TRANSCRIPT - skipping ahead to when the conversation begins.
03:12
Thomas Chatterton Williams (TCW)
Hey Adam.
Adam Rutherford (AR)
Hey good to see you man.
TCW
It's good to see you again yeah, man congratulations on the publication in America of uh such an essential book and I was really intrigued to see how you already began to flip it and bring in um new conversations that have happened since I saw you, I guess in February in London, you addressed both the racialization of the conversation around Coronavirus and also the kind of unprecedented uh mass protests for racial justice that have erupted internationally since the death of George Floyd, how did you get that done so so quickly?
04:00
AR
Wow yeah, I mean it seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it because we we met in London doing a podcast together for The Spectator was that was that February?
TCW
February or March i'm sorry early March
AR
Yeah and then the world turned upside down and um and I got Covid and got pretty badly hit by it and I'm one of the long-termers as well, so the publication date for the the US publication date for "How to Argue with a Racist"was switched around a couple of times and then you know we figured it was an election year and then Covid happened and then Black Lives Matter happened so we decided to bring it back and basically it just was, well it became impossible not to talk about initially, Covid because that was racialized very very quickly in two discrete ways. The first was the provenance of the virus itself so the fact that it comes from China um that there's been literally thousands of of racist attacks based on on that it has its own Wikipedia page for racialized violence in America um which which documents says something like 3,000 attacks since march and it's an international effect too um and you know not helped by president trump talking about it in pretty racialized terms and racist terms in fact so calling it he calls it the china virus and he also causes some some pretty offensive things as well so that was one one half of the racialization of Covid and the other half was from right from the beginning from March we were beginning to see that in the UK I'm in London right now, in the UK Black and Asian people were at much higher risk of infection and a much higher risk death rate as well. And in America it was Black and Asian and also Hispanic and Latino people and immediately I started getting communications on social media and privately saying well doesn't this show that that that there is a a biologically racialized you know underlying molecular biology which is which is part of these this disparity um to which the answer is well almost certainly not um because you know those aren't racially coherent groups anyway but also you know medicine is heavily racialized because it's stratified by socioeconomic factors and we know exactly the reasons why those infection rates for those groups of people are much worse -
TCW
Right
AR
- they tend to live in socialized housing in urban areas with multi-generational families, tend to have key worker status rather than being able to lock down you know and so on and so on all things that we absolutely know exist because they're not exclusive to Covid, nevertheless you know people really clawing for a biological reason that underlies the disparity in in the infections... so anyway to answer your question there wasn't any way that I could get away with writing a book at this time on this subject without prefacing it again with a new introduction.
07:09
TCW
I mean I was thinking about you and um and the points you make in this book a lot when uh it seems like such a long time ago in March or April when there were so many headlines, I mean there were articles arguing that this was they were calling it a Black Plague and that just that that that made me um deeply uh uncomfortable because there's a kind of like terrible history of of thinking there's biological um correlation with some people being susceptible to diseases or weaker or spreading diseases there's so many ways in which that discourse can veer off into a very dark place and I guess it has to do with one of the things you're talking about with the way we use words and terms is not always we often um use terms in ways that are ambiguous and so we're having a conversation about race or about the way race intersects with biology or what it means to even call something a Black Plague and it means very different things to different people who are hearing those terms and that kind of I think that kind of lack of precision causes a lot of problems in our discourse around race and you really nail that in the book um one of the things I wanted to start by talking with you about is that you describe this book as actually as a as a weapon as a weapon to bring into a kind of combat uh with a racist or maybe even with somebody who doesn't isn't aware they're being racist but is reproducing racist uh ways of thinking that can ultimately lead to the same effects can you expand on that how is this a weapon.
