The race is off
Bigotry is again infiltrating medical science
Why are black Americans more likely than white Americans to suffer from high blood pressure? One answer takes account of factors such as poverty, stress and unhealthy diet in an endemically racist society. But some people suppose there must be an underlying biological difference. Does the new science of genetics show that there is, after all, some basis to our concepts of race?
It’s a question that drives The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini, a superb investigation into the unexpected return of racialized science in our day, when it takes subtler and more stealthy forms than it did with the Nazis, or the wider eugenics movement of the early 20th century. The engineer and science journalist Angela Saini tells an eye- opening and persuasive story, for example, about our opening question.
Last decade, a new hypertension drug was tested exclusively on African- Americans, purely for commercial reasons — to get FDA approval — and so it became a “black pill,” even though it also works at roughly the same rate in white patients, and even though rural Africans have the lowest levels of high blood pressure in the world. ( There remain small statistical differences between the drug responses, but they can’t predict how any given individual will do on one medication or the other.) Even so, Saini shows, old racial categories are everywhere creeping back into medicine, in the absence of any demonstrable biological basis for them.
Indeed, there hardly could be: modern archeology and anthropology, as well as genetics, show that almost everyone on the planet today is a mongrel. African- Americans are often of mainly European descent. Ten thousand years ago, Britain was populated by people with dark skin ( such as the famous “Cheddar man”), before lighter- complexioned invaders from Europe arrived. Before that, anatomically modern humans happily interbred with Neanderthals — and when it was discovered that it was in fact Europeans, rather than Aboriginal Australians, who were more closely related to Neanderthals, as Saini wryly points out, the image of Neanderthal Man itself received a rapid makeover: from having been assumed to be brutish and stupid, he suddenly became clever and sophisticated. As with the fact that racial categories are today projected onto data in medicine ( rather than read off them), this illustrates a deeper problem: that we too often still look at evidence through the lens of racial prejudice.
This is the most important lesson of Saini’s book: that even scientists who do not consider themselves to be prejudiced might still be doing science that is, if they are forever searching for definitive biological differences between human populations. This goes on despite the fact that we know for sure that the vast majority of genetic variation between people occurs within the old race categories, rather than between them: for example, 85 per cent of human genetic diversity is contained just within the population of Peru. What’s more, the Earth’s entire family of human beings is more biologically homogeneous than different groups of African chimpanzees. In the face of such facts, anyone who nonetheless proceeds with trying to find genetic differences between “races” should at some point face the uncomfortable question: why exactly are you so interested in this stuff?
Sometimes, the answer to that question is all too clear. In their notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray suggested that black Americans were innately less intelligent than whites, and concluded that social programs to improve the former’s lot were pointless. This was no doubt a welcome finding for the conservative foundations that funded Murray’s research. Or, I should say, “research”, since many of the book’s sources, as the New York Review of Books noticed at the time, are “tainted.” They come from a peculiar journal of anthropology called Mankind Quarterly, which, as Saini shows in her brilliant brief history of it here, was set up by a group of people disgruntled that “race science” had been discredited since the Second World War. ( One of them was literally a former Nazi: Otmar von Verschuer taught Josef Mengele and happily used the data from Mengele’s Auschwitz experiments.) By constantly citing each other’s work, the contributors to such journals have built up a veneer of scholarly respectability, which can fool outsiders into thinking it is not driven by simple white- supremacist prejudice.
And people are increasingly so fooled: Charles Murray himself has recently undergone a partial cultural rehabilitation among what is called the “alt-right,” thanks in no small part to support from the atheist polemicist Sam Harris, who has described Murray’s shunning by the scientific community as an “academic injustice.” More deserving of the name “injustice,” perhaps, is the way in which even well-meaning but philosophically and historically uneducated scientists, as well as those with more murky motivations, can continue to produce work that helps to fan the flames of bigotry. They should all read this brilliant and devastating book.
old racial categories ... creeping back into medicine.