(2) Prologue

Over het British Museum als weergave van Britse macht en grootheid.

"Not long after Sloane bequeathed his collection, white European scientists also began to define what we now think of as race. In 1795..."(6)

"Like Mustafa Hefny, then, I too am black, white, and other colors, depending on your definition. My race, which might seem so obvious to one person, may be quite another thing to the next. And this is because, centuries ago, people placed boundaries around populations and territory as casually as moving pieces on a chess board. The boundaries could have been placed anywhere, but now we squirm to fit into them or jostle our way out of them. Ultimately what matters isn’t necessarily where the lines are drawn, but what they mean. What does it mean to be black or white or something else, and why does it matter to us? (...) There are still many today who look at the world and imagine that the imbalances and inequalities we see are natural, that white Europeans have some innate superiority that allowed them to conquer and take the lead, and that they will have it forever. They imagine that only Europe could have been the birthplace of modern science, or that only the Europeans could have conquered the Americas." [mijn nadruk] (8)

"The subtext is that history is over, the fittest have survived, and the victors have been decided. But of course, history is never over, and it is always more complicated than we think."(9)

"Every society that happens to be dominant comes to think of itself as being the best, deep down. The more powerful we humans become, the more our power begins to be framed as natural as well as cultural."(12)

"Throughout, white thinkers told us that their cultures were better, that they were the proprietors of thought and reason, and they married this with the notion that they belonged to superior races. These became our realities. The truth is something else."(15)

(15) Chapter 1 - Deep Time - Are we one human species, or aren’t we?

"We can’t inhabit minds that aren’t our own."(18)

[Hoe waar is dat? Is het niet een kwestie van graad? Een beetje? Veel?]

"For archaeologists interpreting the past, deciphering cultures that aren’t their own is the challenge."(19)

[Dat dat niet gemakkelijk is, is zeker. Maar niet per se onmogelijk.]

"Bewilderment—or rather, an unwillingness to try and understand the continent’s original inhabitants—suited Europeans in the eighteenth century because it also served the belief that they were entering a territory they could justly claim for themselves. The landscape was thought to be no different from how it must have been in the beginning, because they couldn’t recognize how it might have been changed by the people living there. And if the land hadn’t been cultivated, then by Western legal measures it was terra nullius—it didn’t belong to anyone."(25)

"From almost the first encounter, Aboriginal Australians were judged to have no history of their own, to have survived in isolation as a flashback to how all humans might have lived before some became civilized."(25)

"“There was certainly little respect for the remarkable systems of understanding and land management that indigenous Australians had cultivated over millennia,” explains Griffiths."(27)

"For those with a deeper sense of the past, Benjamin Smith says “the idea of ranking, say, an industrial society higher than a hunter-gatherer society is absurd.”"(28)

"Many hundreds of thousands of people died, if not of smallpox and other illnesses brought to Australia, then directly at the hands of individuals or gangs and at other times of police. Equally harsh was the cultural genocide, says Griffiths. There were bans on the practice of culture and use of language.(...) In 1869 the Australian government passed legislation allowing children to be forcibly taken away from their parents, particularly if they had mixed heritage—described at the time as “half-caste,” “quarter-caste,” and smaller fractions. An official inquiry into the effects of this policy on the indelibly scarred “Stolen Generations,” finally published in 1997, is a catalogue of horrors."(30)

[En dat gebeurde overal ter wereld. Wat een arrogantie van dat agressieve blanke ras dat zichzelf zo geweldig vond. ]

"For Porr, this tale begins with the Enlightenment, at the birth of Western science. The Enlightenment reinforced the idea of human unity, of an essential biological quality that elevated humans above all other creatures. We live with this concept to this day, seeing it as positive and inclusive, a fact to be celebrated." [mijn nadruk] (36)

[Waarmee het respect voor en de eenheid met de natuur verdwijnt. ]

"A number of Enlightenment thinkers, including influential German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, defined humanity without really having much of an idea how most of humanity lived or what it looked like. “A universal understanding of human origins was actually created at the time by white men in Europe who only had indirect access to information about other people in the world through the lens of colonialism,” explains Porr. So when they went out into the real world and encountered people who didn’t look like them, who lived in ways they didn’t choose to live, the first question they were forced to ask themselves was: Are they the same as us? The problem was that, because of the narrow parameters they established of what constituted a human being, setting themselves as the benchmark, other cultures were almost guaranteed not to fit. In universalizing humanity by seeing themselves as the paradigm, they had laid the foundations for dividing it." [mijn nadruk] (37)

"“When you look at these giants of the eighteenth century, Kant and Hegel, they were terribly racist. They were unbelievably racist!”(...) While a few Enlightenment thinkers did resist the idea of a racial hierarchy, many, including the French philosopher Voltaire and the English thinker David Hume, saw no contradiction between the values of liberty and fraternity and their belief that nonwhites were innately inferior to whites."(38)

[Precies. En die filosofen worden in de academische filosofie nog steeds belangrijk gevonden of minstens niet bekritiseerd.]

