1

The Equalitarian Dogma

Why Ideology and not Science Dominates
Debate on Ethnicity and Race in the Modern
World

Simon Webb

This book was made possible by a generous grant

from the Conru Foundation

https://conru.org
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Simon Webb is the author of many non-fiction books

and also runs the History Debunked YouTube
channel. He may be contacted via his website at:
Simon-Webb.com

Elective Home Education in the United Kingdom

Unearthing London
Life in Roman London
Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain

Dynamite, Treason and Plot

The Best Days of Our Lives: School Life in Post-War Britain

The Colchester Book of Days

Suffragette Bomber: Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists

Bombers, Rioters and Police Killers

First World War Trials and Executions

Commuters: The History of a British Way of Life

British Concentration Camps

1919: Britain’s Year of Revolution

The Analogue Revolution)

The Real World of Victorian Steampunk)

The Forgotten Slave Trade

Fighting for the United States, Executed in Britain

© Simon Webb 2021

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Contents

Introduction

Thesis
1. The Roots of Racism
2. Religious Racism
3. The Birth of Scientific Racism
4. The Zenith of Scientific Racism
5. How Scientific Racism became Disreputable
6. What Remains of Scientific Racism?
7. In the Beginning

Antithesis
1. The Roots of Anti-Racism
2. What is the Equalitarian Dogma?
3. Defending the Dogma
4. Rewriting the Past
5. Critical Race Theory
6. The Corpse which Would not Lie Down
7. A Possible Way Forward

Synthesis
1. The Dialectical Process
2. On the Nature of Hybrid Vigour
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3. Accepting racism, rejecting racial prejudice

4. What is to be done about Poverty?
5. What can we do about Education?
6. The Problem of Anti-racism
7. The Legend of Homo sapiens+
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Illustrations

1. Princess Estelle of Sweden, a classic example of

northern European skin colour (Frankie Fouganthin)
2. Bedouin of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, as darkly
complected as Indians or Pakistanis
3. Tel Ubedeiyah in Israel, where some of the earliest
human remains outside Africa have been found
4. Different animal species
5. Supposed human species
6. The White Man’s Burden
7. The Victorian view of human races
8. Determining the race of a human skull by measurement
9. The skulls of different races
10. Francis Galton, pioneer of both fingerprinting and
eugenics
11. Different human and primate species, according to
some 19th century scientists
12. Nazi from the Racial Hygiene department measuring the
face of a gypsy
13. The once popular view of the distribution of
intelligence among white and black groups
14. Typical questions from an IQ test
15. The equalitarian dogma relating to cognitive abilities
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16. The distribution of high and low intelligence in any

population group
17. A possible explanation for what is observed in
education and the workplace. Black, white and Asian
cognitive abilities are superimposed, one upon the
other.
18. How early men are traditionally portrayed; with black
hair and dark complexions.
19. Neanderthals as the ‘missing link’; a Victorian
perception
20. A hand axe of the type which did not change for a
million years (Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin
FRCP(Glasg))
21. Red ochre from Blomberg cave
22. The Lowenmensch lion-man
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Introduction

There is widespread agreement among modern experts in fields as varied and

diverse as sociology, history and education that no such thing as human races exist

and that race is a social, rather than a biological phenomenon. Mathew Engelke,

Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and former editor of

the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute says that, ‘Anthropological

research can be used to show that, biologically speaking, race is a myth’ (Engelke,

2017). Dr Adam Rutherford, a geneticist and science writer, is every bit as blunt,

summing up the orthodox, early twenty-first century view by stating simply, ‘Race

is a social construct’ (Rutherford, 2020). If taken at face value, the remarkable

unanimity on the subject among many academics and scholars would render a book

such as the present one irrelevant and pointless at best and mischievous, even

wicked, at worst. It is to be hoped though that it will prove to be neither pointless

nor wicked, but rather an open-minded survey of an exceedingly contentious topic,

aimed at those who know little of the science involved in the study of race and

genetics and have only the haziest idea what might be meant by expressions such

as ‘polymorphic gene expression’ or words like ‘cladistics’. It is, in short, intended

for the average person in the street.

Despite the widespread agreement among the overwhelming majority of

academics in disciplines like sociology, many ordinary people remain unconvinced

that race is some kind of optical illusion conjured up by societal prejudice.

Although they are well aware that the supposedly correct view is that race, like
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beauty, is only skin deep, they observe any number of things in the world around

them which seem to hint at some deeper difference between white people and

their black and Chinese neighbours; other, that is, than the shape of their eyes or

level of pigmentation in their skin. A man might notice, for instance, that the

Chinese woman living next door cannot drink alcohol because like a third of people

of East Asian heritage, she is deficient in the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase and

it will cause facial flushing and sickness (Suddendorf, 1989). This woman is also

lactose intolerant and has difficulty digesting milk, something she has in common

with 90% of American Asians. The consequent lack of calcium ingested from dairy

products means that she is at increased risk of developing osteoporosis in later life

(Lv & Brown, 2010). This surely hints at some deeper difference between her and

the white people living in the area, other than mere skin colour and the presence

or absence of an epicanthic fold of the upper eyelids.

Across the road from our imaginary observer lives a black family. Their children

stood up, walked and jumped at an earlier age than the white children living in the

street. This tendency for black babies to reach their gross motor milestones earlier

than white children is international and cross-cultural. It has been seen alike in

black children in American cities, those raised on farms in the Caribbean and

children born in the African rainforest. Black children simply develop physically

faster than white ones (Kelly et al, 2006). Puzzled Mr Everyman knows too that

African-American men have the highest rates of prostate cancer in the world and

that it has been speculated that this is connected in some way with the greater

levels of testosterone circulating in the bloodstream of black men (McIntosh, 1997,

Richard et al, 2014).

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A lot of people think along these lines and they are perplexed when watching a

television documentary about, say, pygmies in central Africa. Here are people who

are a foot or so shorter than the average American or British person, whose skins

are a completely different colour and whose skulls tend to have different

proportions, and yet they do not apparently belong to a different race at all; the

very idea is dangerous nonsense. Sometimes, those trying to get to grips with the

supposed non-existence of human races will wonder idly about the case of

domesticated dogs, which all belong to the single species of Canis familiaris and

yet show enormous variety in physical appearance, temperament and intelligence.

All the arguments regarding mixed ancestry and jumbled genetic heritage which

are routinely trotted out to demonstrate the non-existence of human races could

equally well be applied to pet dogs. It remains undeniably true though that while

the average parent might allow his small child to romp on the floor with a friendly

spaniel, he would be very ill-advised to allow the same behaviour with an

American Pit Bull Terrier. After all, although they comprise only 6 % of the dogs in

the United States, Pit Bulls are responsible for almost 70 % of attacks on humans by

dogs and over half of dog-related deaths (Time, 2014). Although he may not be

aware of it, this comparison between the canine and human world has been the

subject of speculation since the 1950s (Haldane, 1956).

It might be at this point in our train of thought that most of us would start

guiltily and realise with a shock that our musing had become ‘racist’. Comparing

dog breeds with humans, indeed! For many people, it would be now that they

closed down, or self-censored, their own thinking, for we are all very aware that

this line of enquiry verges on the heretical in the modern world. The reason is that

in some ways the Western world is ruled by an overarching and inflexible ideology;
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one which permeates almost every aspect of life, including the fields of scientific,

social, political and philosophical enquiry.

History teaches us that when ideology and science get mixed up, the outcome

is seldom promising. One thinks of Nazi Germany, where Einstein’s theory of

relativity was rejected because it had been formulated by a Jew. German

scientists chose instead to stick with Die Deutsche Physik or German physics

(Grant, 2007). This led, among other things to weather forecasting being based

upon the crackpot notion of ‘World Ice’, which may have been thoroughly German,

but relied upon a belief that the stars were really no more than chunks of ice. We

remember too Soviet Russia in the days when it was ruled by Stalin. Genetics and

the concept of natural selection were both rejected in favour of pseudo-scientific

suppositions which accorded with the Marxist ideology in favour at that time. This

was a disaster for agriculture, as it led to the mad theory of Lysenkoism which,

while ideologically pure and politically correct, was wholly unscientific and, among

other things, rejected the very idea of genes (Dawkins, 1986).

The Western world today is in the grip of precisely the same kind of irrational

thinking as that seen in Russia and Germany in the early 1940s. The ruling doctrine

today, not only in sociology, but also education, science and business, relates not

to Aryan supremacy or dialectical materialism, but is rather represented as

championing the supposed rights of ethnic minorities in the cause of equality and

fairness. This puts those who ask questions about it in an invidious position, for

few of us wish to be seen as opponents of fairness. We are irresistibly reminded of

the campaign against abortion, the leaders of which hit upon the luminous idea of

describing themselves as being ‘pro-life’; an expression first used many years

earlier in quite a different context (Neil, 1960). This means, by implication, that
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anybody who might be in favour allowing women the right to terminate a

pregnancy must be either pro-death or anti-life. In the same way, those who have

control of the current narrative relating to race and ethnicity introduce a wholly

false dichotomy and hint broadly that anybody who does not subscribe to their own

version of opposition to racial prejudice must be an enemy of equality and wishes

to make society more unfair than it currently is. This is disastrous for free thought

and honest enquiry, as those questioning the prevailing dogma are frequently

accused of being in favour of segregation or apartheid. This unified and inflexible

mainstream view on race and ethnicity has been dubbed the ‘equalitarian dogma’

(Garrett, 1961) and it has, since the end of the Second World War, had a stifling

effect upon any investigation into possibly innate differences between black and

white people, and those from East Asia.

Looking now at the two totalitarian regimes mentioned above, we can see how

this conflation of scientific research and political stance has in the past occurred.

Lysenkoism was a crank theory of evolution which suited Stalin’s own views; views

that were the yardstick for Marxism in the Soviet Union at that time. Those who

failed to be sufficiently enthusiastic about Lysenkoism were therefore assumed to

be opposed to socialism (Goldwag, 2007). Similarly, in Nazi Germany anybody who

believed that E=MC2 was seen as a supporter of ‘Jewish’ science and therefore an

enemy of National Socialism. In the modern world of the United States and

Western Europe, a precisely similar false dichotomy operates, whereby people who

ask awkward questions about the differing levels of cognitive ability invariably

observed between ethnic groups, and revealed whenever reliable and objective

tests are undertaken, are at once assumed to be right-wing extremists. Of course,

they are not liable to summary execution or confinement in a concentration camp,

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as was the case with dissenters in Germany and the Soviet Union, but ill effects

and unfavourable outcomes there most certainly are. These can range from bad

publicity in the media all the way to loss of career, blighted employment prospects

and investigation by the police. Most of us prefer not to run such risks and so keep

our mouths firmly shut about any doubts which we entertain relating to the

accepted version of matters relating to ethnicity and race.

The equalitarian dogma holds it as axiomatic that there are no inherited

differences of character, temperament or cognitive ability between people whose

origins lie in Europe, Africa or East Asia. This means that any perceived differences

must be caused by a variety of other factors, such as racial prejudice, poverty,

culture and so on. For instance on the SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test which

young people take in the United States before starting college, black people score,

on the whole, lower than white people. The difference is very marked (Inside

Higher Ed, 2019). One possible, and exceedingly economical, explanation for this

would lie in the indisputable fact that black people in the United States have

always scored lower on average in IQ tests than white people and still do so (Weis,

2020). The very idea that SAT scores are connected with real differences in

intelligence is anathema to most liberals though and so an alternative must be

sought. This is where things quickly become complicated.

One way of explaining away the difference in scores on the SAT is by assuming

racism in the educational system. Perhaps black students are overlooked, ignored,

or written off, and more attention given to white children in schools. Income might

also play a role in the matter, as black people tend to earn less than whites, This

could mean more cramped conditions in the family home and less money to spare

for books or outings to museums. The educational backgrounds of parents could

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also be implicated. The tests themselves might also be culturally biased against

black people, in that the language used in the reading and writing component of

the Scholastic Aptitude Test might be more formal than that used in the average

African-American home. So far, so good. We have introduced four different factors

which could all go some way towards showing why black youths do not achieve as

well as white youths in this test; racism, poverty, parental education, and cultural

bias. But then we consider an additional fact, that those of East Asian origin

actually do a lot better than either black or white people. How can we account for

this? Perhaps we might now bring in a fifth variable, which will be family culture.

Don’t Chinese people have a tradition of valuing scholarship and learning? We now

have five things which will help to explain one thing; that is to say the differing

achievements of three ethnic groups all taking an identical examination. It would

be easy enough to double or even treble that number and end up with a dozen or

more theories, all necessary and all jostling and competing to shed light a single

phenomenon. There could scarcely be a more a more flagrant disregard of Occam’s

Razor. The principle of Occam’s Razor, often applied to scientific hypotheses,

suggests that it is wise, when presented with competing theories, all of which

adequately explain observed phenomena, to choose the simplest and most

economical explanation offered. It is time to clear away a little of the confusion.

Readers may be familiar with the ancient Greek myth of Procrustes, the bandit

who offered travellers a bed for the night. If they were too tall to fit the bed, he

would lop off their feet, but if they were shorter than the bed, then he would

stretch them on a rack. It is to a metaphorical bed of Procrustes that matters

relating to apparent racial differences are regularly brought today. The aim is to

squeeze, stretch or mutilate the data until they conform to the proper dictates of
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the equalitarian philosophy. So it is that the high number of young black men in

prison, the paucity of educational qualifications of some other ethnicities, the

astounding number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners, the presence of large numbers

of Asian Americans at universities such as Harvard and Yale, the dominance in

world affairs of white Europeans, to say nothing of colonialism, post-colonialism

and much else besides, must all be accounted for by individual and specially

tailored reasons and excuses. It might help at this point to look at a concrete

example of how this process works in practice.

In 2019 the University of Oxford reported that a study had found that black

children in Britain were twice as likely to be diagnosed with Social, Emotional and

Mental Health (SEMH) needs as white children. Conversely, children of South Asian

origin were half as likely to be identified with Autistic Spectrum Disorders or ASD

as white British children (Strand & Lindorff, 2019). It was literally inconceivable to

those who compiled this report that the reason that more black children were

being diagnosed with mental health problems was that black children tend to

suffer more from such things than white children or those of Asian heritage.

Similarly, nobody thought to ask if it were possible that children whose families

are from the Indian sub-continent might be less prone to autism than black or

white children. Instead, the traditional reasons for the inequalities revealed by the

research were trotted out. One of the authors of the report, Steve Strand,

Professor of Education at Oxford, suggested that;

While ethnic disproportionality for some special needs, Moderate

Learning Difficulties (MLD), can be accounted for by socio- economic

background and early attainment/development on entry to school, this

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research indicates that neither factor explains the ethnic disproportionality in

the identification of ASD or SEMH.

The upshot is that some Asian pupils may not be receiving the access to

specialist resources and support they need with autistic spectrum disorders,

while some Black Caribbean children may be suffering an inappropriate or

narrowed curriculum from unwarranted over-identification, particularly in

secondary school.

(Strand & Lindorff, 2018)

Professor Strand went on to explore what he felt might be the reasons that half as

many children of South Asian origin were being diagnosed as being on the autistic

spectrum as compared to white and black children, mentioning among other

things, ‘cultural variation in social attitudes to disability’. We now have the entire

set of standard explanations when any kind of educational inequality is uncovered;

racism, or perhaps unconscious bias, on the part of teachers and other

professionals, poverty, and Asian cultural differences.

Could there be simpler causes for the findings? That more black children than

white children were being diagnosed with mental health problems was perhaps not

all that surprising. Black Caribbeans in the United Kingdom are nine times more

likely to develop schizophrenia than white people. Black Africans are almost six

times more likely to have the illness at some point in their lives (Pinto et al, 2008).

This tendency is passed down through generations and has a strong genetic
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component. Black people of African origin, whether in Africa or the United States,

are more prone to carrying the genetic markers for susceptibility to this type of

mental illness (Curtis, 2018). Rather than assuming that the black children are

suffering, ‘unwarranted over-identification', as the lead author of the report put

it, the possibility might have been examined that those children are really more

likely to develop mental health problems than white children or those of South

Asian origin. It may of course not be so, but it is certainly a hypothesis worth

considering.

We see here, in the starkest way imaginable, how dogma trumps science in the

western world today, in this case the equalitarian dogma. What do we mean by

dogma and why should it have no place in open, scientific enquiry? Dogma is a

belief or principle which is held to be unquestionably true. It cannot be debated or

doubted; it must be accepted absolutely. We see dogma a lot in religion of course.

On 1 November 1950 Pope Pius XII issued the MUNIFICENTISSIMUS DEUS; the aim of

which was to define for the faithful the dogma of the assumption. This refers to

the belief that while most people die and their bodies decay, the Virgin Mary was

taken bodily into heaven and did not suffer death in this world. She was simply

lifted off the Earth by God and taken to paradise (Flinn, 2007). There is no point

asking anything about this belief, examining the plausibility of the thing or the

mechanics involved; it is a fixed doctrine of the Catholic Church and must simply

be accepted.

Such a way of proceeding must inevitably be antithetical to the scientific

process. When Galileo discussed in print the idea that the Earth revolves around

the sun, his suggestion ran counter to the heliocentric theory strongly held by the

Catholic Church. He was tried and convicted of heresy. The practice of science
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depends upon the freedom to question everything and demand proof of any

hypothesis. Dogma, on the other hand, demands that no questions be asked, nor

evidence sought. Indeed, evidence which contradicts dogma must be hushed up or

concealed. When Professor Strand discovered that there were only half as many

cases of autism in a sample of children of South Asian origin as he expected to find

in a similarly sized group of black or white children, then he might have asked

himself some searching questions; the most obvious being ‘Is autism less common

among people of Indian heritage than it is in those of African or European origin?’

He was incapable of doing so and could only assume that a lot of Indian children

with autism must be hidden away somewhere where they could not be counted.

This is why the equalitarian dogma, that all population groups have equal

cognitive ability and the same chance of producing either geniuses or people with

learning difficulties, is a dogma and not a scientific hypothesis. Hypotheses are

accessible to reason and open to doubt; they may be proved or disproved. Let us

conduct a thought-experiment, analogous to that which Professor Strand evidently

undertook before concluding that the numbers of black children with mental

health problems had been artificially inflated and cases of autism hidden away.

Let us imagine that I believe that equal numbers of dandelions and daisies will,

all other factors being equal, grow on a certain kind of soil. I visit a random field,

carry out a careful survey and find to my surprise that there are twice as many

dandelions as there are daisies. At this point, a scientist testing a hypothesis will

ask himself if he was correct in assuming that the numbers of the different flowers

would be the same. He will check for variables and look at other meadows and

fields. He may eventually decide that his original belief that dandelions and daisies

will thrive equally well in identical conditions is incorrect. The case is very
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different for the person hoping not to prove or disprove a hypothesis, but rather to

confirm dogma.

If one is fanatically attached to the view that dandelions and daisies must both

grow healthily and in similar numbers, then the discovery that this does not appear

to be the case will be seen as evidence of tampering with, and interference in, the

natural order of the world. Perhaps somebody has crept up in the dead of night

and applied fertiliser to the dandelions or weedkiller to the daisies. If there are

not enough daisies to fit the requirements of one’s dogma, then it may be that

they are being hidden from sight. Could it be that some evilly disposed person has

surreptitiously picked a lot of the daisies and hidden them away somewhere?

Without doubt, something fishy, or even downright sinister, is taking place to

distort the data. For the adherent of the dandelion-daisy equalitarian dogma, any

observations which contradict the dogma must be ruthlessly disposed of as the

machinations of those misguided, foolish, or wicked people who feel that

dandelions might naturally outnumber daisies in a field. If all this sounds quite

mad, then the reader is probably a normal, open-minded person who has little use

for dogma when it intrudes into the real world.

This little fantasy parallels closely the thought-processes of those today who

would brush away evidence of unequal outcomes, physical or intellectual, in

different populations. This is the subject of this book, which is a necessary, one

might almost say vital, corrective to the increasingly strident claims of those who

champion orthodoxy. As evidence mounts that the equalitarian doctrine is

hopelessly flawed, those who defend it resort increasingly to personal invective

and the casual and indiscriminate use of the word ‘racism’. Since the first part of

this book is devoted to the history of racism, it might be helpful to end this
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introduction by defining what we actually mean by the term. This is important,

because there are two or three entirely separate meanings of ‘racism’.

I have in front of me the Oxford Dictionary of English, second edition, revised

2005. It gives the following definitions of racism;

The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics,

abilities or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to

distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone

of a different race based on such a belief

(Oxford Dictionary of English, 2005)

I intentionally used a fairly old edition of a dictionary, for these two definitions of

racism have been around for many years. A new definition is in the process of

emerging though, as I shall explain.

The second part of the definition from the Oxford Dictionary of English is easily

disposed of. The idea of discriminating against anybody because of ethnicity is

probably repugnant to most people. If a black person or somebody with Asian

heritage scores highly enough on the American SAT or the British A Levels to

qualify for a place at Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Cambridge, then most of us would

see no conceivable reason for preventing access. The same applies to housing,

schools, employment, and anything else. There may well be, in all parts of the

world, antagonism towards people who speak differently, follow a different

religion or whose culture is nothing like our own. Race is often irrelevant in such
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irrational dislike. We think of the friction between India and Pakistan, the dreadful

fighting between the Tutsi and Hutu of Rwanda and the wars which raged in the

territories of what was once Yugoslavia. The 30 years of low-level guerrilla warfare

in Northern Ireland and the historic enmity between the populations of the

province similarly had nothing to do with race. The antagonism and prejudice here

is between one group of black Africans and another, one population in South Asia

against an ethnically indistinguishable set of people and white Europeans against

white Europeans. When it comes to actual racial prejudice, all the indications are

that this has been declining steadily for decades, both in Britain and other

countries. In 1983 between 50 and 60 % of white people in Britain would have

minded ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’ if a close relative married somebody of a different

ethnic group. By 2013, fewer than 25 % felt this way (NatCen, 2014). By these

standards, racism in the sense of racial prejudice is declining, at least in the

United Kingdom.

It is the first definition which is liable to cause problems. As it stands, with its

blunt talk of races and superiority and inferiority, most people would reject this

notion as swiftly as they would any idea of prejudice or discrimination. Alter it

slightly though and replace ‘races’ with ‘ethnic groups’ or ‘human populations’ and

you might end up with something which many people would think seriously about.

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, we put forward the proposition that

members of certain ethnic groups tended to have abilities and qualities which

differed from those of some other ethnic groups. One suspects that many of us

would have to think this idea through very carefully before rejecting it out of

hand. This idea, that people from Africa might tend to have different

characteristics from those from China, has been called ‘scientific racism’ and
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there is an increasing body of evidence to suggest that there may be something

here to consider.

We have looked at two, very different meanings to the word ‘racism’, but a

third is becoming popular. At the time of writing efforts are being made,

particularly in the United States, to change the definitions of racism currently

found in our dictionaries and insert mention of an imbalance of power being an

essential ingredient of racism. The difficulty in even agreeing a definition of

racism in a dictionary shows how many pitfalls await the ordinary person who is

trying to decide what racism is. The story of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s

change of their definition shows some of the problems.

The 2019 edition of the American Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary gives

the following definition of racism,

1. a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities

and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular

race

2. a) a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and

designed to execute its principles, b) a political or social system founded on

racism

3. racial prejudice or discrimination

This seems very clear and surely comprehensive. However, on 28 May 2020 a

young, black student in the United States sent an email to Merriam-Webster,

asking them to consider altering the definition to include the idea of racism as

entailing systemic oppression and being dependent for its existence upon an
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imbalance of power (BBC, 2020). Kennedy Mitchum asked that the dictionary be

updated in this way when the next edition was published. A spokesperson for

Merriam-Webster agreed to consider the matter. Kennedy Mitchum was by no

means a lone voice in the wilderness, this particular definition of racism had been

widely accepted among left-wingers and academics for several years.

Rather than simplifying and making things easier, a definition of racism which

includes the necessity for it to be connected in some way with ‘systemic

oppression’, as in ‘institutionalised racism’, is fraught with hazard. For one thing,

adopting it in Europe and the United States will have the effect of exculpating

members of any minority from a charge of racism. If a black employer refuses to

hire Chinese workers because he feels an antipathy to those of East Asian origin,

this could not be considered racism, because it is not part of systemic oppression,

but rather an individual dislike. In this way, black people, those from the Indian

sub-continent, Arabs and people of East Asian heritage will gain a free pass for

expressing detestation of Jews, Hispanics, and anybody else they don’t care for.

Instinctively, we feel that something might be wrong here.

The latest online definition of racism by Merriam-Webster now includes this new

concept, saying that racism is;

the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political

advantage of another (Merriam-Webster, 2021)

At once we see that in the Western world, racism becomes an exclusively white

practice. In Europe and North America it is, by and large, white people who are in

control of the social, economic, and political systems which may be used for
 23

oppression and so they alone are capable of racism. The definition of racism as

simple prejudice or discrimination has now disappeared.

For most of us, this is of more than academic interest, because we know that

prejudice on racial grounds is horribly common in all countries and among every

ethnicity, but that it is usually carried out on a haphazard and informal basis,

rather than as a means to inflict systematic oppression. Ghanaians sometimes

speak disparagingly of Nigerians, black Caribbeans make unfortunate remarks

about Africans, suggesting that they are backwards and unsophisticated, it is not

uncommon for black people to express antipathy towards Jews, Koreans, or

Pakistanis; the list of such ‘racial prejudice or discrimination’, to use Merriam-

Webster's old definition, is lengthy and depressing. All this has now been wiped

clean and white people alone are to be blamed for any racism which is seen.

This book is intended for the many people who while not feeling any animosity

towards, let alone hatred of, black people, white people or members of any other

ethnic group, nevertheless have a suspicion that there are real and measurable

differences between black people and white, between those whose origin is in the

Indian sub-continent and others whose roots lie in East Asia.

A word or two about the structure of this book may not come amiss. The first

section will be devoted to the concept of scientific racism, explaining how and

why this arose. In the second part, we shall examine the reaction against scientific

racism and look at what produced such a strong opposition to considering even the

possibility that inherent differences exist between populations and that these

might be inherited. The final section will attempt to reconcile what at first sight

appear to be diametrically opposed viewpoints and find a way forward which

incorporates elements of both.

 24

We must begin by asking how the idea of racism, that is to say that the human

race is divided up into discrete and separate ethnic groups, first arose.
 25

Part 1: Thesis

1. The Roots of Racism

2. Religious Racism

3. The Birth of Scientific Racism

4. The Nadir of Scientific Racism

5. How Scientific Racism became Disreputable

6. What Remains of Scientific Racism?

7. In the Beginning
 26

Chapter 1

The Roots of Racism

We begin our exploration by trying to find out how and when the idea of

racism first arose. This is not easy. One great difficulty in attempting to write

objectively about such an emotionally charged subject as racism is that even

before anything has been said, before even a tentative opinion has been

expressed, the very word itself evokes strong feelings in most people living in the

western world. This is caused in part because many people are unclear about what

the word ‘racism’ actually means, or more precisely what the person using the

expression means by it, and this inevitably causes tensions to arise. Racial

prejudice and discrimination are very different things from simply holding a belief

that members of one ethnicity might have certain statistical tendencies regarding

the levels of hormones circulating in the bloodstream or the age at which children

in that group are likely to stand up and walk. Using the same word to encompass

not only these things, but also a dislike or hatred of another group, will obviously

create confusion. Muddling up racial prejudice with nationalism, which is

frequently done, also leads to needless unpleasantness.

There is of course tremendous confusion between racism and xenophobia.

Disliking people in a neighbouring country is perhaps undesirable, but dislike of,

and contempt for, foreigners has been around for the whole of recorded history

and does not rely upon the targets of hostility belonging to a different ethnicity or

species. Historic enmity and mutual contempt unpinned the relations between

England and Ireland for centuries and has not to this day wholly abated, but
 27

nobody in his or her senses would assert that the English and Irish belong to

different races, although this was indeed done in the nineteenth century.

Nationalism and racism are quite different things.

It is quite reasonable to make generalisations about different nationalities,

because these are based upon culture. Fifty or sixty years ago, it was the custom

in Britain for people to have one bath a week; this was spoken of as ‘bath night’,

which typically took place on a Sunday, before the beginning of the working week.

