“Superior: The Return of Race Science” by Angela Saini

I was recommended this book by a friend who knows I’m interested in science broadly and genetics in particular and how these practices are co-opted by racists to bolster their ideals. This book takes a more historical view of the subject and details how race has been impacted by science and politics over time, but primarily from World War II to the present.

The book starts with the colonization of indigenous cultures and how colonizers saw them as racially inferior. There’s a lot of talk about having inferior peoples die out, leading to the suppression of indigenous cultures and livelihoods. Scientists then enter the conversation as they begin to categorize humans, a sort of natural extension of categorizing plants and animals. This turns the concept of race into an unchangeable aspect of your identity that gets passed down from your parents. This leads to the eugenics used during the Third Reich and to justify the Holocaust. But it wasn’t just the Germans, scientists all over were studying race. It just got much less popular after the war so it moves to the sidelines. And it still exists in this form!

Racist scientists now aim to just get their words out there, in any form, and to simply keep doing this. Then they can cite each other’s work and make it seem more respectable than it is. The mainstream though starts using terms like “human biodiversity” to talk about race without using specifically the word “race.” This allows them to avoid the baggage from the word while being able to investigate the biological differences between groups of humans. She ends with talking about how to get medical approval on treatments, clinicians have started sometimes only testing treatments on Black individuals. This isn’t motivated by racism, it’s simply to get it approved more quickly, but it leads to the idea that some treatments only work on some races. And it’s allowed the idea that there are inherent differences between the races to continue.

Saini also gets into a really interesting concept about stories and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from. And Saini could only get into this as a non-scientist. Basically the facts don’t matter, people will manipulate what facts are published to support their beliefs and claims. And this matters because we understand ourselves through stories! So we have to be careful what facts we are using to support those narratives.

In case you cannot tell from my abbreviated notes above, I thought this was a great book. It gets less into the biological science and more into the social science of race which is a perspective I don’t often seen as a research scientist. Definitely would recommend to anyone else interested in this subject!