"The more superior we are to nature, the more superior we are as humans. It is a way of thinking that still forces a ranking of people from closer to nature to more distant, from less developed to more, from worse to better.
History shows us that it’s only a small leap from believing in cultural superiority to believing in biological superiority, that a group’s achievements result from their innate capacities.
What Europeans saw as cultural shortcomings in other populations in the early nineteenth century soon became conflated with how they looked. The cultural scholars Anderson and Perrin explain how, in the nineteenth century, race came to be everything. "(39)

"Whiteness became the visible measure of human modernity—an ideal that went so far as to become enshrined in Australian law."(41)

"While classic multiregionalism seems unlikely to be the story of our past, the fact that we now know our ancestors bred with other kinds of archaic humans does have implications. It gives nourishment to those who would like to resurrect the multiregional hypothesis in full. It’s a factual nugget that feeds fresh speculation about the roots of racial difference."(55)

"Fairly soon after it was found that it was modern-day Europeans who have the closer association to Neanderthals—not, as it turned out, Aboriginal Australians—the image of the Neanderthal underwent a dramatic makeover."(57)

[In positieve zin uiteraard. ]

"Milford Wolpoff is clear with me that he doesn’t think there is any biological basis to race, that there are no separate races, except as social categories. He comes across as honest and well meaning, and I believe him. The more we speak, the more I like him. But one obvious implication of his multiregional hypothesis is that if different populations became modern in their own way on their own territories, then maybe some became what we today recognize as human sooner than others." [mijn nadruk] (62)

[Het is maar hoe je 'human' definieert natuurlijk. En is dat verre verleden daarbij zo belangrijk?]

"In a sense, it shouldn’t matter. How we choose to live and treat each other is a political and ethical matter, one that’s already been decided by the fact that as a society we have chosen to call ourselves human and give every individual human rights. In reality, though, the political tentacles of race reach into our minds and demand proof. If we are equally human, equally capable and equally modern, then there are those who need convincing before they grant full rights, freedoms, and opportunities to those they have historically treated as lesser. They need to be convinced before they will commit to redressing the wrongs of the past, before they agree to affirmative action or decolonization, before they fully dismantle the structures of race and racism. They’re not about to give away their power." [mijn nadruk] (68)

(70) Chapter 2 - It’s a Small World - How did scientists enter the story of race?

"The notion that race was a hard and fixed feature that people couldn’t choose, an essence passed down to their children, came slowly, in large part from Enlightenment science."(76)

"In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, a catalogue he published in 1758, Linnaeus laid out the categories we still use today. He listed four main categories of human, corresponding to the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, respectively, and each easy to spot by their color: red, white, yellow, and black."(76)

"“In the modern world we look to science as a rationalization of political ideas,” I’m told by Jonathan Marks, a genial, generous professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is one of the most outspoken voices against scientific racism. Race science, he explains, emerged “in the context of colonial political ideologies, of oppression and exploitation. It was a need to classify people, make them as homogeneous as possible.” Grouping people made it easier to control them.
It is no accident that modern ideas of race were formed during the height of European colonialism, when those in power had already decided on their own superiority. By the nineteenth century, the possibility that races existed and some were inferior to others gave colonialism a moral kick in the drive for public support. The truth—that European nations were motivated by economic greed or power—was harder to swallow than the suggestion that the places they were colonizing were too uncivilized and barbaric to matter, or that they were actually doing the savages a favor." [mijn nadruk] (81-82)

"Responsibility for being enslaved was turned back on the slaves themselves. They were in this miserable, degrading position not because they had been forcibly enslaved, it was argued, but because it was their biological place in the universe."(84)

"Cartwright’s medical “discoveries” were patently rooted in the desire to keep slaves enslaved, to maintain the status quo in the American South, where he lived. In place of universal humanity came a self-serving version of the human story in which racial difference became an excuse for treating people differently. Time and again, science provided the intellectual authority for racism, just as it had helped define race to begin with." [mijn nadruk] (86)

"Myth and science coexisted, and both served politics. In the run-up to the passage in 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States, the race question wasn’t resolved—it just became thornier. Although many Americans believed in emancipation on moral grounds, fewer were convinced that full equality would ever be possible, for the simple reason that groups weren’t biologically the same.(...) Freedom was framed as a gift bestowed on unfortunate black slaves by morally superior white leaders, rather than as a reflection of a hope that everyone would one day live alongside one another as friends, colleagues, and partners."(89)

"Like Abraham Lincoln, who was born on the same day as Darwin, he opposed slavery but was also ambiguous on the question of whether black Africans and Australians were strictly equal to white Europeans. He left open the possibility that, even though we could all be traced back to a common ancestor, populations may have diverged since then, producing levels of difference.(...) Darwin, even though he made such a bold and original contribution to the idea of racial unity, also seemed to be unembarrassed by his belief in an evolutionary hierarchy. Men were above women, and white races were above others.
Mixed with the politics of the day, this was devastating. The uncertainty around the biological facts left more than enough room for ideology to be mixed with real science, leading to the fabrication of fresh racial myths." [mijn nadruk] (91-92)