At the same time in Sweden, the majority of people would wash their bodies in a

shower or bath every day, a habit which of course has now spread across Europe

until it is common even in Britain. It would therefore have been perfectly possible

to suggest at that time that the British were more unclean in the habits than

Swedes. Different nationalities vary in their customs and traditions and one can

make observations about these differences without racism entering into the matter

at all.

What this means is that trying to discuss racism with anybody can be a

hazardous undertaking and entail attempting to guess what ‘baggage’ they are

bringing to the debate in terms of strongly held views about the legacy of

colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and immigration; to name but three

topics which colour views around the very idea of racism. Saying anything at all

about the ancient world will, as a matter of course, place you in one or other of

various hostile and opposing camps. Expressing admiration for the Roman Empire

or ancient Greek nations, to give one example, will lay one open to a charge of

belonging to the ‘Alt Right’, some of whom see Sparta and Athens as the font of

Western civilisation and, by extension, white culture. A book published on this

subject in 2019 claimed that, ‘The use of classical imagery to promote a white
 28

nationalist agenda is far from an isolated occurrence’ (Zuckerberg, 2019). Even

apparently innocuous speculation surrounding the Greek custom of painting their

statues in vivid colours can be interpreted in terms of white supremacy. An article

in an online magazine went into detail about how the impression of whiteness

gained from looking at white statues and marble temples could encourage a false

impression of the past; ‘The assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false

idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white!’ (Bond, 2017).

Looking at the distant past often results in people treating it as an extension of

the present and applying modern ideology and political views to societies which

were so differently structured from their own as to make any comparison with the

present day meaningless. In the twenty-first century, any mention of racism brings

immediately to mind two things; colonialism in general and the part played in that

enterprise by the transatlantic slave trade. For this reason, racism is primarily

seen as something directed by white people against those of African origin.

Although subconsciously we might tend to think that racism, colonialism and the

slave trade all go neatly together, it is not really so. There was in the ancient

world, two thousand years ago and more, no shortage at all of slavery, colonialism

and empire-building and yet it took place without the need for racism as we most

of us understand the term today.

Slavery was a common feature of almost every culture, from the first written

records up to the time of the Roman Empire. The earliest mention of slavery dates

back almost to the very first use of writing. In the nineteenth century a small, sun-

baked clay tablet was unearthed in what is now Iraq. It dates from the reign of the

Sumerian king Ur-Nammu, who ruled between 2112 and 2095 BC and is a code of

laws, dealing in part with slaves. The context makes it plain that they are
 29

regarded as chattels or belongings, in precisely the same way as cattle or sheep

(Cotterell,1980). Across the Middle East the practice was common, and the Bible

accepts it without condemnation. It was around in India at the beginning of the

Common Era and probably centuries before that, at the time of the Buddha in the

sixth century BC (Singh, 2009). There is also good reason to suppose that slavery

was widespread during China’s Shang Dynasty, which flourished from the

seventeenth century BC onwards (Cotterell, 1980).

The Roman Empire and Greek city states were heavily dependent upon slave

labour and the numbers involved were immense; dwarfing the transatlantic slave

trade. In the early years of the Roman Empire, there were at any one time about

10 million slaves; perhaps a fifth of the population (D’Arms & Kopf, 1980). The

same source suggests that something in the region of half a million new slaves

would have been needed every year simply to maintain the necessary number of

slaves in the empire. Examination of graveyards containing the bodies of slaves

shows that almost without exception, those buried there had their origins in

Europe; they were the same ethnicity as their owners (Prowse et al, 2007). In

Greece, in the fifth century BC, there might have been 100,000 slaves, making up

a quarter of the population (Andrewes, 1971). As in Rome these were, with rare

exceptions, of the same ethnicity as those who owned them.

There is no suggestion in the ancient world that those who were enslaved were

seen as anything other than fellow humans. In Rome and Greece, slaves were

employed as teachers and given responsibility for the running of households or

estates. It was recognised without any difficulty that they could be as intelligent

as any free man. If a slave was freed, then he could take his place in society

without anybody feeling that he might be a lesser human being than any other
 30

citizen. Something of this attitude may be gleaned from the Bible, which signally

fails to condemn slavery, but nevertheless acknowledges the common humanity of

master and slave. One book on the history of slavery even goes so far as to pose

the question, ‘Job: The First Abolitionist?’ (Everett, 1997). This is because the

writer of the Book of Job, composed perhaps 600 BC, includes the following words;

When any of my servants complained against me, I would listen and treat

them fairly. If I did not, then how could I face God? What could I say when God

came to judge me? The same God who created me created my servants also.

(Job, 31:13)

This is an implicit acknowledgement that Job’s servants or slaves are as human as

he is and in no way inferior, other than by good or ill fortune.

The Bible is explicit about the equality of humanity. The Jews may have been a

special nation, but this did not mean that those others who lived elsewhere were

not as human as they were and also beloved of God. The writer of the Book of

Amos attributes the following words to the Deity, ‘People of Israel, I think as much

of the people of Ethiopia as I do of you’ (Amos, 9:7). In other words, whether

black or white, gentile or Jew, all people on Earth are regarded as being of equal

value. The differences between them are national or religious, rather than racial.

The Romans had a pretty similar attitude towards ethnicity and race. The

emperor Septimus Severus was of mixed heritage; his father was a Phoenician

living in Africa (Sage, 2020). Jews could become full citizens of Rome and people

of all hues of colour served in the army. The important point was not race, but

loyalty to the regime. In the Bible, the Book of Acts tells us that St Paul was born a
 31

Roman citizen, despite being a Jew (Acts 22: 22-29). Because he was born in

Tarsus, which was in a coastal area of what is now Turkey, Paul was automatically

a citizen of Rome and the equal of any other citizen. The Romans had no difficulty

in accepting Jews, Africans or anybody else on equal terms,

The building of empires and colonisation of other people’s country proceeded

in the ancient world for thousands of years without the need for theories of race.

It was not necessary to devise such theories for the simplest reason in the world.

This is because when the Greeks Romans or Phoenicians felt the need to sail to

another part of the Mediterranean and occupy somebody else’s territory, then they

just did it. They required no overarching ideological justification to do so; it was

enough that their armour was stronger and they were better equipped than those

already living in North Africa, Spain, Italy and so on. There was no necessity to

claim that the original inhabitants of a place were racially inferior; if any of the

ancient civilisations wanted land, they simply took it if their army was powerful

enough. This situation gradually changed and when William of Normandy wished to

seize England in 1066, he knew that he needed to be able to demonstrate a legal

or moral justification for his actions. He would have been condemned by both the

Church and his peers In Europe, had he just taken ship for England and seized the

throne simply because he wanted to be king. This was, for the powerful men in

medieval Europe a matter of realpolitik. It was in nobody’s interests for their

neighbours to behave in such a fashion. This would mean that no ruler would feel

safe from an unexpected invasion undertake simply for greed and a desire to

expand territory. It explains why William made such play of a supposed oath sworn

by Harold on a reliquary containing the bones of a saint. Not only had the kingdom

of England been promised to him, the man who was now claiming to be the king
 32

had broken his pledged word, made over sacred relics; invalidating Harold’s claim

to the throne on both temporal and religious grounds.

Even when powerful men in Europe set out to create new kingdoms for

themselves in the Middle East, during the series of Christian jihads known as the

Crusades, it would have been felt poor form for them just to race off trying to grab

other people’s territory for the sake of pride or greed. A handy excuse and

religious justification presented itself in the urgent need to free the tomb of Christ

from the heathen. God wished them to spread Christianity and fight against the

Muslims. Sometimes jihads or Crusades were the ostensible reason for expansion

and conquest, at other times it was claimed that some hereditary principle was at

stake and that the disputed country belonged to an invading force by right. It was,

by the late medieval period, considered in Europe and western Asia not quite the

thing to go to war merely for greed or a desire to burn, kill, loot and rape. These

things may, and almost invariably did, have taken place in passing, but there

needed to be a legitimate reason for the launch of the enterprise in the first

place.

By the end of the fifteenth century, Europe was a fairly well-ordered place and

carrying on like pirates or brigands was generally discouraged. To the east lay

China, India and Russia. These people might have spoken different languages,

followed different religions and even had skins which were darker or more sallow

than the average European, but they were recognised as fellow human beings.

Rough and barbaric they might have been, but they were undeniably people. It was

at this time that Columbus made his first voyage to the New World and the

Portuguese were establishing trading links with West Africa. Europeans were

obliged to tread carefully when dealing with some of the kingdoms in Africa, in
 33

what is today Ghana, but there was no need to exercise caution in the Americas

and Caribbean, where the inhabitants were wilder and more disorganised than

they were in parts of West Africa. In Africa there were well-ordered kingdoms

which would have been more than capable of driving off a handful of merchant

adventurers if they overstepped the bounds of propriety, but on the islands of the

Caribbean, nothing of the sort existed.

The discovery of America promised to be a free-for-all in robbery and

exploitation of a new territory, because it was virgin land and, from the point of

view of the cruel, greedy and unscrupulous, it was open season on both North and

South America and the people living there. The inhabitants of these newfound

lands could be killed or enslaved, and anything in the way of gold, spices or other

profitable goods carried off to Europe without anybody fearing any consequences,

provided that they avoided any well organised societies such as the Aztecs. These

would need to be dealt with later by military expeditions. All this was because the

usual rules no longer applied, those intent upon exploiting the two new continents

having persuaded themselves and others that the men and women living across the

Atlantic were not really human beings at all. They lived at the ends of the earth,

far from where Noah and his ark had supposedly come to rest after the Great

Flood. They could not be the children of Noah at all. They looked human, but they

obviously were not as properly human as those from Europe were.

This ingenious sophistry can be regarded as the emergence of the modern idea

of racism, which is to say suggesting that a certain group of humans were different

from everybody else and not deserving of the same rights and protections as the

rest of humanity. Unfortunately for the freebooters and adventurers who were
 34

hoping that this line of argument would exempt them from the normal rules, the

Catholic Church was having none of it.

For the 40 years following Columbus’ first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean,

the ideology that the native Americans, or Indians as they were known at that

time, were not people at all and entitled to no more consideration than animals,

was a popular one in some quarters. Colonists, conquistadores and buccaneers

made hay while the sun shone, to the disgust of missionaries who were intent on

converting people in Mexico to the true faith. In 1537, they despatched a

Dominican friar called Bernardino de Minaya to Rome to plead their case to the

Pope.

Pope Paul III was clearly convinced by the arguments advanced by the friar,

because on 2 June 1537 he issued a bull, setting out the official position of the

Catholic Church on the treatment of the native inhabitants of the Americas. A

papal bull is a public declaration of policy and this one was called Sublimus Deus,

which means in Latin ‘The Sublime God’. In it, the Pope not only forbids the ill-

treatment or enslavement of what are described as the ‘Indians of the West and

the South’, but a general prohibition is placed upon the practice of slavery. The

Papal Bull reads as follows;

The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring

men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never

before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of

salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not

hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and
 35

other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb

brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving

the Catholic Faith.

We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and

seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into

the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly

men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith

but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.

Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by

these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and

sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit

shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have

been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who

may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their

liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the

faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately,

enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in

any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no

effect
 36

(Pope Paul III, 1537).

This clear and unambiguous statement by the head of the Catholic Church was,

in effect, the universal declaration of human rights of its time. It settled the

question of the common humanity of all human beings on earth and made it a sin

to regard any of them as ‘dumb brutes’. It might be thought that by acting in so

decisive a way, Pope Paul had nipped in the bud the nascent concept of racism. As

we know, this was not to be the case.

The papal bull was a great nuisance to those hoping to kill the natives of the

Caribbean or to buy and sell enslaved people and steal their wealth, but so great

was the economic imperative, that a way would need to be found to circumvent

the teaching of Mother Church. Opposing a pope was unwise and so any means of

evading Sublimus Deus would need to be founded in scripture, rather than based

upon greed for gold or an overwhelming desire to engage in the trade in slaves.

This led to the use of the Bible to provide a good excuse to exploit and mistreat

those whose skins were darker than the average European. This is no mere

historical curiosity, for the reasoning which followed this close examination of both

the Old and New Testaments ended in providing pretexts for some of the worst

excesses of modern history. Slavery, apartheid and the Holocaust all ultimately

stem from what was unearthed in Christian and Jewish scripture.

 37

Chapter 2

Religious Racism

None of us wish to feel that we are murderers and thieves, even if that is the case;

especially if it is the case, in fact. Sometimes, we are able to ameliorate the guilt

we feel for such crimes by persuading ourselves that special circumstances applied

to our actions. Killing and looting which takes place in wartime is often seen as an

exception to the usual prohibitions surrounding such activities. This might be seen

as a mitigation of crimes which would otherwise attract the harshest

condemnation. It is a rare man or woman who acknowledges in a straightforward

manner, ‘I am a thief!’ or ‘I committed cold-blooded murder!’ Human nature is

such that there is invariably an attempt to justify or excuse what looks to be on

the face of it a brutal crime. In the last chapter we saw that early European

explorers of the Caribbean were at first able to pretend that the people whom

they encountered were not really human at all, but were more like animals. This

meant that killing them was no offence and taking any of their belongings did not

count as stealing, any more than it would if one took some item from the lair of a

wild animal. This sophistry was brought to an end by Pope Paul III in 1537, when he

declared that the inhabitants of the New World were also the descendants of Adam

and Eve and should be treated as such.

It might be thought that when the Catholic Church ruled that those living in the

Americas were human, together with the people of Africa and Asia, that this would

in itself be enough to ensure that all people in what we would today call the less

economically developed parts of the world would be treated decently and with
 38

respect for their humanity. When powerful commercial interests such as the desire

for gold, spices and slaves are at work though, common humanity was not a major

factor in the equation. A means had to be found of overriding the rights and wishes

of the indigenous inhabitants of countries to the south and west of Europe. It

needed to be a concept which did not run counter to the teachings of the Church;

preferably one with Biblical authority. Fortunately, such a ready-made excuse for

slavery and colonial exploitation already existed. It would mean borrowing from a

Jewish text, but that was a minor matter when the stakes were so high.

Many readers today may not be as familiar with stories from the Bible as was

once the case, but it is probably reasonable to assume that everybody will have

heard of Noah and his ark. Together with his family and an assortment of animals,

the Bible tells us that Noah survived the flood and when the waters receded, he

and his children were the only people left to repopulate the earth; everybody else

having drowned. This is eerily reminiscent of one of those so-called bottlenecks in

human evolution when humanity has been reduced to a small number of individuals

and very nearly died out altogether. The Toba catastrophe theory, for instance,

suggests that around 70,000 years ago, the entire human race was reduced to no

more than 10,000 individuals (BBC, 2003). Be that as it may, Noah and his wife,

along with his three sons and their wives were the last remnant of humanity after

the Great Flood. As the Bible puts it,

The sons of Noah who went out of the boat were Shem, Ham and Japheth.

(Ham was the father of Canaan). These three sons of Noah were the ancestors

of all the peoples on earth (Gen. 9:18)

 39

And then, something awful happened to the only family in the whole world.

Noah got drunk, took off his clothes and lay down naked in his tent. His son

Ham went into the tent and saw his father naked. He then went and told his

brothers. Whether he was making fun of his father, we cannot know, but at any

rate his brothers Shem and Japheth took a cloak and, walking backwards so that

they did not see their father’s nakedness, they covered him up. It has been

necessary to relate this curious story, because the consequences were so serious

and lasted for centuries. When Noah sobered up and heard that one of his sons had

seen him naked, he cursed both Ham and his son Canaan, saying;

A curse on Canaan!

He will be a slave to his brothers.

Give praise to the Lord, the God of Shem!

Canaan will be the slave of Shem.

May God cause Japheth to increase!

May his descendants live with the people of Shem!

Canaan will be the slave of Japheth

(Gen. 9:25-27).

It may seem incredible to the modern reader, but for hundreds of years this

passage was used as a justification for everything from the transatlantic slave

trade to segregated schools in the United States and apartheid in late twentieth

century South Africa.

Properly to understand the idea of religious racism, it is necessary to

understand a little of the geopolitical situation in the ancient world and also one
 40

or two words of Hebrew. The word ‘ham’ in Hebrew means ‘hot’. Ham’s sons

were, according to another passage in the Book of Genesis, Canaan, Egypt, Libya

and Cush. The Hebrews traced their descent from Shem. Moses led them to the

land of Canaan and declared it to be the promised land. Everything now fitted in.

Those living in Canaan were the descendants of Ham and his son, who had been

cursed. Their destiny was to be servants of Shem and his offspring, which meant

that the Hebrews had a perfect right to appropriate the land for themselves. It

requires no great stretch of the imagination to guess that the story of Canaan

being cursed by Noah was written specifically to exculpate the Hebrews when they

took over somebody else’s land.

The other children of Ham, besides Canaan, were Egypt, Libya and Cush. Egypt

and Libya are of course in Africa and Cushi is a term still used today in modern

Hebrew to indicate a black person. Ham means hot, so obviously Ham’s

descendants are those living in hot parts of the world; Africans, in other words.

Today, all this probably sounds quite mad to the average reader, but it was

exceedingly useful to those who wished to enslave Africans and other people and

colonise their lands. It was generally reckoned by the church that the children of

Japheth were the Europeans. Since Ham’s son and his children were to be slaves of

Japheth, this meant that the trade in African slaves was not only economically

very advantageous, but it was also sanctioned, indeed commanded, by scripture.

The Jewish scholars who moved to Babylon after the temple in Jerusalem fell

to the Romans in 70 AD wrote a comprehensive guide to the practice of Judaism

which is today still studied. It is called the Talmud and it contains many curious

little anecdotes and snippets of folklore. Among these is the information that Ham

was a sinful man and that his progeny are both degenerate and also have black
 41

skins (Gossett, 1963). Other Jewish writers had much the same idea. In the twelfth

century a merchant and traveller called Benjamin of Tudela visited the south of

Egypt. There, he saw people who, according to his account, were,

like animals, eat of the herbs that grow on the banks of the Nile and in their

fields. They go about naked and have not the intelligence of ordinary men.

They cohabit with their sisters and anyone they can find. They are taken as

slaves and sold in Egypt and neighbouring countries. These sons of Ham are

black slaves

(Hess, 1965).

All these stories and legends, backing up as they did the peculiar story found in the

Book of Genesis, provided a perfect justification for the exploitation of Africa by

unscrupulous Europeans. After all, this was divinely sanctioned; the Bible itself

said that the children of Ham would be the servants of Japheth and his children.

Seldom can financial expediency have tied in so happily with religious duty!

The exploration of the Americas and exploitation of Africa both took off during

the early sixteenth century. The export of slaves from Africa became very big

business in Portugal at this time. By 1540 somewhere in the region of 12,000 slaves

a year were being brought to Portugal. It was estimated that 10 % of the

population of Lisbon, the capital city, were enslaved Africans (Grant, 2009). For

the next 250 years or so, the idea that black Africans were by God’s decree

destined to be slaves allowed the transatlantic slave trade to take off, without

anybody’s conscience needing to be unduly troubled.

 42

By the time of the Enlightenment which took place in Europe in the eighteenth

century, doubts about the precise accuracy of the Bibles were being openly voiced,

and more naturalistic explanations sought for much of what was found in scripture,

especially the stories of the Old Testament. Many religious people though clung on

with great determination to the idea that the Bible provided a complete

explanation for everything in the world. Even today, almost a third of people in

the United States believe that the Bible is to be taken literally (Jones, 2011). In

America, as in South Africa, such piety provided a handy excuse for discrimination

against those of African origin.

Throughout the nineteenth century American slaveowners and apologists for

slavery held two Biblical texts to the forefront of their minds; one from the very

first book of the Bible and the other from near the end. The first of these, about

the curse of Ham, we have already looked at. The second is from St Paul’s Epistle

to the Ephesians and in it the founder of Christianity as we know it today endorsed

the institution of slavery. St Paul said,

Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling; and do it with

sincere heart, as though you were serving Christ. Do this not only when they

are watching you, because you want to gain their approval; but with all your

heart do what God wants, as slaves of Christ. Do your work as slaves

cheerfully, as though you served the Lord, and not merely human beings.

Remember that the Lord will reward everyone, whether slave or free, for the

good work they do

(Eph, 6:5-8).
 43

These were useful verses to show any slaves who became converts to Christianity,

ensuring that they understood that their slavery was part of a system set up and

sanctified by the Lord (Rae, 2018). Even with the abolition of slavery, following

the end of the American Civil War, these sentiments lingered on in the minds of

many white people, finding expression in segregation and the Jim Crow laws which

became a feature of the southern states until well into the twentieth century

(Sutton, 2014).

Incredibly, the curse of Ham was still being advanced as a proper basis for race

relations as late as 1997. In that year the founder of modern creationism, Henry

Morris, published a book called The Beginning of the World: A Scientific Study of

Genesis 1-11. Henry Morris had, in the early 1960s, revived the idea of taking the

Bible literally as an historical record of the world. After publishing The Genesis

Flood in 1961, he wrote a number of other books which promoted what we now

call young earth creationism. Then in 1997, just a few years before the turn of the

millennium, when he was only a year from his eightieth birthday, he wrote a book

which included the following passage;

Their future will be one of service—providing mainly for the material and

physical needs of mankind. Shem, on the other hand, with his concern for the

Lord and His honor, will through his descendants lead men to know and follow

God. Japheth also, with his more serious approach to life and its meaning, will

see his descendants enlarged geographically and mentally, coming to dwell

finally in the spiritual house built by the children of Shem. The children of

Ham, however, even those of his youngest and least responsible son, Canaan,

will have to be content with giving service to both Shem and Japheth
 44

providing the material basis of human society, upon which the spiritual and

intellectual concerns of mankind can be superimposed

(Morris, 1997).

The Enlightenment, the abolition of slavery in America, the Civil Rights movement

and the end of apartheid in South Africa had seemingly passed the author by. He

still believed that black people were, by divine command, intended to be servants

of white masters.

The curse of Ham provided a very neat way of both acknowledging black people

as brothers belonging to a single human race, while at the same time relegating

them to an inferior position. With the rise of science in the eighteenth century

though, the Bible was increasingly viewed as being just a book like any other;

inspired by God perhaps, but still open to criticism and analysis. The justification

for oppressing black people on the basis of a few stray verses in the Book of

Genesis was beginning to look a little weak. It was time for science to take the

lead and offer a rational and down-to-earth theory which would explain why

Europeans were better than Africans and white men more suited to invade the

lands occupied by black people and to impose their rule upon them, rather than

the other way round.

 45

Chapter 3

The Birth of Scientific Racism

The beliefs described in the previous chapter were predicated on a common origin

for humanity. Everybody in the world came from one place at a certain time. This

is known as ‘monogenesis’. It will perhaps not have escaped notice that we still

hold to a similar belief today. Most readers will have heard of the so-called

‘Mitochondrial Eve’. This the most recent matrilineal common ancestor or MRCA;

the woman from whom all modern humans are descended. It is thought that she

lived in Africa roughly 150,000 years ago. She was not of course the only woman

living at that time; she was not literally like the Eve of the Bible. It is simply that

all maternal heritage ultimately leads back to her.

When first scientists began questioning whether the Bible is completely

reliable in matters of cosmology, geology and biology they looked with fresh eyes

on the peoples of the world; the white Europeans, sallow-skinned Chinese with

their epicanthic eye folds and dark-skinned Africans. So different were these

populations in appearance, achievement and character, or so it seemed, that the

obvious conclusion was that they were actually different species. Black Africans in

particular had, on the face of it, very little in common with those white people

who came from the vastly more sophisticated societies of western Europe. It was

surely unlikely that the two groups had any common heritage. This led to the

theory of polygeny, known sometimes as multi-regionalism.

The multi-regional hypothesis holds that the populations belonging to different

ethnicities actually arose independently in various parts of the world. Such ideas
 46

of course ran counter to the orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church and were at

first seen as daring heresies. Rather than the three sons of Noah having given rise

to the races of Asia, Africa and Europe, which would of course make all men

brothers under the skin, the idea was mooted that modern humans had evolved

separately in different parts of the world and that this was the best explanation

for the observed variations in development; particularly in Africa. Ernst Haeckel,

Professor of Zoology at the German city of Jena in the nineteenth century, was an

enthusiastic supporter of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he applied to

what he thought were the various human races of the world. Each had evolved

independently from primates in different places. In Africa, black people had

evolved from great apes, in South-East Asia from orangutans and so on (Palmer,

2006).

Let us consider for a little the implications which would inevitably result, if it

should indeed be true that people from Africa, those from Europe and others from

the Far East really did belong to different species. This idea was so commonly held

that we need to think seriously about the practical consequences if many people

believed that it was so. Illustration 4 shows three different species; cats, dogs and

parrots.

4. Different aIQnimal species

 47

These are all completely separate of course and each has characteristics and

qualities which are unique to it. Conversely, each of those species lacks some of

the abilities possessed by the other two. We make no judgement about any of this,

but simply accept it as being so. What kind of abilities to the different species

have? This is an interesting line of enquiry.

Dogs are social animals and are also capable of being trained to do things.

They can be taught to herd sheep, jump through hoops and many other simple

accomplishments. At one time, troupes of performing dogs used to appear in circus

rings. One could get them to walk on their hind legs and balance on beachballs. A

fortune would have been waiting for the person who could have produced a similar

group of performing cats. This vision is so absurd, that we find ourselves smiling

involuntarily. None of us can imagine half a dozen cats following instructions and

doing as they are told in a circus ring. It is not lack of intelligence; this is simply

not in their nature. Parrots, on the other hand, can be trained to do things like

ride miniature bicycles and solve simple jigsaw puzzles. They are also able to

mimic, or parrot, spoken human language. So much for three different animal

species.

Illustration 5 shows the same principle applied to humanity and represents,

incidentally, the commonly held view during the nineteenth century. Here, instead

of cats, dogs and parrots, we have Caucasians, Negroes and Orientals. Using the

same perspective that we used with the animals, it is possible to think in similar

terms of these human types. Perhaps, in the same way as with cats and dogs,
 48

white people and black people are capable of different achievements. Possibly,

they have a different level of intelligence or perhaps a different type of

intelligence? Once one has bought in, as it were, to this view of humanity, it will

be found that it seems to explain a good deal which is commonly observed.

5. Supposed human species

Obviously, crossing a parrot with a dog would be a horrible act against nature

and most people would be repulsed by the product of such a union. Many people

felt the same repugnance in the nineteenth century for children who were the

offspring of marriages between black people and white. This, like our mythical

parrot-dog hybrid, was just felt to be plainly wrong. Then again, how easily such a

set-up would explain the differing average IQs which are found between ethnic

groups. If they belong to different species, then it would be quite natural to find

that some species were better endowed mentally than others. The whole system

was utterly wrong and yet one can see the attraction.

There were still those who believed in a common origin for all humanity,

either in Africa or Asia, but many of these people thought that something must
 49

have happened to different groups of humans; some rising higher and becoming

capable of abstract thought and others remaining at a primitive level. Charles

Darwin was one who held this view. The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species

gave a boost to theories of scientific racism. Its author, although opposed to

slavery and the mistreatment of black people, believed that there was a definite

hierarchy of races, with of course the Anglo-Saxons at the top. He thought that

people in South America and Africa were on the level of the primitive ancestors of

the Europeans and that this was reflected in the size of their brains. Writing of his

travels to South America in the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin described his

reactions on seeing some of the native inhabitants of the southernmost tip of South

America,

The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and

broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed

to my mind – such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and

daubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with

excitement and their expression was wild, startled and distrustful.

(Darwin, 1845).

In a later book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles

Darwin attempted to apply his ideas about the evolution of animals to the human

race. He concluded that there were no separate human species on several grounds.

For one, he observed that all humans could interbreed and produce fertile

offspring, which militated against the idea that black people and white, Chinese

and native Americans, were all from different species. He also said that,
 50

But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as

distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many

cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed

(Darwin, 1871).

It will be recalled that the same point was made in Chapter 1, that there are no

clear lines of demarcation between nations and races, but they all blur one into

the other.

Despite coming down firmly on the side of the view supported by modern

scientific evidence, that all humans have a common origin in Africa, Darwin still

found evidence that the size of the skulls of Africans and Europeans, that is to say

their capacity and brain size, were different. There was nothing surprising about

this and it tied in perfectly with his research into animal species. Merely because

all humans belonged to a single species, that did not mean that there could not be

regional differences between populations in physical size or the capacity of skulls.

