: by some scientific racists like William Shockley, Nobel Prize winning engineer,
Speaker 2: who try to create a sperm bank for Nobel Prize
Speaker 2: winners and very smart people in which he placed his
Speaker 2: own sperm, and of course that continues. Jeffrey Epstein did
Speaker 2: something similar. He was very much adhered to this idea
Speaker 2: that smart, brilliant people should be having more children, leaving
Speaker 2: aside the fact what qualities do we really want in
Speaker 2: the next generation. Do we really want more William Shockley's
Speaker 2: than Jeffrey Epstein's. I'm not sure about that. But the
Speaker 2: point is that we live with these ideas and sometimes
Speaker 2: in very subtle ways. Even now. Sometimes I look at
Speaker 2: the exhortations on social media to be the best version
Speaker 2: of yourself, and I think to myself, how different is
Speaker 2: that really from this eugenic idea that we are not
Speaker 2: enough as we are, that we can't accept people just
Speaker 2: as they are. Be happy with that desperate kind of
Speaker 2: quest that modern day middle class parents have to turn
Speaker 2: their children into superhuman kids through training and classes, and
Speaker 2: I very much imagine one day, probably genetic selection, they're
Speaker 2: not happy with what they have, and that is tragic
Speaker 2: because if there is one ideal I think that has
Speaker 2: evolved throughout the twentieth and twenty first century that I
Speaker 2: think it would be tragic for us to let go of,
Speaker 2: is that every life matters, and every person is valuable
Speaker 2: in their own way. Regardless of how productive they are
Speaker 2: or how useful they are to society, They're still precious
Speaker 2: and useful to us, to themselves, and it is it's
Speaker 2: awful that you know, we still live this up with
Speaker 2: this idea that we are not enough. I think, I
Speaker 2: very much think that is a eugenic style of thinking
Speaker 2: that we hang on to.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely. In recent decades, the growing availability of genomic
Speaker 1: technology and data has led to the continued search for
Speaker 1: a biological basis for race, despite never having found one.
Speaker 1: And one example of this type of research that you
Speaker 1: give in your book is the Human Genome Diversity Project,
Speaker 1: whose creators, as you point out, don't appear to be
Speaker 1: intentionally trying to support racist claims. But how much does
Speaker 1: intention matter?
Speaker 2: Well, so, the Human Genome Diversity Project was a kind
Speaker 2: of an offshoot of population genetics, and we have to
Speaker 2: remember here that population genetics itself was a response to
Speaker 2: the eugenics establishment. So before the Second World War there
Speaker 2: were eugenics labs everywhere. Cold Spring Harbor had one, there
Speaker 2: was one at University College London, whether eugenics projects started.
Speaker 2: But after the war, of course, that became very unfashionable,
Speaker 2: and so a lot of eugenesists or race scientists as
Speaker 2: they would have been called, completely innocuously before the Second
Speaker 2: World War, began to reversion themselves, rehabilitate themselves as geneticist
Speaker 2: population geneticis And this was a very left wing group
Speaker 2: of people at the beginning, so they were very much
Speaker 2: opposed to racism. Many of them had experienced the horrors
Speaker 2: of what had happened during the Second World War and
Speaker 2: wanted to leave that behind. But the science of human
Speaker 2: difference was so deeply rooted in this idea of human
Speaker 2: difference at the population level, it was very difficult to
Speaker 2: do that in a whole scale way. So what you
Speaker 2: get with the Human Genome Diversity Project is an attempt
Speaker 2: to map human variation in a way that, for all
Speaker 2: intents and purposes, looks very much like old fashioned race science.
Speaker 2: Was looking for genetic differences between populations. They won't call
Speaker 2: them races, but they essentially are races that they're looking at,
Speaker 2: or large population groups, which is essentially the same thing.
Speaker 2: And so it was fraught from the beginning. It had
Speaker 2: a lot of opposition from indigenous groups, particularly because the
Speaker 2: project was all about going to these small, isolated communities
Speaker 2: around the world in the belief that they might be
Speaker 2: genetically exceptional in some way. None of them were, but
Speaker 2: you know, there was this in their imagination. They hoped
Speaker 2: that they could pinpoint something genetically special about these isolated groups.
