How to Argue With a Racist

February 24, 2020
Rutherford (The Book of Humans), a geneticist at University College London, addresses this short but impactful volume to the question of what his discipline has to say about racial difference. His thesis is expressed clearly and concisely: “Neither race nor racism has foundations in science.” Taking on four tendentious arguments, Rutherford effectively dismantles each. Skin color, he explains, is “a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people.” “Racial purity is a pure fantasy” in humans, given that “people have moved around the world throughout history and had sex wherever and whenever they could.” He finds a genetic component to success in sports, but one far outweighed by cultural aspects. On the other hand, he can find precious little data linking genetic differences between populations to differences in intelligence. While Rutherford relies on cutting-edge research to substantiate his points, he is not an apologist for everything scientific, recognizing the errors and racism present in the work of previous researchers. Rutherford’s work provides ample ammunition to anyone wishing to use science to combat racial stereotypes. Agent: Will Francis, Janklow.

March 1, 2020
An earnest review proving that the concept of "race" has no basis in science. The title is misleading because it implies that, confronted with the evidence, a typical white supremacist will admit the error of his or her ways. Sadly, countless scientific studies have proven that deeply held beliefs are usually impervious to facts. Regardless, British science writer and geneticist Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (2017), writes a lucid history of Homo sapiens, emphasizing that 200,000 years of wandering, breeding, and wandering again has jumbled our DNA so thoroughly that we have become a single species with a great deal of genuine though not terribly consequential variation. "Racial purity is a pure fantasy," writes the author. "For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes." This didn't prevent dominant cultures--e.g., the Chinese for millennia as well as the Romans and Aztecs--from taking their superiority for granted. Skin color played almost no role until the Age of Exploration, when white Europeans encountered societies that, lacking Western technology, were easy to exploit, often to brutal ends. Since almost all of the members of these societies had dark skin, that seemed a proxy for their weakness. After the scientific revolution in the 17th century, research overturned many nonsensical beliefs, but scholars still can't explain why, with few exceptions, it missed the boat on skin color. Great thinkers, including Linnaeus, Kant, Voltaire, and others, expressed confidence in black inferiority, and 19th-century anthropology remained in the dark ages. In the 20th century, genetics came to the rescue by proving that far more variation exists within than between traditional races and that many racists beliefs are based on explanations that don't involve genes. Rutherford admits that refuting the pseudo-scientific arguments of racial ideologues is futile, but he spends a great deal of time doing so; hopefully, readers are open to his arguments. The author offers few crushing debating points but an excellent overview of human genetics.

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