Although Darwin and many of those who supported his ideas asserted that all

humanity was one species, there were certainly great differences, both physical

and cultural between populations in different continents. Most of sub-Saharan

Africa in the nineteenth century had, at best, reached the iron Age in some parts.

In many places, the inhabitants of the continent had not even reached that far and

were effectively still living in the stone age. The contrast between the conditions

seen in the equatorial rain forests of Africa and the cities of Western Europe could

hardly have been greater or more pronounced. This enormous disparity in living

conditions and achievement cried out for an explanation. That black Africans and
 51

white Europeans were different physically was obvious. Why they should have

progressed at such a dramatically different rate was not.

Readers may be surprised to learn that it is only in the last 50 or 60 years that

the idea of different human races arising independently in different parts of the

world at different times was finally shown to be false. As late as 1962 one of the

most famous of all American anthropologists, a professor at Harvard and also

President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, published his

masterwork, in which he demonstrated that there were actually five human races

and these had all emerged separately in various geographical locations.

Carleton S. Coon was convinced that white people had become properly human

before black Africans and had therefore a head start when it came to developing

and founding civilisations. In his book The Origin of Races, Coon claimed to have

studied, ‘every scrap of existing information about every single fossil-man bone

and tooth in the world’ (Coon, 1962). He concluded that there existed in the world

five separate human races. These were the Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Congoid, Capoid

and Australoid. He concluded that human races had existed as long ago as half a

million years in the past and that each race had slowly evolved to become fully

human. This had happened,

Not once but five times, as each sub-species, living in its own territory, passed

a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state

(Coon, 1962)

Even 60 years ago, Coon’s old-fashioned views caused raised eyebrows in the

United States, particularly among scientists. Not only was there not a shred of
 52

evidence to support his ideas, despite his fame and apparently meticulous

research, there could hardly have been a worse time to write in such a vein.

America was moving along the path of desegregation and in another two years the

Civil Rights Act would be passed which would set the whole issue of racial equality

on a sound, legal footing. To hear that black people had only just emerged from a

semi-human condition, whereas whites had been fully human for a quarter of a

million years was hardly likely to help efforts to establish a fairer society and

eradicate racial prejudice.

Ideas and theories do not emerge from a vacuum; floating down to earth from

some Platonic realm of pure thought. Rather, they are devised by men and women

living in certain eras under particular economic conditions. These factors are

bound to affect the ideas which are propagated. In the nineteenth century,

scientific racism was an idea for which there was very fertile ground, for reasons

which we shall now look at briefly.

In Chapter 2 we touched lightly on the great advantages which would accrue to

merchants, explorers, colonisers and slave traders if black people and others with

skins which were not as white as those of Europeans could be regarded as animals,

rather than human beings. Pope Paul III scotched this idea when he ruled that all

the peoples of the world, including those in the Americas, were the children of

Adam and Eve. Luckily, a get-out clause was devised by making use of the Curse of

Ham. With new theories of human origins emerging, another reason was needed

for taking possession of other people’s lands and treating them as second-class

citizens in their own countries. If black people were not doomed by a curse

uttered 4,000 years ago, then what possible grounds could be found for keeping
 53

them in subjugation? The answer to this conundrum was brilliantly simply. It would

be done for their own good!

Britain’s drive south into Africa and America’s conquest of the West, first

across the continent of North America and then on into the Pacific Ocean,

happened at roughly the same time. Both were exercises in empire-building and

grabbing the lands belonging to other people, but it proved possible to disguise

both as philanthropic enterprises, rather than theft and murder on an industrial

scale. It was scientific racism which provided the best possible motive for the

seizure of the territory and resources of other, weaker nations.

The invasion and permanent occupation of vast areas of land was claimed by

those undertaking the operations to be for the benefit of those living there. The

British had seen the pitiful and squalid conditions under which the natives of Africa

lived; often on the verge of starvation, not infrequently in terror of their lives

from neighbouring tribes. They had no houses, wore scanty and indecent clothing

and had never heard of the redeeming power of Jesus Christ. They did not of

course know any better, because they were inherently less capable of looking after

themselves or reaching any higher level of civilisation without the assistance of the

white race. Surely, Europeans had a duty to help their less able brethren develop

and grow?

This was of course the most frightful cant imaginable. Burgeoning industrial

nations like Britain at that time require two things if they are to flourish. One of

these is sources of free, or at the very least cheap, raw materials and the other is

ever-expanding markets for their manufactured goods. Colonialism fitted the bill

perfectly, as it supplied both these things. Palm oil, rubber, wood, ivory and gold

were transported from Africa to Britain and in return the products of factories in
 54

Birmingham and Sheffield were exported to the colonies where they were sold to

settlers and natives. It was upon such trade that the prosperity of Victorian Britain

was founded. Put like that, it sounds like the exploitation of the weak and

vulnerable by the strong and unscrupulous. This was an unpalatable thought though

for respectable Victorians. Few of us wish to think of ourselves as tyrants and

oppressors. So it was that the myth of the ‘White man’s burden’ came into being,

although the phrase itself was not articulated until the very end of the nineteenth

century. The concept though was, long before that, an integral part of the

dishonest claim that the wholesale expropriation of the land and resources of

others was being done for their own ultimate good. The thesis was that the white

people of Europe and America had a sacred duty to bring the blessings of

civilisation into the unenlightened parts of the world. The justification for this

elaborate charade was that those whose skins were darker than the average white

man were inferior and were being led, like children, for their own good. In this

way, scientific racism was an essential part of British and American history.

In America, this process went by the name of ‘Manifest Destiny’, an expression

coined in 1845 by the journalist John L. Sullivan in August of that year when he

wrote that,

It is the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted

to us by providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

(Rayner & Stapley, 2002)

The temptation to compare this idea with the Nazi concept of lebensraum is all

but overpowering. In plain language, the noble ideas of democracy and the rule of
 55

law which the Americans had brought from Europe were so manifestly, or

obviously, better than any other system which might been encountered, that they

had a sacred duty to impose it on those with darker skins than their own.

Illustration 6 shows a cartoon which sums up the supposed attitude of Britain

and America at that time towards those people whose lands they had conquered

and occupied. John Bull and Uncle Sam are seen labouring away manfully as they

do their best to carry baskets loaded with all manner of primitive, backward,

child-like or dangerous ethnic minorities across rocks marked ‘Barbarism’,

‘Ignorance, ‘Superstition’ and so on towards the ultimate goal of civilisation. This

arduous and thankless task is apparently being carried out in a spirit of altruism

and a desire to improve the lot of the less fortunate.

6. The White Man’s Burden

 56

The cartoon described above, and labelled ‘The White Man’s Burden’, was

inspired by a poem written by the English author Rudyard Kipling that year, to

celebrate the capture of the Philippines; an archipelago some 8,000 miles from

North America. Kipling saw this blatant piece of empire-building as an American

desire to civilise nations less sophisticated than their own and ‘The White Man’s

Burden’ is really a hymn in praise of colonialism. The first two verses read;

Take up the White Man’s burden -

Send forth the best ye breed -

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild -

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden -

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain,

To seek another’s profit,

And work another’s gain.

 57

Put like this of course, the whole thing seems so absurdly simple. Both the United

States and Britain were intent on seeking ‘another’s profit’ and working ‘another’s

gain’. The only possible reason they might have to take over large stretches of

Africa or the islands of the Pacific Ocean would be to raise up the poor people they

found there and bring them to the same status as the white people. One would

need to be exceedingly foolish or phenomenally naïve to take all this at face value.

It is against the background of two powerful nations who perceived themselves

in need of new territories and sources of raw materials that we must understand

the popularity of racism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even if it

was conceded that Darwin was correct in saying that humanity was not divided into

different species, it was possible to see how colonialism could be neatly justified

by his theory of evolution.

It is a curious fact that many of the phrases which we automatically associate

with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution were coined by other people,

including his most ardent disciples. A case in point is to be seen in the one book of

Darwin’s of which everybody has heard, On The Origin of Species. Incredible as it

might seem, the word ‘evolution’ did not appear once in the first edition. It was

hinted at only in the very last word of the book. The final paragraph of On The

Origin of Species reads as follows,

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted

object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the

higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its

several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;

and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
 58

gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most

wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

(Darwin, 1859)

‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ has nothing to do with Darwin, but comes rather

from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson and even the expression which is inextricably

linked in the minds of many of us with Darwin’s theory of evolution, ‘survival of

the fittest’, had nothing to do with him.

Talking of ‘survival of the fittest’ brings us back to the subject of racism,

because the phrase was first used by a man called Herbert Spencer in his book

Principles of Biology, published five years after On the Origin of Species. Darwin

had no more loyal devotee than Herbert Spencer, whose name is all but

synonymous with the concept of ‘social Darwinism’. Just as animals struggle for

survival, competing against each other for territory and food, so too did people

like Spencer believe that human populations fight against each other in the same

way for scarce resources and that those who won such battles proved themselves

fittest to survive by virtue of their strength and cunning. It was a doctrine

perfectly suited to the heyday of British imperialism, because it was as plain as a

pikestaff that those winning this life or death struggle for survival in most of the

world were neither sub-Saharan Africans nor those in the Indian sub-continent, but

rather the white nations of western Europe and North America. Science proved

that Anglo-Saxon domination of the world was in perfect accordance with the

latest discoveries in the field of biology.

The term Anglo-Saxon is used in this context not merely as synonym for ‘white’,

but rather to denote the particular kind of white people who were, at least
 59

according to both many Victorians and later the Nazis in Germany, at the very top

of the human tree. As scientific racism developed, it had been found necessary to

create more than the three or four racial categories which had been recognised at

the end of the eighteenth century. The white race itself was split into a dozen

types, some of which were scarcely human. Once again, this happy discovery tied

by great good fortune into another of the political and national situations which

Britain faced in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was neatly

expounded by another of Charles Darwin’s supporters, an Anglican clergyman

called Charles Kingsley.

The only connection these days in which anybody is likely to have heard of

Charles Kingsley is as the author of the children’s book The Water-Babies, and

also, although not as widely read today as was once the case, Westward Ho! There

was a lot more to Kingsley though than writing fiction for children. He was also one

of Charles Darwin’s chief supporters and advocates. Before going further, we may

reflect that although Darwin’s own views on race were mild for the time, the same

cannot be said for his more devoted followers and it is undeniably the case that

some of the ideas later adopted so vigorously by the Nazis saw their first iteration

in the views expressed by English champions of the theory of evolution. This is of

interest because it demonstrates the wrong turn taken by some of those espousing

the idea of scientific racism and shows us why the very thought of racism is viewed

with horror and disgust by almost everybody; at least when speaking of the matter

in public.

Scientific racism was brought into disrepute at a very early stage partly

because so many of the early strands were plainly mistaken and also because these
 60

wrongheaded notions led directly to the Holocaust. In the process, the very

concept of scientific racism became tainted.

Charles Kingsley has been called ‘Darwin’s other Bulldog’ (Hales, 2012). The

reference is of course to Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s fiercest and most tenacious

advocate, who was popularly known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’. Charles Kingsley,

despite being a minister of the Church of England, was also fanatically keen on the

idea of evolution. He was though hardly a typical Victorian clergyman, as he

combined his Christianity with a belief in the Norse gods. Kingsley thought that the

ancestors of the English and Germans had actually fought alongside the chief of

these gods, Odin, and that the British royal family were descended from Odin

(Horsman, 1976). These unconventional beliefs were very similar to those adopted

in the 1920s and 1930s by the Nazis, of course. They too were very taken with the

old, pagan gods and, like Kingsley, thought that there was something special about

the Anglo-Saxons and Teutonic nations; special from a racial viewpoint, that is.

We see in ‘Darwin’s other Bulldog’ the flowering of some of the more peculiar

ideas about race which were seen as the nineteenth century progressed and which

were to have such disastrous consequences in the century which followed. It was,

for Kingsley and others like him, not enough to think merely in terms of

Caucasians, a white race if you like. He was obsessed with the idea of wholly

imaginary, although supposedly scientific, differences between the nations which

made up Europe. He regarded the Irish as being sub-human; Untermenschen as the

Nazis would later have it.

Writing to his sister in 1860, after travelling through Ireland in the wake of the

Great Famine, Kingsley had this to say,

 61

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of

horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault, I believe that there are not

only more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better, more

comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see

white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so

much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.

(Michie, 1993)

Not that this was a novel idea of Charles Kingsley’s; it was part of the strange

ideas which were growing side by side with the acceptance of evolution, of both

animals and humans. Illustration 7 is from a scientific book published some years

after Kingsley wrote the letter to his sister. It shows three examples of human

types; one black, one Anglo-Saxon, or Anglo-Teutonic as it is called here, and the

other Irish. The caption to these images is priceless and deserves to be quoted in

full for the light which it sheds on the misguided and inaccurate theories about

race which were current at that time,

The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African race, who

thousands of years ago spread themselves through Spain over Western Europe.

Their remains are found in the barrows, or burying places, in sundry parts of

these countries. The skulls are of low, prognathous type. They came to Ireland

and mixed with the natives of the South and West, who themselves are

supposed to have been of low type and descendants of savages of the Stone

Age, who in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never

been out-competed in the healthy struggle for life, and thus made way,
 62

according to the laws of nature, for superior races.

(Constable, 1888)

7. The Victorian view of human races

It is clear from the drawings that the Irishman has a face and skull far more

similar to the African than that of the noble-looking Anglo-Teutonic specimen. We

see here the prototype of the racial theories eventually adopted in Germany after

Hitler came to power in 1933. Europeans were to be classified as Nordics or Aryans

in the north, to which category both the English and Germans belonged. In the

west were the Celts, who were more primitive. Moving south through Europe, one

came to members of the Alpine and then Mediterranean races. Go east and one

would encounter Slavs and Asiatics. All this was to be codified into German law in

the years which preceded the Second World War.

 63

Different races, at least according to many Victorian scientists, could be easily

identified by the measurements and shape of their skulls. This measuring and

calculating of ratios and proportions of the human skull became known as

craniometry. The nineteenth century had seen a number of crank scientific

theories relating to skulls. Phrenology was one of these. It was asserted that by

feeling the outside of a person’s head, it was possible to give a detailed account of

the character and temperament. There were areas which indicated foresight and

others which were indicators of moral deficiency. It was of course all nonsense. In

the 1870s Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso came up with a systematic study

of the skull and proportions of the face which he thought made it possible to

identify criminals. Lombroso believed that some people are born criminals and that

by discovering such attributes as big ears and asymmetry of the facial features,

one could identify thieves and rapists. Different crimes were for him associated

with varying physical features and his theories were hugely popular across the

whole of Europe.

It is interesting to note that we still subconsciously subscribe to many of the

weird theories about determining ancestry or character by examining the shape of

faces and heads. To give one instance of this, strong chins which jut forward are

sometimes taken as indicating a forceful and determined character, in contrast to

the weakness evidenced by a receding chin. Those whose eyes are set closely

together are sometimes perceived as being less trustworthy and honest than those

individuals whose eyes are larger and set further apart. Although we seldom

examine these theories in a logical way, they can still affect how we regard

complete strangers.
 64

The basic process of craniometry for determining the race to which a skull

belongs is simplicity itself. Illustration 8 shows a human skull with a carpenter’s

rule laid across it. By measuring the widest point of the skull and then dividing

that measurement by the length, a single number will be produced. This is known

as the cephalic index and it was once believed that since the proportions and

shapes of skulls tended to be different in people from Europe, Africa and Asia, that

one could thus assign the owner of any skull, whether a living person or ancient

skeleton, to one of the main races.

8. Determining the race of a human skull by measurement

 65

Illustration 9 is of skulls belonging to the three main races which were supposed

to exist in the nineteenth century. The first one, on the left is noticeably narrower

than the others and belongs to a black person. The next is a white person’s skull

and the last belonged in life to somebody from East Asia.

9. The skulls of different races

There were other important measurements and ratios which could, according to

those practicing craniometry, be helpful in sub-diving racial groups. These

included things like the width of the nostrils and proportions of the bones at the

front of the skull. It need hardly be said that because humans on all continents

vary so greatly in their size, proportions and appearance, this ‘science’ proved to

be almost as valueless as phrenology.

 66

By the dawn of the twentieth century, ‘scientific racism’ was generally

accepted by educated people. Of course, there was very little that was scientific

about what was held to have been proved empirically. Measuring the width of a

human skull and then dividing this figure by the length to obtain the cephalic index

may have seemed at that time an infallible way of deciding whether a skull was

that of a Caucasian, Negroid or Mongloid, but it was anything but. For the reasons

which we have already discussed, that there are no sharp distinctions between one

ethnic group and another, these practices were futile, but surprisingly they still

linger on to this day and are now, by a great irony, cheerfully used by anti-racists

to prove their own peculiar theories.

Racism went hand in hand with eugenics, of which Charles Darwin’s cousin

Francis Galton was a proponent. Galton is perhaps better known today for his

pioneering of the idea of fingerprints as a reliable method for identifying

criminals. He may be seen in Illustration 10. The word ‘eugenics’ was devised by

Galton, of whom we shall have more to say later.

 67

10. Francis Galton, pioneer of both fingerprinting and Eugenics

Eugenics simply refers to the idea that just as we breed domestic animals to

improve their quality, so too is this possible with human beings. It was, like

scientific racism, to become inextricably tangled up with the Holocaust in the

years following the end of the Second World War and this fact alone was sufficient

to make it a taboo subject. From the very beginning therefore racism and eugenics

were linked together and those supporting either idea often held some very

unpleasant and untenable views.

Professor Ernst Haeckel was mentioned earlier in connection with his ideas on

polygenic origins for the human race. Illustration 11 shows the frontispiece from

Haeckel’s The History of Creation (Haeckel, 1880). The book was subtitled, The

Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes. It
 68

was meant to be a thoroughly modern account of how the human race had arisen,

according to all the latest evidence.

11. Different human and primate species, according to

some 19th century scientists

Looking at Illustration 11 we observe that the six human profiles are at the

top and beneath them are the profiles of six primates. Haeckel’s contention was

that this showed the proper hierarchy of human types. The very first is a white

European and we work our way down to No. 6, which is a native of Tasmania. Then

come the apes, beginning with No. 7, which is a gorilla. According to Professor

Haeckel, there existed a greater difference between the Tasmanian and the

European than between the Tasmanian and the gorilla.

From a scientific point of view, Haeckel’s perspective on race are utterly

misguided and wrong. Imagining that different species of ape, such as the gorilla

and orangutan were perfectly analogous to varying human ethnicities, was quite
 69

false. It was Haeckel’s belief that humanity was divided up into various species,

which we also know now to be untrue.

If Haeckel’s views on race are shocking, what are we to make of his opinions on

the subject of eugenics? In another book, published in 1904, Haeckel sets out

clearly the blueprint followed 30 years later by the Nazis. The title of The Wonders

of Life; A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy (Haeckel, 1904) is probably not

meant to be ironic, but in retrospect we can hardly view it as being anything else,

when we think of the events brought about by those who acted on the explicit

advice contained in the book. Haeckel makes no bones about his straightforward

approach to eugenics in a practical sense, saying,

Many experienced physicians, who practise their profession in a spirit of

sympathy and without dogmatic prejudice, have no scruple about cutting short

the sufferings of the incurable by a dose of morphia or cyanide of potassium

when they desire it; very often this painless end is a blessing both to the

invalids and their families. However, other physicians and most jurists are of

opinion that this act of sympathy is not right, or is even a crime; that it is the

duty of the physician to maintain the life of his patients as long as he can in all

circumstances. I should like to know why.

(Haeckel, 1904)

To find a German professor writing in this vein in the twentieth century, in the

country which organised and carried out the Holocaust 40 years later, is chilling

and helps to explain why scientific racism and eugenics fell into such disfavour in

the latter half of that century. The next chapter will deal in detail with the ghastly
 70

events which were the natural culmination of Haeckel’s strongly held opinions, but

a brief account of where this particular train of thought inexorably led might not

come amiss to end this chapter. First though, let us read about the kind of people

that the good professor had in mind.

We must class as a traditional dogma the wide-spread belief that man is bound

under all circumstances to maintain and prolong life, even when it has become

utterly useless—a source of pain to the incurable and of endless trouble to his

friends. Hundreds of thousands of incurables—lunatics, lepers, people with

cancer, etc.—are artificially kept alive in our modern communities, and their

sufferings are carefully prolonged, without the slightest profit to themselves or

the general body.

(Haeckel, 1904)

In 1940 the Nazis, acting on a direct order from Hitler, began murdering

disabled children (Sereny, 1974). This was done by gas chambers using carbon

monoxide gas. Later, the killing was expanded to include adults with disabilities

and mental illnesses. These were the ‘lunatics’ referred to by Ernst Haeckel in

1904. Two years later, the Nazis heeded Haeckel’s advice about the use of cyanide

for murder. In 1942, the first murders were carried out at the Auschwitz camp

using hydrogen cyanide (Rees, 2005). From the eugenics and scientific racism of

the Victorian period to the mass-murder of the Holocaust was a smooth,

continuous and direct transition.

Obviously, scientific racism is based upon the idea that intelligence and some

aspects of character or temperament are inherited, rather than learned. It has

 71

long been observed that intelligent people tend to have bright children. That this

is a combination of what we now call nature and nurture has also been known for

at least the last two and a half thousand years. Writing over 300 years before the

birth of Christ, the Greek philosopher Plato discussed in the Republic the role of

nature (physis) and nurture (trophe) in the formation of human character (Plato,

2007). It was not until the Victorian period that scientific efforts were made to

establish the precise nature of these two contributions to intelligence.

Unfortunately, the first person to conduct detailed research into the subject, the

man who coined the expression ‘nature versus nurture’ in that context, also left

behind an awful legacy which would serve to taint the idea of inherited

intelligence. Even today, there are those who give the whole thing a wide berth

and show a reluctance even to consider the matter too deeply.

Francis Galton, who may be seen in Illustration 10, was a cousin of Charles

Darwin. Galton had an idea that intelligence was largely inherited and rather than

men and women being born as blank slates, ready to be imprinted with education

and knowledge, a person’s ability to think and learn was fixed even before he or

she was born. This was a controversial idea at the time and Galton gathered

together a mass of evidence to show that he was right. The result of all this

research was a book called Hereditary Genius. Published in 1869, the book

examines the family trees of 415 distinguished and eminent men; writers,

statesmen, judges and scientists whom Galton thought showed signs of genius. He

found that their close blood relatives also became eminent in various fields and

the closer the relationship to his 415 distinguished people, the more likely this

was. For instance, 48 % of their sons were eminent. Aware that environment might

be the deciding factor, rather than blood, Galton examined as a control group
 72

Cardinals and Popes who had adopted distant relatives and raised them almost as

their sons. These boys did not seem to have the same chances of becoming famous

and accomplished as the genuine sons of geniuses.

One chapter of Hereditary Genius was called ‘The Comparable Worth of

Different Races’ and Francis Galton was in no doubt on the question. He wrote;

The number among the negroes of those men whom we should call half-witted

men, is very large. Every book in America alluding to negro servants is full of

instances. I was myself much impressed by this fact during my travels in

Africa. The mistakes the negroes made in their own matters, were so childish,

stupid and simpleton-like, as frequently to make me ashamed of my own

species.

(Galton, 1869).

Galton estimated that the black people with who he came into contact were

roughly ‘two grades’ lower than equivalent white people, which in modern terms is

about 15 points on the IQ scale.

In addition to being the first person to study in detail the concept of nature

versus nurture in connection with the development of intelligence, Francis Galton

also coined an entirely new word. It is one which is now viewed generally with

suspicion and distaste. Hardly anybody speaks of ‘eugenics’ today without

wrinkling the nose or pursing the lips disapprovingly. The aim of eugenics, as the

idea evolved over the course of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth

centuries, was to ‘breed out’ undesirable human traits such as inherited diseases

and feeble-mindedness. It was thought that eugenics would be able to raise the
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quality of the human race, by artificially speeding up evolution. This idea was later

enthusiastically taken up by the Nazis and resulted in the gassing of those with

learning difficulties or incurable disabilities. It has for this reason, been eyed very

much askance since the end of the Second World War.

Francis Galton realised that if his ideas about the heritability of intelligence

were true, then the place to look for conclusive evidence would be pairs of twins.

When he did so, he found what he interpreted to be confirmation of his theories.

At the time that he was conducting his research, the precise measurement of the

elusive quality of intelligence had not been standardised. It was only when tests

had been devised which would allow for an exact comparison between one person

and another in terms of intellectual ability that any further progress would be

made in the idea of inherited intelligence. When this was done, race very swiftly

become entangled with the business.

The first accurate intelligence test was developed in France in 1905 by Alfred

Binet and Theodore Simon (Colman, 1987). The original aim of the test was to

identify and classify those with what was then known as sub-normal intelligence. A

few years later, a German psychologist called William Stern invented what we now

think of as the intelligence quotient or IQ test. He thought that if one found a child

of 12 who was only functioning at the rate of the average five year-old, then by

dividing the boy or girl’s mental age by their chronological age it would be possible

to reduce intelligence to a single figure, which he termed the intelligence

quotient. It was Lewis Terman, a psychologist in the American university of

Stanford, who hit upon the idea of multiplying this figure by a hundred. This would

yield a simple number roughly between 50 and 150 and so obviate the need for
 74

fiddly decimal points. This became known as the Stanford-Binet test and is the

basis for all subsequent IQ tests.

Lewis Terman was an advocate of both intelligence testing and eugenics. Both

interests segued smoothly into scientific racism, in which Terman was also a firm

believer. It was this lethal combination of eugenics and the idea of inherited

intelligence, combined with racism, which led firstly to the Holocaust and then, as

a reaction to the excesses of the Nazi regime, the rise of the equalitarian dogma

from the 1950s to the present day. In a book published in 1916, Terman said;

In the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of high-grade

defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately

result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the

elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial

inefficiency.

(Terman, 1916)

After expressing the view that what were then termed ‘mental defectives’ were

far more common among black people, Lewis Terman went on to express just the

kind of opinion which in later years caused the idea of inherited intelligence to be

seen as the thin edge of an exceedingly large and evil wedge;

There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be

allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a

grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.

(Terman, 1916)
 75

However awful the views of men like Galton and Terman might strike us to be

today, there is something curious about the observations of both, which ties in

with something at which we looked in the introduction to this book. It will be

recalled that research conducted by a professor from the University of Oxford

showed that a disproportionate number of black children apparently showed signs

of either mental health problems or had been classified as having Moderate

Learning Difficulties (MLD). These are young people who would, at the time that

Terman was working, have been regarded, to use the terminology of the times, as

‘morons’. We saw that Francis Galton suggested the same thing as Terman, writing

that the number of black people who would be regarded as ‘half-witted’ was

higher than expected in a given population. If we leave eugenics aside, and also

modern ideas on racial prejudice, we are left with what may be a significant point.

In 1869, 1916 and 2019, experts in psychology and education all remarked that a

larger proportion of black individuals appear to present with learning difficulties

than would be expected from a white population. We shall return to this point

later, but for the moment I ask readers to hold it in mind, without making any

judgement on the possible causes of these observations over a period of 150 years.

As an aside, we might mention that in one American state, this problem has

been effectively dealt with in a very simple and entirely cost-free manner. As a

result of a court case in 1979, known as the ‘Larry P. case’, it is unlawful in

California for psychologists to administer IQ tests to African-Americans for the

purpose of assessing whether they have low intelligence and therefore need

special educational provision. The tests were ruled by a court that year to be

culturally biased against black children (Frisby & Henry, 2016). Curiously enough,
 76

this supposed bias does not seemingly militate against the interests of children

from Chinese or Korean families.

The measurement of IQs has fallen a little from favour in the last 40 or 50

years. At one time, the IQ test was regarded as a gold standard by which children

and adults could be neatly classified and pigeonholed into compartments such as

‘sub-normal’, ‘normal’ and ‘genius’. The entire British educational system was,

from the end of the Second World War until the 1970s geared to a form of IQ test

and it was the posthumous fall from grace of the man whose ideas led to this state

of affairs which in part brought the entire notion of inherited intelligence into

disrepute. We must leave the details of this affair until Chapter 6, as it ties in with

the events which caused the very idea of eugenics and scientific racism to fall

from favour in the most spectacular way imaginable, which is the subject of our

next chapter.
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Chapter 4

The Zenith of Scientific Racism

It may have been generally agreed in nineteenth century Europe and America that

black people were less intelligent and more childlike than the average European,

but the same could most definitely not be said of another ethnic group. There

might have been widespread prejudice against, and dislike of, Jews, but nobody

doubted for a moment that their intelligence was at least equal to that of any

white European. It was not their intelligence that was doubted, but rather their

temperament and character and these things too were treated as being heritable.

