Angela Saini is a science journalist, author and broadcaster. She presents radio and television programmes for the BBC, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in New Scientist, Prospect, The Sunday Times, Wired, and National Geographic. In 2020 Angela was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. Her latest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was published in May 2019 and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Foyles Book of the Year.
Episode Description
Race science – the belief that there are inherent biological differences between human races – has been “repeatedly debunked” in the words of the Guardian, and yet, like a pseudo-scientific hydra it raises its heard every so often. Most recently race science is the return of scientific racism is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics with guest Angela Saini.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington: The race science, the belief that scientific study will uncover inherent biological differences between human races has been repeatedly deep in the words of the guardian and yet like a pseudo scientific Hydra raises its head, every so often. What's also known as scientific racism has framed studies of human intelligence and attractiveness and most recently emerged in conversations around genetics, the resurgence of scientific racism is the focus of this episode and stats and stories, we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I immerse Mary Eddington stats and stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me were our regular panelists John Bailer, Chair of Miami statistics department and Richard Campbell professor emeritus of media journalism and film. Our guest today is Angela Saini. Saini is a science journalist, author and broadcaster. She produces radio and TV programs for the BBC, and her writing has appeared in such publications as New Scientist prospect. The Sunday Times wired and National Geographic in 2020 Sandy was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. Her book superior the return of race science was published may 2019, and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and the foyles Book of the Year Angela thank you so much for joining us today.
Angela Saini: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Pennington: I was wondering if we could start our conversation with you describing kind of what historic race science was or is and how that compares to sort of its modern iteration.
Saini: Well, I think a lot of people imagine the racial categories that we use now around skin color to have been around forever. But of course they haven't been, they were inventions, and the time that they were invented was around the time of the enlightenment. When scientists and naturalists in Europe were looking at the natural world, and thinking about how to classify it. And, as well as classifying animals and plants. They also thought about classifying us, they thought, you know, this cultural diversity that we see all around the world, all these differences that we see. Maybe they rise to the level of different breeds or different species of human being. And that's where the idea of race, as we use it now, came from so that's not to say that people didn't think about human difference before, of course, there must have. But these racial categories, black, white, yellow, red, you know these very broad racial categories at least now that's around the time that they were invented. But there was. I mean we know now, but it's always been true that there are no natural dividing lines between the human species we are one human species. And we are very homogeneous as a species so we're more homogeneous than any other primate chimpanzees, have more genetic diversity than humans do. And so given that there are no natural dividing lines between us. Any attempt at categorization is by its nature likely to be arbitrary; it can't be anything else, it has to depend on categorizing you know what's important to them. And the fact that they landed on skin color is as arbitrary as anything else because, because at the time, there were lots of different ways of categorizing people so there were some people who thought there were a few races and people who thought there were 1000s of races. And the way that traditionally the word race hadn't been used very much, but traditionally the way it was used. Prior to that had been to refer to a family or tribe. So if you're using it by that definition, which in some ways is a more coherent definition because at least within a family you have some genetic similarity. We know more than you do at a continental level, then there can be millions of races, you know, logically by that by that standard.
But it was skin color that kind of became popular. And that scientists ran with European and American scientists around for hundreds of years, and it was given meaning really because that became one of the ingrained assumptions that formed the science of human difference. So there were lots of assumptions at the time, including for instance that women were not the intellectual equals of men, which is why women in Europe were excluded from many universities and certainly all the scientific Academies of Europe, from the Enlightenment onwards, because we were just seem to be separate but we are two separate categories and women were kind of intellectually separate category. So these assumptions. As arbitrary and as political and unscientific that they came to form the basis, like I said of the science of human difference. And that continued for hundreds of years in fact well into the 20th century, there are still many people who think in these terms now. And that's all that science is, you know, there really isn't anything else.
Richard Campbell: Could you talk a little bit about the notion of a centralism because I think some of our listeners probably don't know what that is. and also how some of these studies got passed, even more recently when got past the early editorial stage, because the, as you pointed out the starting assumption is that populations are essentially different, and people, and that doesn't seem to get interrogated at the beginning of some of this work.
