New Zealand Listener – August 24, 2019

50 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019

BOOKS&CULTURE

by VERONIKA MEDUNA

T

oday, eugenics is a dirty word. We

tend to think of the horrors of the

Holocaust, slavery and colonial-

ism as evil manifestations of

outdated ideas about racial purity

and the superiority of one group of people

over another. Or so you would hope.

Racist populism is clearly raising its ugly

head again, and Angela Saini’s Superior:

The Return of Race Science is a timely and

sadly necessary reminder that any notion

of race is driven by power structures rather

than biological evidence.

Superior is part-science history, part-sci-

en ce journalism, enriched by the author’s

own experience as a person of Indian

heritage living in London, facing everyday

racism.

Saini tracks the roots of racial classifi ca-

tions back to the Enlightenment and its

gentleman scientists’ tendency to observe

the rest of the world through their own

lens of assumed superiority and cast

humanity in comparison to the north-

ern European model. It is not surprising,

Saini writes, but rather a testament to the

audacity of power that white and wealthy

scientists put themselves at the top of a

racial hierarchy they drew up randomly.

Based on the early genetic concepts

Gregor Mendel gleaned from peas, and

infl uenced by Darwinian ideas about

the survival of the fi ttest, race science

extrapolated to humans – and prepared

a fertile ground for politics based on the

expansion of power and racial dominance,

with the most horrifi c consequences of

eugenics emerging in Hitler’s reign. Saini

argues that the post-World War II narra-

tive of good winning over unfathomable

evil meant that the full history of how the

idea of race was constructed in the fi rst

place could not be revisited. This in turn

meant that although eugenics was no

longer acceptable, the idea continued to

simmer.

T

he most chilling part of Superior is Saini’s

detailed reconstruction of how several

scientists whose thinking continued to

be fi rmly anchored in genetic determinism

• the idea that complex human traits are
  genetically fi xed and therefore signifi cantly
  different between population groups – were
  able to reinvent themselves and continue
  their work, funded by a wealthy donor look-
  ing to support racial science.
  Her writing is crystal clear. So much
  so that every scientist she describes
  emerges as a perfectly plausible, if fl awed,

character. She doesn’t need to accuse her

subjects of racism. Instead, she leaves

enough space for them to reveal their

own confi rmation bias and racist convic-

tions before she proceeds to debunk their

science.

In the process, Saini builds a clear

picture of the evidence: race is a social

and political construct not borne out by

biology. If we could look at the genome

of each of us, we wouldn’t fi nd clear racial

boundaries but gradients that blend into

each other.

At the same time, Saini makes it clear

that science itself is socially constructed,

and there will always be those who, for

their own reasons, want to claim that

people’s place in life

is determined by

innate and unchange-

able abilities rather

than inequality in

opportunity. l

SUPERIOR: The Return

of Race Science, by

Angela Saini (Fourth

Estate, $35)

Racially

motivated

A timely debunking of

the pseudoscience

of ethnic inferiority

from British writer.

She doesn’t need to

accuse her subjects of

racism. Instead, she leaves

enough space for them to

reveal their own bias.

Dismantling the

evidence: Angela Saini.