08:50
AR
Yeah sure so you know there's there's it's a short book right there's only there's only actually four chapters and there's about 45 000 words I wanted it to be sort of punching you know like you say a weapon or a tool kit um and part of it is about the concept of racial purity and that that sort of that in in many ways that is sort of focused on real self-declared actual white supremacists or neo-Nazis and that you know they are part of this contemporary conversation and they're also part of the historical conversations about race but in some senses I'm slightly less interested in those discussions than i am with the conversations we have with people who just who don't think of themselves as being racist but as you say are they sort of the difference between um you know in the Angela Davis phrase the difference between a non-racist and an anti-racist, right and in a sort of colloquial way and you know we all get into these conversations when we're in the pub or in a bar or a you know around dinner table and stuff and it's it's often associated with positive attribute racism so you know black people are better at sport or black people are better at dancing or music or jewish people are better at intellectual pursuits and you know chess or have more Nobel Prizes than any other group of people or East Asians are better at uh at math so you know whatever it is the some of those things that I just mentioned have sort of data sets associated with them which reinforce those stereotypes and others the data just falls apart as soon as you look at it but that's almost irrelevant to the broader point which is that those sorts of positive attributes racism serve two things one is they're not necessarily true and they deserve scientific scrutiny to understand why whether or not they're true and why they might not be true but the second thing is that they always serve to reinforce historical structural racisms which are much more pernicious than simply saying you know who doesn't want to be better at running 100 meters or who doesn't want at maths because what they do in the case of so the thinking about the physicalization of black men in particular the roots of that as an idea date back to the origin of contemporary racial taxonomies, which is in the 17th and 18th centuries where the first time we try and classify, when I say we I mean European scientists or thinkers try and classify people in specific taxonomies, they're hierarchical with white people at the top and sub-Saharan African people at the bottom and they are descriptions which are primarily based on pigmentation and secondarily hair color and texture but mostly their behavioral characteristics like you know not intelligent but strong, right or in the case of -
TCW
There was recently a controversy at the um the Museum of African American History on the on the mall in Washington recently had um elements of of whiteness kind of guidelines to understanding ideas about whiteness and one of the things was like belief in objectivity or overvaluing the written word or things like this, i mean that's there's a kind of um terrible conflation of race and values that uh an attribute that can be um in any group and i was wondering yeah how does that have were you aware of that did you see this conversation it was influenced um by Robin d'Angelo's work as well.
AR
No I didn't doubt I didn't actually see that, but yeah I mean yeah, it doesn't it doesn't surprise me because it's right there in the Linnaeus, right and this is this is a point that i've been making more and more in these sorts of talks that you know science isn't exempt from society and the structural racisms we see in society are exactly the same ones that we see in science because they're because they're intertwined at the origin of of race in the European expansionist project in, you know we call it the Age of Enlightenment in a rather fond way, but it's also the age of subjugation and plunder and all those things as well um, it's right there in the writings of Linnaeus in is his categorization of the four subspecies of humans say exactly that those types of things their value judgments right in the same sentence next to black shiny skin or yellow skin i mean they're unequivocally they're sort of unequivocally racist in a sort of descriptive sense in this in their initial inception and we're talking like mid 18th century here and then they're unequivocally like even more racist because of the value judgments that come with those descriptions i don't have the book to hand but it's like. you know um uh native Americans who are described as red-skinned with straight black hair, that govern via tradition and customs and are haughty, um east asians who have yellow skin and thick black hair um and are um like -
TCW
"Meek" I believe right, it was meek.
AR
- yeah meek and also um are greedy right, and um, sub-saharan Africans are um governed by caprice and uh and the women lusty and you think what you know this is, I don't know why why anyone can take those sort of seriously as scientific designations. In the same book where he's describing you know the animals of the world and the plants of the world and basic geology and saying fact fact fact this is a kangaroo this is a the archetypal kangaroo this is what a rabbit does this is the the platonic version of a duck right and when it comes to humans he goes yeah this there's four skin colors four hair colors and these yeah
TCW
It's super simplified -
15:00
AR
- I mean I almost make a joke about this but apart from the fact that it's quite a sort of it's a pretty offensive idea but he adds a fifth category of sub-subspecies of humans in a later edition which are "Homo Sapiens Monstrosus" right, and these are myths and legends so it's like it includes feral wolf boys and patagonian dwarfs and one of I mean perversely one of my favorite sentences that i've ever had to type out: "mono-orchid Hottentots" right which means men of the koi san who have one testicle right and and it's it's nuts it's completely nuts and there it is it goes -
TCW
This is set the agenda for us for years.
AR
Yeah absolutely and and those in those stereotypes, in those value judgments are the roots of stereotypes that still persist to the to this day: Europeans are gentle fair, inventive and industrious. When when i talk about sports in the book and in talks there was an amazing study a couple of years ago by some sociologists who documented um like 3 000 comments by media commentators on TV and radio when talking about elite athletes and what they found is that in the majority of cases when the elite athlete they were talking about was African-American the references would be to their physicality and their ancestry right their their strong their their bodily physique um and in exactly the same proportions the vast majority of references to elite white athletes refer to their industriousness and their intellect their intelligence so this stuff is it's baked into our culture and we we just don't even notice it. I've sort of ruined sports commentary for many people because when you alert them to it you just hear it all the time.
TCW
Yeah i'm thinking about the way that you know Roger Federer is is described as opposed to someone like Monfils or yeah it's it's all baked into the way we talk. But one of the things that you argue in the book is that genetics when properly understood uh gives us a meaningful um basis to refute these kind of racist ideas um and I was interested in in another move you make because you also qualify that and elsewhere you write we are prone to saying glib things such as race doesn't exist or race is just a social construct, while these sentiments may be well intentioned they can have the effect of undermining the scientifically more accurate way of expressing the complexities of human variation and our clumsy attempts to classify ourselves and others.