Speaker 2: And of course these isolated groups were not fans of this.
Speaker 2: They had learned over the centuries not to fully trust
Speaker 2: Western scientists coming in and trying to take their genetic
Speaker 2: material or their biological material. So there was a lot
Speaker 2: of pushback on that front, but also conceptually, as social
Speaker 2: scientists have been at pains to point out those flaws.
Speaker 2: From the beginning, they didn't really resolve these group of
Speaker 2: anti racists within science hadn't fully resolved why what they
Speaker 2: were doing was not really race science. In the end,
Speaker 2: it didn't really go in anywhere. But what did come
Speaker 2: out of that project more broadly was ancestry testing. So
Speaker 2: modern day ancestry testing really is a product of that
Speaker 2: movement within population genetics, and of course ancestry testing has
Speaker 2: only re affirmed in the public imagination this idea that
Speaker 2: race must be real, because then how else can you
Speaker 2: take a DNA test and it tell you where you're from.
Speaker 1: All right, we are going to take a quick break here,
Speaker 1: and when we get back, there's still plenty to talk about.
Speaker 1: Welcome back everyone, Let's get back into it. In your book,
Speaker 1: talk about how race science is still conducted by two
Speaker 1: primary groups, These well meaning anti racist scientists whose research
Speaker 1: nevertheless perpetuates the notion that race has a biological foundation,
Speaker 1: and then the racial realists, the quote unquote racial realists
Speaker 1: who exploit scientific language to disguise themselves as legitimate scholars
Speaker 1: when they are really just using pseudoscientific journals to promote
Speaker 1: racist views. What role do each of these groups play
Speaker 1: when it comes to race science today?
Speaker 2: Rather than two groups, I think it's it's more useful
Speaker 2: to think about it as a spectrum, because yes, there
Speaker 2: are those on the very far fringes, the pseudoscientific fringes
Speaker 2: of academia, with one maybe one foot in academia, and
Speaker 2: most of their time not you know, just blogging on
Speaker 2: these far right blogs or with their YouTube channels and
Speaker 2: producing kind of these pseudoscientific papers for pseudo scientific journals,
Speaker 2: and they are very much allied to the far right.
Speaker 2: There are ideologies and beliefs are straight out of the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century. There is no real difference between what they
Speaker 2: say and what they believed in the nineteenth century. But
Speaker 2: mainstream science, to some degree, I think, still has this
Speaker 2: commitment to race, which plays out in far more subtle
Speaker 2: ways usually. I mean, there are some firmly within mainstream
Speaker 2: academia who give a lot of space to those on
Speaker 2: the fringes. So I wouldn't say that they're necessarily anti racist.
Speaker 2: They will say probably that they're apolitical, that they are
Speaker 2: just driven by curiosity, or you know, that they have
Speaker 2: no political skin in the game, they're just interested. But
Speaker 2: for some reason they give a lot of space to
Speaker 2: those on the far right. And in fact, I just
Speaker 2: published a piece recently in and Dark about mainstream scientific
Speaker 2: journals and how much overlap there is between the people
Speaker 2: who write for them and the people on these racist fringes,
Speaker 2: and there's far more than you would imagine. But then
Speaker 2: there are also mainstream scientists who are permitted to anti racism,
Speaker 2: who very much believe in the need to move on
Speaker 2: and you know, really make a break from those mistakes
Speaker 2: of the past and the pseudoscience of the past. But
Speaker 2: for some reason, deal keep coming back to race as
Speaker 2: a guiding principle in the way that they think about
Speaker 2: human difference. And you see this particularly in medicine. So,
Speaker 2: for example, in recent years, we've had a lot of
Speaker 2: calls from very well intentioned people in medical research and
Speaker 2: clinical research asking for more people of color to take
Speaker 2: part in clinical trials. And sometimes this bleeds into this
Speaker 2: claim that drugs tested on white people might not work
Speaker 2: in black and brown people, which is absolute nonsense. Of
Speaker 2: course that's not true. If it were, we would have
Speaker 2: real problems right now when we went to the doctor.
