Skin Deep

Dispelling the Science of Race

Gavin Evans

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781786076236
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

The dark heart of race science… and why it’s nonsense.

Racial differences are rooted in biological reality, right? That’s certainly what a small group of anthropologists, psychologists and pundits would have you believe. Portraying themselves as brave defenders of the inconvenient truth, this group took the revival of ‘race science’ from alt-right online message boards into mainstream academic journals. They seek to justify raging social inequalities from poverty to incarceration rates with a simple message: some people are just born to be poor. There’s just one problem… race science isn’t real.

The first Europeans had dark skin and black curly hair. Culture was born in Africa, not Western Europe. Gavin Evans examines the latest research on how intelligence develops and laying out new discoveries in genetics, palaeontology, archaeology and anthropology to unearth the truth about our shared past. Skin Deep stands up to the pseudo-science deployed to justify colonial rule, the apartheid regime and the vast inequalities that persist today. As race dominates the political agenda, it’s time to put the hateful myths about it to bed.

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What is scientific racism?

In 1977 I was president of a society, the ‘Grey Union’, at my South African state secondary school. One of my jobs was to organise an Education Week for the school’s seven hundred pupils, involving talks at morning assembly and lunch time. For one of these, I invited a young sociologist from the local University of Port Elizabeth to address the school assembly, the idea being that he would tell us about the latest sociological thinking on our country. After his speech he fielded a question about whether black people were naturally as intelligent as white people. ‘No,’ he said without hesitation. ‘IQ tests here and in America show they have IQs about fifteen points below ours. You can draw your own conclusions.’

I’d already formed a sceptical impression of what IQ tests really measured, and through my parents’ church connections I’d met enough black people who were so much cleverer than me to know that this could not be true. It would be very difficult for anyone to spend time with the wit and wisdom of, say, Desmond Tutu and draw the conclusion suggested by this young lecturer. My reaction was to double down on my dismissal of IQ as a means of measuring intelligence and to doubt that it reflected anything useful.

In retrospect, the sociologist’s claim shouldn’t have been too surprising. His university was led at that time by a member of a secret, race-obsessed, nationalist society, the Afrikaner Broederbond, and its lecturers tended to toe the line. Naively, I’d expected something different, and wondered how this young man had reached this obviously ridiculous conclusion. I didn’t realise that he was drawing on the discredited research of the American psychologist Arthur Jensen, the man most responsible for reviving racist psychology after the post-war lull. Jensen was celebrated in apartheid educational circles and I suspect that the many critiques of his methodology and conclusions that were already in academic circulation by 1977 were not on the University of Port Elizabeth’s curriculum.

Defining racism and race science

I’ll discuss Jensen’s ideas in Chapter 12 but I mention him here because it was my first unambiguous exposure to what we now call race science or scientific racism. Before defining this, it is worth saying a bit more about racism more generally. It’s a newish term that was coined in the 1930s, took off in the 1970s and had its first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1989, as a synonym for the older term, ‘racialism’. The OED’s current definition is that it is a belief that the ‘members of each race possess characteristics, abilities or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races’. Webster’s takes a different angle: ‘A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race’. Wikipedia opts for the simpler ‘belief in the superiority of one race over another’.

All these definitions put the emphasis on belief, which is appropriate. It follows that a racist is someone who holds these beliefs; who embraces the idea that different ‘races’ tend to have different collective characters, personalities or potentials. I stress this essence because there is a view, often heard in the United States but less elsewhere, that black people can’t be racist because they don’t possess power (which parallels a view that women can’t be sexist because under the patriarchy only men have power). I believe this is wrong, and will discuss it further in Chapter 4, but for now I’ll repeat that racism is all about beliefs. Power is something different, although obviously racist beliefs held by those with power are likely to be more dangerous than such beliefs among the powerless. Just one preliminary example: anti-Semitism is a form of racism. A powerless person, regardless of race, who believes, say, that a secret cabal of Jewish bankers, politicians and industrialists controls the world and, as a result, looks askance at Jews, is a racist. The consequences of that racist belief would be very different, of course, if that anti-Semite had power (as in Nazi Germany).