"What was seen as the success of the white races became couched in the language of the “survival of the fittest,” which carried the implication that the most “primitive” peoples, as they were described, would inevitably lose the struggle for survival as the human race evolved. Ingold argues that even Darwin himself began to frame evolution as an “imperialist doctrine of progress,” rather than seeing it as acting to make a species better adapted to its particular environment."(93)

"Darwinism did nothing to slow racism. Instead, ideas about the existence of different races and their relative superiority just became repackaged in new theories. Science—or the lack of it—in the end legitimized racism, rather than quashing it. Whatever real and worthwhile questions might have been asked about human difference were unavoidably tainted by politics and economics."(95)

(100) Chapter 3 - Scientific Priestcraft - Deciding that races could be improved, scientists looked for ways to improve their own

Over het onderzoek van Hubert Markl vanaf 1997 naar de kwalijke rol van Duitse wetenschappers van de Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft — de voorloper van het beroemde Max Planck Geseelschaft — tijdens het nazisme op het vlak van rassenhygiëne en zo meer.

"The answer is simple: Science is always shaped by the time and the place it is carried out in. And ultimately it is at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out."(108)

"But there was one question that went unanswered after the investigations into the blood-stained history of the Max Planck Society: Were scientists in the rest of the world so blameless? (...) The well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others in his regime drew their plans for “racial hygiene,” leading ultimately to genocide, didn’t originate in Germany alone. They had been steadily supplied by race scientists for more than a century from all over the world, supported by well-respected intellectuals, aristocrats, political leaders, and women and men of wealth." [mijn nadruk] (109)

Dat zag je bijvoorbeeld aan de eugenetica die al ontstond in de tijd van Darwin (Galton etc.)

"His (Galtons) logic, drawing on his cousin’s theories of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, was that a race of people could be improved if the most intelligent were encouraged to reproduce and the stupidest were not—the same way you might breed a fatter cow or a redder apple. Some saw it as a way of artificially speeding up human evolution, driving the race closer to mental and physical perfection."(112)

"Galton dreamed of a “utopia” of highly bred superpeople, and he made creating such a perfect society his lifelong mission."(113)

"Eugenics is a cold, calculated way of thinking about human life, reducing human beings to nothing but parts of the whole, either dragging down their race or pulling it up. Yet somehow it seemed to make sense at the time, with a logical appeal that stretched across the political spectrum. We associate it today with the fascists who perpetrated the Holocaust, but before World War II, many on the left saw it as socially progressive. Galton himself was certainly not considered a crank. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, and an anthropometric laboratory he set up in 1884 to catalogue people’s measurements enjoyed support from the British Medical Association. Eugenics belonged firmly to establishment science, and among intellectuals, it wasn’t just mainstream, it was almost fashionable." [mijn nadruk] (117)

"On the one hand, the rich needed to step up their baby-making game. On the other, society’s dregs, particularly those described as mentally feeble or physically weak and criminal types needed to be convinced to have fewer children. Managing reproduction was the linchpin of eugenics, even attracting a fan in the English women’s rights activist and birth control pioneer Marie Stopes. To support her first clinic, Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress."(117)

[Het is altijd weer opvallend: de rijken die zichzelf zo veel beter vinden dan de armen en iets verzinnen om de armen te controleren. Het voorstel is nooit het bestrijden van de armoede, goede ondersteuning, goed onderwijs, en zo meer en nog minder het willen afzien van privileges of eigen rijkdom. Verklaringsmodellen zijn altijd biologisch en nooit maatschappelijk. In de UK sloeg eugenetica niet zo aan uiteindelijk, maar in de VS des te meer.]

"The same wasn’t true in the United States. The state of Indiana passed the world’s first involuntary sterilization law in 1907, informed by eugenicists who argued that criminality, mental problems, and poverty were hereditary. More than thirty other states soon followed, with enthusiastic public backing."(119)

[Het vervolg is voorspelbaar: theoriën over raszuiverheid, pleidooien voor segregatie en tegen immigratie.]

"Karl Pearson, who succeeded Galton as the main force behind eugenics after the latter’s death in 1911 and shared his views on race, believed that since other races were inferior to his own, intermixing was also dangerous to the health of the population."(121)

"In the first decades of the twentieth century, all over the world, eugenics began to be conflated with old nineteenth-century ideas about race. (...) Eugenics, then, became just another tool in what were longstanding power dynamics." [mijn nadruk] (125-126)

"It was against this backdrop that a new ideologue emerged. In 1916 a wealthy American law graduate named Madison Grant published a book that took eugenics to another level.(...) Openly in favor of both slavery and segregation, he made every possible effort to cut immigration to the United States from anywhere but northern Europe."(128-129)

"It took until the 1960s for the word “eugenics” to stop being heard in these corridors. What actually helped kill it in the end wasn’t just the war but also the fact that new research showed it couldn’t actually work. The genetics around inheritance, once it was better understood, didn’t support the idea that humans could breed themselves to perfection, whatever perfection meant. The way we inherit traits from our parents turns out to be more complicated than Galton imagined. There is actually no guarantee that two beautiful and brilliant parents will produce brilliant and beautiful kids. Genetics is bit more of a crapshoot."(133)