Speaker 2: But there is this problematic kind of space in which
Speaker 2: we want diversity in clinical trials. Of course, because there
Speaker 2: is such a huge degree of individual difference between us,
Speaker 2: it's good to be able to map that in as
Speaker 2: broad a way as possible, and to some degree, you know,
Speaker 2: calling for people from different ethnicities can feel like a
Speaker 2: way of achieving some of that diversity. But the truth is,
Speaker 2: if you have a large enough group of people. It
Speaker 2: doesn't really matter what race they are as long as
Speaker 2: there is enough of them, and that sometimes gets lost
Speaker 2: in that messaging. So we need to be very careful.
Speaker 2: I think about the way that we talk about race
Speaker 2: in science, and this is something I often say to
Speaker 2: researchers when I do talks at universities or when I've
Speaker 2: spoken at the nih IS. Every time you use race,
Speaker 2: ask yourself why you are using it and what you
Speaker 2: think race means in that context? How are you defining it?
Speaker 2: It's astonishing to me how many papers I read that
Speaker 2: don't go through that essential first step.
Speaker 1: As you point out the implication of many behaviors genetic
Speaker 1: studies looking at racial differences in traits such as intelligence,
Speaker 1: is that if there is a biological difference, then social
Speaker 1: programs would fail. What are some of the inherent issues
Speaker 1: with studies like this and who benefits from them? Like
Speaker 1: who wants to draw that conclusion?
Speaker 2: There's always been this claim, and this goes back to
Speaker 2: at least before the eugenics era, that no amount of
Speaker 2: affirmative action or trying to fix society's problems when it
Speaker 2: comes to racial inequality will work because deep down we
Speaker 2: are just fundamentally different. And this is why this grift
Speaker 2: continues into the present is because there are so many
Speaker 2: people still invested in this idea that racial difference at
Speaker 2: the psychological or intellectual level is so real that we
Speaker 2: will never really overcome it, that when we look and
Speaker 2: see these racial disparities, for example, in American society, that
Speaker 2: that is something that will never be overcome because that
Speaker 2: just reflects nature. Very again, a very self serving argument.
Speaker 2: It's an argument for doing nothing, for not changing anything,
Speaker 2: and it's very ahistorical because, of course, if you look
Speaker 2: at any group of people that has been designated and
Speaker 2: then deliberately oppressed for centuries and deliberately disadvantage, and then
Speaker 2: overlay on that the legacy of prejudice created by those myths,
Speaker 2: pseudoscientific myths and centuries of disadvantage, of course you are
Speaker 2: going to society is going to look the way it does.
Speaker 2: Of course, how can it look any different. But that
Speaker 2: kind of lazy, pseudoscientific approach to explaining inequality is still there.
Speaker 2: You see it in, for example, in Charles Murray and
Speaker 2: Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve, which is still popular, which
Speaker 2: people still cite and still read. You see it in
Speaker 2: more subtle ways sometimes in the literature and education, for instance.
Speaker 2: You know, how do we solve educational disadvantage? We haven't
Speaker 2: completely got rid of that yet. But what I would
Speaker 2: say to people, and this is what you know, people
Speaker 2: like W. E. B. Dubois said, when everyone is treated fairly,
Speaker 2: when you have really extended that hand of opportunity to
Speaker 2: absolutely everyone in as fair away as you can and
Speaker 2: you still see difference, then perhaps you can come back
Speaker 2: and start complaining about it. But you can't do that
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how is a journal like Mankind Quarterly benefiting from
Speaker 1: this harmful notion that scientists and the science is objective
Speaker 1: and that whatever scientists conclude from research is truth with
Speaker 1: a capital T.