It was racism directed at Jews, rather than that with black people as its target

which triggered the reaction which resulted in a reversal of popular view and the

demise of scientific racism in the twentieth century.

Hostility towards Jews had been endemic in Europe for many centuries before

anybody thought to formulate the matter as a scientific hypothesis. Until the

nineteenth century, this hatred had been motivated, like the general attitude

towards black people, by religious considerations. Just as the children of Ham

were the subject of a curse which doomed them to perpetual servitude, so too

were the Jews destined to be a wandering people who lived by exploiting the

nations where they found lodging. The curse under which they were placed related

of course to the death of Jesus Christ and there was solid scriptural reason to

discriminate against them and treat them less favourably than other people. This is

known as the ‘Blood Curse’ and it had a great influence on how people in European

countries viewed Jews.

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We have seen that the Curse of Ham was founded on the flimsiest and most

unconvincing Biblical evidence of a verse from the Old Testament. Nevertheless, it

provided more than sufficient justification for treating black people as second-

class citizens and denying them the same rights as white people. The Blood Curse

may be found in the New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew gives an account of

the trial of Jesus before the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate. It is a dramatic

scene. The evidence against Jesus is scanty and feeble, but Pilate wished to curry

favour with the crowd. His wife had had a bad dream about Jesus though and

urged her husband to free him. After the crowd, supposedly urged on by officials

from the temple, called for the crucifixion of Jesus, the climax of the drama is

reached,

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was

made, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am

innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.

Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our

children.

(Matt. 27: 24, 25).

When we talk of ‘washing our hands’ of something or other, we are of course

unconsciously referring to this passage of scripture. The significant part of the

thing for now is the claim that a crowd of Jews 2,000 years ago said that the blood

of Jesus should be upon them and their children. These words were taken quite

literally and interpreted to mean that all Jews were accursed because of the

incident.
 79

Jews were the target of hatred in Europe for a very long time for being the ones

responsible for Jesus’ death. Massacres and expulsions took place regularly in most

countries, as did demands that they convert to Christianity. Even then, those who

had converted were still viewed with suspicion and watched for signs of backsliding

by celebrating the Jewish sabbath or Holy Days. The concept of Jews as being a

separate race was not to emerge until the nineteenth century. After all, they

could stop being Jewish simply by the act of baptism. Conversion cut both ways of

course, for it was not unknown for Christians, even members of the clergy, to

become Jews. In 1275 a Dominican friar in England called Robert de Reddinge

converted to Judaism; being circumcised and marrying a Jewish woman. This was

something of an own goal for the Jewish community, for it allegedly resulted in

Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from England (Singer, 1901). If Jews could

become Christians like anybody else and vice versa, then it was obviously not the

case that they were a different race or even ethnicity.

It was, ironically, a Jew who first advanced the notion in print that Jews

belonged to a different race from the general populations in the countries in which

they lived. Benjamin Disraeli is better known today as a Conservative Prime

Minister during Queen Victoria’s reign than he is for his novels, but he was the

author of a dozen, including the first English political novel, Coningsby. Disraeli

was of course himself a Jew, although baptised into the Church of England at the

age of 12. In Coningsby, he wrote,

The Jews, for example, independently of the capital qualities for citizenship

which they possess in their industry, temperance, and energy and vivacity of

mind, are a race essentially monarchical, deeply religious...

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(Disraeli, 1844)

The decline in importance of religion and the rise of science in nineteenth

century Europe meant that the old ideas of animosity towards Jews based on their

supposed guilt for deicide began to look a little old fashioned. The increasing

popularity of, and interest in, ideas about scientific racism which accelerated after

the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 provided an excellent

substitute for the hatred of Jews based upon their lack of Christianity. It allowed

modern people who had no truck with superstitions about God to dislike Jews

because they were members of a different race; one which was parasitical upon

the nations of Europe. European ethno-nationalism in the latter half of the

nineteenth century had the effect of making Jews appear as intruders in otherwise

ethnically homogenous countries (Beller, 2007). As the flames of nationalism were

kindled in the countries of Eastern Europe which sought to free themselves from

the Russian Empire, so too was the old hatred of Jews based upon their role in the

death of Jesus Christ transmuted into race-hatred (de Lange, 1984).

On 9 September 1855 a baby boy was born in the quiet little seaside town of

Southsea, which is on the south coast of England. Britain was approaching the

height of her imperial power in the world; less than a year earlier the Charge of

the Light Brigade had taken place in the Crimean Peninsula, a famous action in the

Crimean War. The child’s father was an admiral in the Royal Navy and the

prognosis was promising for the new-born baby, that he would take a traditional

path to respectability and success in Victorian Britain. As it happened, the baby,

who was named Houston Stewart Chamberlain was destined to inspire both the

most dreadful war and also the worst genocide the world had ever seen. This
 81

would in turn end by tarnishing forever the idea of scientific racism and causing

those who thought that there might be something in the idea of inherited traits of

intelligence and character among varying ethnicities to be viewed as dangerous,

right-wing fanatics; men and women who were either foolish and misguided or

downright wicked.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was a sickly child whose mother died when he

was just a year old. Because of this, he was raised by his grandmother and spent

most of his childhood in France. His poor health led to his spending winters in the

warmer climate of Italy and Spain (Field, 1981). This lifestyle prevented the young

boy from forming close friendships and he became a solitary and thoughtful child.

Although his father hoped that Chamberlain would embark upon a military career

or, failing that, take up a post in the colonial service, his son had other ideas and

ended up studying science at the University of Geneva. It was here that he became

fascinated by the idea of scientific racism. Of course, this was not at that time a

subject which was regarded with such distaste as is now the case.

Chamberlain became enamoured of all things German, learning the language

well enough to write a massive academic book in German. His second marriage was

to Richard Wagner’s daughter (Field, 1981). After working as a journalist and

becoming well-known for his views on race, Chamberlain settled in Austria, where

he held a post at the University of Vienna, teaching philosophy. He was

commissioned in 1896 to write a book explaining the supposed racial history of the

world and the developments leading to the Industrial Revolution and the modern

world. The publisher who solicited this work was Hugo Bruckmannof of the Munich

firm Bruckmann KAG.

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In 1899 Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s great work was published. It was written

in German and called Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts.

Chamberlain’s book, published a decade later in English as The Foundations of the

Nineteenth Century, was a massive undertaking and attempted to show that the

story of the rise of civilisation was inextricably tied in with what he described as

the ‘Aryan’ race. He used the term ‘Aryan’ interchangeably with ‘Indo-European’

and it essentially meant white Europeans from the north of the continent. Russians

were excluded from the Aryan race because they had mingled too freely in the

past with Asians. To use Chamberlain’s own words, they had become a ‘mongrel’

race (Chamberlain, 1899).

According to Chamberlain, the history of the world was a struggle between

different races. His ideas of race were very precise and exceedingly detailed. He

distinguished, for instance, the Jews from the Arabs. The Hittites he called Homo

Syriacus and viewed as the original Semites. Then too there were the Bedouin

Arabs, whom he termed Homo Arabicus. Unfortunately, these two races had bred a

new species, which Chamberlain referred to as Homo Judaicus. These were the

Jews and although a ‘mongrel’ race, they possessed certain traits which allowed

them to thrive at the expense of other races (Field, 1981).

It was the Aryans who had been responsible for civilisation in Europe, but they

were held back by the influence of the Jews. One way in which the Jews cast a

baleful spell on the Aryans was by means of Christianity. Although he stopped short

of attacking Jesus himself, who was not in any case Jewish, as Chamberlain proved

to his own satisfaction, the religion he founded was a mystical hotchpot which

contained a lot of unhealthy, Jewish ideas. In addition to what might be described

as this spiritual malaise with which the Jews had infected Europe, there was a
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more concrete way in which they harmed Aryan culture and that was by

encouraging and financing wars, in which Aryans fought against each other instead

of their common enemy, the Jew.

Chamberlain said,

And so, if such were the purpose of this chapter, we could trace the ebb

and flow of Jewish influence to the present day, when all the wars of the

nineteenth century are so peculiarly connected with Jewish financial

operations, from Napoleon's Russian campaign and Nathan

Rothschild's rôle of spectator at the Battle of Waterloo to the consulting

of the Bleichröders on the German side and of Alphonse Rothschild on

the French side at the peace transactions of the year 1871, and to the

“Commune,“ which from the beginning was looked upon by all intelligent

people as a Jewish-Napoleonic machination

(Chamberlain, 1899).

It will probably not escape notice that the theme here, that the Rothschilds are at

the back of wars in general and the affairs of Europe in particular, is still

commonly found today in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories circulating on the

internet.

The main theme of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century was an

apocalyptic vision of the battle between Aryan culture and Jewish cunning. The

Aryans had produced everything worthwhile in science and art, while the Jews

were capable only of mercantile manipulations and accumulating money. They

planned secretly to destroy the Aryans both by promoting wars between them and
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also by miscegenation, otherwise known as breeding between different races.

Chamberlain attributed the fall of the Roman Empire to the Jews and thought that

it had in great part been accomplished by Jews encouraging Romans to marry into

other and inferior races. He feared that nineteenth century Europe was about to

go the same way. Almost every problem faced in Europe was either directly caused

or greatly exacerbated by the Jews. Eventually, the Aryans would be compelled as

a matter of survival to make a stand and reject Jewish influence and even

physically eject the Jews from their midst.

The effect of Chamberlain’s work in Germany was immense. Kaiser Wilhem II

was a huge fan of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and used to read it

to his children (Prager & Telushkin, 1983). He had copies sent to every library in

Germany and also all army units. It was not only the Kaiser who took to the book,

it quickly became a best-seller. With its clear message of the inherent superiority

of German ideas and German blood to that of any other nation, nothing could be

more calculated to appeal to the ethno-nationalism which was enjoying such

popularity in Europe.

Before Chamberlain’s ideas became current, there was still a general belief

that Jews could become Christians, that they could change their nature and be

ordinary members of society like everybody else. Chamberlain was adamant that

this was not, and could never be, the case. A Jew could no more become a

member of the Aryan people than a black man could become white. It was entirely

a matter of race and blood. Even before touching upon subsequent events in

Germany, it is perhaps not difficult for the reader to anticipate and guess who

might have seized eagerly upon these ideas.

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Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s health declined in the early years of the

twentieth century until he was either confined to bed or needed a wheelchair to

move about. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he was living in Vienna and

volunteered for the German army, although he was turned down on account of his

age and infirmity. The victory of the British over Germany was a devastating shock,

not only for the aging, expatriate ideologue, but also for a generation of young

Germans and Austrians; one of whom was entranced by Chamberlain’s vision of a

life or death struggle between the Aryans and the Jews.

It must be remembered that, unsurprisingly in view of his admiration for

Wagner and the fact that he had even married the composer’s daughter,

Chamberlain had a vision of some sort of Wagnerian, set-piece Battle of Ragnarök,

in which the forces of good, represented by the Teutonic knights of Germany

fought against the crafty Jews who were determined to bring down the Aryan

civilisation of Europe. These mystical ideas were combined in The Foundations of

the Nineteenth Century with other and more practical suggestions, which touched

upon the real-world polity of Germany. It was Chamberlain’s belief that democracy

itself was a Jewish invention and that the ideal government for an Aryan nation

would be a dictatorship; one strong man with unlimited power ruling all the

others. This was just what a young Austrian, who felt much the same as

Chamberlain about the Jews, wanted to hear.

Adolf Hitler was already violently anti-Semitic when he met Houston Stewart

Chamberlain for the first time at Bayreuth in September 1923. For both men, the

meeting was pivotal, as it was also to prove for the future of the Jews in Europe.

Chamberlain was to be the first famous person publicly to endorse the newly

formed Nazi party. After the meeting, he wrote to Hitler saying that,
 86

With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany, in

the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler—that is proof of her

vitality

(Stackelberg & Winkle, 2002).

On reading the fulsome praise heaped upon him in this letter, including

Chamberlain’s assurance that having met Hitler, he now felt able to die in peace,

knowing that Germany would be safe in Hitler’s hands, Adolf Hitler rejoiced ‘like a

child’ (Field, 1981).

The fatal meeting between one man who promoted the idea of Jews as a

distinct racial group and another who had the strength of character and

determination to act upon what might in other circumstances have remained the

ramblings of a misdirected and obsessive intellectual was of course to have the

most catastrophic consequences not only for the Jews but also for the millions of

other people who became caught up in the Second World War.

On Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s 70th birthday, the Nazi newspaper the

Volkischer Beobachter devoted five columns to praising him and described The

Foundations of the Nineteenth Century as, ‘the gospel of the National Socialist

movement’ (Shirer, 1960). Every aspect of this peculiar book was taken as being

part of an essential blueprint for the future of Europe as Hitler and his associates

envisioned it. This meant not only did the Nazis adopt Chamberlain’s perspective

of the Jews as a race, who could not change their nature simply by abandoning

Judaism, his ideas on eugenics also became official doctrine when Hitler came to

power ten years after his first meeting with Chamberlain. In the first half of the
 87

twentieth century, support for some elements of eugenics was widespread in

Europe and the United States. This led to some compulsory sterilisations,

especially in America. Between 1907 and 1963 around 64,000 people were

sterilised in the United States against their will; 61 % of whom were women

(Kluchin, 2009). Reasons ranged from criminality to learning difficulties or immoral

behaviour on the part of women.

It was in Germany that the theory of eugenics was taken to its logical and awful

conclusion. If the presence of Jews really was a hazard to the wellbeing of the

Europeans whose continent it was, then removing them by any means was

justifiable. It is significant that the physical extermination of Jews was preceded

by the gassing of Germans with learning difficulties or incurable diseases (Sereny,

1974). This is one more aspect of Nazi Germany which has served to make the idea

of scientific racism unpalatable to so many people today. Everything which had any

connection with Hitler’s policies is now contaminated and beyond the pale.

The murder of millions of people on racial grounds, an event which has come to

be known as the Holocaust is too familiar to need to be described in detail. Jews

and Gypsies were of course the primary target for what we would now call ethnic

cleansing, but Russians too were massacred in astounding numbers. The killing of

Russians was partly undertaken as a matter of realpolitik of course, to provide the

empty lands to the east of Germany which would furnish the Nazi regime with its

lebensraum or living room. Their destruction though was also an ideological and

racial imperative, based once again on what Chamberlain had written in The

Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. The Russians were, in Chamberlain’s

opinion, a ‘mongrel’ race produced by miscegenation between Aryans and

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Orientals. Like the Jews, they would need to be disposed of to make room for pure

Aryans.

The efforts of all previous racists faded into insignificance beside the

systematic actions of the Nazis, which were back by modern technology such as

railways, aircraft, radio and all the rest of it. The random and disorganised killing

of natives in Africa or South America looked in comparison haphazard and

amateurish. The German army and SS showed what racism could really accomplish

when there was untrammelled power and the protests and hand-ringing of liberals

could be ignored. The numbers involved speak for themselves; six million Jews,

seven million Russians, countless others whose death, although incidental, was

convenient to Germany’s geopolitical ambitions.

As part of their plan to base the whole of their new territories on principles

founded upon what they believed to be scientific racism, the Nazis began carefully

classifying every single person who lived under their rule according to the methods

devised in the nineteenth century. Skulls were measured, the width and length of

noses recorded, church records scrutinised and penises examined. Illustration 12

shows a Nazi official measuring the facial features of a gypsy woman.

12. Nazi from the Racial Hygiene department measuring the

face of a gypsy
 89

The intention was ultimately to place everybody in a racial category, ranging from

the Aryans at the top to the sub-humans at the bottom. This was all done partly on

racial grounds, but also with a strong dash of eugenics as well. Although they had

begun to murder the disabled almost as soon as war began, the initial means of

controlling the many supposedly inferior racial types who now lived in their realm

was to be by sterilisation; a practice which was already being used in other

European countries, Sweden for example.

Sometimes an event in history occurs which acquires a mythic stature and its

influence extends far beyond what actually happened, and the greater part of its

effect lies in what people in later generations think happened. King John’s

acceptance of the Magna Carta comes to mind or, more recently, the Battle of

Britain. There is no point in analysing such myths in the hope that people will gain

a more accurate understanding of what took place, together with a better

appreciation of their context. The fact remains that these are myths which now

have a life of their own. Much the same thing has happened with the Holocaust.

For the man or woman in the street, the Holocaust is what happens if scientific

racism and eugenics are not vigorously opposed. It is a terrible warning of where

racism leads. Just as there is little point in trying to show by facts and figures that

when the British air force clashed with the Luftwaffe in 1940, it was not a David

and Goliath affair, with plucky little Britain standing up to overwhelming odds, so

too with the notion that the Nazis were proponents of ‘scientific racism’. We may

dismantle all the crank theories which underpinned Hitler’s model of ‘racial

hygiene’ and expose the idiocy of aspects of the programme of eugenics adopted

in the Third Reich, but it will all be to no avail. The death camp of Auschwitz will

still remain the ultimate symbol for the horrors of racism.

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As we shall, part of the legacy of the Holocaust was to smear anybody

advocating the idea of scientific racism and leave them open to the accusation

that they were secretly Nazis, Holocaust deniers or worse. This has, since the end

of the Second World War, made it very difficult to engage in sensible and cool

discussions on the subject of racism.

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Chapter 5

How Scientific Racism became Disreputable

Up until the start of the Second World War the idea of scientific racism, together

with the tenets of eugenics, were championed by any number of respectable

politicians and scientists. This is not to say that dissenters did not exist, but many

people in Europe and the United States were assured of what appeared to be a

scientific consensus; that the human race was divided into different races and that

generally speaking the white race was superior to the others. Similarly, the idea of

sterilising the incurably insane, the severely learning disabled and even the

feckless and idle was acceptable and the advocacy of such schemes was not

greeted with the horror and disgust which would now attend any proposal to carry

out vasectomies on unwilling patients to prevent them passing on genes for

madness or laziness.

The change in perception of such things may be dated precisely, although it

took time to spread across the whole of the civilised world. As allied troops swept

through Europe they came across horrors such as most people could not have

imagined. In camps like Belsen, liberated on 15 April 1945, scenes which might

have come from Dante’s Inferno were revealed. Just as modern technology had

made possible the mass-killing of human beings and their destruction on an

industrial scale, so too did it make the conditions in Belsen visible to everybody in

Europe and America. Newsreel films of the condition of prisoners held in the camp

were soon being shown in cinemas across the world.

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Today, the camp which most people see as embodying the Holocaust is of

course Auschwitz, but for the first few years after the end of the war it was Belsen

which was most widely seen as symbolic of the dreadful crimes of the Nazis. This is

perhaps because the liberation of Belsen and the conditions which were found in

the camp after the British occupied that part of Germany were recorded in detail

by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit. The films which were taken, of the

10,000 unburied corpses found when the troops first entered the camp, were made

into a short documentary, with a commentary by the BBC broadcaster Richard

Dimbleby. This was shown in cinemas across Britain and it seared itself into the

national consciousness. Cinema-going was at that time all but universal, which

meant that the ghastly images were seen by the great majority of the British

population. They found their way to the rest of Europe too and also crossed the

Atlantic. The corpses and malnourished survivors of Belsen came to stand for all

that the allies had been fighting against for the last six years.

That Nazi Germany had horribly mistreated the Jews living not only in its own

country, but also across the whole of Europe, was an accepted fact during the war.

Even before the war began in 1939, newspapers in other countries reported things

such as the 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Word had leaked out from

Poland, even before the camps were liberated in 1945, that extermination was

being carried out on an industrial scale in those places under German control.

Many of the world’s nations adopted what were seen as being up-to-date and

modern views of race in the first half of the twentieth century. We might recoil in

horror from the idea of genocide now or view with disgust the idea of sterilising

people because they had a history of indolence and petty crime, but in both

Europe and the United States, the ideology and practices so enthusiastically
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embraced by Hitler and his followers were seen by many in the decades before the

Second World War as the salvation of mankind. By sterilising those unfit to have

children and making sure that black people and white led separate lives, it was

thought that society would be the beneficiary. It must not be forgotten that it

wasn’t only in the Deep South that racial segregation was practiced in the United

States during the 1930s and 1940s. The American army operated a strict policy of

separate units for black and white troops. It was in Germany though, from 1933 to

1945, that supposedly scientific racism reached the greatest extent and was taken

to its logical conclusion. These theories led of course to the Holocaust and as a

consequence scientific racism became, in the minds of many people, forever

associated with the images of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Of course, any sound and reasonable idea may be corrupted by fools or rogues

and used for wicked and immoral purposes. One remembers Jesus’ teaching the

love of our fellow beings and the forgiveness of enemies, which are indubitably

lofty and praiseworthy ideals. That the Spanish Inquisition could take the teachings

of this gentle prophet and use them as justification for the slaughter of Protestants

and Jews seems almost beyond belief. In the same way, the egalitarian theories of

Marx and Engels were the justification used for the concentration camps of the

Soviet Union. So too with scientific racism. In itself, the idea was innocuous and

unremarkable. That the percentages of those with above average intelligence

might vary from one ethnic group to another is not, of itself, surprising or

objectionable. One may certainly acknowledge such a state of affairs without

feeling the urge to lynch anybody or arrange for the systematic segregation of one

ethnicity from another. This though is where the idea of the slippery slope or thin

end of the wedge comes into play.

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The revelation of the true extent of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in the

cause of supposed racial differences had the most profound effect upon the world;

especially in Europe and the United States. It is no exaggeration to say that the

newsreel films of what was found in the concentration camps marked a turning

point in western views of scientific racism. This led ultimately in the United States

to the decision of the Supreme Court in 1954 to rule against segregated schools

and in 1964 to the passing of the Civil Rights Act. In Britain, the following year, the

first Race Relations Act was passed, which outlawed discrimination on the grounds

of ethnicity or race. In both Britain and America, progressive thought was firmly

set in the years following the end of the Second World War against anti-Semitism

and racial prejudice directed against visible minorities. There may have been

resistance to such radical ideas from the mass of ordinary people, but the feeling

was certainly gaining strength that scientific racism had been proved wanting and

its day was over. Events such as the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa in 1960

and the Civil Rights movement in America cemented this belief in the minds of

many politicians, intellectuals and academics. When, in 1968, British politician

Enoch Powell made his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood speech, there was universal

condemnation from all shades of political opinion. Scientific racism was no longer

seen as a respectable doctrine in the modern, post-war world.

Even before the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, there were influential thinkers

and academics who were determined to show that race was a cultural, rather than

a biological phenomenon. A few years later, the results of unfettered scientific

racism were there for all to see in the photographs and moving pictures produced

of the Nazi concentration camps after Germany’s defeat in 1945. In Hitler’s

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Germany, scientific racism had been taken to its logical conclusion and this,

thought much of the world, was what happened.

At this point we pause and consider what might have happened next, as

opposed to what actually did happen. The Holocaust revealed what happens if

conscienceless psychopaths gain unlimited power and are thus enabled to follow

any kind of crackpot idea which comes into their heads. We have already seen that

Nazi Germany rejected conventional physics, because of its association with

Jewish scientists. They embraced instead the mad idea of an eternal struggle

between ice and fire as the basis for cosmology and even meteorology. There were

any number of peculiar ideas floating about in Hitler’s Germany and some related

to strange ideas about race. It might have been possible to stand back a little after

the end of the war and ask searching questions about the extent to which the Nazi

actions in setting up the machinery of extermination was based upon what was

reasonable to believe about the difference between various ethnicities and to

what extent it was just the Germans adopting a crazy course of action based upon

a misunderstanding of science.

Of course, in the late 1940s, following the executions at Nuremberg of the

criminals responsible for the atrocities of Auschwitz and Treblinka, there was little

appetite for taking a balanced view of anything in which the Nazis had been deeply

involved. Their actions had served to contaminate all with which they had been

associated; not least their idiosyncratic interpretation of scientific racism.

Auschwitz was taken as confirmation of all that had been preached for years by

some left-wing anthropologists in the United States. Racism led to mass murder,

lynching, segregation and apartheid. The pendulum had begun to swing from

uncritical acceptance of the superiority of European civilisation and all its works
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towards the largely uncharted waters of regarding other societies in different parts

of the world as being equal to or even superior to, western civilisation. After all,

the Germans had been pioneers of European civilisation and just look what that

had led to.

This was, although it is only possible to see so in retrospect, a revolution in the

making. The assumption of European superiority had been unchallenged by most

people for a very long time and this belief had been founded in large part on the

knowledge that ethnic groups other than white, western European gentiles were

somehow deficient. As is also so often the case, this led to the baby being thrown

out with the bathwater, as the old saying has it. Instead of carefully considering

every aspect of scientific racism and sifting through the different strands to see

which might be sound and which wrong-headed and dangerous, there was now a

subconscious tendency for many of those leading the intellectual life of Europe and

America to reject wholesale everything to do with racism. This did not take place

overnight, it took several decades, but within 30 or 40 years of the first images of

the Holocaust being widely circulated, scientific racism was regarded by anybody

with pretensions to being modern and progressive as outmoded and liable to lead

to the most wicked consequences.

Of course, the current of thought could have moved in another direction

entirely. A clear distinction could have been drawn between the exercise of racial

prejudice and discrimination, which had indeed led to terrible suffering, not only

in Nazi Germany, but across the world, and the simple concept of scientific racism.

It might have been agreed that racial prejudice was a bad thing, while at the same

time asking if it was now quite certain that were no inherent differences between

ethnic groups in cognition, physical development and so on. This is not though how
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such processes generally work in history. The new ideology is typically in definite

opposition to the old and from that contradiction or conflict, a new and improved

idea will in time emerge. This concept will be explored more fully in the final

section of this book.

So it was that from believing that all the characteristics of different races were

entirely determined by biology, enlightened thinkers now asserted that none of

them were. Everything was now solely the proper business of sociologists and every

ethnicity was of precisely equal intellectual ability to every other one; whether

Asian or European, Jew or gentile, black or white. This being so, a natural

corollary was that if Chinese people did better at mathematics than those from

Africa, then it was because of cultural factors at home or the schools which they

attended. If white countries were more prosperous and law-abiding than those in

the Caribbean, then this too was no more than a cultural affect. Obviously,

colonialism had held back the development of Africa, which accounted for the

typically low IQs which were recorded there. In the United States, the segregated

schools had similarly held back the potential of black pupils. Every perceived

difference between the performance of black people and white could be explained

away by inequalities, either between nations or within the societies of individual

countries. The new world was at hand. All that was necessary now was to make

sure that everybody had the same access to housing and employment, education

and opportunities for social advancement and we would soon watch Africans,

Caribbeans and African-Americans surge forward and take their rightful place at

the top table with everybody else.

This unbridled and naive post-war enthusiasm gave rise to what is sometimes

known as the equalitarian dogma and since this has become the prevailing,
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although generally unspoken and subconscious, view today on anything to do with

ethnicity and race it will be dealt with at length in the second part of this book. A

few words though will be necessary about it at this point. Anthropologists in the

United States, people like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, were convinced as early

as the 1920s that the idea of essential and inherent differences between ethnic

groups was mistaken and that everything which appeared to distinguish the

behaviour of one human population from another could be explained by culture

alone. Whether IQs or incomes, criminal records or academic achievement,

according to the new view which was being championed in some quarters of the

United States before the Second World War began, literally any observed

differences were the product of imperfect societies.

The equalitarian doctrine was thus waiting, ready-made as one might say, when

the post-war disgust at the Holocaust was causing many people to think seriously

about where racial prejudice and scientific racism might lead. The reaction against

scientific racism was powerful and still dominates almost all discourse on the topic

of race today in the western world. In addition to the effect which knowledge of

the Holocaust had when the subject of scientific racism was broached, there were

one or two scandals in the post-war years which encouraged people to place more

faith in the doctrine of equalitarianism than was perhaps justified. One of these

cast doubt upon the data which suggested that intelligence was largely inherited

from an individual’s parents, rather than being acquired after birth from the

environment.

A key plank both in racism as a scientific theory and also in the mundane, day-

to-day type whereby discrimination was practiced against black people in

education, was that intelligence, together with various other characteristics, was
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largely inherited. It is not hard to see the importance of this concept. If the

greater part of an individual’s intelligence is inherited from his or her parents,

then it would be quite reasonable to assume that some populations have higher

levels of intelligence than others, on average, and that their children tend to be

more intelligent because that is simply their genetic inheritance.