"Even long after the war, scientific fascination with human variation remained tainted by a lingering belief that there might be something deeper about racial difference, that perhaps some races really are better than others.
Yes, some good science emerged from the ashes. Biology did attempt to reform itself, to cast away the mistakes of the past and do a more precise and accurate job of understanding human variation. But at the same time, while the world around them changed, a few of the hardened old-school race scientists could still be found knocking about. “Racist science continues; it just becomes more marginal,” Schaffer tells me. “But there’s no doubt that it does continue.”"(136)

(136) Chapter 4 - Inside the Fold - After the war, intellectual racists forged new networks

"When it came to how the world thought about race, a wider political shift was under way. It was most clearly signposted in 1949 when more than a hundred scientists, anthropologists, diplomats, and international policy makers met in Paris under the umbrella of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, to redefine race. A British-born American writer and anthropologist, Ashley Montagu, led the charge against scientific racism and its horrific legacy, taking his cue from a wave of social scientists who had already long argued that history, culture, and environment were really behind what people thought of as racial difference." [mijn nadruk] (140)

"The concept of race was as slippery as jelly, defying any effort to pin it down. In the end, academics had to concede that it probably wasn’t an accurate or reliable way to think about human variation."(142)

"The next few decades would be crucial to dismantling the idea that race was real and to proving Montagu right."(143)

"In the long run, then, Ashley Montagu’s position on race has been vindicated."(145)

"Despite the changing public mood around race, some researchers just couldn’t bring themselves to ditch a body of work they had been cultivating for decades. Many didn’t agree with UNESCO’s claim that biology supported the idea of a universal brotherhood. A few couldn’t accept that there were no mental differences between racial groups. And they weren’t all racists. Some of them were respectable, eminent scientists at universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, who simply wanted the statement to be revised with more scientific precision and qualification."(148)

"Whether all biologists liked it or not, by the second half of the twentieth century, race belonged to the social sciences, to the study of culture and history. It was understood to be a social and political construction, not a concept borne out by biology. Old-fashioned race researchers and eugenicists had to move on or be sidelined."(150)

"Veronika Lipphardt, a historian at University College Freiburg, in Germany, has noted that the 1950s saw new institutes dedicated to the study of human variation open around the world. (...) A politically correct scientific terminology emerged."(151)

En de racisten maakten een nieuw eigen tijdschrift, de Mankind Quarterly.

"The other, deeper secret behind the Mankind Quarterly was that it had legs of its own. Support came indirectly from a reclusive, multimillionaire textile heir with a vested political interest in the articles the journal published. Wickliffe Draper"(162)

[Dat is ook een vast en voortdurend terugkerend gegeven: rijke mensen die conservatieve standpunten financieel steunen.]

"The anthropologist Robert Wald Sussman explains in his 2014 book The Myth of Race that “Draper wanted to recruit scientific authorities with academic credentials and scholarly records who believed in the necessity of racial purity and [believed] that integration posed a threat to civilization.” In short, he was trying to build a scholarly argument to defend segregation."(164)

"But that didn’t happen. In fact, the journal kept going for many more decades, publishing scientists and not-quite-scientists at the margins of their fields, many of them personally bankrolled by Wickliffe Draper’s Pioneer Fund. The fund stuck to its aims even after Draper died in 1972. In his will, Draper left $50,000 to Henry Garrett alone. Despite all the criticisms it faced when it was first published, despite the widespread expectation that it wouldn’t last, the Mankind Quarterly never succumbed. If you want to read it, it’s still around today."(167)

(179) Chapter 5 - Race Realists - Making racism respectable again

"Despite the urgency that both Barry Mehler and Keith Hurt felt, their investigations never made it into any high-profile publications. They appeared instead in a few small Jewish and left-wing newsletters, often with Hurt’s name omitted, or an alias used, to protect his job at the Congressional Research Service. The lack of public interest reflected how many people assumed they no longer had anything to fear. Neo-Nazi political parties and white supremacists were thought to exist only on the irrelevant margins of real life."(189)

"Then, in May 1988, Mehler and Hurt published an article in The Nation that finally confirmed that there might be reason to worry after all. It linked a professor of educational psychology at the University of Northern Iowa, Ralph Scott to both the Pioneer Fund and the government."(189)

"In short, here in 1985 was a man known to be actively involved in blocking policies aimed at achieving desegregation who had been made officially responsible for defending civil rights in his state."(191)

"Scott was just one individual, but he operated within a larger network of intellectuals opposed to desegregation, including Roger Pearson."(192)

"When researchers like Meisenberg today link economic development to intelligence, they imply that the vast inequality between the world’s richest and poorest countries is rooted not just in the imbalance of power or historical circumstance, but in the innate weaknesses of the populations themselves."(202)

"Race scientists who had a platform for their views in the 1980s are building a stronger presence once more. In 1994, in The Bell Curve, one of the most notorious bestsellers of the twentieth century, political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein suggested that black Americans were less intelligent than whites and Asians."(205)

