Under the Skin Nathaniel Comfort Wonders at the Enduring Trend of Misrepresenting Race

AUTUMN BOOKS

GENETICS Under the skin Nathaniel Comfort wonders at the enduring trend of misrepresenting race.

s race biologically real? A clutch of books A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race at stake in this debate: human social equality. published this year argue the question. and Human History Race is certainly real — ask any African All miss the point. NICHOLAS WADE American. It originated long before the Penguin: 2014. IMichael Yudell’s Race Unmasked and science of genetics, as sets of phenotypes Robert Sussman’s The Myth of Race can be and stereotypes. These correlate with haplo read as inadvertent retorts to former New Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the types, clusters of genetic variation. In this York Times journalist Nicholas Wade’s A 20th Century sense, race is genetically ‘real’. But those cor Troublesome Inheritance, published while the MICHAEL YUDELL relations depend on judgement calls. Wade former were in the press. Wade’s book is by far Columbia University Press: 2014. cites population-genetics studies that identify HOPES DARREN BY ILLUSTRATIONS the most insidious, but all three are polemics three principal races: caucasian, African and that become mired in proving (in Wade’s case) The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence East Asian. Elsewhere he cites five, adding or disproving (in the others’) whether race is of an Unscientific Idea Australasian and Native American; or seven, biological and therefore ‘real’. This question is ROBERT WALD SUSSMAN splitting caucasians into people from Europe, a dead end, a distraction from what is really Harvard University Press: 2014. the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

A study in Scientific Reports this year iden By contrast, the ‘race realist’ and ‘human inflected “talented tenth” campaign, which tified 19 “ancestral components”, including biodiversity’ (HBD) groups are delighted sought to identify the “best of this [black] Mozabites, Kalash and Uygurs (D. Shriner with Wade’s book. For example, Jared race”. Not all eugenics is racist, and most rac et al. Sci. Rep. 4, 6055; 2014). Palaeogeneticist Taylor, editor of the HBD magazine Ameri- ism is not — or not principally — eugenic. Svante Pääbo and others have revealed the can Renaissance, applauds Wade’s argument For both Yudell and Sussman, the anti underlying human genetic variation to be that (in Taylor’s paraphrase), “foreign aid is dote to eugenic hereditarianism was cultural a series of gradients. Whether and how one probably wasted because poor countries are anthropology, developed by Franz Boas and parses that variation depends on one’s train not genetically prepared for the institutions his students in the late nineteenth and early ing, inclination and acculturation. So: race necessary for wealth”. Other pillars of the twentieth centuries. Boas coined the word is real and race is genetic, but that does not race-realist movement, such as the website culture in its modern sense, and became per mean that race is ‘really’ genetic. haps the greatest opponent of the biological The completion of the draft human- concept of race. He and his students studied genome sequence in 2000 led some opti human societies through an entirely cultural mists to forecast the end of race (one of them, definition of human difference. Boas found, Craig Venter, wrote the foreword to Yudell’s for example, that cranial characteristics that book), but use of the term in the biomedical DEBATES OVER THE had been claimed to be innately racial were literature has actually increased since then. the result of differences in nutrition and For clinicians, race is a matter of pragma GENETIC overall health. Sussman and Yudell insist that tism. Although each of us is genetically and Boasian anthropology scientifically proved epigenetically unique, our ancestry leaves REALITY that race is not genetic. footprints in our genomes. Consequently, Their arguments then diverge. Sussman clinicians use familiar racial categories such OF RACE ARE NOT becomes, if possible, more polemical, as ‘black’ or ‘Ashkenazi Jewish’ as crude mark whereas Yudell grows slowly less so. The ers of genotypes, in a step towards individual MAINLY former returns to the history of scientific ized medicine. For them, the reality of race is racism, providing a passionate account of the immaterial; diagnosis and treatment are what SCIENTIFIC continuing influence of the Pioneer Fund. count (see page 301). BUT Yudell’s late chapters, by contrast, trace the Debates over the genetic reality of race, struggle to strip racism from race science. then, are not mainly scientific, but social. Yudell offers a rich analysis of the state They deploy the cultural authority of science SOCIAL. ments on race by the United Nations Educa — considered society’s most objective way of tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization understanding the world — as a fig leaf for (UNESCO) — a string of contentious multi positions motivated explicitly or implicitly by disciplinary reports that sought to document ideology. All three of these books argue that scientific knowledge on race while denounc if the proof or disproof of race is scientific, it Stormfront and the writer John Derbyshire, ing racism, starting in 1950. The project’s must be true. The author must be right. More gave Wade’s book glowing reviews. myriad authors split into two factions. importantly, his opponents must be wrong. For both Yudell, a historian of public health, One, led by Boas’s student Ashley Montagu, For Wade, science proves that race is and Sussman, a cultural anthropologist, sci wanted to call race a fiction, a product of cul genetic. Much like Richard Herrnstein and ence proves that race is cultural. In making ture. The other insisted that genetics showed Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (Free Press, this case, both devote considerable space to that race was real. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1994), his book moves smoothly through eugenics, the science and social movement a brilliant population geneticist, was intel seemingly reasonable arguments that humans concerned with human hereditary improve lectually invested in the genetic concept of are still evolving, to end up at the retrograde ment. The eugenics movement — particularly race, yet morally invested in anti-racism. conclusion that Europeans have become the in the United States in the early twentieth “Dobzhansky’s paradox”, in Yudell’s phrase, world’s richest and most powerful people century and in Nazi Germany — offers a was how to save biological race theory with mainly because they are genetically the most cornucopia of evidence of scientific racism. out sounding racist. He never did — and nor open, curious, innovative and hard-working. But, in focusing on the US movement’s most have we, Yudell concludes poignantly. Also like The Bell Curve, Wade’s book draws egregious leaders, such as Charles Davenport, A full-throated, intellectually rigorous anti- heavily on a long tradition of what histori Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, racism must critically assess both biological ans refer to as scientific racism, particularly both Yudell and Sussman over-simplify. and cultural evidence about race. It must research connected to the Pioneer Fund, Eugenics was about much more than just acknowledge that no work on race science chartered in 1937 in part to “support study race. Recent scholarship has documented the can be free of ideology — and, precisely for and research into the problems of hered pervasiveness and adaptability of the US and that reason, it must not place historical actors ity and eugenics” and, as Sussman shows, UK eugenic creed and the complicated ways before a moral green screen showing an image still deeply involved in eugenic and racial it mingled with race, public health and femi of contemporary values. Rather, it must set research. Despite such transparently politi nism. Sussman and Yudell both, for exam the stage for each scene with meticulous, cal sources, Wade insists that his argument is ple, discuss the efforts of the distinguished empathetic historical detail. Such work would based on ideology-free science. On 8 August, black leader W. E. B. Du Bois against white- allow the scientific study of ‘racial superior 139 population geneticists — including sev supremacist eugenics in the early twentieth ity’ — inherently grounded in subjectivity and eral on whose work Wade based his argu century. But both fail to mention his concern bias — to fall on its own sword. ■ ments — signed a letter to The New York over black “dysgenics” and his eugenically Times declaiming his use of their results. Now Nathaniel Comfort is at the Institute of that those whose work he once categorized as DIVERSITY the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins “scientific” instead of “ideological” have come A Nature and Scientiﬁc American University in Baltimore, Maryland. His latest out against the book, Wade has denounced special issue nature.com/diversity book is The Science of Human Perfection. them, too, as being motivated by politics. e-mail: [email protected]