 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 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.
Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity. Modern variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These views can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. There have been attempts to legitimize racist beliefs through scientific means, such as scientific racism, which have been overwhelmingly shown to be unfounded. In terms of political systems that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices or laws, racist ideology may include associated social aspects such as nativism, xenophobia, otherness, segregation, hierarchical ranking, and supremacism.
A 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 1500s, 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.
White supremacy or white supremacism 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 superficial division 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 empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Historically, scientific racism received credence throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. Dividing humankind into biologically distinct groups is sometimes called racialism, race realism, or race science by its proponents. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.
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. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.
Samuel Jared Taylor is an American white supremacist and editor of American Renaissance, an online magazine espousing such opinions, which was founded by Taylor in 1990.
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.
Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed 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 is presided over by Richard Lynn.
Hydralazine/isosorbide dinitrate, sold under the brand name Bidil, is a fixed-dose combination medication used to treat self-identified Black people with congestive heart failure. It is a combination of hydralazine hydrochloride and isosorbide dinitrate.
Social interpretations of race regard the common categorizations of people into different races, often with biologist tagging of particular "racial" attributes beyond mere anatomy, as more socially and culturally determined than based upon biology. Some interpretations are often deconstructionist and poststructuralist in that they critically analyze the historical construction and development of racial categories.
Angela Saini is a British science journalist, broadcaster and the author of books, of which the third, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was published in 2019. Her work has appeared in Science, Wired, The Guardian, The New Humanist and New Scientist. She is also a presenter on BBC radio.
Negroid is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). The term is derived from now-discredited conceptions of race as a biological category.
Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was an American historian, journalist, political scientist, conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and white nationalist. Stoddard wrote several books which advocated eugenics and scientific racism, including The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). He advocated a racial hierarchy which he believed needed to be preserved through anti-miscegenation laws. Stoddard's books were once widely read both inside and outside the United States.
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 the SPLC has described as a "racist journal".
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 assistant 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.