"Another contributor to the Mankind Quarterly has become a key figure in the white supremacist movement. Yale-educated Jared Taylor, who belongs to a number of right-wing groups and think tanks, founded the magazine American Renaissance in 1990. William Tucker calls the magazine the true intellectual arm of the modern neo-Nazi movement."(205)

"One regular speaker at American Renaissance Foundation conferences who is also a Mankind Quarterly contributor is Michael Levin, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York...(...) He is the author of Why Race Matters, a book that went out of print after its initial publication in 1997, but was reissued in 2016 with a new cover and a foreword by Jared Taylor."(208)

"But another reason that scientific racists have more influence now is that the internet and social media have given them simpler ways to access and grow their networks."(209)

"“Why do we still have race science given everything that happened in the twentieth century?” I’m asked by Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist who is the academic many turn to for clarity when it comes to racism in science.
His answer is unequivocal: “Because it is an important political issue. And there are powerful forces on the right that fund research into studying human differences with the goal of establishing those differences as a basis of inequalities.” Ultimately, politics is always a feature of the science, just as it was in the very beginning."(212)

"A common theme among today’s race realists is their belief that, because racial differences exist, diversity and equal opportunity programs—designed to make society fairer—are doomed to fail."(214)

(218) Chapter 6 - Human Biodiversity - How race was rebranded for the twenty-first century

"At the time, Marks was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, a few years on from having written a popular textbook on race, genes, and culture, titled Human Biodiversity. Wedging these two words together, he had neatly coined a phrase to describe biological and social variation across the human race. Part of the reason he chose it, he says, is that “biodiversity” had become something of a buzzword. He never guessed it would cause any problems. And why would it? Diversity was being celebrated; both the glorious biodiversity of the natural world and the rainbow of cultural and physical diversity in human societies. It was the proud label of liberal antiracists, of the good guys like himself." [mijn nadruk] (219)

"Marks noticed the term “human biodiversity” being used differently from the way he had originally intended. Members were using it to refer to deep differences between human population groups."(221)

"It dawned on Marks that Sailer’s seemingly innocent email list was not so much a way to discuss science in an objective way but more about tying together fresh science and economics with existing racial stereotypes."(222)

"For those sucked into Sailer’s electronic arena for the intellectual discussion of race, his email list was just a taste of the virulent racism that would later be seen far more often in the shadowy areas of the internet, then more openly on social media and right-wing websites, and finally in mainstream political discourse. Many more soon took hold of the phrase “human biodiversity,” giving it a life of its own online. Today it’s nothing short of a mantra among self-styled race realists."(225)

"Steve Sailer’s political convictions became increasingly obvious. He and other members of the list went on to become prominent conservative bloggers, writing frequently on race, genetics, and intelligence."(226)

"Hurt explains that the racist ideologies that existed at the start of the twentieth century, which manifested themselves in the eugenics movement and then German nationalism, survived to the end of the century. The only difference was that those who held these views were later forced to keep them private."(229)

"In the course of this study, population geneticists such as Cavalli-Sforza quickly noticed that there were no hard genetic boundaries around human groups, but rather continuous statistical variation, with a good deal of overlap. What differences there are exist along gradients, not borders."(233)

"But if people were slow to see their good intentions, there was another, deeper reason. At the same time that the project claimed to be antiracist, it was hard to escape the paradox that this was also all about finding out how people differed. If the genetic variation between us was already known to be trivial, then why embark on a multi-million-dollar international project to study it at all? In what way did this reinforce that we were all the same underneath?" [mijn nadruk] (246)

"As antiracist as the scientists behind the project were, they had somehow fallen into the trap of treating groups of people as special and distinct, in the same way that racists do. They were still forcing humans into groups, even if they weren’t calling these groups races. They were using similar intellectual frameworks to pre-war race scientists, but with fresh terminology."(247)

"Other geneticists have also warned against dividing up the world. It imposes a certain order onto our species and ignores the actual fuzziness. If the Human Genome Diversity Project had proposed sampling people more systematically, in a grid pattern across the globe perhaps, the true overlapping nature of human variation would be easier to see. Scientists would have been able to map gradual, continuous variation across regions, rather than tight knots centered on very small communities. It’s hard not to imagine that this approach—which was mooted at the time but then discarded—might also have been a more effective way of fighting racism. But it wasn’t the one the researchers chose."(249)

"“They basically redistributed race,” argues Joanna Radin. Race wasn’t ditched at all, just the parameters were changed. According to Radin, the problem with the new statistical “population” approach to studying human difference is that even though it may look different in some ways, it hasn’t fully shed the baggage of the past."(254)

"A dislike of other groups in the belief that they are biologically different? In the mind of the racist, it probably doesn’t matter how big the groups happen to be, or if the differences are gradual or sharp. It presumably means equally little if it’s all about gene frequencies or population averages, so long as the differences are real."(257)

"Dismantling the edifice of race is about more than just tweaking language; it is about fundamentally rewriting the way we think about human difference, to resist the urge to group people at all."(261)

(269) Chapter 7 - Roots - What race means now in the light of new scientific research