Can you break these distinctions down because one of the things i try to do in my writing and I realize that I'm I'm not writing as a geneticist is I try to um take very seriously the claim that race is not real and that leads me even to to argue that uh if race is not real then isn't doubling down on it as a social construct just saying that it wasn't, we made a mistake with calling it biologically real, and now we're making another we're making the same mistake again through another terminology but you take a different view. I think that may be one of the few places where I felt in the book you might find me being a little bit uh naive or not going far enough or being thorough enough in my own critique so i wanted to hear you flesh that out.
18:30
AR
Yeah sure well this is why I like talking to you about this stuff because no one asks a question like that, um it's all softball and until you get questions like that. So I mean there's a lot to unpack in what you just said um the the I guess the first thing to say is the temptation to say that race doesn't exist. Which I think is well intentioned and stems from it's it's a slight, it's a twisting of what is the more accurate way that I think it should be expressed and what i when i say argue in the book which is that um it's just not as pithy - the way that we talk about race using folk taxonomies or just the colloquial understanding of how we define people, doesn't tally with what we understand about biological variation as represented by the genome, and the genome being the ocean from which human variation is drawn. Now that doesn't mean to say that people aren't different around the world and that there are physical differences between people and that there is clustering of those physical differences around the world and i think that I think sometimes in having these discussions well-intentioned people fall into a sort of blank slate trap, where because the um they they effectively deny the differences between people which are both real, possibly meaningful depending on what we're talking about, um but also you're denying the obvious the the obvious experiential um uh with the experiences of of people. If you go up to someone and say you know this is a black person and this is a Chinese person and say well race doesn't exist, you're asking someone to to deny what they're seeing in front of in front of their eyes, so that's what I mean when I say the glibness of these these arguments, um it is possible to recognize that there is biological difference between people and that they cluster both geographically and they recapitulate the human the human journey over the last you know ten thousand or a hundred thousand years or however you want to measure it, but the question is whether those differences are biologically meaningful and whether they align with our folk taxonomies, and the answer to those questions is well you know murky - it's it really depends on what you're looking at.
21:01
TCW
Yeah and it gets murkier in certain societies than others, like I would think that in America or in the UK um it's much more difficult to look at somebody's face and know exactly uh and be able to read accurately their ancestry um you're certainly an example - I'm living in France I can be misunderstood um as being any number of things that are that are represent any population group that is represented here from north africa i can be confused with - um and so yeah I wanted to talk to you about Kamala Harris actually in the conversation that cropped up around her in in in this kind of same vein, what we mean when you look at somebody uh who's from sub-saharan africa and you look at somebody who's from east asia we we make kind of judgments about what that means but it can also break down and oftentimes with mixes people can be perceived as an identity that is not in fact the identity that their ancestors would have claimed or that not everybody that they're descended from would have claimed and it can kind of um that can become a social identity that gets uh reified I guess would be the term so you have Kamala Harris who's descended from a Tamil mother uh from India and um a very mixed um partially British partially African descended father from Jamaica and you have her growing up in America and at times being identified as and sometimes identifying herself as African-American which in the American discourse really is less of a racial group than um than an ethnic group um descendants of American slavery and that population is specifically tricky because that population can be anything from blue-eyed and and essentially ivory-skinned to essentially ebony complected and indistinguishable from someone from sub-Saharan African so what does it mean for her to be identified as African-American and is this useful terminology to even to even be reproducing and in such a complicated uh multi-ethnic society as 2020 America?
23:21
AR
Yeah sure. Well you know it's weird being a geneticist and spending a lot of my time denying the importance or downplaying the importance of genetics and things that we're discussing, but when you say when you describe it like that which I think is quite accurate and and eloquent, what I'm hearing is these are cultural self-identifiers that are determined by the lived experience of those people and you know I know that then you get antagonistic, especially on social media, antagonistic people say well if I declare that I'm African-American does that mean I'm African-American uh and in Kamala Harris's case despite the fact that she is she doesn't fit the exact mold of being directly descended from the enslaved people in North America um -
TCW
But she passes the eye test that you're referring to, before people look at her and they read a racialized identity on her in this context of America.
AR
Yeah yeah I always get - just before lockdown happened um i was in uh Dubai at the Dubai Literary Festival and so this has been a big learning process for me as well because i think as you pointed out up top we often just do not have the language to accurately describe either how we self-identify or the underlying biology or the underlying ancestry that comes with that and you know both of us are mixed race and you know you write - your whole book is about having kids who are similarly mixed race but look well Swedish right
TCW
Really look um very phenotypically what people think of as as as white white you know not uh what i guess my sociologist father would call ethnic white but yeah blonde hair blue eyes very pale skin um but you know genetically um almost a quarter um sub-Saharan African descended um not visible to most people who they encounter in the street.