Saini: Well, essentialism really cuts to the heart of this because it says that there are biological qualities that certain groups have or certain populations have that other populations don't have, and what. Historically, people have tried to make inferences based on their assumptions around these essentialisms. So for example, that the Western world is as economically prosperous, as it is as it was for a couple of 100 years at the time that these ideas are being developed, because of some essential quality that white Europeans have that other people in the world don't have, which is a very a historic way of thinking too because as we know, if you look through the course of human history Europe's dominance for as long as it was, is just one part of human history other other cultures and other civilizations have risen and fallen and and you know Western European civilization will go the same way we know you know that's how history works. But, you know it, what it does is try to explain society, and what we can see out there in the world through nature and say that this isn't historical, this isn't political, this isn't social This has nothing to do with how we live or how we choose to treat each other. This is because of some qualities that we have within ourselves. And it's a it's an argument that remains powerful to this day there are many, particularly on the right, and by this I mean the far right the alt right, who want to be able to make these claims because if they can then we don't need to do anything about inequality as we see it in the world, whether that's gender inequality or racial inequality, or even class inequality, there are still attempts to reintroduce class into this equation as it existed in the early 20th century, a lot of for example the British eugenics and race science movement was about was actually about class. And there were attempts to state that for example poor people were genetically biologically inferior to richer people and that's why you had generational poverty. And there are some people even trying to revive that now in the 21st century, believe it or not
John Bailer: You know what, when I was reading your book one thing that really struck me was the issue of the kind of the cultural and political context searches done and how that shapes and frames the way that that kind of you we've looked at problems. So I, you know, this seems like this echoes throughout history as part of this investigation. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Saini: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there is this, I mean, I studied engineering, and I was certainly trained within a system that taught me that what we do when we do science or engineering or mathematics or whatever is objective that we set apart from society we were above politics. And the problem with that is that we forget that much of the science, including those very early assumptions that I just mentioned earlier, were very much rooted in the politics of the time they were informed by the politics of the time. And because they weren't interrogated enough because of that politics. That's why mistakes continued for so long. And this is how mistakes happen even sometimes orthodoxies can build within the science sciences fallacious orthodoxies can build within the sciences, for a very long period of time because nobody questions. These basic assumptions because they assume that everybody who's doing this is perfectly objective so there can't be any problems here. And that is something I think we need to challenge, I trust the scientific method. I really do think it is the best one of the best ways we have of understanding the universe and understanding ourselves as humans, but, it's limited by our own by the fact that we are human and that we, we have these biases and purchases. We are informed by the world around us. And that shapes the questions that we ask the limits to what we can imagine. You know, for example, it's only relatively recently that scientists have started challenging the idea that there is a gender binary, you know, to think outside those boxes. And that's because it literally wasn't within the purview of their imagination to but there could be anything else out there and society in that sense is challenged it because everyday people and their discomfort with these gender categories and how they feel about how they feel about these things and challenging that politically has been entered into the sciences and then scientists start asking these new questions. So, we have to accept that. And if we can accept it and understand it and engage with the fact that science sits within society that's embedded within cultures, then, then I think we can get closer to objectivity because then we can understand exactly what it is that we're looking at.
Bailer: Just as a quick follow up. I remember years ago when I was reading Stephen J. Gould, some of the work that he had written that was what I had the epiphany of that kind of cultural context in which, in which science is done and I've found myself thinking, oh my what kind of, you know, how is this, how is the world in which I live now and the culture in which I live now shaping the way that I ask questions, or how I look at problems or how I think about interpreting results and analyses and that's a that's a that's a, that's an important and challenging consideration as we do our work.
Campbell: I was gonna just follow up on that. How is this sort of the politicization of science, during the COVID crisis I mean this has really been a remarkable thing is this a new phenomenon or is it a new stage or just the the the mask wearing thing in the states here, you know, divided politically it's just, it's sort of incredible to me, and the stories that are emerging of people dying in the Midwest who refuse to admit they have they have COVID that they have something else. Is this a phenomenon that you've seen before and studying the history of this
Saini: t's always been there they've always been people, I mean there are lots of different, I think there are lots of different things happening this year. One of them is as you say conspiracy theories and this kind of pseudo scientific conspiracy theories that can be quite elaborate, and especially popular because they spread so easily on social media, that you know this phenomenon of misinformation and disinformation that gets spread so quickly through things like WhatsApp and Facebook and Twitter.