"Yet, our modern ideas of race are deeply connected to how we look. Our appearance is a shorthand for the stereotypes, a means of slotting people into groups and making judgments about them. The disbelief that met Cheddar Man’s probable blackness was because many among the British public couldn’t help but assume that Britons had always looked a certain way, even in the distant past. They struggled to categorize Cheddar Man, forgetting that he existed thousands of years before our racial categories came about. He was proof that there couldn’t be anything eternal or pure about race because once upon a time, not so very long ago in evolutionary terms, most of the people on earth didn’t look like us. They were already human. They were, however distantly, us. But they looked different."(280)

"Even today, there is far more variation in Africa than the simplistic black-white model of race implies. “I think many people don’t recognize the large range in skin color in Africa,” says Tishkoff. “The whole continent of sub-Saharan Africa is incredibly diverse genetically. It doesn’t fit with a racial model, one homogeneous African race. There’s a huge amount of variation amongst populations in Africa. Skin color is a terrible racial classifier. There really are no good biological classifiers for race.”"(283)

"But it’s the story of migration that is the most revealing. What we think of as “indigenous” Europeans are, Reich and other scientists now understand, the product of a number of migrations over the past fifteen thousand years, including from what is now called the Middle East."(287)

"The true human story, then, appears to be not of pure races rooted in one place for tens of thousands of years, but of ongoing mixing, with migration constantly changing geographical direction. The cherished belief that people in certain places have looked the same way for millennia has had to give way to the understanding that migration made the world a melting pot long before the last few centuries, long before the multicultural societies we have today."(290)

"But what does this have to do with national identity? Many would argue that identity isn’t necessarily about biology or appearance, it’s actually about language, culture, and values. But if it’s about language, culture, and values, then I am as British as anyone."(298)

"Despite his research revealing the extent of interconnectedness between humans, the great uniting trellis of ancient migration, Reich still suspects there’s something worth investigating about group difference. And he leaves open the possibility that this difference correlates with existing racial categories—categories that many academics would say were socially constructed, and not based in biology at all, except for in very unreliable ways, such as along crude skin-color lines."(300)

"He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones"(301)

"Reich is technically correct that there could be more profound genetic differences between population groups than we are aware of at the moment. But to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between population groups that go further than the superficial, such as skin color, or that are linked to hard survival, such as those that prevent a geographically linked disease. There is no variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another."(304)

(308) Chapter 8 - Origin Stories - Why the scientific facts don’t always matter

"So science is not enough to forge identity. We also need stories to build a sense of who we are, even if the stories are held together with only threads of truth."(310)

[We need? Dat dat gebeurt betekent nog niet dat het nodig is. ]

"And this was necessary, not just for the sake of producing a gripping narrative but also because it’s tough to build national pride and a sense of superiority around a dirty history."(311)

[Waarom zouden we nationale trots nodig hebben? Waarom een gevoel van superioriteit? ]

"We know this now. The founding myth becomes harder and harder to maintain. And yet it has strange ways of reasserting itself, even within academic circles, as Raff has found. Her work, trying to understand the distant past and the effects of race and migration, has shown her how easy it is for people, including respected scholars, to resist abandoning popular myths and racialized views of the past even in the face of undeniable evidence. Indeed the myth of American exceptionalism is so pervasive that an entire scientific theory exists to explain it, weaving in archaeology and anthropology with the notion that Europeans are the ultimate bearers of human progress. It’s known as the Solutrean hypothesis." [mijn nadruk] (313)

"It’s a theory at the very margins of science, yet a small number of American archaeologists have staked their careers on it, publishing books on the Solutrean hypothesis and clinging to the belief that more evidence will prove them right."(315)

"This suggests that the peoples of the Americas must have reached there from Europe, possibly by traveling across the North Atlantic, via Greenland and Canada. The political implications are clear. It could be read as a suggestion that Europeans had a prior claim to the Americas, because their ancestors were already here many thousands of years before Columbus arrived in 1492."(316)

[Dat is toch een nonsense standpunt? Dus als je ergens het eerste komt is het jouw eigendom en mag je iedereen verder verwijderen (lees: over de kling jagen)vanwege trespassing of zo? Ook al zou die hypothese kloppen, waar ontleen je dan de gedachte aan dat dat land jouw eigendom is?]

"It’s a narrative they thought gave them a moral claim to the land, and later helped to square the inhuman treatment and murder of Native Americans with the squeaky-clean founding values of the United States."(316)

"For Thomas, this is about a handful of researchers who have become so attached to an idea that they have embarked on a “confirmation bias odyssey,” as he calls it, scouring the world for evidence while neglecting whatever doesn’t fit. Yet Solutrean hypothesis survives, popping up online, in scientific journals, and in the odd biology book—not just surviving, but also enjoying support from those with a vested interest in its being true."(320)

"Our stories get in the way of science."(331)

"Reputable historians and archaeologists found themselves fighting an intellectual war against nationalist ideologues who wanted to justify their actions by promoting false versions of the past that suited their cause.(...) When push came to shove, truth became victim to politics. The facts mattered only if they suited the power-hungry agenda."(334)