A natural, and perfectly obvious, corollary of this would be that if intelligence

is mainly inherited, then there are strict limits on what may achieved by improving

educational opportunities for those minorities whose parents appear to have IQs

which are below average. Whatever steps you take in integrating their children and

ensuring that they go to good schools, these children are likely to remain dullards.

This of course was one of the reasons that segregated education in the United

States lingered on until a century after the end of the American Civil War. There

was thought to be little point in expending too much time and money on the

education of black people, because such efforts were doomed to fail. They were a

struggle against basic biology. Precisely similar ideas were popular in the British

Empire. One simply couldn’t expect black people to be able to benefit from

advanced education in the way that many bright Europeans could. It just was not

in their nature.

Illustration 5 shows how the matter was thought to stand. Black people were in

a different category and that was all there was to it. In a later chapter we shall

look closely at the logical fallacy which led to this false view of the case, but for

now it is sufficient to say that this was the prevailing view. All the education and

civilisation in the world could not be expected to alter the essential nature of

those belonging to supposedly inferior races.

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The opposing camp, supporters of the equalitarian doctrine, felt quite

differently. They maintained that all ethnic groups had the same capacity to

benefit from education and that if artificial barriers were removed, then black

children would flourish just as much as whites. Since there was no real difference,

other than skin colour, it was plain that if you took black children from poorly

performing schools and gave them a similar education to white children from

wealthy neighbourhoods, then their academic achievements would be identical to

those of the white children. Of course, there might be some discrepancies due to

home conditions and so on, but if society itself could also be made more just and

equitable, then these too would simply fade away and all children would compete

on an even playing field and no one group would be likely to do better than any

other. Illustration 15, which may be seen below, shows how this view of the human

race looks. All ethnicities are in precisely the same case, as regards intelligence,

character and everything else. Only upbringing and society will affect development

and achievement.

15. The equalitarian dogma relating to cognitive abilities

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The perspective outlined in the last paragraph has become a key one for those

who are fervent for the cause of anti-racism. So precious is the idea to them that

those who even raise doubts about the matter are liable to find themselves being

branded racists and dismissed as the kind of people who support segregation and

probably believe in eugenics. When books appear which seem as though they might

be suggesting that some ethnic groups may be inherently more likely to score

lower in IQ tests, then the hunt is on among left-wing activists, journalists and

academics to discredit those holding such heterodox views. This can become quite

ugly, as was witnessed when a book called The Bell Curve was published in 1994.

At first sight, the thesis advanced was innocuous enough; that intelligence is

affected by both genetic and environmental factors and that the more intelligence

a person has, the more likely is it that that person will succeed in life. It was when

mention was made of the possibility that different ethnic groups had different

average IQs and that this might be a factor in poverty and underachievement

among black people that the book became ferociously controversial. Some

criticised it because it was not peer reviewed, a practice which is sometimes, but

not invariably used when publishing popular works on science. Others thought that

even asking questions about the sort of thing which was dealt with in The Bell

Curve was sinister. Writing in Scientific American, a former professor of Computer

Science at Columbia said, more than 20 years after publication that it, ‘endorses

prejudice by virtue of what it does not say. Nowhere does the book address why it

investigates racial differences in IQ’ (Siegal, 2017). This is a truly extraordinary

accusation; that even looking at, thinking about or asking questions relating to

some topics might in itself be suspect. After all, the underachievement of black
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people is a real enough phenomenon, surely trying to work out what is behind it

cannot, of itself, be wrong?

It is obvious that those adhering to the equalitarian dogma are far more likely

to be politically left-wing. Their scientific beliefs tell them that reordering society

and making everything from educational opportunities to good housing, healthcare

and decent incomes accessible to everybody will automatically lead to a world

where black and white flourish equally and all ethnicities will be as likely as any to

achieve top grades at good universities, enabling them to become doctors,

architects or lawyers. Followers of this doctrine must inevitably be Utopians. The

question we need to address though is not whether this or that state of affairs

would be desirable and lead to pleasant consequences, but if it is true.

Before examining one of the major scientific scandals of the twentieth century,

let us consider what we have so far learned. The idea that human intelligence is

largely inherited was, from the very beginning, tangled up with the belief that

black people were more likely to be of very low intelligence and unlikely to be of

high intelligence, compared to white people. If intelligence was just another

inherited characteristic, like skin colour or height, then the conclusion was

inescapable. If two people with low IQs had a child, then their child would

probably have a low IQ as well. The chances that such a child would, even with the

best upbringing and education, turn out to be a genius, were vanishingly small.

Since the IQs of black people, when measured, tended to be a good deal lower

than the average white person, about 15 points, it followed inexorably that their

children would be dull-witted and all the schooling in the world was not going to

change that. This idea had a strong bearing on any discussions about race and

education up to the 1970s, by which time it was beginning to be described as

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‘racist’ in the pejorative sense that it indicated prejudice and unfavourable

treatment of black people.

Cyril Burt was an educational psychologist with the London County Council in

the 1920s. He was an enthusiastic exponent both of the idea that intelligence was

almost completely hereditary and also of the need to prevent people with low IQs

from having babies together. Part of his job entailed identifying children in London

schools who were, as the term then was, ‘feeble minded’. These were often sent

off to residential institutions, where the sexes were kept entirely separate. For

some, these homes would be where they would spend the rest of their lives. By

ensuring that males and females could not mingle freely, there would be no

chance of girls getting pregnant and giving birth to babies who would themselves

be ‘feeble minded’. If this sounds like a form of eugenics, that is because it is

precisely what it was. Burt was keen on breeding out ‘mental deficiency’ and

because he was convinced that intelligence was passed on to children in a similar

way, and according to the same rules, as skin colour and height, he thought that

isolating those with very low IQs and forbidding them to have babies was a sensible

and humane course of action for society to take.

In 1931, Cyril Burt was appointed Professor and Chair of Psychology at

University College London. He had a great influence on the 1944 Education Act and

the change in British education which began after the end of the Second World

War. Burt was knighted in 1946 for his services to psychology and the development

tests for intelligence. It is impossible to overstate the influence which this man

had upon the field of psychology and beliefs about the nature of intelligence, not

just in Britain, but throughout the entire world. His former students went off into

professional life without the shadow of a doubt that the professor had
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demonstrated that at least 85 % of a person’s intelligence was inherited from his or

her parents and that there was nothing which any amount of education could do to

alter this. The British school system from the late 1940s onward was also

predicated on this assumption. Children were tested for intelligence at the age of

11 and then allocated to either an academic grammar school or to a vocationally

geared Secondary Modern, where the emphasis was on practical subjects rather

than anything too cerebral. It was expected that those consigned to Secondary

Moderns would end up as labourers or in jobs which required little in the way of

abstract thought.

The relevance of this to race and intelligence will be immediately apparent.

The twin pillars of Cyril Burt’s work were firstly that it was possible accurately to

measure intelligence and secondly that this intelligence was almost entirely

handed down genetically. Since the testing of black people’s intelligence

invariably indicated that they were an average of 15 points below white people,

this meant that their children would be similarly poorly endowed intellectually.

These ideas formed a good part of the basis of scientific racism in the twentieth

century and many of those who were the staunchest supporters of the idea had

come under Cyril Burt’s influence; including men like Hans Eysenck and Arthur

Jensen. Eysenck was a former student of Cyril Burt’s and Jensen was a student of

Eysenck’s. Both men became notorious in the late 1960s and early 1970s for

championing the cause of scientific racism.

In 1969 Arthur Jensen, a psychologist who lectured at the University of

California, Berkley, published a piece in the Harvard Educational Review entitled

‘How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?’ (Jensen, 1969). His

conclusion was that very little could actually be done. He produced evidence for
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the 15 point gap in measured IQ between black and white pupils and attributed it

largely to heredity. This confirmed what many people already suspected, but it

marked the beginning of the modern debate on race and intelligence. One of the

chief planks in Jensen’s theories was the study of twins who had been raised

separately. Two years later Hans Eysenck, whose student Jensen had once been,

published two books; one in Britain and the other in the United States. These were

Race, Intelligence and Education and The IQ Argument. Eysenck agreed with

Arthur Jensen and became embroiled in controversy in Britain of the same kind

which Jensen had encountered in California. In a foreshadowing of today’s

practices, Eysenck was ‘de-platformed’ by students at the London School of

Economics. When he tried to give a speech there on 8 May 1973, the stage was

stormed and Eysenck assaulted.

Cyril Burt had published extensively on what he claimed was definitive proof

that the greater part of our intelligence is handed down to us by our parents.

Identical twins are the product of a single egg which has split into two foetuses;

known technically a monozygotic or MZ for short. The babies resulting from this

process have identical genes. Of course, in the usual way of things such pairs of

children are raised in identical environments, which makes it all but impossible to

untangle how much of their intelligence is due to nurture and how much to nature.

What though if identical twins are separated at, or very close to, birth and raised

in different homes? If the homes vary greatly in terms of class, socio-economic

background, education of the parents and so on, then this might tell us something

very useful about intelligence. If the intelligence of the twins was found to be very

similar in later years, this would hint at heredity being the main factor. If, on the

other hand, their IQs differed greatly, then environmental conditions would be
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more likely implicated. The problem is that such instances of MZ twins separated

at birth are vanishingly rare. At least, they had always been rare for most

researchers other than Cyril Burt (Colman, 1987).

The twins study about which Burt wrote was hugely impressive for two good

reasons and it was hardly surprising that both Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck

should have relied heavily on his data. He had somehow found no fewer than 53

pairs of identical twins who had, for various reasons, been separated soon after

birth and raised separately. This was far more than anybody else had ever written

about. Not only that, but Cyril Burt had also apparently managed to investigate the

environments in which the children had grown up. By assessing the families in

which these twins had been raised, it appeared that almost all the twins had been

reared in different circumstances. Burt used a six-point scale to assess the socio-

economic status of families, ranging from ‘unskilled’ to ‘higher professional’. By

happy chance, he found that the correlation between the home backgrounds of the

children he studied was almost zero. In other words, almost all of them grew up in

different circumstances, one from the other.

After measuring the IQs of all the MZ twins he studied, Cyril Burt concluded

that the correlation between the pairs was 0.86. No correlation would have been

indicated by a score or zero and perfect accord by a score of one. In other words,

since the environments were in almost all cases dissimilar, around 86 % of the

intelligence displayed must have been from genetic factors alone. This really gave

a great boost to those who believed that IQ could not be increased by education. It

was seemingly a fixed quantity, handed down at birth and neither home

background or schooling made any difference. Little wonder that Jensen and

Eysenck were so keen to rely upon Cyril Burt’s findings; his work supported and
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endorsed their own views on both the probable intellectual ability of the average

black person and to what extent this could be improved by spending more on

schools.

Cyril Burt died in 1971 and for the next three years the views of Hans Eysenck

and Arthur Jensen on the heritability of intelligence, seemed secure, although they

were reviled and detested in some quarters as racists. Then in 1974, some

disturbing information came to light. A statistical analysis of the data used by Burt

to prove his ideas about intelligence revealed that the figures were simply too

good to be true. Since this related to the work on MZ twins, it cast into doubt what

had looked to be cast-iron evidence in favour of the largely inherited nature of

intelligence. Much worse was to come. In 1976 the British newspaper the Sunday

Times published a detailed study Burt’s work relating to identical twins. Much of

what he had published on the subject had listed as co-authors and collaborators

two women called Margaret Howard and J. Conway. It was they who had seemingly

tested the children and arranged the resultant data. The problem was that

exhaustive research had failed to find any evidence that these women had ever

existed. Before his death, Burt had told somebody that they had both emigrated

and he had lost their addresses. Not one person, other than Burt himself, had ever

set eyes on Margaret Howard or J. Conway. Burt’s official biographer, Leslie

Hearnshaw, was given free access to all Burt’s diaries, correspondence and

research notes. Not only was he unable to find any information about Margaret

Howard and J. Conway, neither could he find the slightest evidence that Cyril Burt

had ever conducted any research himself on identical twins either (Grant, 2007).

It is hard to overstate what a devastating blow the discovery of Cyril Burt’s

fraud was to the world of psychology. No other work on identical twins was
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anywhere near as extensive as his, nor had others in the field managed to carry

out as much research on the home backgrounds in which the children grew up.

Both Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen were furiously angry, not so much at Burt as

at those who had unmasked his deceit. It enabled those who disapproved of their

work to ridicule them and claim that the conclusions which they had drawn about

matters relating to the intelligence of black people were hopelessly flawed. As we

shall see, although some of the data used was unreliable, that did not by any

means suggest that Jensen and Eysenck were wholly wrong in the ideas which they

were promoting.

Another factor though was at play when people were discussing and thinking

about the heritability of intelligence. It is true that the exposure of Cyril Burt’s

mendacity dealt a great blow to those who claimed that the majority of

intelligence was inherited, rather than being related to the environment in which a

child was raised. Even before this though, there was a vague feeling of unease

after the end of the Second World War that somebody should be conducting

experiments of any kind on or relating to twins. In the last chapter we considered

the devastating effect which the Holocaust had upon discussions in the western

world about the two topics of race and eugenics. There too, in the midst of the

Holocaust, twins had been the focus of a certain academic.

Most people have heard of Dr Josef Mengele, the doctor at Auschwitz who

carried out the most atrocious medical experiments on prisoners, especially Jews.

Like Cyril Burt, Mengele was intrigued by twins and the insight which they might

afford to the genetic inheritance of abilities (Rees, 2005). Mengele’s interest in

twins caused him to save any he could lay hands on from being sent to the gas

chambers of Auschwitz, so that he could conduct research upon them. This was an
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unprecedented opportunity, for there were quite literally no limits at all on what

he could do with his human subjects; up to and including killing two identical twins

at the same time with lethal injections and carrying out autopsies on two twins

who died at the same hour of the same day; surely a unique circumstance in the

annals of such research (Nyiszli, 1973).

The memory of the ghastly experiments conducted at Auschwitz by Mengele,

one of which was injecting dye into children’s eyes in an effort to change their

colour, made the very thought of experimenting with and testing pairs of twins a

little distasteful to many people. The discovery that Cyril Burt was a pathological

liar who had faked his research on twins was enough to make anything touching

upon the topic something which most people preferred to keep at arm’s length. It

did not help either that both Mengele and Burt were keen eugenicists.

By the dawn of the third millennium, it might easily have been thought that

the very idea of scientific racism was discredited; an outdated relic left over from

the Victorian era and ready to be consigned to the scrapheap of history. The

various notions of what might be termed ‘hard’ racism had been shown to be false.

We have seen that the Nazis divided humanity into many supposedly separate

races. In Europe alone, there were Nordics, Alpines, Slavs, Gypsies and Jews; each

with distinct physical characteristics and temperaments. It has not proved difficult

since the end of the Second World War to demonstrate that this is not a realistic

description of the actual state of affairs. As a result, all right-thinking people now

seem to be in full agreement with the most ardent anti-racists that race itself is no

more than a social construct and only eye colour and differing levels of melanin in

the skin distinguish sub-Saharan Africans from the nations of northern and western

Europe. In short, to use the vernacular; racism is a busted flush. And yet, like the
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supposedly slain monster in some horror film, which unexpectedly comes back to

life in the final reel, scientific racism has refused to lay down quietly and expire

without any further fuss.

This is reluctantly admitted by at least some those who are experts in the field

of anti-racism, but they have devised various cunning and mendacious strategies to

account for the unpalatable truth that some scientists disagree with what seems

almost to have become an article of faith in the modern, western world. Ali

Rattansi, a Professor of Sociology in London, is the author of a book on racism

which was published by the Oxford University Press. Here is how he tries to present

the uncomfortable truth. He begins by announcing that,

Most sociologists in the UK and many in the USA are now convinced by scientific

research that ‘race’ is a social construct rather than a biological fact. This is

often reflected in the use of quotation marks around race by many sociologists,

and indeed I often follow this practice here and in other writings (although my

usage in this book varies).

(Rattansi, 2020)

We observe at once the appeal to science. The author tells us that ‘scientific

research’ backs up the position that race is a social construct. We see this same

reliance upon the supposed science of race being used quite regularly by anti-

racists. Here is what a well-known expert in Critical Race Theory has to say about

the same subject when discussing the impossibility of races existing,

…society frequently chooses to ignore these scientific truths, creates races,

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and endows them with pseudo-permanent characteristics is of great interest to

critical race theory.

(Delgado & Stefancic, 2017)

All this is of course very reassuring for those who wish to persuade both

themselves and their readers that scientific racism has been disproved by scientists

and all that remains for us is to accept this and start viewing ‘race’ as merely

something dreamed up by people in the same way that knitting, jet engines and

philosophy have been devised. It does not relate to any pre-existing quality in the

external world, but is a free invention of the human mind. This of course makes

the study of the supposed phenomenon the proper business of psychologists and

sociologists. The trouble is though, that scientists often do not actually happen to

agree about this.

We saw that Rattansi, quoted above, began by talking of the heartening

unanimity among sociologists on the subject of race being a social construct, but

sociologists are bound to see everything in terms of social structure. Perhaps they

are not the best people to consult if we want to know about biological matters

such as the possible sub-divisions within a species. We might be better off asking

what biologists and anthropologists think about this kind of thing. There, as

Rattansi himself admits, the story is very different,

For the USA, significant interview and textual research conducted by

anthropologist Ann Morning suggests that not only are a great many academic

anthropologists and even biologists still adhering to a biologically ‘essentialist’

concept of race, but this is also common among her sample of American
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undergraduates taking anthropology and biology courses. ‘Essentialism’ denotes

the view that members of a group share one or more defining characteristics

which are innate and unalterable. Her survey of popularly used biology and

anthropology textbooks in US schools also demonstrates that there is a

widespread tendency to use a biological concept of race rather than presenting

students with the idea of race as a social construct.

(Rattansi, 2020)

The passages which are quoted above are typical of many which may be found

in both popular and academic books on race. The complaint made in the last of the

quotations might best be summed up by saying that the writer and his fellow

sociologists all think one thing, but real scientists have another opinion. Perhaps

this is unfair. When we spend a lot of time in the company of those who share our

own views, it is possible to forget after a time that other people might disagree

with us. This appears to have happened to some of the more vociferous proponents

of the ‘race as a social construct’ theory. The fact is that an increasing number of

scientists, including leading geneticists, do not subscribe to the idea that race is

some kind of illusion. Such people have to phrase their statements on the subject

very carefully though, as even to hint at the possibility that black people might in

some real way be different from white is to court controversy at best and ignominy

and disgrace at worse. One need only recall the fate of James Watson, the Nobel

Prize winning scientist who, along with Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of

the DNA molecule in the early 1950s.

In 2007, at the age of 79, James Watson was a leading geneticist, one of the

most famous scientists in the world. He had flown to Britain to promote his latest
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book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science and his appearances and

book signings had sold out before his plane even touched down in London.

Everybody was keen to see, listen to and meet one of the men who had been

involved in one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. In

the event, scarcely anybody saw Watson and by the time that he flew back to the

United States, his career was over and he was fast on his way to becoming what

George Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-four as an ‘unperson’. His reputation

has never recovered from the disaster and Watson is today seen as a dreadful

example of that most modern of hate-figures, the racist.

Before going on the tour to promote his book, Watson gave an interview to a

journalist called Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe. Some of the remarks which he made

appeared in the magazine section of the British newspaper the Sunday Times on 14

October 2007. The piece was headed ‘The elementary DNA of Dr Watson’, a clever

reference to Sherlock Holmes. The effect was devastating and on the Friday

following the publication, James Watson flew back to the United States, having

cancelled all the events at which he was due to appear or, in some cases, having

had them cancelled by the institutions at which he was scheduled to be speaking

and signing copies of his book. The charge against him was of course racism.

What did Watson actually say which prompted the horrified reactions of so

many people? Well, among other things, he was quoted as saying that he was,

‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa, (Sunday Times, 2007) and went on

to remark that, ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence

is the same as ours — whereas testing says not really.’ (Sunday Times, 2007). As if

these casual asides were not inflammatory enough for many people, Watson also

talked about the idea of equality of intelligence between members of different

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races and said bluntly that, ‘people who have to deal with black employees find

this is not true.’ (Sunday Times, 2007)

James Watson’s lifetime in science and the enormous amount of valuable work

he had undertaken on genetics counted for nothing and those carelessly spoken

words were enough to cause him to be cast into the outer darkness. Others saw

and understood the lesson very well. If it was that easy for a great man like

Watson to fall from grace by an unguarded comment or two, how much easier for

the rest of us to suffer a similar fate?

Yet what had really been said? The past history of the continent might well

make the rest of us feel inherently gloomy about the prospect for Africa’s future.

In the same way, it is perfectly true that testing does indeed suggest that the

intelligence of black Africans does not tend to be the same as that of white

Americans. It may of course be the case that the research is faulty or

misunderstood, but Watson would probably have been happy to discuss this

further. As for black employees being less able or intelligent on average than white

ones, this might be so in certain fields. In short, nothing which James Watson said

was really all that shocking. He was not advocating racial prejudice, but rather

talking of the possibility that some aspects of scientific racism may be sound.

Because of the confusion between the idea of racism as unfavourable treatment

on the grounds of ethnicity and the simple concept that there might be objective

differences between black people and white, few respectable people wish to

associate themselves with any of those still supporting or propagating scientific

racism. Being accused of ‘racism’ is now indistinguishable from being denounced as

exhibiting hostile attitudes and behaviour towards members of visible minorities.

The two things have become indissolubly melded together into one awful entity.
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That being so, finding funding to research possible cognitive differences between

different populations is now difficult and even reviewing favourably a book written

by somebody perceived as racist can have its hazards. This means that the few

who still champion the cause of scientific racism are driven to fall back on their

own resources; reviewing and quoting from each other’s work. This of course gives

the impression that only a few diehard ‘racists’ still keeep the faith, a little like

those who believe that the earth is flat. The names of this small group of men are

known to anybody with the slightest interest in the subject; it includes Arthur

Jensen, J Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Charles Murray. They all link

together in various ways.

When Arthur Jensen wrote a book called The g Factor: The Science of Mental

Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior & Intelligence), it was regarded with suspicion

in some quarters; Jensen being a noted ‘racist’. The most favourable reviews

quoted on Amazon’s page for this work are from Charles Murray, author of The Bell

Curve, and also a magazine called Mankind Quarterly, which is edited by Richard

Lynn. Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve was heavily criticised for drawing upon

sources which appeared in Mankind Quarterly, which is viewed by some as being a

‘racist’ publication. Not only did Murray’s book quote Richard Lynn, it also

contained information gleaned from the research of J Philippe Rushton. In this

way, scientific racism became more and more to be seen the exclusive province of

a tiny handful of cranks.

It is worth remarking, by the way, that condemning people in this way for

reading or referencing the work of others, or even failing to denounce them with

sufficient vigour, is eerily reminiscent of the ‘guilt by association’ which was used

with great effect by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. It will be remembered that
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people at that time were criticised and blacklisted simply for having shared a

platform or attended meetings where somebody suspected of communism had

spoken. This was essentially the charge against Charles Murray and today, anybody

who mentions his own book favourably is in turn liable to be accused of racist

sympathies.

Since the turn of the millennium though, things have been changing and for that

we have to thank advances in genetics. The old methods of distinguishing one

ethnic group from another relied upon such blunt instruments as using a tape

measure to ascertain the size of skulls or length of noses. Skin colour and type of

hair were judged by eye and the distribution of fat across the body was thought to

be a useful indicator of somebody belonging to a different race.

Work in genetics has revolutionised our understanding of many apparently real

and measurable differences between people belonging to various ethnic groups

across the world. We know that it is possible to tell that black Africans are more at

risk of developing certain mental illnesses than white people of European origin,

that a purely physical examination can accurately predict the academic level

which an individual is likely to reach, and much else besides. We shall be exploring

these and other topics, but first let us see what remains of scientific racism after

the blow which theories about it received following the revelation of the

Holocaust.
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Chapter 6

What Remains of Scientific Racism?

In the next part of this book, we shall look in close detail at the way in which anti-

racism, in the form of the equalitarian doctrine, rolled on like an unstoppable

juggernaut during the second half of the twentieth century, crushing all

opposition. In the United States, segregation was abolished and South Africa

became a pariah state. In Britain, opposition to immigration from Commonwealth

countries was denounced as being on a par with fascism. All right-thinking people

became convinced that not only was racial prejudice a bad thing, but that

scientific racism itself was an irrational viewpoint and ran counter to all the

available evidence. Even before the end of the millennium though, awkward

questions were beginning to be asked. At first, they appeared to relate to no more

than trifling inconsistencies in the received wisdom; odd little bits of research

which sat ill with the whole idea that every apparent difference between human

populations could really be attributed to culture alone.

It was easy enough to see that such crude measurements as the cephalic index

would tell us nothing useful about an individual, any more than would skin colour

or length of a person’s nose; all favourite ways in Nazi Germany to determine in

which ethnic category people should be placed. Blunt instruments of that type

were indeed useless. But as more precise measurements became available and it

was possible to examine DNA for particular genes, certain things became apparent.

When these curious anomalies were combined with rigorous and peer-reviewed

research, it was clear that scientific racism was not dead at all and however loudly
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it was proclaimed that there were no such things as races, it was glaringly obvious

that some differences did exist between black people and white. It seemed that

reports of the death of scientific racism had been greatly exaggerated.

Babies of sub-Saharan heritage tend to stand and walk at an earlier age than

white babies of European origin. The black children are also less likely to suffer

from delays in the acquisition gross motor skills than either white children or those

whose families come from East Asia (Kelly et al, 2006). This difference appears to

have no connection at all with culture or nationality, being observed in Africa,

Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. It makes no difference if the

children are being raised in rural or urban environments, nor does social class seem

to have any bearing on the case. It is simply a brute fact; black children usually

walk before white ones and this appears to be an innate difference.

Inevitably, some people have been moved to wonder if this early physical

mastery of their bodies may play some role in the fact that black people make up a

disproportionate number of top athletes, footballers, basketball players and

boxers. Not only are many men who take part in competitive sport black, an awful

lot of those, both men and women, who reach the very top of in running have

higher levels of testosterone in their bloodstream than average (Bermon, Garnier,

2017) (Ahmetov et al, 2019). It has been hypothesised that this extra hormone

gives athletes a little more muscle and perhaps aggression, thus providing them

with a competitive edge.

African American men have the highest rate of prostate cancer in the world.

There may be a number of reasons for this, but one is almost certainly that black

men in the Unites States have on average 15 % more circulating testosterone than

white men (Ross et al, 1986). This came to light many years ago and has been
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confirmed in subsequent research over the following decades (Richard et al, 2014).

This extra testosterone might, some thought, also help to explain the prowess of

black men on the running track and sports field. Of course, there could be a

downside to this. High levels of this hormone are found not only in those who excel

in some sports, but also among volent criminals in prison (Dabbs et al, 1995).

Those who have faced disciplinary action in prison for clashing aggressively with

warders are found to have higher levels of testosterone than usually expected.

One remembers the old myth about black men being better performers sexually

than white men and also the persistent suspicion which many white people

entertain that black men are more aggressive and potentially violent than other

ethnicities. Here too is scope for research. The problem is that funding or

sponsoring research which might result in the confirmation of ‘racist’ stereotypes

is a far from tempting prospect for most charities or universities. It is likely to

generate bad publicity and a dubious reputation. Many of the more intriguing

snippets of information which have emerged in the last 40 or fifty years have fallen

swiftly from sight, as nobody seems eager to pursue the subject. Only those who

have already been branded as racists will usually touch this kind of thing with a

view to following leads which might confirm innate differences between one

ethnicity and another.

It is the field of genetics which has precipitated a resurgence of scientific

racism, although needless to say, nobody actually calls it that, preferring such

vague terms as average differences between human populations. We must bear in

mind that it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to pry

into the mysteries locked away in the DNA molecules which lie at the heart of

almost all the cells in our body. These advances in understanding are now coming
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thick and fast, making some books on human origins out of date almost as soon as

they arrive in bookshops. Popular books on genetics published in the 1990s and

even later make firm, but erroneous, statements such as that breeding between

Neanderthals and early modern humans was improbable (Jones, 1993). As recently

as 2007, a book published by the Natural History Museum in London contained the

following sentence,

There is also no evidence that modern Europeans inherited genes from

Neanderthals, as would be the case if Neanderthals were simply a European

population within a broader, worldwide species of archaic humans.