And it's because we consume things so so fast and we don't always have time to challenge it, and it's very easy for these incorrect means to kind of proliferate, and it is something I'm working on I set up a group last year, which now sits under the wall institution here in London, which is one of the oldest scientific societies in the world. And we are a group of journalists, policymakers, social media experts counterterrorism experts, academics, a very broad range of people all interested in this problem of pseudoscience in whichever way it manifests, and what you quickly start to realize when you look at this, is that these people who, you know, whichever conspiracy theory they're there to whether it's an anti Vax one or whether it's flat earth or a climate change denier conspiracy theory or whatever it is that what they have in common, because they don't have anything in common demographically They come from all kinds of walks of life, age everything, but what they do tend to have in common is a mistrust of authority. And this is that common thread, you see. And actually that's understandable because, you know, very often are authority figures and not always trust, and especially these days where we have all these populist leaders around the world who are willing to lie sometimes outright to the to their citizens, then it's very easy to build a mistrust of authority and to buy into certain conspiracy theories. And that is why it's sometimes very well educated, very skeptical people are sometimes the most vulnerable to this because what they're really doing is questioning what they're seeing to such an extent that they question everything you know, even the fundamental basics. And that is the point at which we need to engage with these topics. This isn't about ignorance always, you know, very often, especially, I mean I looked at anti vaxxers particularly for a documentary last year. These are often very well educated middle class people who are very well clued up on the facts but what they're choosing to do is dismiss a certain set of facts and choose another set of facts that fits with their fears or their worldview, and what the conspiracy theorists do. And the ones who spread this kind of misinformation disinformation and who do that for lots of different reasons, including sometimes state actors. So there are Russian bots you know spreading this kind of stuff around, but what they try and do is play on those fears. So for example the legitimate fear of a parent that their child might be hurt if they're given this medicine or this vaccine, and then they draw you into that rabbit hole of false facts and everything can, and sometimes seeded with accurate stuff, you know, for example, real examples of Vaccine Injury, but it marginal but real examples, and then use that to kind of build a case as seeds that doubt in your mind so it can be. I think it's very complex, the way the psychology of this works, and especially with the internet and then dynamics around the internet, it makes it even more difficult, but it's a phenomenon that has always existed there have always been doubts around these things and often what's happened, for example with vaccine doubts. Is that a big pandemic like this will happen. Everyone feels that they need to take the vaccine, and then the doubt kind of subsides. A little bit, and shocking though it is and it's unfortunate that it happens that way that people have to die in order to be confronted with the devastating reality of the importance of these things but that's often how these things happen.
Pennington: You're listening to stats and stories and today we're talking with science journalist Angela Saini. Angela so you write about the work of Karen Fields. And the idea of race craft and I you. I'm trying to find iPad to pull up on my phone, because I love this, this line where you say, in thinking about you know race is sort of in relation to sort of witchcraft and sort of it being a construct and about race writing it as biologically real as witches on broomsticks. I love that line but I also I think back to Richard's earlier question about sort of editors letting these things through right so you also write about a blog post a man wrote about sort of the, you know, lack of intelligence and attractiveness of black women, and then talk about sort of the scientific papers that get through. And I wonder it's sort of the inverse of what Richard just asked if, if, because people are credentialed who are pushing some of these views that it lends sort of truth and and sort of vigor, to this idea of there being what is it biological diversity remember how one of the people you talk to biological diversity or something right they're human buttons too Yes Yes, that's the term. Right. Whether the credentials behind some of these people sort of reifies the idea that race is somehow real.
Saini: Yeah, and it's a real problem. I think it's a difficult one to tackle because I think the nature of academia is that it is a board church and in some ways it needs to be a board church in order to maintain academic freedom.
And I value that I do think that's important, but at the same time.
What we get is as a result of that we do get people, and we've always had these people so they've been existed right from the beginning, and people who hold very marginal political views who then turn to science to justify those political views. So many of the people, for example that I write about in superior or who I interviewed for superior about their.
