How to Argue with a Racist
This book is a weapon.
That’s a start.
As English teachers we spend a lot of time helping pupils learn how to put together a coherent argument. It’s a pleasure to come across a model of how to do this in a fluent and powerful way, deeply informed by scientific expertise, which is just what we get in Adam Rutherford’s recent (‘deliberately concise’) book How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality.
Rutherford points out that he is exploring the explosive intersection of two phenomenally complex matters: genetics, which has made dramatic progress even in a handful of years, and ‘race’, a slippery construct which Rutherford digs deep into. His scientific qualifications are unquestionable, but he is also a fine explainer if, like me, you tend to struggle with scientific terms. This is crucial for his purpose: to provide us with the tools that can challenge racism, the greatest of which is scientific fact:
The tool that grants us the clearest view of how people actually are, rather than how we judge them to be, is science.
He recognises the difficulties: ‘mere’ fact often does not challenge deep-rooted prejudice, from the likes of keyboard warriors, and
As Jonathan Swift said in 1721: ‘Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.’
Moreover, dismayingly, racism
never went away, but now we stand at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, (it) is making an overt comeback, revitalised by the new genetics.
That does not mean that we should not tackle head-on that revitalisation, and Rutherford skilfully, and often entertainingly, takes us through areas like sport (packed full of erroneous ideas), skin colour, migration and the brain. He challenges simplicities:
We crave simple stories to make sense of our identities. This desire is at odds with the reality of human variation, evolution and history, which are messy and extremely complicated. But they are recorded in our genes. The aim of this book is to anatomise and lay out precisely what our DNA can and can’t tell us about the concept of race.
More sentences that struck me, and things I learned:
There is more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world.
In the study of genetics, we assume a generational time of twenty-five to thirty years, and in every generation back through time, the number of ancestors you have doubles. What this means is that over a 500-year period, you have 1,048,576 ancestors. By a thousand years ago, you have 1,099,511,627,776–that is, over a trillion.
Everyone alive today is descended from all of the global population in the fourteenth century BCE.
It is possible that you are genetically unrelated to people from whom you are actually descended as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century.
Only five White men have competed in the Olympic 100 metres finals since the starting pistol was fired in the 1980 race… In that same time, the number of African men in the finals is also five … by this metric, African men are precisely as successful as White men.
You’ll have to read the book to see how Rutherford uses these points for his argument.
This book is clear, well-informed and convincing. Its most important purpose is to expose the dangerous ignorance of racist attitudes and how science can be deployed to do this, but is also perfect to give to a senior pupil, to show just how to argue.