Speaker 2: Well. The Mankind Quarterly was a journal that appeared in
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixties after the Second World War, and it
Speaker 2: was a reaction to the fact that race science was
Speaker 2: moving out of science because it wasn't seen it was
Speaker 2: seen as illogical and pseudoscientific. By this point, it was
Speaker 2: completely unfashionable to be a race scientist in the after
Speaker 2: the Second World War, but there were a number of
Speaker 2: academics around the world who were still committed to it,
Speaker 2: who very much still thought that maybe we weren't one species,
Speaker 2: that we were different species or subspecies or breeds, and
Speaker 2: that racial mixing was somehow dangerous to society that would
Speaker 2: create these strange hybrid people, which I know sounds absolutely
Speaker 2: bizarre now, but was an actual fear that, you know,
Speaker 2: some people had less than a century ago. So they
Speaker 2: created a journal of their own. It was called The
Speaker 2: Mankind Quarterly. It was funded by a very wealthy segregationist,
Speaker 2: Wickliffe Draper, American man who had inherited his wealth and
Speaker 2: invested it in the segregationist cause. And one of the
Speaker 2: planks of this was to fund racists within science and
Speaker 2: academia who shared his views, who could then be used
Speaker 2: as a kind of intellectual force with which to convince
Speaker 2: conservatives that desegregation was a stake. And that's exactly what
Speaker 2: The Mankind Quarterly was for. Wickliffe Draper distributed it to
Speaker 2: prominent conservatives in the US, and some of the people
Speaker 2: who wrote for it were prominent in the early days,
Speaker 2: quite prominent scientists. There was Henry Garrett, who was a
Speaker 2: very well known and distinguished psychologist who argued that racial
Speaker 2: mixing was deadly, that it was dangerous to society. There
Speaker 2: was a lot of overlap between this community who wrote
Speaker 2: for it and right wing, far right wing politicians and
Speaker 2: figures in the segregationist movement and white supremacist movement, and
Speaker 2: there were calls for it to be shut down. Even
Speaker 2: at the time the journal was reviewed in mainstream scientific
Speaker 2: journals and found to be complete nonsense. People asked for
Speaker 2: it to be shut down. It wasn't shut down because,
Speaker 2: like I said, it was independently funded, and in fact,
Speaker 2: it's still in publication today. And that's the thing that
Speaker 2: people find absolutely impossible to understand is how something like
Speaker 2: this can still be circulated today. That's not to say
Speaker 2: it's widely read, but it is there, and it certainly
Speaker 2: has influence on the far right. Many of the people
Speaker 2: who write for it, or who have written for it,
Speaker 2: you know, also provide intellectual ballast, if you want to
Speaker 2: call it that, for some of the most horrific right
Speaker 2: wing ideologies that we have, and they are cited. They
Speaker 2: were cited by the man who killed ten black people
Speaker 2: at a supermarket and Buffalo just last year. If you
Speaker 2: read his manifesto, there are scientific article after scientific articles
Speaker 2: cited there, and many of those people have written for
Speaker 2: the Mankind quarterly.
Speaker 1: It is yeah, shocking and disturbing that it still exists
Speaker 1: and is still popular and like you said, published in
Speaker 1: by people who have a foot in both academia and
Speaker 1: publish in legitimate scientific journals, but also things like me
Speaker 1: and kind Cordly. So you mentioned how a lot of
Speaker 1: biomedical studies still use race as a category that they
Speaker 1: want to measure something by, even though that something maybe unclear.
Speaker 1: And in your book you wrote about the hypertension drug
Speaker 1: by Dill, where does this drug fit into the growing
Speaker 1: problem of racialized medicine?
Speaker 2: By Dill was one of the first, and as far
Speaker 2: as I'm aware, the only still is the only drug
Speaker 2: approved by the FDA from marketing to black patients only.
Speaker 2: So it's a racially specific drug at least in marketing terms,
Speaker 2: which is unprecedented. And the reason that it has a
Speaker 2: very long backstory, and in fact, there are some very
Speaker 2: good books by Jonathan Cahn and Dorothy Roberts that kind
Speaker 2: of go into this story in much more detail. But
Speaker 2: I interviewed the inventor of Bydel for my book and
Speaker 2: he admitted quite happily that bidel works on everyone. It's
Speaker 2: not that it works better on black people. It was
Speaker 2: just a complete act of expediency that it was much
Speaker 2: cheaper and cost effective to test only on black people.
Speaker 2: And because in America rates of hypertension are much higher
Speaker 2: among black Americans, they did it that way. So there's
Speaker 2: no logic. But there's no scientific logic behind it. And
Speaker 2: in fact, he himself prescribes it to white and black patients.
Speaker 2: He doesn't discriminate in the way that he prescribes it.