But you know like i want to say with and and i don't mean to keep um going back to it but i'm actually trying to figure this out myself and and it's really interesting to talk about it with someone like you um if there is no Black essence and i don't believe there is some essence that links everybody in the Black uh African diaspora, then it isn't indistinguishable to be from Jamaica to be from anywhere else and to replicate the same experiences in any other context, and if there is not a black essence then and if it is cultural and based on how people perceive you then that opens the door to actually not an antagonistic controlling but a very serious philosophical conversation about someone like Rachel Dolezal I think. Is it possible to um become in a racially significant way in the social construct way part of a race that your ancestors were not directly linked to um and if not why not and how does genetics help us in this in this thorny debate.
26:34
AR
If we can answer that in the next 20 minutes then I think we've fixed everything. In some way I'm not judging the question here but in some ways this is kind of outside of my domain because the answer to the last bit that you said is that genetics I don't think does help that and i think that we're good examples of that, or anyone who has uh unusual or mixed ancestry or whatever the terminology is I mean I use myself as an example because when you know when part of one of the themes of the book is the rise of genetic ancestry testing kits you know things like 23andme and ancestry.com which are enormously popular and and offer a sort of narrative satisfaction and a place for people um regardless of whether they're the minority of extreme right-wing you know white supremacists who use these tests to demonstrate their racial purity or most people most of -
TCW
The milk drinking videos are yeah are -
AR
- absolutely insane um in some ways, you know, you take that sort of Swiftian view that you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into but also I get a lot of correspondence from people who are again well-intentioned non-racist people who discovered that they've got ancestry which is surprising to them um because they thought they knew the family tree and actually it's they're much more multi-ethnic than they had previously thought
28:14
TCW
- and and the reverse of that people thought they were more mixed than they actually were when they did test them and it turns out they're not like descendants of Cherokee Nation
AR
Absolutely - we're progressing in a meandering conversation way which means I'm not directly answering your questions but i think that that's okay conversations at midnight and one o'clock in France should be over a glass of Chardonnay um one of the stories i tell in the book is that my um my second cousin is a is a keen genealogist and he's done the Rutherford family tree so that's my paternal line which is from the northeast of england and Rutherford is a is a name that clusters around southern scotland and northeast of england for hundreds of years centuries and they and they've done our family tree and and you know some interesting things pop up such as the the my great great great time six um grandmother was called Mary Huntley and on her wedding certificate it says "savage" right -
TCW
whoah
29:10
AR
- yeah and we thought when we saw those we were like what does that mean um and she was married to this guy called ben handy who was a circus uh owner - Handy's Traveling Circus it was called and she was a horse jumper in this - and so the next generation back we then went back another generation and her father. was a guy called Neil Huntley and Neil Huntley was a Catawba tribesman. who was famous for his horse jumping skills and he was, as a lot of Native American people were at this time imported from the US to Europe to join the circus to be you know an exotic entertainer for the masses. Now I'm reading this and you know discovering this in my own family tree and thinking dude this is really cool right? I've got a Native American horse jumping circus. performer who is my literal ancestor my great great great whatever grandmother and the reason I use this story is because it means absolutely nothing it means nothing about my identity I don't carry i probably don't carry any of her DNA for sort of biological reasons which i won't go into now but it's in the book um but also i don't claim any sort of cultural identity associated with that because there is none um and furthermore it sort of plays up to that the concept of racial identity that we derive from our ancestry or that we like to derive from our ancestry which i also think is meaningless, because Mary Huntley probably has probably hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of of descendants in the UK and Europe because that's how family trees work. Right? And in the same way i know we were talking about this the other day in the same way that what you know the uh i think it was the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post one of the two um published an article that identified a significant enslaved man i forget his name in Barack Obama's maternal -
TCW
- white ancestry yeah
31:22
AR
- yeah and that's cool because you can't, it's difficult to identify individuals from your ancestry. Is it surprising? Not in the least,
TCW
Right. Not if you know American history at all
AR
- exactly you know most white European-descended Americans have African ancestry via slavery right and and vice versa
TCW
And are completely unaware of it
AR
yeah yeah and and i can't remember what the exact numbers are but it's like
TCW
In the millions -
AR
- you know so up to 20 percent of the African-American genome, whatever that means is European -
TCW
- and oh absolutely yeah exactly the typical the average African-American male in America is only 80 percent uh west African descendant i did my um own testing and my dad hits that like 79 percent right on the mark.
