Race to the Bottom: A Superior Evening with Angela Saini and Alom Shaha

In an infamous edition of Family Fortunes a contestant was once asked "Name a dangerous race". The question setters meant the Indy 500, the Kentucky Derby, or the Paris-Dakar rally so were probably a little alarmed when it was misunderstood and the answer that came back was "the Arabs"!

But, it's not true. The Arabs are not a dangerous race. No race is any more dangerous than any other. Or cleverer. Or kinder. Or more stupid. Or less human. It's all a construct and factors like education, diet, class, and background, to give just four examples, have far more impact on the way we behave.

It was a warm Monday in June and I was back in Camden for another fantastic evening with London Skeptics in the Pub. This time, instead of one solitary speaker I clutched my veggie hot dog and pint of Red Stripe as Alom Shaha broke with protocol and interviewed Angela Saini on a comfy old sofa about her recent book Superior:The Return of Race Science (also the title of the evening) and the theories, ideas, research, and hard lived experience that inspired her to write it.

It was pretty emotional in places. Angela grew up in South East London in the eighties and the nineties at a time of fascist marches and the 1993 racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in Eltham. There was a BNP bookshop not far from her house - which may come as a surprise to those who assumed BNP members couldn't read - and this climate of fear, which she'd hoped was fading away, is, of course, now rearing its ugly head once again.

Very prominently. In the last twenty years many liberals have assumed that racism was on the wane but with the rise of neo-Nazism and the alt-right we've all become disabused, quite shockingly and depressingly so, of that notion. Angela Saini has devoted much of her life to using science to help improve how we understand the world and that's been, massive understatement here, testing at a time where racist ideas are back in the public sphere and given the air to breathe and when Michael Gove can claim we've had enough of 'experts'.

At university, Angela Saini joined the SU anti-racist committee and this introduced her to and got her involved in both activism and journalism. In 2017 she released the book Inferior:How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story and she's followed it now with Superior:The Return of Race Science.

She may have been in Camden to, nominally, speak about racism in science but, you'll only be too aware, that those who spread racist ideas and lies are very often the self same people who perpetuate unpleasant and sexist falsehoods too. It's hardly news that people who seek to hold down people from other races also seek to hold back people from other sexes.

Some white male scientists justify both colonialism and slavery because they believe, or pretend to believe, that women and people they would term minorities (but aren't) are somehow inferior. Much closer to animals than to themselves. Othering, basically.

If you've been discriminated against as a group and you have to fight for your right (not just to party, but to be given a fair chance in life) then it's understandable that it makes a lot of sense to fight for them in a group with those who have been similarly discriminated against. Critics call it 'identity politics' but, really, it's accepting that several voices are louder, and more difficult to silence, than just one - which can often seem like an impotent yelp into a forest of despair.

Everything so far should, you'd hope, read like common sense (whatever that is) but it was when Angela and Alom started drilling down on to the very notion of race itself that things became more interesting. I'd say cloudier but such was the articulacy of Saini's answers and the lucidity of her thinking and explanations that she actually clarified some ideas that others may have struggled with. The crowd hung on her every, softly spoken but impassioned, word.

She proposed that race was not even a set thing. A black person in America would have a very different idea of what the black lived experience is to a black person growing up in South Africa or Australia. We all have internalised societal ideas about race. So much so that Angela Saini mentioned that in different parts of the world she could be described as either white, brown, or black.

We are defined not so much by the skin we live in but the way the society we live in judges that skin. This was the crux of the evening's talk and the later, equally insightful, Q&A. Questions were asked about India's caste system, "pakibashing" (a word that's cringe inducing just to type), Gene Rodenberry, the acceptability of the word 'hybrid' when describing fellow human beings, colourism, and why (despite the huge difference in skin tones across India) the Miss India finalists all looked very much the same.

We learned that old European 'race scientists' were fascinated by India's caste system and wanted to bring in something not dissimilar in the West. They craved rigidity, they yearned for hierarchical structures that placed themselves at the top, and many of them believed eugenics was a good way to enforce this.

Yet some still say politics should be kept out of science. Science IS political. Many of the enlightenment philosophers who did so much to popularise science and move scientific ideas forward were inherently political. Eugenics is a political idea. Some scientists may be in denial of the racist scientific ideas that they propagate but that doesn't mean those ideas aren't there.

