The ever-mutating virus of racism, and whether it can be stopped

Some years ago my GP took one look at me and said, “Indian origin, you must be susceptible to diabetes.” More recently, on another visit to my GP, to pick up medicine that had been prescribed by my consultant, the pharmacist checked online and said that my ethnic background mean the prescribed dosage was unsuitable. My consultant had to overrule her before I could take the medication.

Initially it worried me that referring to my ethnic origin on health issues seemed like a return to scientific racism. But when my GP explained I might be vulnerable to diabetes because of my Indian diet, I was reassured that it was not my genes but what took place in my kitchen that mattered. But while my doctors were not dabbling in scientific racism, race science can no longer be considered to have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

This view is argued persuasively by the authors of both Superior: The Return of Race Science (4th Estate, £16.99) and Skin Deep: Journeys in the Divisive Science of Race (Oneworld, £18.99). The different backgrounds of the authors – Angela Saini is a British writer of Indian origin, Gavin Evans a lecturer in London brought up in South Africa – do give the two books a very different flavour. Saini examines the Hindu caste system and how, with Hindus considering themselves as Aryans, they are attracted by Hitler's Aryan theories and Mein Kampf is a bestseller. Evans has fascinating personal stories of white South Africans cloaking their racism with spurious science and claiming that the culture of pre-European Africa must have been the work of Europeans.

What made race lethal was the rise of Europe as the supreme world power. The greatest of European Enlightenment thinkers made no secret of their racism

Their methods are also different. Saini, who presents science programmes on BBC Radio, has supplemented her book-based research with the classic journalism practice of knocking on doors and interviewing people. Evans’s extensive footnotes show he has relied more on the written material. However, they cover so much of the same ground that their books read like two volumes on race science.

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Race in the long history of mankind is a recent construct, and even today it can produce confusion. In 1795, the German doctor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was the first one to divide human into races, defining five human types: Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans and Malays. While today Caucasians are people of European stock, Blumenbach included everyone from Europe and India to North Africa.

Since he also considered Caucasians as the most beautiful, that would have suited me fine as I would have counted as a Caucasian. Today in the US, Mostafa Hefny faces exactly the opposite problem. In 1997, the US defined people from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa as white. This means Hefny, an immigrant from Egypt, who looks black and wants to be considered black is, despite taking legal action, classified as white.

What made race lethal was the rise of Europe as the supreme world power, and, as they took possession of the world and made their history and thought the universal template, the greatest of European Enlightenment thinkers, men we still revere, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel and David Hume, made no secret of their racism. As Hume put it in 1753: “There was never a civilised nation of any other complexion than white.” They saw no contradiction in preaching liberty but seeing whites as innately superior to non-whites.

These views on race were shared by great and good in Europe until well into the 20th century. By then, many Europeans also believed in eugenics, convinced, as Saini puts it, that “a race of people could be more quickly improved if the most intelligent were encouraged to reproduce, while the stupidest weren’t – the same way that you might artificially breed a fatter crow or a redder apple”. Such racist thinking reached its horrible conclusion under Nazism with Josef Mengele searching concentration camps for twins he could amputate, mutilate and dissect. However, as Saini points out, contrary to popular belief, the Nazis did not invent eugenics. That was done much closer to home, London, fathered by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin.

Winston Churchill was 'a convinced white – not to say Anglo-Saxon – supremacist and thought in terms of race to a degree that was remarkable even by the standards of his own time'

The first eugenics institute, the Eugenics Record Office, was set up by the University of London in the heart of Bloomsbury in 1904. It took Galton only a week to convince the university. In 1912, when it held its First International Eugenics Congress in a plush London hotel, Winston Churchill, then first Lord of the Admiralty, attended in his capacity as vice-president as did two other vice- presidents, the lord mayor of London and the lord chief justice.

Churchill, as even the historian Andrew Roberts, who is a great admirer, admits, was “a convinced white – not to say Anglo-Saxon – supremacist and thought in terms of race to a degree that was remarkable even by the standards of his own time”. In February 1945, with the Nazi regime about to collapse, he told his Downing Street secretary John Colville, and Bert Harris, head of Bomber Command, that “Hindus were a foul race ‘protected by their pullulation from the doom that is their due” and he wished Bert Harris could “send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them”.

Such was the hold of racist ideas that in July 1943 Alan Lascelles, private secretary to George VI, wrote in his diary that it would be difficult to make the Indian the equal of the white man – “no white man can endure the thought of mixed marriages; and nature herself condemns such marriages by the almost invariably inferior quality of their fruits”. Marie Stopes set up the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, and even Bertrand Russell was in favour of fining the “wrong” type of people for having children. Saini’s meticulous research shows how a veil has been drawn over all this, with the Galton Institute renamed Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment. It has helped generate the myth that biological racism died with the Nazis.