Scientific racism is a variant of these beliefs. One might say it is the attempt to attach the categories of science to racist beliefs, to give them ballast, but one needn’t be that cynical. It is more likely to be the genuine belief that this is where science leads. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists who believed the mental capacity of different races could be found by measuring their skulls or weighing their brains were perfectly sincere in their wholly mistaken views. Today we might say the same thing about those who believe, say, that different average IQ scores among different population groups tell us something profound about their innate intellectual potential. Regardless of motivation, such thinking fits squarely in dictionaries’ definitions of racism. This, incidentally, would be true even if such ideas were correct, although I will show in later chapters why they are profoundly mistaken; in essence, unscientific.

This raises an obvious but tricky question: is someone a racist if they hold the idea that different population groups have different innate, average intelligence? A few of those advancing such views are indeed happy to own up to racism. One of those is Richard Lynn, the University of Ulster evolutionary psychologist, who has no hesitation about calling himself a ‘racialist’, a ‘racist’ and a ‘scientific racist’.1 But most of those who advocate race science, including several who enthusiastically quote Lynn, deny they’re racists, preferring to view themselves as intrepid truth-tellers who follow science wherever it may lead. To say they are racists would put the likes of Steven Pinker, Andrew Sullivan, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Nicholas Wade, along with older hands such as Charles Murray, in a particularly odious circle of hell. I would prefer not to go that far, because I do not know what goes on in their every secret place. It is perfectly possible that all or some of these men treat black, white, Asian and Hispanic people the same, perhaps even that they have close friends who are not white, and that their belief that some population groups are, on average, less intelligent than others has no influence on the way they treat individual people from any of these groups. What I will say, however, is that some of the beliefs they advance are indeed racist, and that the adjective ‘scientific’ does nothing to mitigate this verdict.

What would be some examples of contemporary scientific racism? I’ve already mentioned, in the foreword, Nicholas Wade’s views on innately tribalist Africans, enterprising Brits, bright but conformist Chinese and capitalistic Jews. I could add a few other prominent claims made by various university-based academics over the past decade or so: Europeans and Asians evolved to be more intelligent than Africans because of their exposure to ice age conditions 45,000 years ago; a gene variant that makes sub-Saharan Africans less intelligent than everyone else; the smartest people on earth today are Ashkenazi Jews, followed by East Asians and white Europeans and Americans; the dumbest are Bushmen and Congo Pygmies, followed by Australian Aboriginals and Ethiopians; poor people are poor because they’re stupid, which is why there are so many underclass black people; the prime cause of poor health all over the world is low IQ, which is why Africa suffers; infectious diseases have affected the genomes of Africans, making them less intelligent; sub-Saharan Africans haven’t evolved to possess a work ethic. We will tackle all these ideas head-on.

The twenty-first-century revival of race science

The complementary ideas of a link between race and intelligence and between race and character have long pedigrees, probably even longer than slavery and colonialism. But because such thinking is seldom aired in polite circles nowadays, it is tempting to think that, Steve Bannon aside, it is confined to the anonymous midnight trolls who furiously patrol racist websites, or the backwoodsmen of Confederate America, and that it is no longer something significant to bother about. But there are good reasons to bother because after a post-Holocaust lull, scientific racism has returned in a full-fledged, brazen form and its current alt-right wave is still building its momentum.

It is hard to pick a precise starting point but 2007 is as good as any. That was when James Watson, one of America’s greatest living scientists, a Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, attracted headlines for trumpeting his belief that black people were inherently less intelligent than white. Having previously advocated eugenic solutions to weed out less intelligent people, he started speaking out on race in 2000, when he announced there was a link between darker skin and higher libido. Seven years later he went significantly further, saying that the idea that black and white people shared ‘equal powers of reason’ was a delusion and that ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.’2 Subsequently, following an outcry, he apologised but made it clear that he hadn’t changed his mind, noting that the desire of society ‘to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity’ was ‘not science and that it was not racist to question this’.3 Watson has since been quoted as suggesting that Jews are smarter than everyone else, and that Indian Brahmins had been naturally selected for both intelligence and servility and East Asians for conformity.4 In 2019, in a PBS television documentary on his life, he said his views were unchanged, explaining that ‘there is a difference on the average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. I would say the difference is genetic.’5

Since 2007, ideas such as Watson’s have begun to proliferate on the Web, often finding their way into the mainstream media. They were given a huge boost by the rise of the American alt-right in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Watson aside, their purveyors are usually people outside the ‘hard’ sciences; a mixture of evolutionary psychologists, journalists, social theorists and media personalities, who believe that different population groups have different innate mental and emotional assets and who feel that these ideas are being suppressed by the political correctness of a self-serving liberal elite.