"Gustaf Kossinna remains a cautionary figure for archaeologists, as he does for academics more widely. The problem throughout, Arnold argues, is that archaeology—with its shortage of evidence and abundance of interpretation—has always lent itself to misinterpretation. The same may be said of other scientific fields, especially when data is thin on the ground and there are plenty of people desperate to speculate on the meaning and significance of what little there is. This has certainly been the problem with race science, and the study of human variation."(339)

"Even so, Romila Thapar, Subir Sinha, and other academics have expressed strong concerns about what they see happening in India. “Most of the politics of connections with land and nature and ‘we are the true people’ tends to be of a fascist, right-wing variety,” Sinha explains. “They believe that civilizations should be based on a true homeland of righteous people, which have the same religion and language.” Religious minorities, particularly Muslims, have been picked out for persecution in this increasingly charged political environment."(349)

(351) Chapter 9 - Caste - Are some races smarter than others?

"in India, freedom to marry and move between groups does seem to have been restrained. Millions prefer to marry within their own religion, color, caste, and community, however shallow a pool of potential partners that might leave them with. And their preferences are policed not by authorities enforcing laws but by families: cases of couples being attacked or killed for falling in love inappropriately occur on a regular basis. Intercaste marriage was legalized in 1954, yet a survey in 2016 found that as many as 40 percent of adults in Delhi who didn’t belong to the lowest castes thought there should still be laws preventing intercaste marriage." [mijn nadruk] (354)

"Parallels have been drawn with the British class system, or race in the United States, but caste has features of both and of neither. It is ugly in its own way. At birth, you inherit your place in this social hierarchy, and few transcend it.(...) Those at the peak are apparently supposed to show benevolence to those below, but in reality there is considerable discrimination and violence.(...) It is taken as given that people are fundamentally different, that they are born a certain way. Everyone becomes trapped in the net of their ancestral history."(356-357)

"Here, systematic discrimination, the notion that groups of people are biologically pure and should be kept separate, that some populations are different from others, isn’t just an ideology. It’s a living practice."(359)

"What is remarkable is just how widely Indians today believe that caste is deeply, biologically meaningful, that it has created exactly what it must have been intended to create: a social order reflected in biology, with the smartest and most gifted at the top, and others in various professions with their own skills below, as warriors and merchants, or cleaners and servants. Even scientists think this way."(360)

"The question of whether cognitive abilities, in the same way as skin color and height, have a genetic basis is one of the most controversial in human biology. It’s a grenade. And Robert Plomin is one of the few who has dared to handle it. A professor of behavioral genetics at the southern campus of King’s College London, he has dedicated his career to the search for the roots of intelligence, becoming one of the most divisive researchers in mainstream science." [mijn nadruk] (365)

"For example, in 1969 the American educational psychologist Arthur Jensen claimed that black Americans had substantially lower IQs than white Americans, and that IQ was also significantly heritable. This in turn suggested that the apparent black-white intelligence gap wasn’t because blacks were socioeconomically worse off or discriminated against. Plomin tells me he both personally knew and defended Jensen against his critics before he died." [mijn nadruk] (367)

"The implications of Bouchard’s work, which had been financed initially by the Pioneer Fund, were obvious. If some people weren’t doing so well at school—black American children, for example—it was nobody’s fault but their own genes’." [mijn nadruk] (371)

"So for Turkheimer, it beggars belief that anyone should assume that the cognitive gaps psychologists now claim to see between racial groups in the United States could be biological. The effects of slavery and centuries of racism, in all its forms, are hard to quantify, but black Americans have undoubtedly suffered in ways that have left their marks on generations. “Millions of people were kidnapped and thrown in the bottom of boats and taken across the ocean, and a third of them died on the trip, and then thrown on plantations and enslaved for hundreds of years. And after that, treated with total discrimination. And now, now their IQs are a little lower? And we’re saying it’s in their genes? My feeling about that is, give me a break.”" [mijn nadruk] (379-380)

"The logical consequence of insisting that IQ gaps between races are biologically determined is that nothing in human society can really be changed. In an age in which some like to believe that we have transcended the old rules of social inequality, when the playing field is supposed to be level, when women have the vote, when black Americans have civil rights, and colonialism is dead, they believe that biology is all that’s left to explain the disparity that remains. Inequality, then, must be natural, the product of the survival of the fittest. Yet we still don’t have the genetic evidence to prove any of this, says Turkheimer. All we have is the belief that the proof will be there somewhere in the genes." [mijn nadruk] (381)

"Turkheimer explains that the problem is not in the data, which is so far either unclear or unsupportive of racist interpretations of intelligence, but in the rampant speculation."(383)

(402) Chapter 10 - The Illusionists - Down the rabbit hole of biological determinism

"“Mendelism and determinism, the view that heredity is destiny, they go together,” says Gregory Radick, a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Leeds, who has studied Mendel and his legacy. But Mendel’s pea plant research had a problem."(416)