In fact, as Evans point out, many psychologists, particularly in the United States, while not going as far as eugenics, have held on to race theory ideas. They resurface every few years, but what makes the current wave different is the platform the internet has provided to alt-right views on race, with US President Donald Trump echoing some of its themes. Trump has nothing in common with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, but his call to send some black American Congresswomen home echoes what both these great Americans suggested. Lincoln, despite liberating slaves, thought it would be best if they went back to Africa. Jefferson, in a letter in 1811, said the blacks could “carry back to the country of their origin the seeds of civilisation”. Trump could not today articulate such a blatantly racist view, and that sums up what is happening with race science. It has got a new lease of life but veiled in the more acceptable language of the 21st century.

So Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, while insisting he is not a racist, in his 2014 book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, argues that it was English genes for hard work and respect for law that made them come up with the industrial revolution. African genes made them tribal, Chinese ones authoritarian and Jewish ones super-smart and evolved for capitalism. This last claim has now developed into the idea that Jews are smarter than everyone else, which Evans, who is himself Jewish, shows is very useful for race scientists. “Accept that Jews are innately smarter than the rest and you’ve accepted the founding principles of race science and its inevitable corollary that others are innately less smart.” However, only Ashkenazi Jews, people of northern European stock, are considered smart.

The fact is many great thinkers and politicians were Sephardic Jews of Spanish origin, including Benjamin Disraeli, the economist David Ricardo, philosopher Spinoza and the physicist Niels Bohr. The theory is based on Ashkenazi Jews having higher IQ scores. Evans argues that IQ does not measure intelligence, it measures more abstract verbal and non-verbal reasoning, and that environment, not genes, are the determining factor. Perhaps the clinching argument is that when IQ tests were conducted in the United States in 1913 on immigrants, 83 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews were considered “morons” and only prevented from occupying the last place by 87 per cent of Russians being “morons”. As Evans wittily puts it: “The nation of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Stravinsky and Nabokov kept the people who produced Maimonides, Kafka, Einstein, Mahler and Roth off the bottom rung.”

Those IQ tests suited the US then as the country was keen to have more immigrants from northern Europe. One suspects Trump would love such IQ tests now as he has said that he would like fewer immigrants from “shithole” countries and more from Norway. But, as Evans points out, there is a downside for those who argue that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter. Go down the road that Jews have special skills in money-lending and mercantilism and this “lends itself to undisguised forms of anti-Semitism”. For many in the Middle East this would be a handy weapon to recreate the ghost of Shylock.

Ibram X Kendi takes Barack Obama to task for a campaign speech in 2008 blaming blacks for not clawing their way out of the ghetto to get a piece of the American dream

For those who argue that such ideas do not matter because we now live in a post-racial word, Ibram X Kendi provides a cold dose of realism in How to Be an Antiracist (Bodley Head, £16.99) that is both shocking and provocative. Kendi takes issue with the very idea that saying you are not a racist means you are neutral on race. "The claim of not-racist neutrality is a mask for racism." The word "racist" is not, he argues, a pejorative, a slur, the worst word in the English language. It is a descriptive term. If you want to oppose racism, you cannot say you do not think about colour or are colour-blind and therefore must be an anti-racist.

Kendi is an American academic, and his book is designed like a university textbook with chapters devoted to various subjects such as biology, ethnicity, body and culture, and each of them starting with a definition of what constitutes racist and anti-racist behaviour. But far from being a dry tome, he uses his personal story to make his arguments so skilfully that the book is both a memoir and a strident call to arms.

And in this fight he spares no one, going so far as to suggest that Barack Obama is racist. He takes Obama to task for a campaign speech in 2008 blaming blacks for not clawing their way out of the ghetto to get a piece of the American dream. For Kendi, this is Obama being racist by behaving as part of the black elite condemning poor blacks who had not made it. Kendi’s argument is that such is the virus of racism, that you can be racist towards your own race.

Kendi, whose family have been part of that elite, confesses that he was himself one such racist black, recounting how as a high school student he took part in an oratorial contest to honour Martin Luther King and lambasted his fellow blacks for their failings. Kendi sees race as “a power construct” and turns on its head the notion that ignorance and hate cause racist ideas, leading to racist policies. Racist policies come first, and racist ideas are invented to justify them.

Kendi sees black people as constantly duelling within themselves to be anti- racist and assimilationist. He rejects assimilation as racist as it means accepting that white people have the superior standard. Kendi has resolved the duel by considering himself black, African but also part of a wider world. However, this involves taking in practically every community including European Jews and victimised white people, and it is too fanciful a solution to have universal application.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the book is that, having set out a template for anti-racism, Kendi then confesses that racism can never be defeated. He and his wife have survived cancer but he cannot see the cancer of racism – which he says “is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancer humanity has ever known” – being conquered.

This suggests an American pessimism caused by Trump, for in contrast both Saini and Evans are more confident that the tide of race science can be halted. If this is because they live in the UK, it may show that environmental conditions more than genes are always the more crucial factor.