32:14
AR
- amazing amazing and we we can - one of the one of the really cool things about genetics is that we can test history we can and often it recapitulates known history and sometimes it challenges it and a paper published just in the last month did exactly that, in a really interesting way, it demonstrated that there was a there's massive over-representation of female Africa west African ancestry in African Americans in America today and there are multiple reasons for this but none of them are nice right the sexual relations between white males and enslaved females which I don't need to explain um but also a massively increased death rate from um uh from males from working in much harsher conditions particularly rice fields uh particularly from from Sena people imported from Senegal - imported? - enslaved from - uh because they had you know rice skills uh in places which were where malaria was rampant, so you know many more men died than women many more women were raped um and and we can see that in the DNA of living people today um I definitely haven't answered your question now.
TCW
That's okay and I'm not going to force you into is it it's one of the you know i started the week thinking that it was a question that was more answerable than i've finished the week thinking of it if that makes sense uh I'm less sure
AR
That's a good thing, right?
TCW
- yeah I think that is a good thing and I think that you know she [Kamala Harris] provides in some ways a more interesting conversation around this than Barack Obama did for a variety of reasons, one of which is that um you know she married a white man and I think that uh you know in a way Barack Obama marrying Michelle Obama and and the children and being in that family I think it brought him into a into a, I think that we all have a kind of we all have a way of kind of eyeballing it and seeing if it looks like what we think it is, and I think Barack Obama satisfied many people but Harris raised the question for others in a in a way that maybe is going to be really interesting um but getting y'all go ahead -
34:41
AR
One of the things i was going to say that i got - I sidetracked myself was when i was i was giving a talk in Dubai and uh and a guy put his hand up and said um the one of the most successful um ethnocultural groups in America today is recent Nigerian immigrants
TCW
- oh yeah absolutely
AR
- who have a completely different um cultural experience in America than historical people descended from the enslaved and yet you know we could we can categorize them very easily and say African-American or you know or we can do it even more crucially by old Linnean terms which is via pigmentation or hair texture or physical characteristics when in fact you know they're they're actually as genetically distinct, they're more genetically distinct than white European descendants are from African-Americans or in fact from either group to each other and yet it's just, like you said, we don't have the terminology to to to try and satisfy our need to taxonomize people um the phrase that we sometimes use is that humans suffer from the "tyranny of the discontinuous mind" - right we're desperate to put people into categories or anything into categories.
TCW
That's right and that so that's exactly when it broke down for me is when i couldn't uh it was very personal for me i couldn't put my daughter in 2013 when my first child was born i couldn't put her into the categories that i had grown up and been trained to um think through um she didn't fit and so her presence in my life kind of exposed for the first time the kind of fiction of what i guess i would call the fiction of race in a way that I hadn't questioned it before um I just couldn't accept that I couldn't un wrap my mind around how you can be a different race than your own child or how my child could be a different race than my father, but I could be um inextricably directly linked to both of them and so then the whole thing kind of fell apart for me, that way.
36:49
AR
So so I mean I was incredibly moved by by your book it's it's a it's a stunning piece of work and and you know i've said this to you before the thing that was most striking to me about it is how we approach this subject from completely different ends of it's not even a spectrum, but yours is a sort of personal cultural um uh American/French attempt to understand what it means to be, well, racialized or mixed-race in the 21st century and how that affects your your identity and the identity of your children and you know i'm approaching the subject from this sort of scientific view of what how our basic biology relates to our identity but as individuals or as groups or as as ancestrally defined populations and so on and and we just uh it was like reading a sort of Bizarro World version of my my - well no that makes it sound bad - it's just sort of you know you know what I mean i mean it was I guess the question is does it matter you know why why do we do this? Why does it matter that -
38:03
TCW
well yeah
AR
Kamala Harris - it's something - has an ancestry which is unusual in that population and therefore difficult to describe and therefore, if you are of a certain political bent, problematic right and there and therefore fair game um and I suppose U suppose part of the theme of the book is that you can't yeah - it is this is right - actually a lot of the theme of the book is that whatever the issues that we're discussing or whatever the racialized topics or people that are part of the public discourse on this - genetics is unlikely to be your ally or be a a scaffold -
TCW
- that's right yeah -
AR
- on which you can base those biases or prejudices or outright racisms.
38:59
TCW
That's a really interesting point that I guess I first started thinking about a few years ago when David Reich uh the Harvard geneticist wrote in this op-ed in the New York Times that got a lot of traction and he wrote if scientists can be confident of anything it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong is that overstating it or that's kind of what you were saying too is that whatever a lot of what we're thinking and have been thinking for a long time genetics will upend it or we our assumptions are not safe.
