30 | New Scientist | 8 February 2020
Book
How to Argue with a
Racist: History, science,
race and reality
Adam Rutherford
Weidenfeld & NicolsonI AM black and mixed-race, but
it remains unclear to me whether
these are social identities or
biological classifications. Luckily,
I can turn to Adam Rutherford’s
latest book, How to Argue with
a Racist, to reveal the current
scientific understanding of race,
ancestry and genetics. It also tells
us how to argue effectively against
the idea that certain populations
of people are biologically inferior.
From the beginning, Rutherford
is clear that although he uses the
term “race” frequently, he does so
only because the word is widely
used: it isn’t scientifically valid,
yet it exists so must be addressed.
“Race is a social construct. This
does not mean it is invalid or
unimportant,” writes Rutherford.
How to Argue with a Racist’s
strongest suit is to encourage a
general conversation about race,
informed by the latest science on
the reality and origins of racism.
Researching ethnicity has often
been career death, but Rutherford
says scientists shouldn’t shy away
from the field. Nor should writers,
to judge by his mission.
For many, race is a cry for
identity and belonging. In 2018,
when groups of neo-Nazis in the
US “chugged” milk to supposedly
demonstrate their superior,
genetically encoded ability
to process lactose, they were
trying to assert their white
identity, writes Rutherford.
He rather undermines such
an assertion by revealing that
the gene mutations that enable
lactose processing aren’t uniquePlay the realism card on race
Let’s welcome a new book that takes apart the persistent race myths plaguing
society and helps us fight back against “everyday racism”, says Layal Liverpoolto people of European descent.
They also exist today in Kazakhs,
Ethiopians, Tutsi, Khoisan and in
many places where dairy farming
took off as part of agriculture.
Chugging milk is a theatrical
gesture, but as Rutherford points
out, we increasingly turn to
ancestry and genetic testing
to reaffirm our human tendency
to seek meaning and identity.I can relate to this. My surname,
Liverpool, comes from an ancestor
on my father’s side, forcibly
shipped from West Africa to the
Caribbean via Liverpool, UK,
during the transatlantic slave
trade. But as Rutherford points
out, the number of children
produced by sex between enslaved
peoples, and between the enslaved
and their owners, makes it
virtually impossible for a geneticViews Culture
GUY SMALLMAN/GETTY IMAGESanother than we think is a pretty
strong argument against racism.
Is any of this enough to
convince hard-liners? Maybe
not. As Rutherford writes:
“The commercial genetic
tests remain scientifically
unconvincing. Regardless, the
utility of consumer genetic testing
is now a major and significant part
of white supremacy discourse.”
But in many ways How to Argue
with a Racist isn’t really about
arguing with hard-liners. Its target
is the surprisingly prevalent set of
racist beliefs, from men of certain
groups having larger or smaller
penises than average to people
from different racial groups being
more or less intelligent than
average. “The way we generally
speak about races does not align
with what we know about those
innate differences between people
and populations,” says Rutherford.
For example, the largest study
of penis size, including more thantest to establish an African
country of origin for the
descendants of slaves.
Instead of arguing against
the logic of marrying identity
to ancestry, Rutherford elegantly
uses a bit of mathematics to
show how our whole way of
thinking about ancestry is wrong.
He assumes generational time
is 25 years and that the number
of ancestors for each person in
every generation has doubled.
So we each have two parents,
four grandparents, eight great-
grandparents, and so on. In
500 years, or 20 generations, that is
1,048,576 ancestors. Go back 1000
years, and each of us has more
than a trillion ancestors: 10 times
more people than ever existed.
The notion of a family tree isn’t
the most scientifically accurate
metaphor, he writes, because trees
only ever branch, but family trees
contain loops, with the same
person appearing at multiple
positions in the tree, for example,
as a result of first cousins having
children. Understanding that we
are all more closely related to oneFighting racism means
tackling the most
entrenched stereotypes“ The field of human
genetics has a dark
history, but it has
also demonstrated
the falsity of race”