What have been termed by some people, scientifically racist or pseudo scientific positions or papers that they've written. Most of them are not geneticists. In fact, none of them are geneticists, most of them tend to be psychologists political scientists, you know, people outside these disciplines where the work of whether real kind of biology, around human differences done.
And very often, when you kind of scratch beneath the surface and this is something I've tried to do very hard in my work is not just interview people who are critical of race but understand those who adhere to these racist theories, or what have been termed racist theories. Why do they do it, why are they so attached to these ideas. And when you dig underneath very often, what comes out is a kind of political underbelly so you know they're anti immigration, or they're anti racial mixing, or they feel that there should be some form of segregation between people that equal opportunities are a bad idea that affirmative action is a waste of time. And that's often what lies beneath all of this and what they're really doing is using the science as a tool to justify these political beliefs, and sometimes they go through quite unbelievable contortions intellectual contortions to be able to do that. And because the evidence really doesn't support the idea number one that race is real or that there are these deep psychological differences between us, but they won't let it go, and what they cling to increasingly is the possibility that one day evidence will come along to prove them right. And, and, you know, you could say that about pretty much any area of science because we don't know everything we're never going to know everything, especially because human nature is not just some simple biological kind of substrate, it's it, who we are is heavily influenced by our environment our culture, our biology is affected by our environment and culture how we develop our brains, everything. So because all these things are so intertwined. You cannot extricate them there are, there is no separate nature and nurture they're all intertwined with each other. We are always changing. And so you can never get a full grip on who we are as human beings, you can never say definitively what human nature is. And that's really where the, the territory that they occupy now is that uncertainty. And I guess they will occupy it forever as long as they hold these political beliefs, and that's the that's the space that they'll that they'll live in the the thing we have to challenge is not just a science that all the pseudoscience that they're peddling, but really understand why they why they so desperately want it to be true.
Bailer: You talk a lot about where the work appears, or some of the more recent research, and it is reinforced. For me the idea of of identifying funding sources, as well as identifying kind of the outlets for this work just because it's it's appearing or just because it's been supported doesn't doesn't necessarily mean there isn't an agenda that goes that goes with that could, you know, can, can you describe a little bit about how you know digging into that and kind of how do we how do we kind of inoculate ourselves against these kinds of impacts.
Saini: Well, within scientific publishing there is a wide range of quality. So there are some journals that are right at the bottom end like the mankind quarterly so this was a pseudo scientific journal that was set up after the Second World War, by race scientists including one Nazi race scientist who carried out experiments on the body parts of Holocaust victims, some of them children, so he and others all around the world, I should say scattered all over the world, and not confined to any one region, set up this publication which is still, you can still read today. So it's still being published in fact I interviewed the person who was then the editor of mankind quarterly when I was writing superior. And so in that sense, on the margins of scientific publishing there are people trying to keep these ideas alive in those circles. Very often they're writing for each other so they cite each other's rights for each other they're not generally cited in the mainstream in mainstream academic journals, but some of them also do have a presence in mainstream academic journals. So one thing I learned in 2018. During my research two of the editors of mankind quarterly were sitting on the editorial board of the journal intelligence which is a major journal published in the field of intelligence, which itself is a very fraught field so it has a. It has its roots in eugenics as well it has a very dark history and history it hasn't completely let go of unfortunately even to this day so there are still figures within the intelligence community who are considered racist by others within academia who have been denied platforms or denied access to conferences because of their views. But anyway, so these two. These two people were on the board of this journal and Elsevier which is a major Publishing Group has very strict rules around who can sit on editorial boards. And when I asked them about why they allowed these two people who had very weak academic credentials to be sitting, one of them in fact has been.