(Lockwood, 2007)

It is now common knowledge that mating did take place and has serious

implications for the idea of scientific racism.

Analysis of DNA has revealed that it is possible to predict accurately, simply by

examining genes, the risk factors for developing schizophrenia and discover that

these are far higher for those of black African heritage than for white Europeans or

Americans. Many other real differences between ethnic groups have also been

found. There is for instance, evidence of a similar trend with Alzheimer’s disease

(Barnes & Bennett, 2014). Perhaps of the greatest significance is the realisation

that our own species, Homo sapiens, certainly did mate with Neanderthals and

that as a result, everybody other than sub-Saharan Africans has Neanderthal genes.

This has proved to be a controversial revelation and the full implications are still

becoming apparent. Some of the genes which are now being identified relate to

the architecture of the brain and of course an old claim of what one might perhaps
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call traditional scientific racism is that the brains of black people are usually

smaller than, or different from, those of white people or Asians. Already, there

have been skirmishes on this particular frontier of research and we see a perfect

illustration of what was said earlier, about nobody other than a tiny handful of

scientists being prepared to investigate the effects which new discoveries might

have upon our understanding of race and possible racial differences.

Some of the genes which Europeans and Asians inherited from the Neanderthals

are uncontroversial. To give one example, when modern humans first encountered

those already living in the Middle East and Europe, they soon came into contact

with all kinds of pathogens to which they had no resistance; bacteria and viruses,

in other words, which they had never come across in Africa. From the point of view

of survival, it made perfect sense for nature to insert, after a few generations of

interbreeding, a gene which beefed up the Homo sapiens immune system and

enabled it to cope with new threats. Sometimes, this boost to our immune system

is too effective and our bodies react to harmless intruders such as grains of pollen

or specks of dust, giving us the modern disorder of hay fever. This is a minor

irritation when compared to the advantages of a fully tuned system for dealing

with germs.

One particular gene which 70 % of Europeans and Asians have is a variation of

microcephalin. This protects against the disorder of microcephaly and is connected

with the growth and architecture of the brain. Babies with microcephaly are born

with heads much smaller than average. The outlook for such children in terms of

life expectancy and intellectual ability is poor. The commonest cause of

microcephaly is genetic disorders.

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Another gene which helps the brain develop is a version of the ASPM gene. This

is found in just a quarter of the world’s population. In 2005 a researcher at the

University of Chicago called Bruce Lahn found that these two variants of the genes

had only been around in our own species for 40,000 years and 6,000 years

respectively (Taylor, 2009). A paper published that year claimed that this was

evidence of the continued evolution of humans, as it was asserted that the gene

had spread so quickly that it must confer some positive advantage to those

inheriting it (Evans, 2005). This simple discovery soon exploded into a raging

controversy, with those connected with the research or even writing about being

accused of racism (Taylor, 2009).

The ‘problem’ was that both these genes were far more common in those of

European ancestry than they were in people whose origin was sub-Saharan Africa.

The question was raised as to whether it might be possible that these genes had

had some effect on culture and civilisation. The variant of Microcephalin appeared

to have become established soon after modern humans colonised Europe and the

other gene, the variant of ASPM, could be traced back to the time of the first

cities in the Middle East. It was speculated that these genes had caused a

flowering of human intellect and that, by implication, those who remained in

Africa had not benefited from this boost to their brain power (Taylor, 2009).

The series of events which followed illustrate with perfect clarity just why so

few scientists have any appetite for becoming mixed up in such debates. Richard

Lewontin, an extremely famous geneticist, said that the scientific papers on the

research were, ‘particularly egregious examples of going well beyond the data to

try to make a splash’. There was a hasty scramble among respectable scientists to

distance themselves from the whole notion of tying these genes in with any idea
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that they might bestow a disproportionate intellectual advantage upon white

people and those from Asia.

It is now that we see how the phenomenon touched upon in the last chapter

comes into play. Here was something which might shed light not only upon human

history, but also some very modern problems such as the chronic

underachievement of black children at schools in Europe and the United States.

Nobody dared even to hint at such a possibility and most people began to be

embarrassed about the whole thing. The very idea that genetics could throw up an

alternative solution to a problem which has for many years been regarded as

purely sociological was alarming to many people. Those who even posed the

question as to whether the new research might shed any light on possible ethnic

differences in cognitive ability were made to feel very uncomfortable.

So it has been that for the last few decades discussion of the heritability of

human intelligence has been something of a minefield. Those championing one

view or another cannot fail to be aware of the political implications inextricably

bound up with the question. It does not help matters that the fiercest defenders

on both sides are not above deceit and even deliberate lies in their crusades to

persuade others of the virtue and strength of their position. If it is true that

differences in the average IQ scores between ethnic groups may adequately be

explained by upbringing and environment, then it should not be necessary to resort

to tricks to prove this. Even world-famous scientists though are very ready to

engage in some pretty dubious tricks to make their own ideology appear to be the

only sensible one. Take Richard Lewontin, for example.

Richard Lewontin, who died in 2021,was probably one of the best-known

geneticists in the world. He had been a professor at Harvard for almost half a
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century and was a staunch opponent of the idea of genetic determinism. In 1972

he published a paper which is still frequently quoted today, in which he expressed

the view that there could be no such things as human races because the great

majority of human genetic diversity, over 80 %, occurs within geographical groups,

rather than between the traditional racial classifications (Lewontin, 1972).

As a self-declared Marxist, Lewontin might in any case have been expected to

be in favour of revolutionising society, but his political views were closely bound

up with his scientific work, which caused him to assert warmly that differences in

intelligence between different populations can all be explained by environment

and that it is unnecessary to posit genetic effects relating to what he regarded as

non-existent races. Since he was so enormously famous and such a great figure in

his field, it is curious that Richard Lewontin found the need to try and mislead

people about what he claimed are the facts relating to the inheritance of

intelligence.

One thing which almost everybody who wishes to advocate the view that

nurture is all and nature of trifling significance when it comes to intelligence does

is to deride IQ tests and suggest that they do not really measure intelligence at all.

Professor Steve Jones, a British geneticist who also believes that the difference

between races is trivial says rather sniffily,

I have no idea whether IQ tests are an unbiased measure of intelligence: what

they measure is, I hope, known to those who design them.

(Jones, 1993)

Richard Lewontin is even more dismissive. He wrote,

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First, what do I.Q. tests actually measure? They are a combination of

numerical, vocabulary, educational and attitudinal questions. They ask such

things as “Who was Wilkins McCawber? (sic.)”,

(Lewontin, 1991)

Now this is very odd, one is tempted to say suspicious. Overlooking the fact that

the one of the world’s great scientists was apparently unable to spell the name of

a famous character from fiction, what are we to make of this passage? Do IQ tests

really determine intelligence based upon a knowledge of nineteenth century

literature? This is of course completely untrue. Black children in deprived parts of

American cities are not being marked low in IQ tests because they have not read

David Copperfield. This is a very neat bit of sleight of hand. What Richard

Lewontin was trying to do was to explain the undeniable fact that black people in

the United States have always, on average, scored lower than white people (Weis,

2020). One way of accounting for this is to try and trash IQ tests and suggest that

they tell us nothing meaningful about intelligence. Claiming that they are geared

to cater for what Lewontin described as, ‘the societal prejudices of educational

institutions’ (Lewontin, 1991), is an excellent way of accomplishing this purpose.

Illustration 14 shows an IQ question of the kind asked in the real world. Some tests

are designed to be ‘culture fair’, that is to be independent of previous education.

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14. Typical questions from an IQ test

Of course, Lewontin also mentions the Cyril Burt debacle, to make sure that

readers are aware that they might disregard all the twin studies. Hidden away

though within the text of the book from which these quotations is taken, a book

about DNA aimed for the popular market and called The Doctrine of DNA, is an

extraordinary admission which rather blows a hole in the denunciation of biological

determinism. Talking of the IQ scores of adopted children, as they relate to the IQs

of their biological parents, Lewontin has this to say,

So biological parents are having some influence on the I.Q. of their children

even though these children were adopted early, and putting aside the

possibility of prenatal nutritional differences or extremely early stimulation, it

would be reasonable to say that genes have some influence on I.Q. scores. We

can only speculate about the source of the genetic influence. There is a

premium on speed in I.Q. testing, and genes might have some influence on
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reaction times or general speed of central nervous processes.

(Lewontin, 1991)

The significance of these three sentences may not be immediately obvious.

Lewontin is saying three things. First, he is saying that part of our intelligence is

inherited from our parents. Secondly, he tells us that we don’t know which genes

are involved in this. Finally, and most strangely, he suggests that it could be

something to do with genes making the central nervous system work more rapidly,

as though this is no big deal. He then moves on without more ado to another

subject.

The central nervous system consists of the brain and spinal cord. Running from

this is the peripheral nervous system, leading to the hands and feet. If, as

Lewontin thinks may be possible, the increased score in IQ tests which is

noticeable in the children of parents who have high IQs is caused by faster

processing in the central nervous system, then he is presumably talking about the

brain, rather than the spinal cord. In plain language, he is saying that these

children may do well in IQ tests because they have inherited from their parents,

brains which handle and process information more rapidly than some other people.

If this is what is happening though, then it is of enormous significance and the

fact that he mentions such an hypothesis in a throwaway remark of this sort tells

us a good deal about his attitudes. For those among us who are not world-famous

scientists, speed of processing information in the brain is a large part of what we

mean by the word ‘intelligence’. It is for this reason that we talk of people who

catch on immediately to a topic under discussion as being ‘quick-witted’.

Conversely, those whose apprehension lags behind the rest of us are sometimes
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dismissed as being ‘slow’. It is after all a matter of common observation that

intelligent people tend to understand new concepts in a shorter than average time

and are also quicker off the mark in grasping the gist of an argument or solving

mathematical or other problems. What Richard Lewontin writes casually of,

‘general speed of central nervous processes’, he is actually describing a large

chunk of what differentiates the clever from the dull.

At risk of labouring the point, if I ask two people to calculate 2 % of £415 and

one glances at the figure and almost at once tells me that the answer is £8.30p,

while the other sits scratching his head and after much laborious thinking, takes

ten minutes to work out the result, am I not justified in suspecting that one might

be brighter than the other? This is assuming of course that both individuals have

received a similar secondary education up to the age of 16 or so and that there are

no other obvious differences. Perhaps I try to explain an economic theory, such as

the relationship of supply and demand and one person at once grasps what I am

talking about, while the other has to mull the thing over for a quarter of an hour

before it starts to make sense to him; is this significant when evaluating

intelligence? Most ordinary people who do not happen to be Marxist geneticists

would, one suspects, agree that this may be so.

It might be helpful at this point to introduce a real-life case where tests of

cognitive ability are administered, not for some arcane and purely academic

purpose as is often the situation with IQ tests, but for practical reasons to sift out

those who will be the best for a vitally important job. In this case, the tests are

similar in some respects to the IQ tests which we have been discussing, but have

been rigorously designed to be ‘culture fair’. This means that they do not depend
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on prior academic education beyond a rudimentary stage and require no extensive

vocabulary or familiarity with the works of Charles Dickens.

For the better part of six months in 2020, attempts were made by means of

Freedom of Information requests to persuade Britain’s Royal Air Force to disclose

the ethnicity of those who did well in the aptitude tests taken by those applying

for admission and also to reveal which groups had not done so well. When, in

December that year, the figures were finally released, it was very plain why there

had been such a marked reluctance to let people see them. The tests themselves

concerned things like spatial awareness, the ability to manipulate three-

dimensional objects mentally; rotating them and working out where they would fit

and so on. They had no connection with formal education and were not culturally

biased. The scores in one, the BIS Test of Spatial Ability, taken by those who might

wish to be gunners, police officers and lorry drivers, were fairly typical. Over five

years, from 2015 to 2020, they were as follows,

Any Chinese Background 60.1

White British 55.4

Asian Indian 50.1

Mixed Black Caribbean And White 51.4

Black Caribbean 44.0

Black African 40.6

These scores align very closely with other tests, such as those for IQ, the Scholastic

Aptitude Test used for admission to American universities and many others.

Chinese people, as we would by now expect, came above everybody else. This will
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come as no surprise. Below the Chinese came white applicants and a little way

below them were those whose families were from the Indian sub-continent (Daily

Telegraph, 2020). Looking at the scores for black people though shows something

starkly, which is that the more black heritage a candidate had; the lower the score

he achieved in the test. Candidates of mixed black Caribbean background, usually

one black parent and one white came higher than black Caribbeans, who usually

have some white ancestry. The lowest scores of all were by those whose

background was entirely black African.

It need hardly be said that the Royal Air Force, from whom these scores had to

be prised as though from a closely shut-up oyster, was quick to respond with an

orthodox explanation. A spokesman blamed ‘underlying inequality’ in education.

This is however hardly convincing. Had the different black groups all received a

different quality or standard of education from each other? Did the young people

of black African heritage go to schools inferior to those which the Caribbeans had

attended? It must be borne in mind that all these groups had, by and large, grown

up and been educated in Britain. Did the Chinese and white people all attend

better schools? This argument would also have been more persuasive if the tests

had entailed a knowledge of mathematics, English grammar or general knowledge.

They did not. All they required was an ability to think clearly and logically. Any

notion the tests could have been culturally biased in favour of Chinese and white

people may also be abandoned. This might have been a reasonable point if one

ethnic group consisted of illiterate Kalahari bushmen and another of middle-class

citizens from a sophisticated city like New York, but all came from the same

country.
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Any rational person who had not been indoctrinated into contemporary ways of

thought and examined the raw data from the RAF aptitude tests without the filter

of modern ideology and correctness of outlook would most probably assume that

the Chinese were the brightest and most able and the black Africans the dullest in

thinking skills. That most of us veer away from this simple view of the matter in

favour of mysterious ‘underlying inequalities’ in education and indeed view the

obvious answer to the conundrum as being disgusting and unacceptable tells us a

great deal about the mores of the modern, Western world in the first decades of

the twenty-first century, but nothing at all about why black people do not do well

in objective tests of aptitude and intelligence.

Thinking now about the orthodox perspective on a set of data such as these, it

is difficult to understand how cultural and educational differences could explain

what is seen. From the famous American anthropologist Ruth Benedict to Richard

Lewontin, the same reason for these disparities is routinely trotted out. This is

that environmental factors alone are sufficient to account for what is seen. When,

in 1943, Ruth Benedict wrote about the very different scores achieved in

intelligence tests by black and white recruits for the army, there was some reason

for her to adopt this stance. She said,

For instance, in the First World War, intelligence tests were given to the

American Expeditionary Forces; they showed that Negroes made a lower score

on intelligence tests than whites.

(Benedict & Weltfish, 1943)

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To Benedict, the reason for this could hardly have been plainer and she

patronisingly pointed out to the soldiers of the Second World War for whom her

views were intended in a pamphlet which she was writing,

Everybody knows that Southerners are inbuilt equals of Northerners, but in

1917 many southern states’ per capita expenditures for schools were only

fractions of those in northern states, and housing and diet and income were

far below average too. Since the vast majority of Negroes lived in the South,

their score on the intelligence test was a score they got not only as Negroes,

but as Americans who had grown up under poor conditions in the South,

(Benedict & Weltfish, 1943)

All that Ruth Benedict writes here was perfectly true of the United States 80

years ago. Like many liberal and progressive people at that time she thought that

once conditions had changed and the education and social standing of black people

achieved parity with whites, then this would all fade away as a matter of course.

This has not happened. The attainment gap in academic results, intelligence tests

and so on has not vanished; it stubbornly remains.

Thinking now about the Royal Air Force aptitude tests at which we looked

above, we may say some things with assurance. All these applicants are likely to

have attended the same kind of state school. It is unlikely in the extreme that any

young person who had gone to a fee-paying school would have been applying for a

technical position such as gunner or lorry driver. They would be almost certain to

wish instead to become officers. These young people went to state schools and

were all educated side by side in the same classrooms to the same National
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Curriculum which is mandated by law in Britain. The tests, which were culture

fair, appeared to show that the more African heritage an applicant had, the lower

the score which he or she would achieve. The highest score were achieved by

those of Chinese ancestry. There can be little doubt that anybody viewing these

results objectively, without their view being obscured by the modern horror and

detestation of racism, would be very likely to assume that one could draw a

provisional conclusion about the relative cognitive abilities of the ethnic groups

involved.

It cannot be long before there are calls to ignore, or at least ‘adjust’ the scores

from the RAF aptitude tests. The RAF are embarrassed about the whole business

and still wish to press ahead with making the air force ‘diverse’ It is not hard to

see what the consequences will be. One need only look at what happened in the

United States Navy when there was similar pressure not over race, but gender.

On 25 October 1994 a woman called Kara Spears Hultgreen was killed as she

attempted to land a fighter plane onto an American aircraft carrier on a routine

training mission off the coast of San Diego. Hultgreen had achieved fame briefly

for becoming the first woman fighter pilot in the American armed forces. Her

accomplishment was the subject of controversy though after her death, for it was

alleged that there was political pressure on both the air force and navy to produce

a female pilot in order to demonstrate that there was no sexism in the armed

forces. Rumours, which were later confirmed, suggested that men were

overlooked for qualification so that the navy could produce a female fighter pilot.

Hultgreen had failed her first test and there were those who said that she was not

of sufficiently high calibre to be a pilot landing aircraft on the decks of an aircraft

carrier. There was also a suspicion that the navy had rushed the process of
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allowing Hultgreen to qualify, because they were determined to beat the air force

in having a female fighter pilot.

How true all the stories about Kara Spears Hultgreen are is still a matter of

debate, but there can be little doubt that there was a fixed desire to appoint a

woman as fighter pilot on ideological grounds, in the interests of diversity and

inclusion. Britain’s Royal Air Force will perhaps be under similar pressure from

above soon, to ensure that black people are allowed into the service without the

tiresome necessity of passing some tricky aptitude tests.

The story of Kara Spears Hultgreen was related above because it shows the

perils of pressing too hard for strict parity of gender and ethnicity in an enterprise

like an air force. No sooner had the results of the aptitude tests which we

discussed above been released than a spokesman for the RAF BAME Network

claimed that more needed to be done to break down, ‘potential barriers to

recruitment’ faced by young black people hoping to join the RAF. Since the chief

barrier currently appears to be the tests in which black people are scoring so

poorly, it can only be a matter of time before somebody comes up with a scheme

for either scrapping them or introducing ‘contextual’ information to make the

difference in scores less glaringly obvious. The prospect of people who scored very

lowly on aptitude tests being employed as gunners for the RAF in the interests of

racial balancing is a chilling one.

None of what has been said here is of course conclusive, nor is it meant to be.

The intention is to encourage readers to think for themselves about topics which

are often seen as taboo. Alost everybody commenting publicly in Europe and North

America is now extremely cautious about saying anything which could be

interpreted as racist. At the time of writing, April 2021, the British government has
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just released the statistics for students who gained good marks in the A level

examinations which are important in seeing which university an 18 year-old might

be able to gain admission. Astonishing though the results are, it is unlikely that

anybody will remark in newspapers or on television about the one feature of them

which is glaringly plain. This is especially odd because in the same week that the

examination results were published, the BBC and some British newspapers claimed

that racial prejudice, which was described by some of those interviewed as

‘structural racism’, was preventing young black, Asian and other minority ethnic

people from getting jobs.

First, let us look at the A level results. These were published on the British

government’s website at www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk. The figures

showed a stark contrast between the achievements of various ethnicities. Of white

British students taking these examinations, 20.2 %, just over a fifth, managed to

gain at least three Grade As. These are the high marks which one would need to be

considered for a place at the best British universities such as Oxford and

Cambridge. The picture for black students was not so promising, because only 12 %

of them succeeded in getting three Grade As or more when sitting their A levels.

For students of Chinese heritage, the situation is truly extraordinary. No fewer

than 37 % gained at least three grade As. Just to make this perfectly clear,

students of Chinese origin were three times as likely to achieve top grades at A

levels as black students.

Of course this situation is seen too in the United States and has resulted in the

best universities there attempting to rig their admissions procedures against

Chinese students and in favour of African Americans. In Britain, this has not yet
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happened, although 66 % of young people of Chinese origin take up places at

university, compared to 41.2 % of young black people.

Of course, because these are almost entirely children who have been raised by

biological parents, or in some cases just one parent, cultural differences are very

hard to rule out. Some homes have more books in them than others, some families

are stricter about their children staying in at night to do homework, highly

educated parents tend to have a positive effect upon their children’s education

and things such as these are all likely to be factors when considering academic

success at school and progression to higher education at University. However, the

same feature may be observed in the A level results as we saw earlier with the RAF

aptitude tests.

Looking again at the figures, we can see that 12 % of black students got three

Grade As and 20.4 of white students. These are families where both biological

parents are either black or white. What happens though to the children on mixed

couples, that is to say when one is black and the other white? How do they do in

their examinations? The data are clear. When one parent is black African and the

other white, then 15.6 % of the children gain three Grade As. In the case of

families where one parent is white and the other black Caribbean, 14.4 % of the

children pass three A levels at Grade A. Looking now at the traditional explanation

for such disparities, that environment, upbringing and education are responsible

for the fact that mixed race children of these ethnicities fall almost precisely

between the average black scores and the average white scores, it is hard to see

how this might happen. If, however, we abandon our modern prejudices in favour

of this or that reason based upon what is now considered a socially acceptable

view to hold and just look at the information in front of us, then a simpler
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hypothesis might well suggest itself. This is that the more white ancestry a

teenager has, rather than black, the better the chance of succeeding

academically.

It is not only the possible distribution of intelligence across different ethnic

groups which persistently refuses to vanish and causes some people to feel that

the idea of scientific racism may be more thana social construct. Research in

genetics also raises doubts about the wisdom of wholly abandoning the idea that

there are real differences between black and white people; differences which

might possibly alter their behaviour and affect their life chances.

In the 1980s, there was widespread and justified annoyance among black

people that doctors and medical researchers in both Britain and the United States

tended to overlook disorders which affected chiefly, or even exclusively, black

people. Sickle Cell Anaemia is one such health problem which hardly affects white

people at all. In the United States, African-American men suffer from the highest

rates of prostate cancer in the world. Black men in America are more than twice

as likely to die of the disease as white men. When researchers examined the

situation in the mid-1980s, they found something which had the most awful

implications; not least for adherents of the equalitarian dogma. It is known that

the growth of tumours in the prostate gland can be stimulated by the hormone

testosterone. Could this have anything to do with the mortality rate for this type

of cancer in black men? Testing the levels of testosterone in the bloodstream of

black and white men showed that young black men had on average 15 % more of

this hormone than did young white men (Ross et al, 1986). This was confirmed in

subsequent research over the following decades (Richard et al, 2014). What

seemed likely to be a promising line of enquiry into a serious health problem for
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African-American men had been uncovered. The news of a discovery which could

help in tackling a terrible and deadly scourge affecting many black people, was not

greeted in all quarters with unalloyed joy.

On a broader front, if there were genuine and inherent differences in the levels

of hormones circulating in the bodies of black and white people, might there be

other differences which were not related to diet, upbringing or environment?

Academic publications were swift to play down the possible significance of all that

extra testosterone and to remind readers that environment was of far greater

importance than any supposed inbuilt difference between ethnicities. This stance

was maintained until recently. In 2019, for instance, research was published which

laid the increased mortality rate for black men dying of prostate cancer firmly at

society’s door.

In May 2019, the magazine JAMA Oncology revealed the findings of what was

described as an ‘original investigation’ (Dess et al, 2019). Whether to muddle up

the question or for some other reason, the article dealt not only with cancer of the

prostate, but also with other causes of death too; ‘Association of Black Race With

Prostate Cancer–Specific and Other-Cause Mortality’. Essentially, the study

focussed on a very narrow question of whether black men with the same stage of

prostate cancer as white men were more likely to die of the disease. The results

will probably not surprise anybody, but do not contribute anything to

understanding why black men are more prone to this kind of cancer than white. It

was found that if cancer develops then the quality of healthcare and overall health

of the patient have a good deal of bearing on how soon he was likely to die. Having

established a fact which few people would have doubted, the authors of the piece

went on to say, among other things,

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The study’s researchers found that black men did not have an increased risk of

dying from prostate cancer compared to white men with a similar stage of

disease. On a population level, the disparities in death rates appear to mostly,

if not entirely, be attributed to external circumstances.

The largest study of its kind finds societal factors and access to quality care,

rather than genetics, underlies higher prostate cancer mortality rates for black

men.

Therefore, the greatest disparity to black men with prostate cancer is access

to quality healthcare and guideline concordant care that are likely rooted in

complex socio-cultural inequities in the US

(Dess et al, 2019).

The conclusion appeared, at first glance, unarguable; ‘societal factors and

access to quality care, rather than genetics... rooted in complex socio-cultural

inequities in the US’. It will perhaps not have escaped readers’ notice that a rather

neat version of the three-card trick has been played upon them. The titles of the

article suggested an exploration of the prevalence of prostate cancer in black men

and the only culprits for all those deaths seem to be the usual suspects of poverty

and ‘socio-cultural inequities’. Genetic factors are an irrelevant distraction and

the equalitarian dogma is, once again, triumphant. Those with enquiring minds

though might still be wondering why it is that so many more black men should

develop cancer of the prostate in the first place. This question is not addressed,

because of course it cannot so easily be attributed to poverty and racism. In this

way, the difficult question of why black men are so likely to get cancer of the
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prostate is deftly sidestepped, in favour of the more easily answered matter of

why poor people with cancer die more rapidly than those with a lot of money.

The reason for this kind of evasiveness is very simple. When once we start

talking about such things as levels of testosterone in the body and genetic factors,

whether relating to cancer or intelligence, some people see a thin wedge, which

ends with talk of eugenics and apartheid. This was the experience of David Reich,

who set up a molecular biology laboratory in 2006 to try and find mutations which

differed in frequency between West Africans and Europeans. Reich and his fellow-

workers examined diseases ranging from prostate cancer to diabetes (Reich, 2018).

It might be mentioned at this point that David Reich is no maverick or worker on

the fringe of science. He is, at the time of writing, a professor in the Department

of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Studying 1,597 African American men with prostate cancer revealed that in one

part of their genome, these men had on 2.8 % more African ancestry than the

average in the rest of their genome (Reich, 2018). According to Reich, the odds of

this happening by chance were around 10 million to one. Checking with other

African Americans who had entirely European ancestry in the same section showed

that they had no increased risk of prostate cancer; they were no more likely to

develop it than any European.

The reaction to Professor Reich’s research was fascinating and somewhat

alarming. The champions of orthodoxy were anything but pleased to hear about

the possibility of identifying genetic risk factors for a variety of diseases. When he

unveiled his results in 2008 at a conference concerned with disparities in health

between ethnic groups in the United States, he expected excitement at a new

method for investigating better ways to deal with illness among minorities.
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Instead, an anthropologist who was present spoke angrily to Reich and accused him

of ‘flirting with racism’ (Reich, 2018). On another occasion, he was told that

rather than talk openly about the different West African groups whom he was using

dealing with, he might be better advised to refer to them as ‘Cluster A’ and

‘Cluster B’.

Nothing could more clearly illustrate the way in which those who follow the

orthodox line in academia are taken aback and put out when they find that the

real world sometimes fails to conform to their ideology. The equalitarian dogma

may for now remain intact, but those upholding it put one in mind of the story of

King Canute, demonstrating to his courtiers the limits of regal power and

authority. Simply repeating a slogan over and over again will not prevent scientific

progress being made which is now shedding light on the real and quantifiable

differences between people whose origins lie in Europe and those whose heritage

is in Africa and Asia.

It is to be hoped that enough has been said in this chapter to indicate that

scientific racism is, rather than being a spent force and discredited concept, still a

useful and valuable way of thinking about humanity. By all indications, it is poised

to make a return in coming years, although it will presumably have to be

repackaged under a bland new name. We turn in the next section of this book to

the avowed enemies of scientific racism, whose views are, at least ostensibly, held

by almost all politicians in the Western World, together with almost every religious

organisation, academic institution, publisher and company providing news.

Persuading these to alter their views on racism is likely to be a formidable task.

How did an ideology which is now looking more than a little threadbare and

outmoded gain such a firm grasp upon society?

