How racism is creeping back into mainstream
The world needs to be on guard as eugenics and other controversial, dodgy beliefs are gradually on the rise
niversity College London has been unwittingly hosting an annual conference attended by race scientists and eugenicists for the past few years. This might have come as a shock to many people, but it is only the latest instalment in the rise of “scientific” racism within academia. Researchers with extreme views on race number relatively few but, having languished on the margins of their fields for many years, they are now managing to push their ideas into the mainstream, including into respectable scientific journals.
There is a tight, well-connected cabal of people who nowadays call themselves “race realists”, reflecting their view that the scientific evidence is on their side. Their work is routinely published by Mankind Quarterly, a marginal journal operating since the 1960s, when it was founded by a group of scientists disgruntled with the fact that mainstream journals were unwilling to publish their controversial ideas.
Its earliest editions argued against desegregation in the United States, and warned that inter-racial conflict was the by-product of natural selection. Many of its writers became sources for the notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which drew links between race and IQ scores. More recent contributors to the journal include Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist magazine, American Renaissance.
Mankind Quarterly’s editor-in-chief, Gerhard Meisenberg, told me last month that there were likely to be biological differences in intelligence between racial groups, which he believes will eventually be discovered by genetics. He referred to “low-IQ countries”. Meisenberg, a professor at the Ross University School of Medicine, says: “The question of whether there are genetic ability differences between people in different countries is perhaps the most fundamental question in development economics.”
What is worrying is that people such as Meisenberg and Mankind Quarterly’s assistant editor, Richard Lynn, have managed to penetrate more mainstream scientific circles.
Lynn sits on the editorial advisory board of Personality and Individual Differences, produced by Elsevier — one of the world’s largest scientific publishers, whose titles include the highly respected journals the Lancet and Cell. Among his papers was The Intelligence of American Jews (2004). The editor-in-chief of Intelligence is Richard J. Haier, an emeritus professor in the medical school at the University of California, Irvine. When I asked him how he felt about having Mankind Quarterly editors on the board of his journal, he told me, “I consulted several people about this. I decided that it’s better to deal with these things with sunlight and by inclusion.”
But the steady creep of extreme views from the fringes of academia to the everyday should worry us all. Academic freedom is an honourable ideal, and one worth defending, because we trust that the system works. Through careful checks and peer review, only the most reliable, well-evidenced ideas, and most trustworthy researchers, should pass through. But in practice the system does fail. Poor papers do get published, weak research can pass through the net, and people’s prejudices can sometimes taint the process. This is what those at the disreputable edges of academia are counting on.
The scientific community needs to be more vigilant. The system broke down over eugenics research in the early 20th century, with catastrophic consequences. We have to ensure this never happens again. Angela Saini is the author of Inferior, and is researching a book on science and race, to be published in 2019.
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