Speaker 2: There has long been this correlation between being black in
Speaker 2: America and having higher high pertension. There's no genetic basis
Speaker 2: to it, at least that's not what studies are found,
Speaker 2: and a lot of money has gone into looking for
Speaker 2: genetic explanations for this. It is most likely associated with
Speaker 2: social factors. You know, high blood pressure or persistently high
Speaker 2: blood pressure, which is what high pertension is. You see
Speaker 2: all over the world. Millions of people around the world
Speaker 2: have it. My mother has it. You know. This is
Speaker 2: a common condition and it's caused most often by high
Speaker 2: salt in the diet, which is why the highest rates
Speaker 2: in the world are seen in Finland and Germany. Once
Speaker 2: adjusted for other factors, of course, Infinite and Germany diets
Speaker 2: tend to be very high in salty meat and fish.
Speaker 2: It's also caused by stress. People have shown that higher
Speaker 2: blood pressure is associated with fewer years of education, with
Speaker 2: being an immigrant. So there are lots of factors that
Speaker 2: contribute to high blood pressure, and of course stress and
Speaker 2: racial discrimination and one of them. But this kind of
Speaker 2: desperation to prove a racial genetic underpinning to hypertension is
Speaker 2: just the most fascinating story and it just shows I
Speaker 2: think it's emblematic of the ways in which race can
Speaker 2: be invoked in medicine inappropriate ways, but just continue over
Speaker 2: time until it becomes myth, until it becomes dogma. And
Speaker 2: even now that dogma is so deeply rooted that in
Speaker 2: the UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence,
Speaker 2: which is the body that advises doctors on how to
Speaker 2: treat patients deal advises different drugs if you're under fifty,
Speaker 2: if you're black, then if you white, and there is
Speaker 2: no scientific basis for that. I should add, you know,
Speaker 2: there was a study done in twenty twenty one, this
Speaker 2: is after my book came out that showed that there
Speaker 2: is no logic, there's no evidence basis for prescribing different
Speaker 2: drugs based on ethnicity.
Speaker 1: Since your book came out, have you seen any examples
Speaker 1: of racialized medicine or racialized discussions or language, you know,
Speaker 1: involving racialized differences in terms of COVID in popular media.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean at the beginning of the pandemic, there
Speaker 2: was a lot of speculation. You might remember this in
Speaker 2: the panic in the kind of absence of scientific evidence
Speaker 2: which we had, you know, we really didn't know anything
Speaker 2: at the end of twenty nineteen and early twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: we really knew so little about this virus, and there
Speaker 2: was a lot of speculation about the possibility that certain
Speaker 2: racists couldn't catch COVID. And then later in April or May,
Speaker 2: I remember I was in the UK. Then I was
Speaker 2: still living in the UK, and rates were very high
Speaker 2: among Asian people living in Britain. So this is usually
Speaker 2: in Britain that refers to South Asian, so from the
Speaker 2: South Asian subcontinent, and people started speculating about whether South
Speaker 2: Asian people were uniquely susceptible to this virus. But of
Speaker 2: course you only had to look at the demographics to
Speaker 2: understand why that was. It was because the virus hit
Speaker 2: in London, first, London is a minority white British city,
Speaker 2: so demographically it does not look like the same as
Speaker 2: the rest of the UK, and the majority of or
Speaker 2: a disproportionate number of frontlines workers in London come from
Speaker 2: ethnic minority or immigrant backgrounds, not to mention the fact
Speaker 2: that the NHS, which is where a number of those
Speaker 2: deaths happened among doctors and nurses, is disproportionately staffed by
Speaker 2: ethnic minorities, so of course the figures are not going
Speaker 2: to look the same. And that's leaving aside the fact
Speaker 2: that race impacts health on so many different levels, which
Speaker 2: we can see for ourselves, for example, in the fact
Speaker 2: that when we should have known this already that in
Speaker 2: the US, black Americans have a lower life expectancy than
Speaker 2: white Americans, not in any way because they are somehow
Speaker 2: uniquely biologically disadvantaged, but just because of the way we live,
Speaker 2: the way people are treated, for the same reason that
Speaker 2: poor people around the world have a lower life expectancy,
Speaker 2: of course, because of the lives that they live in
Speaker 2: the way that they are treated. And why those social
Speaker 2: explanations for the differences weren't brought in sooner, why I
Speaker 2: had to endure you know, while we all had to
Speaker 2: endure serious scientists and physicians making these ridiculous claims in
Speaker 2: those early months of the pandemic, which did enormous damage
Speaker 2: to people, because later on, when the vaccine came out,
Speaker 2: ethnic minority groups were nervous about taking the vaccine because
Speaker 2: they felt that a vaccine tested on white people wouldn't
Speaker 2: necessarily work on them. Had emails with people asking me that,
Speaker 2: which is absolutely nonsensical. But of course that ridiculous speculation
Speaker 2: on the part of scientists and doctors for the two
Speaker 2: years prior had fed into that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Of course since publishing Superior, have you received any
Speaker 1: pushback either from population geneticists studying humans or from race realists.