39:33
AR
Yeah i think that um this again relates to this sort of the idea of the tyranny of the discontinuous mind and our desires to name things rather than describe what they do and this is a more sort of philosophy of science question and although i think it has cultural resonances as well which is that and again it relates to Linnaeus because Linnaeus is the guy who tries to name everything, and he's he's doing this in a time where people are everyone is a creationist a Biblical creationist and so we're talking about nailing things down as - this is the definitive form of a duck or a kangaroo or a person - these are created to be inviolate and immutable - and then a hundred years later evolution has become an idea and then 1859 um Darwin describes how the mechanism by which all organisms are four-dimensional the way everything is transitional, everything is passing through time, uh as well as space all living things, um at least.
And so how this relates to so i started thinking about this a few years ago in relation to biology that we're very bad at trying to label things and say this is what it is, which is a really often almost always not a very useful scientific thing to do, whereas what you should be doing is saying what does it do, right? Because what a thing is is is less interesting or possibly more constricting than what it does, because as soon as you say - a classic example of this is for 150 years we've been describing Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens as different species and we've been defining species as to two biological organisms that cannot have offspring that are fertile, right? That's the standard definition of a species um and then in 2009 people like David Reich and others managed to get DNA out of Neanderthals and people who have been dead for 50 000 years and guess what? They weren't our cousins they were our ancestors because they they had sex with Homo Sapiens and we are the living offspring because we carry Neanderthal DNA so what do you do with the definition of a species then are they are they a separate species or or not uh well no according to the species definition uh yes according to physical um definitions of how we look at differences biological differences in any species and at which point I'm going "well dude you're asking the wrong fucking questions." I'm sorry, for the listeners in America it's one o'clock in Paris and it's midnight in London. You know, if you're so wedded to something being a different species that reality conflicts with what that definition actually says then you're not doing science, right? It has to inform your your experiment, the definition is subservient to its behavior, so we think that you know how this relates to the conversation about race, well that that's what that's what the biology that's what the genealogy that's what the genetics does it it will not conform evolution and human behavior will not conform to our crude and superficial and ephemeral taxonomies because these taxonomies are only a few hundred years old and we just assume that they're permanent but the historical record says something completely different that pigmentation is recognized as a phenotypic characteristic but it's not how the Romans or the Greeks categorize people they were much more interested in othering and slaughtering people based on language or religion or cultural practices and expressed very little interest in pigmentation as a as a defining characteristic.
43:38
TCW
Yeah, and you could imagine - as James Baldwin posited, that one day uh the pigmentation in your epidermis could be as meaningful as the pigmentation in your iris or your your hair follicles your hair you know it doesn't have to be the thing that gives the definition to your lifelong identity we we make that the reality that we live in right now but you know in your book you really you you go into one of the the most dangerous uh areas which is which is iq and and uh and genetics and i thought I felt like that's where the book really um I felt um gives the reader a lot of tools to counter what um are some pretty um awful arguments that are that are that are gaining confidence i think um out there on the internet and and and in the mainstream so uh you want to elaborate on that before we open up?
44:36
ARYeah sure I mean so this is another area where I tried to be in the book, I tried to be scientifically honest whilst also, in order that i didn't fall prey to the trap of the accusations which I get all the time, which is "you're sacrificing science at the altar of political correctness" right, um and there's a side issue to that which is that the notion that science is neutral that data is neutral and apolitical and amoral is total bullshit, right and it always has been total bullshit and when people state that, and they do all the time, and there's a particular mindset of sort of people self-described skeptics - um or data bros who do this they're just they're just ignorant of the history of science right. Science is always political. Lawrence Krauss wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal and uh i think it was i think I actually think it was republished from Quillette um where he argued that um science was by its very nature apolitical and could not be racist, right, and I think that it was sort of uninterestingly wrong, and I'm willing to concede that um, maybe high-end particle physics is less prone to structural racisms of society than anthropology or human genetics or evolution but it's still wrong because as long as data sets are created by people and as long as science is done by people and in fact -
46:12
TWC
It's never going to be in the platonic form yeah
AR
Exactly, we're discovering more and more these days as well that even when you remove people by creating AIs that do scientific jobs - they reproduce it - because you put garbage in you get garbage out, and in trivial ways it's you know automatic hand sanitizers that don't recognize dark skin, they've only been trained on white skin, or stuff like that. I can't remember what the question was now because I was rambling.
46:38
TWC
Oh it's just you know you want to unpack because one of the places you say you know racists like to use genetics as a kind of weapon of their own uh and so you do have to understand how to counter you know, when they say aha but you know there are um differences uh among uh racial groups or what we think of as population groups that we call racial groups, uh there are average differences in an IQ and some of them are significant and you know, how does the anti-racist uh argue with that.