He hadn't kind of honorary position with an Irish University which has now been rescinded as well so it has no academic affiliation anymore. And I, and I asked them why do you have these people on your journal board because you have certain standards that you're meant to uphold and they entirely wash their hands of it and said it's not for us it's for the editor in chief, the editor in chief told me it was a matter of academic freedom that this was about having a plurality of views within the journal, which is worrying because the journal itself has published a number of articles over recent years, by people who've had links to the alt right and white supremacists who, you know, have strong connections with the mankind quarterly have edited or written for it. And he just refused to do anything, but by the end of 2018, when I went back to check the editorial board when I was, updating my references, I noticed that those two people had been quietly removed from the editorial board. So I feel that maybe because I wrote an article at the time that maybe there was some pressure within the editorial board to clean up their act a little bit, but the the point I'm trying to make is that these are not isolated instance, there are other problems within other journals. If anyone goes to the brilliant website retraction watch. You can see how common this actually is the basis pseudoscience it as recently as this year has had to be retracted. In fact one paper published earlier this year was retracted from a journal. And after criticisms of how politically motivated, it seemed to be.
And then the authors themselves admitted that their data was shoddy, and that they should that they should retract.
So you really have to ask yourself, you know, are we, upholding the standards that we need in academic publishing. And this isn't just a matter of academia anymore this is a matter for all of us because the public has access to these papers now because of because of the internet. And if we can't trust what we're reading, if these kind of retractions are going to continue and if we're going to get dodgy people sitting on the boards of journals writing papers, then it's going to erode trust in science even further.
And it's going to damage the reputation of science and make it much harder I think for good scientists to do good work. But there are people I mean I know I work with journal editors and journal groups and there are people trying to tighten those standards, not just around quality but also around the ethics and looking at the repercussions of their work.
Campbell: Angela, how much of that is a problem, I think you.I think this was from your, your piece in nature, where you say, scientists rarely interrogate the histories even have their own disciplines.
How much of what you just talked about, is, is because of that is because we're not the scientists themselves aren't even aware of the long trajectory of history. And I think you're right elsewhere. John probably won't, but how humanities professors and humanities have provided a stronger critique here than science itself. I think this is changing. I think there's more attention being paid to history, but talk a little bit about this failure of science to interrogate its own history.
Saini: Well, humanities does also have its own problems. It's within the social sciences that you often see the best critiques I think of the sciences. And one of the problems that we have is that scientists very rarely engage with that body of knowledge. So for example when it comes to medicine and race health and race. There is actually a huge wonderful body of literature that we have within the social sciences, looking at the effects of racism and discrimination on health on the body. Mentally on all of these things. And yet, in the covid 19 pandemic this year. I saw a number of high profile physicians and medical researchers, looking to genetics to explain the racial disparities that we were seeing immediately, you know, by March, April as soon as it was clear that black and Asian people in certain countries are dying at higher rates than others, they've jumped straight genetics which, if they were aware of that body of literature that shows the effect of racism, discrimination structurally on how we live and how people are treated and not just that also around class and all these different factors, I mean, a lot of this is stupid socio economic status and a lot of that work is done within the social sciences. And then we would I don't think we would be jumping to those kind of essentialist conclusions or assumptions, immediately. And so we do need, I think, more dialogue, and more humility I think sometimes among scientists that it's not just hard science it contains all the data that you need that there is data out there in the world that it's actually equally, and sometimes even more important when we're talking about certain, certain things.
And that failure to understand not just that body of social and cultural knowledge but also history. I think is why a lot of mainstream scientists fall into these traps while they make these mistakes, and I know this from my own experience because as I said, I studied engineering. I was, I was very poorly exposed to the social sciences when I was at university, but as an adult after I left, I was working in the BBC, and in my spare time I started doing a degree at King's College London which is just here in London in their department of war studies, so this was an interdisciplinary science and security course, in which taught by social scientists mainly but also a few people who have experienced in sciences and engineering. And for the first time, I learned about the construction of knowledge feminist critiques of knowledge or, you know, all these Foucault everything, all these things that I've never been taught before I suddenly got an introduction to and also the history of science, technology, how ideas develop the cultures that they're developing and how that shapes how we think about them. And it completely changed the way I think about ideas. And I, I really very firmly believe and in fact I've been advocating this all this year in every university talk I've given that we should integrate science, history and humanities teaching into science teaching more. I really very strongly believe that every time you learn a scientific concept in whichever discipline, it is, you should know the background to it.
Pennington: Well that's all the time we have for this episode of stats and stories Angela, thank you so much for being here today.
Saini: Thank you for having me.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.