Speaker 2: Well, the race realist still won't leave me alone. One
Speaker 2: of the reasons I'm not on Twitter or Facebook anymore.
Speaker 2: I left Twitter a few years ago. The degree of
Speaker 2: trolling I was getting was just unbearable. And it wasn't
Speaker 2: just me. Maybe I'm very thin skinned. I probably am,
Speaker 2: but I just couldn't handle it anymore. It was just incessant.
Speaker 2: I couldn't write anything, I couldn't do anything. They published
Speaker 2: all the personal details of my family, including my son
Speaker 2: who's just a kid. He's nine years old now that
Speaker 2: he was seven or eight then, and it was just
Speaker 2: I couldn't I couldn't bear it. I had to just
Speaker 2: distance myself. I took down any pictures of him. I
Speaker 2: try and keep a minimal presence on social media now,
Speaker 2: and it's a very difficult thing to deal with because,
Speaker 2: of course, as a freelance journalist, you work, your only
Speaker 2: currency is your reputation. And I still worry sometimes that,
Speaker 2: you know, for people who don't know any better, they
Speaker 2: will see these things that they write online and they
Speaker 2: will believe them about me, that I'm compromised in some way,
Speaker 2: that I'm some kind of left wing stooge who is
Speaker 2: just peddling these They call me a pseudo scientist, you know,
Speaker 2: these scientific racists online, these pseudoscientists online. And that is
Speaker 2: a hard thing to deal with as a freelancer. And
Speaker 2: it's not just me. There are many of us who
Speaker 2: deal with that every single day. So that really doesn't stop.
Speaker 2: And I hope people can see through that now. I
Speaker 2: hope people are more aware of their tactics and the
Speaker 2: way they operate, and in fact, at the end of
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, because of all of them, I started a
Speaker 2: group which now sits under the Royal Institution in London
Speaker 2: called Challenging Pseudoscience. So I bought together scientists, academics, policymakers,
Speaker 2: social media experts, people who work in the misinformation space,
Speaker 2: counter terrorism experts, and we as an informal group. None
Speaker 2: of us get paid. We have quite a bit of funding,
Speaker 2: but none of us get paid, and we commission projects
Speaker 2: around scientific misinformation and disinformation. We commissioned some research last
Speaker 2: year on anti vaxers. There's some really detailed ethnographic research
Speaker 2: on anti vaxxers and how they work. And we run
Speaker 2: public events and I hope that we're making some traction there.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's my way of kind of making a
Speaker 2: difference in this space, is just to help clean up
Speaker 2: the wild West that the Internet has become when it
Speaker 2: comes to these kind of ridiculous pseudoscientific conspiracy theories. And
Speaker 2: I hope that ultimately we can create a system, if
Speaker 2: not a regulation, which I would certainly hope for, but
Speaker 2: at least a return to some kind of civil discourse
Speaker 2: online which is informed by a factual, you know, good
Speaker 2: faith information, not what we have at the moment.
Speaker 1: Angela, thanks again, so much for taking the time to
Speaker 1: chat with me. I really enjoyed our conversation. If you
Speaker 1: also liked this interview and want to learn more, check
Speaker 1: out our website this podcast will Kill You dot com,
Speaker 1: where I'll post a link to where you can find
Speaker 1: Superior The Return of Race Science, along with a link
Speaker 1: to Angela's new book The Patriarchs How Men Came to Rule,
Speaker 1: which sounds super fascinating on to read list as of today,
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Speaker 1: those hands, oh.
Speaker 2: Oh oh
Speaker 1: Oh