47:10
AR
Yeah so well you know this is hard because this is one of the most incendiary topics in the whole of science in the whole history of science and it's also one of the areas that has been most politicized in the history of of science particularly in the US less so in the UK but the the invention of IQ - which I think is a valid metric - I think it is a is a metric which which deserves scrutiny for many reasons because it has predictive power - um but also because it's been studied for so long that um even if we don't know exactly what it's measuring, the fact that we have such reams of data on it means it has some validity in measuring a cognitive ability right, uh which isn't the same as saying it measures intelligence because that's a vague fluffy definition that can't be it's not very satisfactory but IQ has validity. Now this kind of relates back to what we were saying a minute ago about is the data right to reinforce the stereotype and we do have some data on country-wide average IQs from around the world. The problem with this is that well one of the many problems with this is that much of that data has been generated by a very small cardre of scientists who are out and out racists
48:32
TWC
Right the people that originally went looking for that -
AR
Yeah right right and and and this is an example of scientists being not doing due diligence because you know how referencing works someone does a study which becomes referenced somewhere else and it gets repackaged in a tertiary review and then someone else looks at it and uses that and then you base some data on that you know and by the time you're 20 years down the line no one's looked at the original data for 20 years, but when you do look at the original data for some of these national IQs, they're just fraudulent or so wrong things like the average IQ of one country - they didn't have any data for, so they just averaged it for the two neighboring countries, right right you know and that data has been cited dozens if not hundreds of times as being a fact, that this country has a sub 100 IQ on average, when actually no measurements were taken. Or taking - you know that one one of the valid challenges that psychologists good psychologists are very aware of is that IQ is culturally biased, which it is, now if you're aware of the fact that it's culturally biased that that confounding factor isn't necessarily scientifically problematic, but if you ignore it, then it definitely is, right? And some of those data sets that have been subsequently used and were generated by people who were somewhere between fraudulent or just straight up racist are are based on cultural biases within the testing system, which are just unaccountably bad, you know like using children who not only don't speak that language and then subsequently have IQs that fall well below that standard deviation, you know, one or two standard deviations, and saying well that's the national average IQ of this entire country, well you know that's deeply problematic in terms of reusing that data subsequently and we've seen some sort of high profile cases in the last year, at least high profile within certain domains, within certain social media domains as well ,where controversial papers have been pulled because the scientists were unaware or had ignored ,the fact that the data sets that they were using were just just absolute garbage um so that's one aspect to it, right so you know check the data before you start. Is this is the data you're relying on is it good? And in many cases the answer is seriously no.
51:14
Then on top of that you got the notion that there are natural variances in IQs and and maybe I think i think probably realistically some countries have higher national IQs than than others can this be explained genetically is the question and I think the answer is a categorical no to that we do see different different genetic structure in different populations different ancestral populations the new techniques that have been invented in the last four or five years to try and assess these are valid and interesting but particularly bad at comparing populations different populations very good at testing within populations but bad at testing between populations.
But you know this conversation is in danger of stepping into the really serious reads here of complex statistics molecular biology and and and population genetics which very few people understand and I'm only on the border of understanding these things, right I have to go to much smarter people than me in order to try and really get my head around what's being, you know, what is actually being measured here.
52:32
TCW
But that's the confidence that's the confidence of ignorance that uh that Darwin talked about, that you quoted in the book, you know, that the ignorant are much more confident in just going out there and stating uh the position than the people like yourself who are really trying to figure out what's going on, on a genetic level.
AR
Well it's a sort of yeah yeah that's - I do think that's right and it's you know it's one of the uh it's one of the curses of being scientifically minded that uh you have to perpetually doubt your results, and that's you know a basic premise of science is that that you whatever you produce you assume it's wrong. Um and if you keep testing it -
TCW
- more humility in science than on Twitter that's for sure
AR
yeah well that's definitely true and of course it's the opposite in politics, right you know the concept of a u-turn, is shows your strength as a scientist to change your mind is the greatest thing a scientist can do to change your mind as a politician is suicide exactly.
53:28
TWC
I think uh I think at this point even though I'd love to keep pestering you with my own questions, I think we've got some questions to take.
AR
Sure. For the listeners we you know we've been trying to do this now since February but um uh you know in person at various book events um, just in any capacity and then you know, the world turned upside down.
TWC
So here's one uh why is there and it's definitely to you: "Why is there such an enduring link between social darwinism and race i.e Nazi and American obsession with skull size, what can be done to help change the minds of those who are bent on using social darwinism as a justification for racist beliefs despite it being invalid." That's from Annais Lightling.
