 First edition | |
| Author | Angela Saini |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Race, scientific racism |
| Genre | Essay |
| Publisher | Beacon Press |
Publication date | 2019-05-21 |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 978-0-8070-7691-0 |
Superior: The Return of Race Science is a non-fiction book by Angela Saini published in 2019. Built around interviews with experts, the scientific consensus, and the author's analysis, it argues that some fields of biology are still influenced by the discredited scientific racism theories of the 19th century.
With Superior, Saini draws upon her own childhood in a white neighbourhood of London. The racial discrimination she faced at the time pushed her towards a style of journalism that seeks to highlight injustice. Her renewed interest in the genetics of race was stirred by the exploitation by the white supremacy movement of research that seems to point to genetically distinct racial groupings. [1] [2]
Saini first recounts the history of scientific racism, from its origins of systematic classification of humans according to physical appearance and alleged racially-based personality traits, an approach adopted by a list of scientists that includes Linnaeus, Darwin and Huxley. She goes on to the acceptance of these theories by 20th-century anthropology and biology, and to their integration into political doctrines under the Nazi regime. She traces the way racial categories have changed over a fairly short period of time, revealing them as social constructs. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Saini argues that despite deliberate efforts to discredit this approach in the post-war period, the pseudo-scientific claim that some varieties of homo sapiens are inherently superior (or more evolved) than others has not only survived, but is making a comeback. Having served the ideologies of the slave trade, race-based immigration and the Holocaust in the past, scientific racism is today enlisted in the cause of white supremacy. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
While acknowledging that today's scientists who look for expressions of the concept of race in biology are not the equivalent of their 19th-century peers, Saini questions whether this line of inquiry can produce any useful findings. [4] She argues a focus on race or ethnicity in public health and medicine can blind researchers to environmental causes that have already been proven to affect health outcomes, such as socioeconomic conditions. By rehashing the idea that the concept of race corresponds to actual genetic differences, they also feed the re-emergence of the white nationalist movement. [1] [8] [9]
In Nature , Robin Nelson argues the book "is perhaps best understood as continuing in a tradition of groundbreaking work that contextualizes the deep and problematic history of race science", along with works by Dorothy Roberts and Alondra Nelson. She notes the author uses loaded terms such as "political correctness" and "identity politics" without acknowledging those terms are often used in a pejorative manner, making her intention unclear. [4]
In Slate , Tim Requarth calls the book "exceptional and damning" and says it will force scientists to examine how a society's culture affects their scientific judgment. [9]
Writing for the Center for Genetics and Society, Peter Shanks calls Saini "an author to watch". He believes the book is "an invaluable resource, and my only real criticism is that the one-word title may give some the false impression that Saini endorses the idea that some groups are superior." [7]
In the Financial Times , Clive Cookson said the book is a "brilliant analysis of race science past and present". While Cookson is uncomfortable with what he perceives as an invitation to avoid researching links between genetics and intelligence, he still considers Superior "a thought-provoking combination of science, social history and modern politics." [8]
Arthur Robert Jensen was an American psychologist and writer. He was a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen was known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, the study of how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.
John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.
Race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. The term came into common usage during the 16th century, when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds, including those characterized by close kinship relations. By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits, and then later to national affiliations. Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning. The concept of race is foundational to racism, the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence, and that this separation is a source of social division within the United States.
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.
The concept of race as a categorization of anatomically modern humans has an extensive history in Europe and the Americas. The contemporary word race itself is modern; historically it was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries. Race acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology through scientific racism starting in the 19th century. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "races", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.
Charles Alan Murray is an American political scientist. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
Researchers have investigated the relationship between race and genetics as part of efforts to understand how biology may or may not contribute to human racial categorization. Today, the consensus among scientists is that race is a social construct, and that using it as a proxy for genetic differences among populations is misleading.
Mankind Quarterly is a journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", and "a pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality". It covers physical and cultural anthropology, including human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology, archaeology, and biology. It is published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which was presided over by Richard Lynn until his death in 2023.
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve (1994).
Social interpretations of race regard the common categorizations of people into different races. Race is often culturally understood to be rigid categories in which people can be classified based on biological markers or physical traits such as skin colour or facial features. This rigid definition of race is no longer accepted by scientific communities. Instead, the concept of 'race' is viewed as a social construct. This means, in simple terms, that it is a human invention and not a biological fact. The concept of 'race' has developed over time in order to accommodate different societies' needs of organising themselves as separate from the 'other'. The 'other' was usually viewed as inferior and, as such, was assigned worse qualities. Our current idea of race was developed primarily during the Enlightenment, in which scientists attempted to define racial boundaries, but their cultural biases ultimately impacted their findings and reproduced the prejudices that still exist in our society today.
Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective is a book by Canadian psychologist and author J. Philippe Rushton. Rushton was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario for many years, and the head of the controversial Pioneer Fund. The first unabridged edition of the book came out in 1995, and the third, latest unabridged edition came out in 2000; abridged versions were also distributed.
Angela Saini is a British science journalist, broadcaster and the author of books, of which the fourth, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, was published in 2023 and was a finalist for that year's George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Saini has worked as a reporter and presenter for the BBC and has written for a number of publications including The Guardian, New Scientist, and Wired UK. She has also produced and presented several radio and television documentaries, including a BBC Radio 4 documentary on biofuels and a BBC World Service documentary on the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture. Saini's writing and reporting focus on how science interacts with society, especially on how it affects marginalized groups, and she has been acclaimed for her work by a diverse range of organizations and institutions.
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History is a 2014 book by Nicholas Wade, a British writer, journalist, and former science and health editor for The New York Times. In the book, Wade argues that human evolution has been "recent, copious and regional" and that this has important implications for social sciences. The book has been widely denounced by the scientific community for misrepresenting research into human population genetics.
Gerhard Meisenberg is a German biochemist. As of 2018, he was a professor of physiology and biochemistry at Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica. He is a director, with Richard Lynn, of the Pioneer Fund, which has been described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was, until 2018 or 2019, the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal and purveyor of scientific racism.
Who We Are and How We Got Here is a 2018 book on the contribution of genome-wide ancient DNA research to human population genetics by the geneticist David Reich. He describes discoveries made by his group and others, based on analysis and comparison of ancient and modern DNA from human populations around the world. Central to these is the finding that almost all human populations are mixtures resulting from multiple population migrations and gene flow.
Jennifer Anne Raff is an American geneticist and an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. She specializes in anthropological genetics relating to the initial peopling of the Americas and subsequent prehistory of Indigenous populations throughout North America. She is the President of the American Association of Anthropological Genetics. Alongside her research, Raff is a science communicator who writes and gives public talks about topics in science literacy.
The Human Biodiversity Institute (HBI) refers to a far-right group of scientists, academics, and others associated with pseudoscientific race theories and neo-eugenics. Founded by Steve Sailer in the late 1990s, the theories were given the euphemism human biodiversity. Ideas that originated in the group, presently believed to be dormant, have since entered general alt-right discourse.
