Adam Rutherford (2020) How To Argue With A Racist.

In front of me is a cardboard packing from a gift. A wavy dividing line drawn in biro. Good: Rosay, Sophie, Megn. Bad: Claudia, Robin. The list was drawn up by Alfie aged seven, and Tilly, aged five (her birthday today). Rosay has just turned one and is Robin’s sister. She can’t be bad because she’s a baby. Claudia is bad because she’s Alfie’s sister. Megn, aged six, is a neighbour’s kid that runs really fast and told me she doesn’t really need to go to school because she already knows everything. Sophie, aged twelve, is an almost adult, but she lets them play on her trampoline, and she plays with them too. That makes her good.  It’s a polarised world we live in. The good and the bad. The black and the white. All of these kids are white. None of them are racists—yet.

Adam Rutherford doesn’t really tell us how to argue with a racist. He describes himself as mixed race, but acknowledges that has negative connotations in an Eurocentric white world. Karl Linnaeus around 1758 listed the genus and species of Homo sapiens. That’s us. You’ll probably recognise some of them. Afer (African), Americanus, Asiasticus, Europus and Homo sapiens monstrosus (spelling may vary). But the sentiment remains. Some people were good. And some people were no good. Adam and Eve were white skinned, although they came out of Africa because Africans were lazy and dumb.

‘Pigmentation is not a binary trait, even though we use terms like black and white.’

There is no one gene for skin colour or intelligence. Tilly, who drew up the list of who was good and bad, has the most beautiful red hair which she hates. She is also the smartest girl on the planet. MC1R a recessive gene involved in the coding of protein melanin, and is associated with skin colour. For example, it also has seventeen variants, or mutations, making it more and less likely a child will have ginger hair. As a rule of thumb. Ginger pubes gives you ginger. A recessive trait, two people with two red alleles of MC1R have a 70% probability of producing a ginger snapper. Both Tilly’s parents have black hair. The latest genetic research shows that over 200 genes interlink to influence pigmentation in hair. There are more points of genetic diversity between Africans than the rest of the world put together. When you see black, you see your own biases.

 I don’t have any black friends, or Asian. My partner would argue I don’t have any friends. I remember Rangers supporters flung bananas onto the pitch in the early seventies because Celtic had a mixed-race winger, Paul Wilson. In the eighties our supporters flung bananas onto the pitch because Rangers had signed winger, Mark Walters. We made monkey noises, of course, not because he was black, but because he was an orange bastard.

I like bananas. They were my favourite fruit when I was a kid. A real treat was eating them on a sandwich— white bread, of course—with a spread of margarine. In a footnote, Rutherford tells us edible bananas were a human invention, and monkeys rarely eat them. Orange bastards could choose to stop being orange bastards by choosing to support Celtic. My nephews, for example, have sons that are orange bastards and daughters that are normal. Mixed lineage from the same mother and father. The idea of tabula rasa, or starting from a blank slate, on which our abilities and knowledge are drawn, is also a human invention, like edible bananas. Personality equals a person and their reality. We feed our children what we believe. There are no blank slates.

Rutherford tells the reader of a meeting he had with a scientific great, James Watson who shared the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the shape of the double-helix structure of DNA. Rutherford was a young research student and was told he would do OK, because ‘Indians are industrious, but unoriginal’.  No Nobel Prize for him. Despite not being Indian, he could have been marked down as black and lazy. Watson proclaimed black people to be stupid. That’s a relative term. He meant stupider than whites or any other race. Cognitively they did not measure up in terms of IQ or any other measure of intelligence.

Anyone that has written an essay on intelligence knows it’s like writing an essay on love sickness.

‘IQ  is a single number, but intelligence is not a single thing, and the genetic component to intelligence is most emphatically not a single gene. The most recent studied identify scores of genetic variants that correlate en masse with better results in cognitive tests.’

The human genome has around 20 000 genes. They are the same genes for everybody, but expressed differently. Tilly has over 200 genes working together to produce the pigment on her beautiful red hair, which she says isn’t red. Her intelligence is beyond measure. Robin, who has blonde hair, the same colour Tilly wants, is in the bad book. In antiquity, white lead was used to make the skin look pale. Every culture has its own way of naming and categorising colours whitewashing ancient statues before putting them back on the plinth to show the march of progress and white superiority.

Conclusions:

Human variation is real.

The dominance of skin colour as a racial classifier is based on historical pseudoscience.

The primary physical characteristics or race are not representative of overall similarities or difference between people and populations

We see broad geographical clustering of people and populations on the basis of sampled genetic markers, but the borders are fuzzy and continuous.

Concept of racial purity are ahistorical and pseudoscientific.

Genetic differences between populations do not account for differences in academic, intellectual, musical or sporting performance between those populations.   

Race is a social construct. This does not mean it is invalid or unimportant.  

Read on. I’ll let you know how Tilly’s and Alfie’s list of good and bad people pans out historically.