AR
That's a hell of a question, um, yeah it kind of links up um it links up with this two closely related but different concepts which is scientific racism and eugenics. and um the some of the concepts of scientific racism which which were the attempts to biologize the differences between people um that's sort of that's what scientific racism effectively was um and the attempts to shape society's fire effectively just by reproductive control uh that that that was formalized as the eugenics project that sort of began in the late 19th century um and for the first 50 years of its existence was considered a good thing by by people across the political spectrum in Europe in the UK where it was founded at my university UCL um but but particularly enacted in in the States and this is relevant to what we're talking about a minute ago because IQ is a big factor in this. So if you can actually attach a metric such as IQ or such as physical characteristics.like skull shape um to behavioral characteristics or you can use those data to reinforce a political ideology and say well these people are different from us from whoever the hegemonic power is is uh then you have you have the tools to politicize it in any direction that your political ideology takes you so you know that that that could be saying well we need to treat everyone the same even though there are biological measurable differences or on the other end of the political spectrum we we need to sterilize these people because we need to eradicate them from from from this population because they are they are bringing the overall health of a nation down now you know in the UK eugenics was much more class focused and race focused um and i think that reflects - maturity is not the right word but the the longer history that Britain has associated with Europe has associated with social structures than than in the in America, North America, where it was heavily racialized from from the from the get-go. So attaching metrics like IQ and measuring people and say particularly African-Americans and saying these people have low IQ was used as justification for involuntary sterilization which accounts for what 31 states had had used eugenics programs we estimate something like 60,000 - 80,000 people were involuntary sterilized including up until the 1970s and in fact most recently in California in like 2012, right so this is something which has largely gone away but but really hasn't gone away, um uh in a true sense. Um how do we move beyond that? Well again it's about trying to recognize two things simultaneously. That people are different that that there is inherent variance between individuals and between ancestral population groups um and not being shy from saying that those are real things and sometimes they're biologically informative but but that that is the second point is are they meaningful are they differences which um uh are medically or culturally or or evolutionarily meaningful and you know the overall tenor of this conversation as well it depends how what you're looking at right and if you want to categorize people by whether they can drink milk or not or their eye color or their skin color or whether they have sickle cell susceptibility or you know whatever you can do it by whatever you choose and none of them make more sense than any other.
58:24
TCW
I think we have time for one last question and you're going to love this uh: "so how do you argue with a racist."
AR
I'm going to go now.
TWC
And that's from Books and Books.
AR
Well it's a hardback so the spine is very sharp um no that's that's not i don't endorse that at all um so you know, I said earlier that Jonathan Swift line, that you can't reason a person out of a position they didn't reason themselves into and that to a certain extent is why I want to park the white supremacists and actual neo-Nazis that I spend quite a lot of time tracking and you know looking at the conversations they're having about concepts of genetic purity and so on, but the non-racist or the well-intentioned people who express racialized stereotypes or your drunk uncle or who are not your specifically, um but that you know the people who say well Black people are better at sport and that's a good thing or Jews are better with money and you know who doesn't want that. I think we have good evidence that close networks and families are the best places for for contesting controversial views um we we have good evidence that shouting people it not only is ineffective but often has the effect of making people double down on their views um i i like to think because I'm a wishy-washy liberal that having better arguments is the way that you persuade people or i mean maybe maybe you maybe that isn't a liberal viewpoint is that isn't that the marketplace of ideas or whatever that idea is um but i'd like to think that when someone says you know as a result of transatlantic slavery black people in America have superior athletic genes and that is why you see their dominance in 100 meters in the olympics and that is why for 30 years we've seen the majority of NBA players being of African-American descent um I'd like to equip people with the tools to (a) point out why that is why the data is incorrect which it most certainly is in those two cases; and why why it matters you know where we started why those positives those assumed positive stereotypes are actually simply reaffirming the structural racism that our societies are built on, the thing that is that we most need to change. You know when people think about, I think often if you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this deeply, people just assume that racism is is calling people racialized epithets which is important and you know it's important, that that is that is tackled and that is unacceptable but structural racism is the problem that the fact that hegemonic power is maintained um via whatever political or pseudo-scientific uh framework, uh can be grabbed hold of, that would basically so many people are just unaware of that that that is where the real fight is and I think the main message of the book is you can be a you can be racist you can be a bigot if you want you can't have my tools to defend that position.
TWC
Thank you I think that's one of the most important messages that we can be hearing right now and I can't think of a more important book for the moment congratulations I wish that we could do this in person in Miami but hopefully yeah again somewhere else.
AR
Next time and before before we go you should buy this book this is you should buy this book.
The representative from Books and Books the comes on to tell them how brilliant and intimidating they are and then says:
"This also made me think of gender - if there's a race fluid can there be a gender fluid?"
To which TCW laughs and responds: "be careful on Twitter." Because he became famous promoting the Harpers Letter which gave a bunch of famous and wealthy transphobes a chance to whine about "cancel culture."