Even the 'good guys'. Charles Darwin believed women to be inferior to men and IBM provided the technology that was used in concentration camps. Many of the ideas we associate with the Nazis started in the UK (eugenics for example) but because 'we' won the war we've not had a good hard look at ourselves since it, like the Germans have had to do.

Instead a myth of British exceptionalism has taken pernicious and destructive hold (culminating, at least so far, in the current Brexit shitshow) that says simply because we were on the right side once (even though most of us weren't even born) that we can never be on the wrong side of history - and, in fact, never have been.

Following the Nazi defeat in World War II there was something of a global consensus that there were definitively bad ideas (concentration camps, eugenics, holocausts, genocide, etc;) but there were always race scientists who didn't buy into this and even struck out against it. They wore the clothes of science, they spoke the language of science but, funded by wealthy industrialists and hitting out against civil rights and in favour of segregation, they were not scientists.

Peer reviewing each other's papers to give a false, and thin, veneer of respectability, these people are now in the ascendancy - using social media and the public's distrust of career politicians to advance their agenda. As a remainer, Angela Saini spoke about just how popular, powerful, and persuasive the far right are in Britain right now and how if a second referendum (or people's vote) on Brexit was called they would juice it for all its worth. She felt the following riots and the recruiting that would take place by the neo-Nazis would cause more damage than even a very very damaging no deal Brexit.

Sounds like we're fucked either way. The right have turned almost everything into a free speech issue and they've been allowed to by the infighting of those who seek to oppose them. You only need to read the Twitter accounts of pompous oafs like Piers Morgan and the present POTUS to see that. I'd suggest you don't though. Life's too short - and if you're black in America at the moment it's shorter still than if you're white there.

Geneticists have looked for a genetic reason for this while, for the most part, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that being poorer and having less opportunity to do anything about that leads to shorter life spans. There's not a genetic disposition to dying early in any race. There are other reasons.

Sickle cell is one thing that is particularly prominent in African-Americans and there are one or two other examples across the globe. These are held up as proof by race scientists that our race is the thing that primarily defines us but that's just lazy thinking. We have more in common with each other than not. We always have had. We always will.

Biological determinism finds favour even among liberals and self-described anti-racists (see the current Labour antisemitism row for an example if you like) but there's not a gene for everything (traits like intelligence are polygenetic and use thousands of genes) and though our genes may affect us, the very very tiny amount that reflect our racial identity has such a minimal affect as to be completely negligible.

We live in a world where John Cleese can tweet shit to David Lammy (who he called Davis Lammy)  about DNA (and then get 'schooled' by former London Fortean Society speaker Dr Adam Rutherford about it) after complaining (from the Caribbean) that he doesn't recognise London anymore and where, in India, the PM Narendra Modi can create a fake myth of Indian (specifically Hindu) history that is so nationalist (and so untrue) that it looks rather a lot like the one Adolf Hitler created for Deutschland.

So it's important that people like Angela Saini are listened to when they speak calmly and rationally but with no little fear for the future about where these ideas come from, who's come up with them, and what damage they could do to the entire planet. It's time the quiet thoughtful voices drowned out the loud, ill-informed, shouty ones because, let's be honest that's not working very well for anyone, is it?

Racists used to begin their racist statements with the line "I'm not being racist but...." and I'd always joked it would be fun to begin a hopefully non-racist assertion with the line "I am being racist". So,when I say "I am being racist but I think we'll all do better to try and get along a bit better and stop screaming in each other's faces" I hope you'll realise I'm both being flippant, and a bit smug, but also trying to make a serious point.

Alom Shaha and Angela Saini made a far more serious one than I've managed and if it's one we keep having to remind ourselves of then so be it, that's for the best. A hostile environment isn't just hostile for the people you want to make it hostile for. It's hostile for everyone. With that I supped up and wandered up to Chalk Farm tube station with the sounds of Roxy Music's On the Radio ringing in my ears. Another cracking, thoughtful, evening from London Skeptics in the Pub. Looking forward to watching Angela's upcoming BBC4 documentary on the history of eugenics. Thanks to all involved. As ever.