Three pillars of race science

This group’s first contention is that our brains, like our bodies, have continued to evolve in response to different environmental conditions, leading some ethnic groups to develop superior intelligence and different character traits. Some confidently predict that significant genetic markers related to brain power will be found to differ substantially between races. The reason: the extreme challenges created by ice ages in Europe were not faced by those living in warmer climates, and these cold challenges prompted further evolution of the brain after groups of humans left Africa 50,000 years ago. Richard Lynn, for example, wrote that in ice age Europe ‘less intelligent individuals and tribes would have died out, leaving as survivors the more intelligent.’6

Second, they claim their perspective is borne out by archaeology. Evidence cited for this conceptual leap includes the flowering of cave art and other creative innovations in parts of Europe, some of it dated to be more than 40,000 years old. Some, such as Nicholas Wade, have argued that the diverging evolution of character traits and of intelligence has continued even over the last thousand years.

Third, they claim proof of hardwired racial differences in intelligence comes from IQ tests, which they believe can measure innate ‘general’ intelligence. We are told that the reliability of these tests as an accurate measure of intelligence is proved by studies of twins, which show that IQ is highly heritable. There is indeed variation in IQ scores when assessed on a population basis. For example, Asian Americans have higher average scores than white Americans, who have higher average scores than African Americans. Some USA-based writers – who include media luminaries such as the evolutionary psychologist and popular science author Steven Pinker – suggest that this racial variation in IQ proves the point that the brains of different groups have evolved differently. They frequently add that those who ignore this evidence are obdurately turning a blind eye to scientific fact.

The fallacies of race science

One area of confusion relates to the fact that in certain ways human bodies have continued to evolve over the millennia. This can be illustrated by looking at diseases that are more common among some ethnic groups than others, such as sickle cell anaemia among those with sub-Saharan ancestry, Tay–Sachs disease among Ashkenazi Jews, and so on. Some populations have also evolved certain physical capacities, such as survival at altitude and, more widely, the ability to digest lactose. Other examples include skin colour, eye colour, hair type, the presence or absence of an eyelid fold, average height, bone density and body type. Today, scientists can identify a person’s regional historic origins and population mix by examining genetic markers in their DNA. The recent capacity to sequence whole genomes has expanded this ability, for example the discovery that around 50,000 years ago early human migrants to Eurasia interbred with Neanderthals, and those in New Guinea, Australia and the Philippines with Denisovans (another, recently discovered, extinct human group).

Despite these differences, all humans are remarkably similar, in the sense that there is very little genetic variation among us. The small amount of Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA possessed by non-Africans appears to make little physical or other difference to them, although Denisovan DNA does seem to have contributed to helping Tibetans live at altitude and Neanderthal DNA to have helped Europeans live in cold climates. Because of our relatively recent common ancestry – the first humans like us emerged in Africa just 300,000 years ago – humans share a remarkably high proportion of their genes, compared to othe...

Table of contents

• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Foreword
• 1 • What is scientific racism?
• 2 • Are we smarter than our ancestors?
• 3 • Why did humans migrate?
• 4 • Is Africa really ‘backward’?
• 5 • Where did ‘scientific’ racism come from?
• 6 • Are race groups real?
• 7 • Can white men jump and black men swim?
• 8 • Are there race-based intelligence genes?
• 9 • What is IQ and is it hardwired?
• 10 • What can twins tell us about nature and nurture?
• 11 • Do rising IQs suggest genetic or environmental change?
• 12 • The Bell Curve: what’s it all about and why is it back?
• 13 • Are Jews smarter than everyone else?
• 14 • Do some populations have different brains from others?
• 15 • Is race science making a comeback?
• 16 • Race, genes and intelligence: where next?
• Acknowledgements
• Notes