"Raphael Weldon, a British professor at the University of Oxford with an interest in applying statistics to biology, spotted this dilemma and began campaigning for scientists to recognize the importance of genetic and environmental backgrounds when thinking about inheritance. “What really bothered him about the emerging Mendelism was that it turned its back on what he regarded as the last twenty years of evidence from experimental embryology, whose message was that the effects a tissue has on a body depend radically on what it’s interacting with, on what’s around it,” explains Radick. Weldon’s message was that variation matters, and that it is profoundly affected by context, be it neighboring genes or the quality of air a person breathes. Everything can influence the direction of development, making nurture not some kind of afterthought tacked onto nature, but something embedded deep in our bodies. “Weldon was unusually skeptical.”" [mijn nadruk] (418)

"Comparing Mendel’s peas to the real world, then, is like comparing a soap opera to real life. There is truth in there, but reality is a lot more complicated. Genes aren’t Lego bricks or simple instruction manuals; they are interactive. They are enmeshed in a network of other genes, their immediate surroundings and the wider world, this ever-changing network producing a unique individual."(419)

[Precies dat. Complexe zaken vereenvoudigen via reductionisme is altijd een slecht idee. ]

"“Before it was something in the ‘blood’ and now it’s in our genes,” Byrd tells me. What has remained the same over the centuries are the racial stereotypes of black Americans. Rather than black disadvantage being seen as social or structural in origin, which it is, it’s conveniently rendered in the new scientific language of genetics."(421)

"The notion that there are essential differences between population groups, that genetically “shit” people come from “shithole countries,” may be an old one, but the science of inheritance helped propel these racially charged assumptions into modern intellectual thought. The concept of genetic determinism has made some succumb to the illusion that every one of us has a racial destiny."(433)

"If schizophrenia is inherited, then its inheritance clearly can’t be a straightforward equation. Indeed, environmental risk factors, including living in an urban environment and being an immigrant, have already been shown to be at least as important to being diagnosed as any genetic links found so far."(436)

(437) Chapter 11 - Black Pills - Why racialized medicine doesn’t work

"Concerns were raised that the nongenetic influences on blood pressure were being oddly neglected by most medical researchers, even though this looked like an obvious medical gold mine of explanations for disparities in health."(451)

"In real life, though, it’s not always possible or ethical to carry out randomized trials, which is why adjustments are made after the fact, artificially removing the effects of variables such as age and weight. When they do this, says Kaufman, researchers create what are in essence imaginary worlds where these things no longer matter. They are worlds made of manipulated data, sending a clear signal through the noise of reality." [mijn nadruk] (456)

[Dat heb ik ook altijd raar gevonden en gezien als het masseren en manipuleren van data.]

"“Most practitioners of medical research with medical degrees and basic science degrees don’t really have much background in statistics. Many people with perfectly good intentions end up committing a lot of statistical errors because of lack of training and something we call “wish bias,” which is this idea that you want to find something interesting so you keep sifting through the data and fishing around until you find something interesting. That’s a practice that generates many incorrect findings.”" [mijn nadruk] (460)

[Zo waar.]

"He often sees scientists picking out a handful of variables to adjust for racial differences, without explaining why those ones were chosen and not others. At other times, he sees evidence of residual confounding, where the variables are measured poorly in the first place, making the final statistics even less reliable. This is especially true when it comes to adjusting for complex factors such as socioeconomic status."(460)

"In a paper published in the medical journal Lancet in 2017, a raft of public health researchers, including Mary Bassett, the New York City commissioner for health, warned that scientists were too often turning to biology to answer questions that could so clearly be better explained by social inequality." [mijn nadruk] (465)

"When you see a drug specified for use in a certain group, it implies that this group of people is biologically different from others."(476)

"And in the end, this is business. Indeed, pharmaceuticals are big business."(481)

"Kaufman suggests that part of the reason the United States clings to the idea of black exceptionalism when it comes to health may be because, in some way, it lets society off the hook. It lays the blame for inequality at the feet of biology. If poor health today is intrinsic to black bodies and has nothing to do with racism, it’s not anyone’s fault. “It says it’s not about our organization of society that’s somehow unfair or unjust or discriminatory. It’s not that we treat people badly. It’s not that we give people worse life chances. It’s not that we are unfair or unjust as a society. It’s just that these people have some genetic defect, and it’s just the way they are.”" [mijn nadruk] (489)

(490) Afterword

"In the space of just a few years, far-right and anti-immigrant groups have become visible and powerful across Europe and the United States."(492)

"This is a twisted ideology that deliberately makes no appeal to a shared humanity, but instead rests on shadowy myths of belonging, on origin stories offering an umbrella to some but not others, sheltering them with false comfort."(493)

"Whenever ugly politics become dominant, you can be sure that there are intellectuals and pseudointellectuals ready to jump on board. Those with dangerous ideas about “human nature” and even more dangerous prescriptions for our problems are always content to bide their time, knowing that the pendulum will swing their way eventually."(494)

"There are plenty of ignorant racists, but the problem is not just ignorance. The problem is that, even when people know the facts, not everyone actually wants an end to racial inequality. Some would rather things stayed the way they are, or even went backward. And this means that those committed to the biological reality of race won’t back down if the data prove them wrong. There’s no incentive for them to admit intellectual defeat."(495)