Superior
The Return of Race Science
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
This fascinating critique of race science, from the Enlightenment to the 21st century, is an “easy-to-read blend of science reporting, cultural criticism, and personal reflection” (Slate).
“An important and timely reminder that race is ‘a social construct’ with ‘no basis in biology.’” —Kirkus Reviews
After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races.
If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists.
At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Attempting to scientifically justify racial prejudice might seem like a relic of less-enlightened times, but science journalist Angela Saini offers an emphatic “think again.” After giving us a brief history of race-based science—brief in part because the very idea of race only surfaced during the 18th-century heyday of European colonialism—she dives headlong into the ongoing struggle that genetic science has with ignoring race as a factor. We might be past human zoos that doubled as research facilities and Nazi-appropriated eugenics theories, but it’s disturbing to read about the ways that ideas started by those heinous practices colour modern work. With geneticists agreeing that any differences in homo sapiens are minuscule, the question that arises repeatedly in Saini’s work is whether there’s any value in looking at the human genome through the lens of race. The answer she finds is “not really”—and yet there are researchers who refuse to let it go. With Superior, Saini pushes an unseemly underside of science that thrives in the shadows out into the light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The answers are not in our blood, but they are in us," proposes science journalist Saini (Inferior) in this often brilliant critique of "race science," the academic attempt to explain inequality between different ethnic groups via biology rather than sociology. Science has, in the past, not just been co-opted by racists, she observes. A number of scientists willingly played a role in abhorrent movements such as Nazism and American eugenics. She observes that, in the 19th century, Darwinism "legitimized racism, rather than quashing it," by suggesting that, though all humans share a common ancestor, some ancestral groups such as Europeans are more evolved than others. More recently, she finds that the National Institutes of Health policy, since 1993, of requiring clinical trials to ask about the racial identity of participants, intended to increase the diversity of those included, has had the "unintended consequence of driving researchers to use , hunting for gaps" between different groups. Occasionally a line in this book misfires. The science enthusiasts who will constitute much of its audience will object, for instance, when Saini asserts, "There is no authenticity except the authenticity of personal experience." But, just as clearly, this is an important and, in an era of rising racial tensions, must-read book, especially for those most sure they do not need to read it.
Customer Reviews
Angela Saini has written a remarkable book
Many years ago, when I was writing my graduate thesis at Oxford, I discovered that two of the leading members of the Fabian Society, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, were strong believers in eugenics. Up until that time, I had never thought that social democracy’s founders would also be calling for steady reduction in the propagation of the “unfit”.
With further reading came the realization that these ideas were widespread at the time, in both Europe and North America, and that many social reformers, from Harold Laski to Tommy Douglas in Canada, were influenced by the ideas of eugenic theory.
Angela Saini has written a brilliant, thoughtful book, that deals with the continuing influence of “race science” - and its dangers and risks. She takes us on an intellectual journey that is at once thought provoking and exceptionally accessible.
Race thinking has a long and sad history in Canada, as in virtually every country and culture in the world. We can’t understand the residential school movement without realizing how deeply ingrained it was in our recent history. But what Saini does it bring us out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into an insidious ongoing debate about how “race” is still seen as a useful concept, and “nature” explains inequality.
It is an important book that will stay with me for a long time. Thank you. Angela Saini.