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Before considering this question, it might be helpful to think about what almost

everybody debating the subject of race and racism agrees about, rather than

tackling the many things which are controversial. Let us then cast a quick eye over

the origins of the human race and see why although strictly speaking there may be

no individual races, there are probably definite differences between those who

belong to different ethnic groups.

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Chapter 7

In the Beginning

We begin this chapter with the observation that much of the accepted, modern

view on this subject is undeniably correct. For instance, all the available evidence

suggests that the following scientific opinion, which sums up the twenty-first

century perspective to a tee, cannot be contradicted; ‘All modern humans, Homo

sapiens, are one species – not for reasons of political correctness, but based on

biological evidence’ (Benton, 2008). It is also true that with few and exceedingly

rare exceptions, the Sentinelese tribe living on a remote island in the Bay of

Bengal being a well-known example, almost every human today has mixed ancestry

and jumbled heritage. There are no pure races. Consider African Americans in the

United States who, judged solely on appearance, might appear to have completely

separate ancestry from their white neighbours. Looks can, according to the old

proverb, be deceiving and so it proves in this case. Between a fifth and a quarter

of the genome of the average African-American consists of genes inherited from

Europeans (Bryc et al, 2015). The search for wholly separate and distinct races or

ethnicities, whether classified by physical appearance of geographical location, is

a fool’s errand.

A personal anecdote may help to make this clearer. In the late summer of 1978,

I caught the ferry from the Swedish port of Gothenburg, which took me to

Frederikshavn, one of the northernmost towns in Denmark. Over the course of the

next two months, I travelled south overland through the whole of Europe and into

the Middle East. In Scandinavia, the people were generally pale and had fair hair
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and blue eyes. Illustration 1. shows a typical example of a child in this part of the

world.

1. Princess Estelle of Sweden, a classic example of northern European skin

colour

By the time that I had travelled across Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy

and what was then Yugoslavia, complexions and hair were both darker and brown

eyes more common than blue. As I moved from Greece to Turkey and then into the

Arab countries of Syria and Jordan and on into Israel, black, curly hair and very

dark skins were the norm. I continued to the Sinai Peninsula, the north-east edge

of Africa, where some of the Bedouin have skins as dark as Pakistanis. Illustration 2

is of some young Bedouin women in the Sinai. Although very different in

appearance from the typical Dane, they do not belong to a separate ‘race’.
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2. Bedouin of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, as darkly complected as Indians

or Pakistanis

At no time during my journey across Europe was there any abrupt change in

appearance of the people in neighbouring countries or territories. The Greeks at

the Turkish border were indistinguishable from the Turks a matter of yards away.

At the other end of Turkey, the Turkish men manning the border post looked

precisely similar to the Arabs on the Syrian side of the border. Both in appearance

and in genetic inheritance, these men were more or less identical. The difference

between the Bedouin of the Sinai and the Danes in Scandinavia is a smooth and

continuous gradient. Arabs are not a different race from Turks, any more than

Turks are a different race from Greeks or Italians. All the so-called races and

ethnicities which I came across blurred one into the other.

Does all this mean that there are no differences in cognitive ability or

temperament between Africans and Chinese, Europeans and Indians? It does not. It

means though that instead of crude generalisations, we must deal in statistical

probabilities and percentages. If we are to abandon the equalitarian dogma, we

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shall also have to reject any racial prejudices and generalisations about people

whose eyes and skin colour differ from our own. Nothing useful or true can be said

about the intelligence or temperament of any individual person whom we

encounter for the first time, whatever the colour of the skin, type of hair or shape

of eyes.

All humans in the world today may belong to the same biological species, but it

was not always so. There was a time when modern humans like us shared the

supercontinent of Eurasia with three or four other species to whom we were

related and with at least two of which we were able to interbreed. It is to this

distant age that we must turn if we wish really to understand the world in which

we live today. Events which took place then have had the most profound effect

upon the subsequent history of the human race and, for good or ill, shaped the

world in which we now live.

There is no dispute about the early stages of human evolution. In Africa,

millions of years ago, there were various species of great apes. It is from these

that both modern humans and also apes such as the chimpanzees and gorillas

descended (Leakey, 1981). The fossil record is sketchy, but we know from the

genetic evidence that our own lineage split off from the other apes between four

and six million years ago. There followed a series of apes who looked increasingly

human, all of whom remained in Africa. Then a species arose which was not

content to remain in Africa. For reasons which we are never likely to know at this

late stage, some of our primitive ancestors made their way to another continent

(Stringer, 1989).

Illustration 3 shows a scene in northern Israel in the mid-1970s. This is the

mound upon which the Arab village of Al Ubedeiyah stood until 1948, when the
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inhabitants fled the fierce fighting which followed the establishment of the state

of Israel that year. In the foreground the river Jordan wends its way south towards

the Dead Sea. It is an idyllic place, compared by those who now visit the area to

the Garden of Eden. It was here, in the course of archaeological excavations which

took place up until 1974, the year the photograph was taken, that some of the

earliest evidence has been found for humans living outside Africa (Papagianni &

Morse).

3. Tel Ubedeiyah in Israel, where some of the earliest human remains

outside Africa have been found

The only possibly way to leave Africa on foot now is by walking across the Sinai

Peninsula, which links African and Asia. Today, it is a desolate wilderness. The

rocky desert is punctuated by only occasional oases. A million years ago though,

the terrain was very different. It was lush and verdant, with trees and grass

leading invitingly east from what is now Egypt. We do not know if those early

humans, perhaps Homo erectus, possibly an earlier species, headed across the
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Sinai in pursuit of the herds of animals upon which they preyed, or whether it was

that curiosity about the world which is the hallmark of modern humans which

caused them to travel further than anybody had previously done. Whatever the

motive, bands of them arrived on the shore of a lake in the Galilee, the northern

part of Israel, and there they feasted on turtles and other animals which they

caught. This was only a temporary stopping-place though, because others of the

same species carried on towards the rest of Asia and Europe, which they colonised

over the course of thousands of years.

Homo erectus was the species which was effectively in possession of Africa and

much of Asia, as far as China and Java for a very long time; hundreds of thousands

of years, in fact. Eventually, other species arose from Homo erectus. One of these

has been called Homo heidelbergensis and this new human came to dominate

Africa and Europe; but not Asia, where Homo erectus continued to be the only

type of human in that continent. This is a highly simplified version of human

evolution and new ancestors and ancient cousins of our own species are constantly

being discovered. In this chapter though, we need only consider the broad outline

of what is currently known.

So far, the history of human evolution at which we have looked has essentially

been one species evolving into another, but about half a million years ago, things

began to grow complicated. For the first couple of hundred-thousand years, two

populations of Homo heidelbergensis flourished, one in Africa and another in

Europe. Slowly, the two groups began to evolve differently, a process probably

driven by a change in climatic conditions in the northern hemisphere.

The remains of the first humans to live in Britain were found in the southern

English county of Sussex in 1993 (Williams, 2006). Some teeth and a bone from the
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leg of a specimen of the Homo heidelbergensis were found at a place called

Boxgrove. At that time, Europe was much warmer than it is today. Lions, leopards,

elephants and hippopotamus roamed the land and the men and women of that

time hunted horse and deer with wooden spears and butchered the carcasses by

cutting them up with flint hand-axes. The temperature was probably similar to

that of north Africa. Then everything changed and sheets of ice began to cover

Europe, reaching eventually as far south as London. Life was dramatically altered

for those living in Europe. No doubt some people fled south, to warmer parts of

the world, but others remained and devised strategies to survive in desperately

inhospitable conditions, similar to those which might today be found in the Arctic.

Over the course of many thousands of years, the population clinging tenaciously to

territory in what is now Europe gradually became a new species, which we know as

the Neanderthals. To the east, another species emerged, whose existence has only

been known to us for a decade or two. These have been christened the Denisovans,

after the location where their first remains were found. They are best thought of

as cousins of the Neanderthals. In Africa, the Homo heidelbergensis were also

changing, into our own species, Homo sapiens.

It is only relatively recently that we have realised how complex our family tree

is. As late as the 1990s, the orthodox view of the evolution of modern humanity

was that it had been a linear process. That is to say Homo erectus emerged,

evolved into Home heidelbergensis, which in turn evolved into Homo

neanderthalensis, which we know as the Neanderthals. These Neanderthals were

then supposed to have evolved into our own species, Homo sapiens. This simplistic,

and wholly erroneous, perspective was summed up neatly in 1973 in a book based
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on the popular television series made by Jacob Bronowski. In The Ascent of Man,

he writes that;

Probably some lines of Neanderthal man died out: but it seems likely that a

line in the Middle East went on directly to us, Homo sapiens

(Bronowski,1973)

This idea, that each successive human species simply evolved into the next, was

seen as an endorsement of the equalitarian idea that all humans are intellectually

equal and of similar character. How could it be otherwise if our own species simply

came forth from a previous one? We would all then be likely to have a similar

genetic inheritance and such trifling differences as hair type and skin colour would

have developed naturally and had no bearing upon the brain. Of course, this neat

and simple myth has now been thoroughly discredited. What actually happened

was a good deal more complicated and we are still able to see the effects of it

today.

The new human species, whom we call Homo sapiens, left Africa and spread

through the world. They found that at least three other species were living in

Eurasia. In south-east Asia, relict populations of Homo erectus lingered on.

Elsewhere in Asia, there were probably Homo heidelbergensis or Denisovans, while

in Europe and the Middle East itself, the Neanderthal ruled. Before this happened

though, there was a strange hiatus of 40,000 years or more, which we shall shortly

examine.

We have very little idea how our own species, Homo sapiens, reacted to the

other kinds of humans whom they encountered when they left Africa, between 50
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and 150 thousand years ago. That interbreeding took place between our species

and the Neanderthals is indisputable. How else to explain the fact that those of us

outside Africa have two or three % Neanderthal DNA? Denisovan DNA is also found

in those of Asian heritage. We know too that the Neanderthals became extinct

after modern humans arrived in Europe. If we know little of the interactions

between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, we know even less of what happened

when our species reached Asia and found Homo erectus still living there.

This talk of Neanderthals interbreeding with other human populations, even

though they belonged to a different species, might puzzle some readers who have

a vague recollection from their schooldays that the very definition of a species is

that members can only breed and produce fertile offspring with their own kind.

This is often, although not invariably, the case. There are however exceptions.

Lions and tigers can breed together, although they are different species. The

resulting female offspring are sometimes fertile (Guggisberg, 1975).

The question of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA may be an important one when

considering possible differences between Europeans and those whose origins are in

Asia or Africa and we will be returning to this subject later in the book. Would

those who were colonising Eurasia have felt any instinctive hostility or repugnance

to the earlier human types whom they came across; some kind of proto-racism

perhaps? Prejudice and dislike of others is not directed only against those who

belong to another ethnic group or come from a different country. Antagonism

towards and distrust of people with red hair is a case in point.

In 2003 a man in the English town of Baildon was taunted and abused in a wine

bar, simply because he had red hair. Following this friction, the individual

concerned left the bar and two men followed him out and stabbed him in the back
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(BBC, 2003). A survey of 1,742 red-headed people from 20 countries, undertaken in

2014 revealed that 60 % of the men and 47 % of the women had had suffered ‘some

kind of discrimination in the past due to their hair colour’ (BBC, 2014). Picking on

people with red hair and regarding them as being undesirable and different is a

tradition dating back centuries. In the Middle Ages, red hair was associated with

being Jewish and Judas Iscariot was generally shown in pictures as being ginger.

This simple and highly visible physical characteristic has always been enough in

itself to brand people as outsiders, without the need for any underlying ideology

relating to race.

It is not inconceivable that the longstanding and irrational antipathy which

many people feel today for those with red hair and very pale skin might go back

further than just a few centuries. It has been speculated that encounters between

Neanderthals and modern humans might have been preserved in the form of folk

legends (Lockwood, 2007). The very pale skin typically seen in people with red hair

would have been something of an advantage to Neanderthals living in northern

latitudes, because unpigmented skin would make it easier to synthesise vitamin D

from sunlight. The paler the skin, the easier to make use of the light. It is known

that red hair was found among Neanderthals (Lalueza-Fox et al, 2007). One

wonders what the swarthy Homo sapiens moving north into Europe would have felt

when coming into contact with people with dead-white skin and vivid red hair. Is

what has facetiously been termed ‘gingerism’ a lingering relic of the repugnance

felt by one human species for another?

The truth is, we do not really have the least idea of how our own species

reacted upon coming into contact with a large population of people who looked

very different to them. Did they even recognise them as people? Or did they regard
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these unfamiliar and weird-looking strangers as sub-human, mentally putting such

creatures into a separate category from themselves? We know that interbreeding

took place or, as a modern website coyly puts it, ‘they had children with them’

(Science Daily, 2007). Saying that modern humans and Neanderthals had children

together summons up a scene of cosy domesticity and brings to mind an episode of

The Flintstones. There is no reason at all to suppose that they had children

‘together’ at all; at least, not in the modern sense. Men invading somebody else’s

territory are just as likely to rape women as they are to form stable family units so

that they can ‘have children with them’.

What we may be sure of is that the interbreeding took place almost as soon as

modern humans began to infringe upon Neanderthal territory in the Middle East. It

was not something restricted to Europe. How do we know this? Simply because

Neanderthal genes are now found in every population outside sub-Saharan Africa.

The highest proportion of such genes is to be found not in Europe, but in south-

east Asia in the islands which lie to the north of Australia. The Chinese too have a

good inheritance of Neanderthal DNA. Since Homo sapiens spread very rapidly

across Asia, reaching Australia before Europe was fully under their dominion, it is

clear that the only way that these Neanderthal genes could have been acquired

was as they moved through the Neanderthal-occupied Middle East, en route to the

rest of Asia.

This might be a good point at which to explain what is meant by things such as

DNA and genes. It is a surprising fact that even those with very strong views and

opinions about such matters as genetically modified crops often do not even know

what a gene actually is. The explanation is very simple and without it some of

what is said in this book might be difficult to follow.

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In almost every cell in our body is a coiled molecule known as DNA, which is

short for Deoxyribonucleic acid. This provides a blueprint for our entire body.

Whether we have blue eyes or brown, straight hair or curly, are dark or fair, tall or

short, male or female; it’s all here in our cells.

We all know that information on computers is stored in binary form, that is to

say that each piece of information is represented by a string of ones and zeros.

This is what we mean by ‘digital’ information. On the DNA molecule, information

for building and operating a human body is stored using four digits rather than two.

These are the bases which spiral around the coiled up string of the DNA. There are

four different chemicals and we use the abbreviations C, G, T and A for them

(Angier, 2007). Those groups of Cs, Gs, Ts and As are known as genes. Each of the

genes tells the body to make a different protein. These proteins build up into a

human body. That, essentially, is all that there is to genetics. Sometimes, groups

of the letters mean stop or start, or instruct the body ‘make lots of this’ or ‘just a

little of this one’.

If just a single letter is out of place in a gene, it can lead to serious

consequences. Haemoglobin, the red cells which carry oxygen around the body,

are smooth and round. A single letter out in the gene which instructs the body how

to manufacture them and they can become jagged and likely to jam in clusters,

rather than flowing smoothly. This is how sickle cell arises as a genetic disorder

common in Africa (Jones, 1993).

This is probably as much as we need to know for now about genetics, but more

will be said on the subject later in this book. Together with the brief account of

the origin of the Neanderthals, this information about genes has been necessary to

set the stage for the thesis which will be outlined in this book. This will be that the
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admixture of Neanderthal DNA, together with that of the Denisovans, is of crucial

importance in the understanding of the relative achievements of modern ethnic

groups. All that is said of interactions between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals,

other than the archaeological and genetic evidence, is pure guesswork. Speculative

fiction such as William Golding’s The Inheritors and Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the

Cave Bear, both of which deal with the collision of modern humans with the

established Neanderthal communities of Europe, are purely fantasy. All that we

are able to say with assurance is that there was mating between the two groups

and that children were born as a consequence of this. It is also certain that

modern humans mated as well with the Denisovans, as did Neanderthals.

Talk of speculative fiction brings us to a very modern fairy tale which has, at

first sight at least, the appearance of a scientific hypothesis. Once it was realised

that Homo sapiens did not evolve from the Neanderthals, but emerged quite

separately in Africa and then moved later into Europe, the question arose as to

what happened to the Neanderthals to cause their extinction. Two explanations

are commonly offered for this. A popular book on science published just before the

turn of the present century summed these up neatly;

It used to be assumed that Neanderthal was simply wiped out by the invaders –

certainly a reasonable hypothesis to make in a century which has seen the

likes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot... Scientists now argue that

although the brains of modern humans were slightly smaller than those of

Neanderthal’s, they were capable of different sorts of activity, particularly in

the area of technological innovation (Trefil, 1996).

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The idea that Homo sapiens outperformed the Neanderthals intellectually and that

one species was simply left behind in the race for living space and food by their

more resourceful cousins has now become almost an accepted fact for the average

person. The dwindling populations of Neanderthals simply could not keep up and

Homo sapiens were always coming up with new inventions such as bows and arrows

which enabled them to survive a lot better than groups who still relied upon

spears. There is a serious problem with this glib explanation and looking at remains

in the Middle East dating back 100,000 years soon shows us what this is.

There is evidence of early modern humans, Homo sapiens, leaving Africa and

pushing through Israel towards Europe and Asia over 100,000 years ago. Modern

humans reached Asia while the Neanderthals were still restricted to Europe. This

colonisation did not last though, for the Homo sapiens were then replaced by

Neanderthals who moved into the Middle East from Europe and displaced the Homo

sapiens population (Haywood, 2008). Neanderthals remained in occupation of that

part of Western Asia for the next 40,000 years or so. In other words, precisely the

same pattern which was later seen in Europe happened tens of thousands of years

earlier, the difference being that in this first iteration of interactions between

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, things did not work out as well for our own

species. They either became extinct, retreated from or were driven out of Western

Asia, leaving the supposedly less capable Neanderthals in possession of that part of

the continent for another 40,000 or 50,000 years. This of course was not how

history was supposed to turn out, according to the most up-to-date and modern

view of the case.

If Homo sapiens had such sharp minds and were able to come up with so many

new and useful ideas, how is it that they abandoned the Middle East when the
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Neanderthals arrived and went back to Africa for the next 40,000 years? They

certainly did not return to Africa and then do all the wonderful things which they

undertook in Europe when finally they settled there. They were not making

marvellous little statuettes, painting beautiful images on the walls of caves or

doing any of those things for which the Europeans became famous after they had

replaced the Neanderthals. What happened when they left Africa for the second

time, or shortly afterwards, to make them so very different?

We shall be looking in much greater detail at events in Europe about 40,000

years ago, later in this book. Meanwhile, it is enough to say that one of the things

which happened is that Homo sapiens mated with Neanderthals almost as soon as

they left Africa for the second time, and that this activity produced hybrids. It is

altogether possible that this was, in a sense, the making of modern humans. One

might say, to use a demotic expression, that it was just what the doctor ordered.

At about the same time that the modern humans passing through the Middle East

and heading west towards Europe were mating with Neanderthals, those heading

north-east encountered the Denisovans and mated with them as well. The

Denisovans had already been breeding with Neanderthals. In 2016 bones from a

female who died in Siberia 90,000 years ago were examined and shown to be a

first-generation hybrid, with one Neanderthal and one Denisovan parent (Nature,

2018).

The Homo sapiens who remained in Africa continued to mate only with each

other. What appeared to happen after this was that although the Neanderthals fell

into a decline and within a few thousand years had died out entirely, some of their

DNA lived on in modern humans. For tens of thousands of years, the Neanderthals

had clung on in Europe, working out strategies to survive the ferocious winters of
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the Ice Age. Did something of their ingenuity and determination to find solutions to

seemingly intractable problems pass to the hybrids who lived in Europe after they

themselves became extinct?

In the introduction, we briefly considered the notion that different human

ethnic groups might be thought of in a similar way to breeds of dog; all belonging

to a single species, but very different in physical appearance, intelligence and

temperament. This idea might be worth serious consideration when we are talking

not of varying ethnicities, but different species of humans. It has long been known

by those who breed animals such as horses and dogs that too pure a strain can

have disadvantages for an animal. Pedigree dogs are famously prone to certain

diseases and weaknesses. Mongrels are often sturdier and healthier than pedigrees.

The possibility will be examined that something of the kind was seen in the early

days of humanity in Europe and that the admixture of Neanderthal and Denisovan

genes was beneficial to both Europeans and those living now in Asia.

This process, when populations are invigorated by the introduction of new

genes, is known as ‘hybrid vigour’. Most cases of which we know relate to new

breeds of the same species injecting vitality or robustness to a line which has

become a little feeble, although of course hybrid vigour has also been used for

thousands of years to create a more effective beast of burden by creating not a

new breed of the same species, but rather by combining two different species.

Crossing donkeys and horses gives us mules, which have advantages over both the

parent species.

Of course, most of the time when two species mate, the offspring are sterile,

which makes the useful new strain a dead-end. Sometimes though, fertile animals

result. Mules, for instance are generally said to be sterile although cases of fertile
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mules are known (Rong et al, 1985). Cross-species hybridisation in the natural

world, without any human encouragement, is surprisingly common. Around 10 % of

the animal kingdom are known engage in mating of this kind which produce

offspring. Fishes are famous for this kind of thing, as are ducks, frogs and sealions

(Schrein, 2016). We must remember too that Homo neanderthalensis, the

Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens were on the very cusp of being separate species.

There is still debate as to whether the two groups had diverged sufficiently as to

even be regarded as separate species, which means that they would perhaps have

been more likely to have fertile offspring.

It was remarked above that rape was as likely to account for Neanderthal and

Homo sapiens mating as anything else. Judging by the general behaviour in the

animal world when such things happen, it might be considered the most probably

explanation. Most copulation between species is undertaken either forcefully,

without the conventional mating behaviour or surreptitiously, seemingly in the

hope that the female will hardly notice what has happened. When we think about

two greatly differing human populations, who have been separated for tens of

thousands of years, it is difficult to imagine what common ground there might have

been for any courtship or wooing. It would not merely be a question of different

languages being spoken, the very nature of the language used by Neanderthals is

debateable. Forcible coupling is a more likely explanation than two star-crossed,

prehistoric lovers transgressing societal boundaries.

We know that the replacement of the Neanderthals by Homo sapiens in Europe

and the extinction of the Denisovans in the east took thousands of years. During

the course of this time, which spanned a longer period than that which separates

our own generation from the Bronze Age, the newcomers to Europe and Asia
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underwent a change. Each successive generation of both Neanderthals and Homo

sapiens saw an increasing number of children born who belonged to neither

species, who were in fact hybrids. As one generation succeeded another, some of

these hybrids would have mated with others, as well as members of the two

species who had given rise to them. We do not know when this process began, but

it may be hypothesised that it was fairly soon after Homo sapiens left Africa for

the second time. If this were not the case, then it is difficult to know how

Neanderthal genes found their way so rapidly and in such profusion to South-East

Asia. The first wave of explorers and settlers from Africa may not have had the

vigour and drive to forge onwards, beyond the Middle East and into Eurasia, but

this second invasion had no difficulty in doing so.

One possibility is that the addition of a few percent of Neanderthal and

Denisovan DNA gave the African newcomers something which they had previously

lacked. The Neanderthals, after all, must have had something going for them to be

able to hang on for tens of thousands of years in Europe, battling the most

ferociously adverse climatic conditions imaginable. We know that some of the

genes we gained from our Neanderthal forebears relate to the immune system, but

others are associated with the brain. Whatever the effect these genes had, it is

not hard to see that they must have been very important to us and aided the

survival of Homo sapiens in various ways. To see why we are able to draw such a

conclusion, even knowing little about genetics and not having much idea what

some of those genes actually did, let us carry out a simple calculation.

The first modern human to mate with a Neanderthal would have had as

offspring a child with 50 % Neanderthal and 50 % Homo sapiens genes. The next

generation, if no more mating with Neanderthals went on, would have 25 %

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Neanderthal genes. Within five generations, the percentage of Neanderthal genes

found in the descendants of that first child born as a result of coupling between

different human species would be around three %; roughly the figure found today,

50,000 years later. Obviously, since the Neanderthals have not been around for

tens of thousands of years, all mating since their extinction has been between

Homo sapiens and yet there has been no further dilution or loss of those few

genes. This strongly suggests that they are advantageous to us, that they confer

some benefit upon those who have them. Were it not so, then they would by now

probably have been diluted to undetectably small levels.

We are accustomed to thinking of Homo sapiens as being brighter and more

quick-witted than the Neanderthals, but of course intelligence alone is not always

enough to enable a people to flourish. Qualities such as curiosity and

tenacity, the ability to stick at a task, may be just as useful for somebody hoping

to get on as simply possessing high intelligence. This is of course a matter of

common observation in the world today. We have all seen people who although

highly intelligent, lack the drive and readiness to stick at one thing long enough for

them to become successful. Perhaps it is some elusive trait of this kind which was

bequeathed by the Neanderthals. Or it might be even simpler than that. It could

be that the Neanderthals were, contrary to what we have believed for generations,

no less clever than us and, at least in some respects, actually more advanced than

Homo sapiens. This sounds a radical and controversial view, but over the last few

years it has almost become the mainstream opinion.

As more research is carried out and the dating of ancient remains becomes more

accurate, it has slowly dawned on us that the Neanderthals were probably no less

intelligent that the first modern humans. They were doing much the same kind of
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things and making similar advances, both cultural and technological, as were the

Homo sapiens who began encroaching upon their ancestral homelands 50,000 years

or more ago. Every year, new evidence emerges to indicate that we have massively

underestimated Neanderthal abilities. Only a few years ago, there was lively

debate about whether they were even capable of spoken language. We now know

that the Neanderthals were doing much the same things that modern humans were

doing and at the same time. They were not just copying new ideas which they had

picked up by imitating the arriving Homo sapiens. Dr Paola Villa at the University

of Colorado Museum in Boulder said bluntly that, ‘The evidence for cognitive

inferiority is simply not there’ (Plos One, 2014).

Not only were the Neanderthals not inferior physically or intellectually to the

modern humans who turned up on their doorstep, in some ways they may even

have been more advanced. Until a few years ago, the oldest extant manmade

structures were generally accepted to be the remains of huts in Poland dating back

perhaps 20,000 years and composed of the bones of mammoths. There have been

older finds of rocks which might have supported crude shelters, but the remains of

the circles of mammoth bones have been described rather grandly as,

the earliest examples of 'monumental architecture' as evidence of increased

social complexity and status differentiation during the final phase of the Ice

Age

(Bahn, 1995)

In 1990 a cave was discovered in southern France. The Bruniquel cave in the

Tarn-et-Garonne region, was very long and about 1000 feet deep within the
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complex was found a structure composed of many stalagmites and stalactites

which had been broken off and then reduced to uniform lengths of about a foot

each. These had been stacked up to form a low, oval enclosure, which was 15 feet

long. Inside, there was evidence of a fire and the cooking of a freshly killed bear.

Nearby was another enclosure, this one smaller and more nearly circular. Carbon

dating of the bones showed that the creature which had been cooked, and

presumably eaten, had been alive over 50,000 years ago, before the arrival of

modern humans in Europe (Nature, 2016). This meant that the rings of broken

limestone must have been constructed by Neanderthals. This was surprising, but

the greatest shock was not to come until somebody decided to date the

stalagmites and stalactites themselves.

In 2016 news was released of the results of dating the construction of the

circles in the Bruniquel cave. This was done by looking at the decay of uranium

and revealed that the pieces of limestone had been stacked into walls 175,000

years ago (Smithsonian Magazine, 2016). This made them by far and away the

oldest structures ever found which had been made by any human species. They

predated the arrival of modern humans in Europe by almost 100,000 years. The

fact that they had been built in pitch dark, 1000 feet inside the cave militated

against the idea that these were the remains of huts. More likely is that they

served some ritual or religious function. It will be recalled that the cave paintings

of Lascaux are in a similarly inaccessible spot and these images have long been

assumed to serve a magical or religious purpose.

The importance of this discovery can hardly be overestimated. It means that

the people whom we had for so long thought to be barely on the cusp of humanity

were actually building things tens of thousands of years before modern humans
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ever set foot out of Africa. Using the same methods for dating, other shocks came

a couple of years later. It was known that very early modern humans in Africa had

scratched lines on a piece of ochre about 100,000 years ago and also made crude

patterns on Ostrich egg-shells, but that seems to have been the limit of their

artistic endeavours. In 2018 two archaeologists from the University of

Southampton, in England, published the results of the uranium-thorium testing

which they had carried out on cave paintings in Spain. It had previously thought

that these strange ladder shapes and stencilled outlines of human hands were

either undertaken by modern humans or just conceivably by Neanderthals who

were copying what they had seen the more sophisticated newcomers do. The

provisional date for these pieces of artwork, 40,000 years ago, placed them at

roughly the time of the invasion of Europe by Homo sapiens and their displacement

of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent. The more accurate dating

astonished everybody, for it gave dates as early as 65,000 years before the present

for two of the cave paintings; pre-dating the arrival of modern humans by some

20,000 years As those who conducted this ground-breaking work wrote,

Modern humans may have “replaced” Neanderthals, but it is becoming

increasingly clear that Neanderthals had similar cognitive and behavioural

abilities – they were, in fact, equally “human”.

(Standish & Pike, 2018).

At every turn, new research and dating increasingly indicates that there was no

real and measurable difference between the abilities of Neanderthals and modern
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humans. Each new archaeological discovery serves to reduce the gap between our

own species and that of the Neanderthals.

When all is said and done though, the amount of Neanderthal DNA in the

genome of the average European is only two or three percent. Could this be

enough to make a genuine difference in those who have inherited it? It is often

said, with some truth, that we share over 98 % of our genes with chimpanzees, but

the differences between the two species are staggeringly great. Geneticist Steve

Jones says, quite rightly, that,

A chimp may share ninety-eight % of its genes with a human being but it

is certainly not ninety-eight % human; it is not human at all – it is a

chimp (Jones, 1993).

We know that chimpanzees and humans share so many genes, but we are far from

understanding how those genes make us so different. The man in charge of the

Chimpanzee Genome Project, Svante Paabo, said after the complete genome was

sequenced that, ‘Part of the secret is hidden in there, but we don’t understand it

yet’ (Le Fanu, 2009). What is without doubt is that just two or three % variation in

genes can make an incalculably great difference between two primates.

We can say with assurance that while the Homo sapiens who remained in Africa

stagnated or advanced at a snail’s pace over the course of the 50,000 years

following the move into Europe and Asia and extinction of the Neanderthals, those

who left Africa made dizzyingly rapid progress, until by the time that they began

to wonder what was going on in their ancestral homeland, the Industrial Revolution
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was in full swing and an immeasurable gulf lay between their own culture and that

existing in Africa.

Glancing at any list of innovations and inventions shows the width of the gulf

which separated those who remained in Africa from those who mingled their DNA

with the Neanderthals and Denisovans. A hefty, 1,000-page book called 1001

Inventions That Changed the World lists inventions from the first, crude stone tools

to the Large Hadron Collider. Leafing through this suggests that since stone tools,

nothing much has been invented in the original home of Homo sapiens (Challoner,

2009). The earliest wooden spears are known from Europe, as are the first flint-

tipped versions. Pottery, oil lamps, metal-working, weaving and wheels followed;

all either in the Middle East or Europe. So the list continues, through to steam

engines, motor cars, television, nuclear power and space rockets. Whatever else

the pure Homo sapiens were capable of, original thought did not seem to be a

noticeable trait.

In this chapter, we have discussed the meeting of different human species and

seen that Homo sapiens mated with Neanderthals, probably as soon as they began

encroaching on Neanderthal territories in the Middle East 50,000 years or so ago.

The result if that those humans who left Africa acquired a certain number of genes

which those who remained in Africa had to do without. This is still the situation

today and we shall look later at the possible implications of this fact.

Although there was mating, it is impossible to know how those early men and

women viewed each other and whether there was any feeling which might have

been akin to what we now called racial prejudice. There are various possibilities.

One is that the two types of humans saw no essential difference when they

encountered each other and simply traded, made friends and perhaps formed
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romantic attachments. Another might be that the Homo sapiens men behaved like

an invading army and raped any Neanderthal women whom they were able to

capture. It is even possible that the two groups did not even recognise each other

as fellow humans; we have no idea and are never likely to do so. It is tempting to

speculate that there might have been some element of proto-racism, with the

modern humans feeling an instinctive disgust for another species who looked so

different from them; perhaps with different coloured skin and a different kind of

hair.

It is essentially fruitless to speculate about the prehistoric past and form

theories and hypotheses which are never likely to be confirmed in the future by

evidence. A brief account of the relations between two species of humans 40,000

years ago has been outlined here not because it sheds, in itself, any light on the

origin of racism, in the sense of racial prejudice, but rather because the genes

which were acquired at that time by those who now live in Europe and Asia are

proving crucial to an understanding of the history of the world.

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Part 2: Antithesis

1. The Roots of Anti-Racism

2. What is the Equalitarian Dogma?
3. Defending the Dogma
4. Rewriting the Past
5. Critical Race Theory
6. The Corpse which Would not Lie Down
7. A Possible Way Forward
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Chapter 1
The Roots of Anti-Racism

In the first part of this book we studied how the concept of scientific racism arose

and the way in which it flowered in the nineteenth century. The final chapter

examined one or two themes which indicated that it is a little soon to abandon the

idea that there are innate differences between ethnic groups and showed that

perhaps new evidence tends to confirm that there is more to be said yet on the

subject. We are now going to see how the view which was diametrically opposed

to scientific racism came into being and look at the ideas which gave birth to it.

We begin by considering that even when people in the eighteenth and nineteenth

century expressed strong disapproval of institutions like the slave trade and

practices such as the lynching of black people, this did not by any means indicate

that they rejected the underlying belief which permeated European and American

society, that is to say that there were definite, real and inherent differences

between black people and white; just as Indians and Chinese people also belonged

to other races, each with their own characteristics. They may well have thought it

wrong to be cruel to or mistreat black people, but that did not mean that they

thought black people to be as intelligent as white people, nor that they believed

Indians or Chinese people capable of running their own countries in an efficient

and humane fashion.

When the subject of slavery crops up, we often hear the same names

mentioned every time. William Wilberforce and Abraham Lincoln are two of those

whose work in ridding the world of slavery is surely worthy of note. In the case of

both men, the popular perception is very far from being the correct one. Neither
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Wilberforce nor Lincoln were advocates of equality and neither thought that black

people, cultural differences apart, shared the same potential or were possessed of

the same intellectual abilities as white people. Both men were, in other words,

racists.

William Wilberforce was of course a British Member of Parliament who was

instrumental in having the slave trade made illegal in the British Empire. Now

while it true that Wilberforce, as part of his devout Christian belief, thought that

slavery was wrong, that did not mean that he felt that black people could run their

own affairs or be freed wholesale without the outlook for such freed men, women

and children, being bleak and unpromising. In the late eighteenth century

Wilberforce and fellow members of his church, known as the Clapham Sect, helped

found a colony in Africa which would be a refuge for former African slaves who had

been repatriated to the continent from which they came. Even when the British

government assumed nominal responsibility for Sierra Leone, as the colony was

called, the Clapham Sect was heavily involved in the running of the place. After

the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy was active in

intercepting ships in the Atlantic and if they were slavers, then returning the

captives to Africa. Sierra Leone was a handy place to drop them, because it was

now run by the British and the navy had a base there.

William Wilberforce did not think that freeing slaves all at once was a good

idea, because they would not be able to cope with freedom. He said that he and

his fellow Christians,

had always thought the slaves incapable of liberty at present, but hoped that by

degrees a change might take place as the natural result of the abolition
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(Hague, 2007).

The slaves ‘rescued’ by the Royal Navy were actually sold into slavery again in

Sierra Leone. The governor there paid the navy a bounty for each slave they

deposited at the capital Freetown. These people were then bound as ‘apprentices’

for fourteen years. Any who ran away were pursued, arrested and brought back to

their ‘masters’. All this was sanctioned arranged and organised by Wilberforce and

the Clapham Sect. The first Crown Governor of Sierra Leone, Thomas Perronet

Thompson, complained that Wilberforce and the Sierra Leone Company, which had

founded the colony, ‘by means of their agents become slave traders themselves’

(Tomkins, 2010).

William Wilberforce did not think of black people as able to take care of

themselves and run their own affairs, which may come as something of a surprise

to those who see him as an early anti-racist. What though of Abraham Lincoln; the

man who fought a war to free the slaves in the southern states? We cannot do

better than to look at what Abraham Lincoln said in a public debate in 1858, just

three years before the beginning of the American Civil War.

I am not, nor ever have been in favour of bringing about in any way the social

and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have

been in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to

hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. and I will say in addition to

this that there is a physical difference between the white and black

races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms

of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they
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do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I

as much as any other man am in favour of having the superior position assigned

to the white race

(Lincoln, 1953).

Abraham Lincoln was a believer in segregation and thought that it would make life

in the United States much easier if black people returned to Africa. Both he and

William Wilberforce were typical of progressive political thinkers of the time. They

might disapprove of slavery or lynching, but that did not mean that they viewed

black people as their equals or wanted to live next door to them.

Of course, there were people who thought that the different ethnic groups of

the world were alike in intellectual ability and that there were no inbuilt

differences between black people and white, but they were probably few and far

between and seldom rose to prominence. It was not until the twentieth century

that the ideology of racial equalitarianism took off. Chief among the pioneers in

this new perspective was Franz Boas, the German-born anthropologist who spent

most of his life in the United States.

Franz Uril Boas was born in Prussia, which is now part of Germany, in 1858. His

parents were Jewish, although not religiously observant. He began his academic

career studying physics and geography, but then became interested in

anthropology, which was at that time a fairly new discipline (Holloway, 1997).

After embarking upon a field trip to study the waters of the Arctic, Boas instead

became fascinated by the Inuit people of Canada. A few years later, still in his

twenties, he emigrated to the United States; in which country he spent the rest of

his life. He is today known by some as the ‘Father of American Anthropology’.

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Boas’ thinking has been enormously influential in anthropology and the idea of

racism. He was, for instance, the mentor of, among others, Margaret Meade.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the traditional, Victorian beliefs

about scientific racism still held sway. It was thought that there was a strict

hierarchy of both races and the cultures which they produced, with the Anglo-

Saxons at the pinnacle of racial, intellectual, scientific, cultural and technological

development. Franz Boas thought this a short-sighted and parochial perspective.

He promoted instead the notion of cultural relativism, suggesting that there was

no objective way of judging between different societies and cultures and that all

such opinions were subjective. Who was to say that the British, with their

technologically advanced civilisation were actually a more worthy culture than

that of the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia? Such ideas may have been ground-

breaking and revolutionary in the 1920s, but they are of course now the orthodox

and accepted view of most educated people in the west. This led, almost as a

matter of course, to the revolutionary thought that if this was the case with

societies and cultures, could it also be true of the individuals who made up those

populations? If the Inuit culture or that of the Kalahari Bushmen was in no way

inferior to that of Britain or the Germany, then why should we think that the men

and women in those African or Canadian groups were somehow inferior

intellectually or in any other way to, say, the British royal family? Perhaps cultural

differences were all?

Boas showed that the then popular idea about the world’s races being distinct

and separate, with particular physical features associated with each of them, was

mistaken. He demonstrated that studying skull size and proportions, to which great

importance had been attached when studying the different races into which
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mankind was supposedly divided, was little better than the old pseudo-science of

phrenology.

As far as it went, Boas’ work was perfectly correct and the way in which he

dismantled the ideas relating to race which had been riding high for a century of

more was masterful. He worked with the black sociologist and historian W. E. B.

Du Bois and with him was involved with the National Association for Coloured

People, which was founded in the United States in 1909. Boas worked too with the

researcher and inventor Booker T. Washington, who was also black. There is no

doubt that he was quite indifferent to the colour of a man’s skin and the culture

from which he came; an admirable enough sentiment and perhaps not a common

one in America in the first half of the twentieth century.

Franz Boas was not the only person in the field of anthropology who was

advancing the idea that the only differences between different ethnicities were

cultural and that culture alone could explain any supposed inferiority in

intelligence. One of his students, Ruth Benedict, went on to enjoy a distinguished

academic career herself and was able to advocate for cultural relativism from

within Columbia University. Her 1934 book, Patterns of Culture, made her one of

the most well-known anthropologists to hold such views (Silverman, 2004).

Because she was so well known for her views in the years before the beginning

of the Second World War, Benedict was commissioned by the United States Army to

write a pamphlet called The Races of Mankind, which was originally intended to be

distributed to all troops, with the aim of promoting harmonious relations between

black soldiers and white as they fought together the common enemies of Imperial

Japan and Nazi Germany. When completed though, this piece of work was thought

to be so revolutionary in the views expressed, that it was quietly shelved. Reading

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the booklet today is fascinating, because although Benedict wrote it almost 80

years ago, in collaboration with a man called Gene Weltfish, it presents the

orthodox view which is widely accepted today by many in the field of sociology and

anthropology (Benedict & Weltfish, 1943). At the time it was published though,

this was radical stuff indeed.

The Races of Mankind emphasises that all differences across population groups

are cultural and nothing more. A cartoon shows two boys; one scruffy and unkempt

and living in a run-down neighbourhood and the other presentable and smart. The

tidy and clearly well-raised boy is depicted in front of a clean, prosperous street

with a nice school. The caption is, ‘WITH BETTER HOME, SCHOOL, MEDICAL CARE,

JOHNNY COULD HAVE BEEN JIMMY.’ (Benedict & Weltfish, 1943). Another cartoon

points out the indisputable fact that an American raised in China would speak

Chinese. From these simple points, the argument moves on to race and it is

suggested that only physical differences exist between varying ethnic groups.

Everything else, intelligence is specifically mentioned, is entirely environmental. A

passage relating to intelligence is worth reading in its entirety, for it could have

been written yesterday,

Scientists then studied gifted children. They found that children with top

scores turned up among negroes, Mexicans and Orientals. Then they went to

European countries to study the intelligence of children in homelands from

which our immigrants come. Children from some of these countries got poor

scores in America, but in their homeland they got good scores. Evidently the

poor scores here were due to being uprooted, speaking a foreign language, and

living in tenements; the children were not unintelligent by heredity.

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(Benedict & Weltfish, 1943)

There is a great deal in Ruth Benedict’s writing which has now been either

proved to be incorrect or, at the very least, called into question, but the point has

been made that the modern, progressive view of race was already firmly

established almost a century ago in the United States.

In 1942, the year before Ruth Benedict wrote her pamphlet denouncing the

idea of race as an actual biological phenomenon, a man who was a student of both

her and Franz Boas published a book on the subject which is still in print to this

day. Ashley Montague’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, put

forward the thesis that the whole idea of race had arisen for reasons of economic

advantage, as it provided a handy justification for the slave trade (Montague,

1942). This may or may not be true, although it is very plausible. The important

question though is not why this or that theory emerged at the time it did. We can

explain the origins of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in similar terms and

analyse why it became so popular at the time it did, rather than earlier or later.

After all no human idea emerges from a vacuum; all are the product of their

historical period. Instead of asking ourselves why an idea becomes generally

adopted at a particular point in human development, we might more profitably

enquire as to the veracity of the idea and if it can be proved or disproved.

Demonstrating that some set of economic factors made an hypothesis attractive to

merchants is interesting from a sociological point of views, but tells us nothing

useful about the accuracy or correctness of the hypothesis.

We have outlined briefly some of the driving forces behind modern thinking on

race. The ideology devised by academics like Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Ashley
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Montague is still going strong today. Indeed, this is to dramatically understate the

case. It has gone from strength to strength to the point at which challenging, or

even asking too many questions, about the subject has the effect of making people

look askance and suspect racism. Many writers today simply repeat the assertions

made by anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s as though this is enough to prove

their case, saying bluntly that, ‘Anthropological research can be used to show that,

biologically speaking, race is a myth’ (Engelke, 2017) and ‘Race is a social

construct’ (Rutherford, 2020).

We pause at this point and consider two separate matters which both weaken

the foundations of the towering and monolithic structure which is anti-racism in

the western world today. The first of these is to remind ourselves that an awful lot

has changed in the 80 years since Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race

was published. It was reasonable at the time that books like this and Ruth

Benedict’s summary of modern research which was provided for the American

army to claim that the only difference between races are purely physical ones.

How could it be otherwise? If the only tools you possess to examine differences

between a black man and a white are a pair of callipers, a ruler and perhaps a

colour chart, then clearly all you are likely to uncover will be crude, physical

measurements. Nobody at that time was able to analyse DNA and intelligence tests

were not as sophisticated as they are today.

There is also the fact that the lives of black people in the United States were

often very different from those of white people in terms of income, education and

opportunity. It must have been very tempting to dismiss all apparent racial

differences as either physical or cultural. These were, after all, the things which

could be measured and catalogued.

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The chief difficulty though about anti-racism, as it is now accepted in the

West, has nothing to do with new developments in any scientific field. It is that

the core ideas which underpin the whole ideology are flawed and illogical. In other

words, anti-racism today is fatally harmed by three logical fallacies which

permeate the belief-system and make it look increasingly untenable when

examined objectively.

The first of the logical fallacies which Fran Boas and Ruth Benedict unwittingly

embraced is known as arguing from the particular to the universal. Let us suppose

that I hold an irrational belief that all dogs are savagely aggressive and prone to

biting people. I hold this view in contrast to my affection for cats, which I believe

to be invariably affectionate creatures which never bite anybody. One day, I meet

a pleasant and good-tempered dog which, far from barking at me and taking a

lump out of my leg, rubs itself against my legs and then jumps up to sit on my lap.

I am now compelled to alter my opinions about dogs. I can no longer say that all

dogs are aggressive, nor that they will, without exception, bite people. That

however is all that I can say. I am familiar enough with cats, but having found that

my strongly held antipathy to dogs was ill-founded, I can say nothing more than,

‘Some dogs are not aggressive’. I cannot go further than this though and state with

assurance that dogs are no more likely to bite people than cats. That would be

arguing from the particular to the universal; taking one instance and turning it into

a general rule.

Thinking about the hypothetical case above shows us that it would be easy to

fall from one error into another. From thinking that all dogs were prone to biting

and then changing one’s opinion radically as a result of limited refutation of the

earlier theory might very well end with somebody being persuaded that dogs are
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no more likely to bit people than cats, which is of course false. The true state of

affairs is that some dogs bite and so too do some cats, but cats biting people is a

very rare event, whereas dog bites are not at all rare. It comes down to a matter

of statistics and any generalisation about all cats or all dogs is likely to be wrong.

Drawing a general conclusion from one case is just what we mean by arguing from

the particular to the universal.

What bearing does this have on Franz Boas and the other anthropologists? It is

simple. In the 1920s, the common view in Europe and America could probably be

summed up as being that black people were dull-witted, compared to white

people. This was what many, perhaps most people believed. Racial prejudice was

the rule, rather than the exception. There was less mixing of black people with

white than is now the case and so a lot of white people did not socialise, attend

church with or live next to black people. That people of African origin were of

inferior intelligence was widely thought to be the case. Although few people, other

than sociologists or anthropologists ever stopped to think what they really

understood this to mean, Illustration 13 shows how many, perhaps most, white

people saw the case to stand. This shows all black people to be in a separate

category of cognitive ability from all whites. It is of course the perspective which

provided a justification for the segregated schools in the American south, as well

as the apartheid system in South Africa. It need hardly be said that this perception

is faulty.
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13. The once popular view of the distribution of

intelligence among white and black groups

People like Franz Boas found through personal experience that this commonly

held view was erroneous, because he knew personally black people who were

highly intelligent. If we meet only a few black people and they are highly educated

and intelligent people, we might jump to the conclusion that highly educated and

intelligent black people are as common as highly educated and intelligent white

people. This is a debateable point, but it is certainly not a logical deduction to

make after meeting one, two or even half a dozen such people. Franz Boas was an

academic and although he carried out field trips among other cultures as a young

man, in later years he tended to come into contact only with others working in

academia. Through working with brilliant men such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who was

black, Boas and others were assured that any sweeping generalisation about all

black people being less Intelligent than white people was false. It could not be

true that all black men were dull-witted. The correct deduction would have been

that some black people were not dull-witted. To jump though from this simple
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statement of truth to the position that black people were no more likely to be

dull-witted than white people was a step too far. Just as in our earlier example of

the man who thought that all dogs were ferocious, having discovered that one is

not tells him only that he was mistaken in his previous ideas about the subject.

This false conclusion still lies, unremarked and unexamined, at the heart of

modern anti-racism. Meeting a black intellectual does not tell us anything at all

about the distribution of intelligence in black people. We could not know from that

single encounter whether high intelligence is as common in those of African

heritage as it is in people of East Asian origin or Europeans. To establish that, we

would need to carry out a great deal of research and many tests of intelligence

across different parts of the world. When this is actually done, the results do not,

on the whole, suggest that cognitive ability is evenly divided in the way in which

we might hope that it would be. We shall return to this matter later.

The 2008 film Gran Torino, which was produced and directed by Clint

Eastwood, provides us with a perfect instance of another failure of logic known as

the Fallacy of Division. The protagonist of the film, also played by Clint Eastwood,

berates a young woman from south-east Asia for what he regards as foolish and

hazardous behaviour on her part. He says, ‘I thought you Asian girls were supposed

to be smart!’ Here, in a nutshell, is the fallacy of division; the assumption that

what is true of the whole must equally be true of the parts which make up that

whole. Imagine that you meet a football player who is a member of a spectacularly

successful team. You might perhaps say to yourself, ‘Wow, this man must be a

sensational footballer, after all his team is winning every match it plays.’ There

are no grounds for this belief. It might be the case that the team has five or six

members whose ability at the game is almost superhuman and that the remaining
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players are slightly below average. Just because the man you meet belongs to a

winning team tells you nothing useful about his own prowess at the game.

The fact that people of Chinese origin tend to score more highly in IQ tests and

other measures, including the passing of academic examinations, tells us

something about the group as a whole. It does not enable us to make any

assumptions about any individual person of East Asian heritage whom we meet. Nor

does the fact that black people score, in general, lower marks in IQ tests and do

not tend to do as well in academic examinations let us conclude that the next

black person we meet will be less intelligent than the last white person we

encountered.

Of course, the commonly accepted view of the case today, at least among

educated people in the West, is that there are no inherent differences in cognitive

ability or anything else relating to the mind between one ethnicity and another.

Whether a person is black or white, Asian or American, regardless is they were

born into a family of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert or a prosperous, middle-class

home in a smart part of New York, all have equal potential and similar

intelligence. All differences as a baby grows to adulthood are the product of

upbringing and nurture. Illustration 15 shows this situation schematically. This is

the equalitarian dogma of course, which we have already encountered. This may

be the true state of affairs, but this is by no means certain. Let us look at another

possibility.

That most people, of any ethnicity or nationality fall into a roughly comparable

category of average intelligence is very likely to be the case. It is the proportions

of the very intelligent and the very dull-witted though which might differ. These

are small numbers, compared with the overall population. Illustration 16 shows
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how things stand for any given group of people. Almost all will fall more or less

into the zone marked ‘average’. At one end are a few who are very clever and at

the other a small number who are very slow. This picture holds good for white

people, black people, and those from Asia. There is some reason to suppose that

people whose families have their origin in East Asia might have more people in the

group who are very intelligent and perhaps fewer in the category at the other end;

the ones who are unusually slow-witted or have learning difficulties. Perhaps their

average IQ will accordingly be a little higher than the average for white people.

16. The distribution of high and low intelligence in any population group

Although the educational data suggest that there may be differences of the sort

discussed above, we cannot be sure. But if it is so, then the group containing black

people, that is to say those of African origin, will contain a greater number of

individuals who are slow and fewer at the very bright end of the spectrum. This is,
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as I say, what we seem to observe in schools and it also appears to be the case

when aptitude tests and IQ tests are administered.

Illustration 17 shows how the three groups might really look, if combined

together. Here, they are superimposed, one upon the other with the bulk of the

members of each group in the same general category of ‘average intelligence. Only

at the extremes, those of very high or very low intelligence is there any real

difference. We can see that very high intelligence is most likely to be found in

those of East Asian origin and least likely in those of African heritage. For very low

intellectual ability, these positions are reversed. This situation means of course

that we are quite unable to draw any conclusions about any individual African,

European of Chinese person whom we should chance to meet.

17. A possible explanation for what is observed in education and the

workplace. Black, white and Asian cognitive abilities are superimposed one

upon the other.

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The truth is that whatever IQ you care to mention, from 50 to 150 there will be

black people and white who share that level of measured intelligence. There will

also be people of Indian origin, Hispanics and those whose families have their roots

in China, all of them with that same IQ. This indisputable fact can lead unwary

people to leap from one false supposition to another, which is equally wrong and

ill-founded. In the little fantasy at which we looked above, a man jumped from the

position of thinking that all dogs were more aggressive and liable to bite him than

all cats, to the belief that dogs were no more likely to bite him than cats were.

This skewed and inaccurate view was based upon very limited experience and we

saw that it is the logical fallacy of arguing from the particular to the universal.

Precisely the same thing can happen with race and intelligence.

Let us look now at another flaw in the logic of those who might be said to be

founders of the modern anti-racism movement. It was observed in the 1920s that

black people in America did not do as well educationally as white people. This

attitude led to white civil authorities spending far less on black schools than on

white ones (Lamon, 1983). Now the substandard schooling which black children

received in much of the southern part of the United States might well have been

responsible for the fact that the IQs of black children and adults which were

measured at that time were, on the whole, lower than those of white people. This

is possible, but not certain. A genuine deficit, even a fairly slight one, would also

explain this. The hypothesis which one chose in 1930s America for those differing

IQ scores depended less upon reason and logic, than they did upon ideology and

politics. One possibility, that embraced by many white people, was that the

inherent intellectual ability of black people was limited and this explained why in

adulthood they had, on the whole, lower IQs than white people. There were those
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though, especially anthropologists like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, who were

champions of cultural relativism, and thought that if black children and white were

given equal opportunities with access to schools of the same quality, then there

would inevitably be equality of educational outcome and also intelligence.

Of course, poverty can be a product of prejudice and denied opportunity, but it

is also the case that those less intellectually gifted also often have lower incomes

and so are more likely to fall into destitution than the average genius. We can see

poverty as a cause of intellectual impoverishment, which is what cultural

relativists are apt to do, but it is also undeniably true that the dull-witted are at

greater hazard of poverty than others and that poverty can then be a consequence

of a lower IQ.

To assume one of these possibilities over the other is to fall into the post hoc

ergo propter hoc fallacy; which is to think that because one thing precedes

another, the first thing caused the second. The classic example of this is usually

given as the building of a new church steeple in Kent in the sixteenth century. Sir

Thomas More had been sent to investigate the reason that the harbour at the port

of Sandwich was silting up and he spoke to the oldest inhabitant in the district,

hoping that he might be able to shed light on the matter. We cannot do better

than quote what William Minto, a Victorian logician, wrote about this incident,

More asked him what he had to say as to the cause of the sands. ‘Forsooth Sir,’

was the greybeard’s answer, ‘I am an old man: I think that Tenterden steeple

is the cause of the Goodwin sands. For I am an old man, and I may remember

the building of Tenterden steeple, and I may remember when there was no

steeple at all there. And before that Tenterden steeple was in building, there
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was no manner of speaking of any flats or sands that stopped the haven; and,

therefore, I think that Tenterden steeple is the cause of the destroying and

decaying of Sandwich Haven.

(Minto, 1893)

It is not being suggested that Ruth Benedict was as foolish as the old man from

Kent during the time of the Tudors, but her deductions were no more rational.

In the pamphlet which she produced during the Second World War, Benedict

explicitly stated her firm belief about material conditions in childhood being the

only significant factor in the development of intelligence and also made a rather

rash prediction; one which can be measured today. Discussing the discovery made

during the First World War that black and white conscripts usually had different

scores in intelligence tests, with most of the white soldiers doing better than the

majority of black men, Benedict had this to say,

Since the vast majority of Negroes lived in the South, their score on the

intelligence test was a score they got not only as Negroes, but as Americans

who had grownup under poor conditions in the South.

(Benedict, 1943)

Benedict went on to make a statement which set out what was to become dogma

in the coming years,

The differences did not arise because people were from the north or the

South, or because they were white or black, but because of differences in

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income, education, cultural advantages, and other opportunities.

(Benedict, 1943)

For much of the United States’ post-war history, this is the doctrine which has

been sedulously followed by successive governments, both Democrat and

Republican. If only, it is thought, conditions of equality prevail between black and

white, then equality of outcome will arrive as a matter of course. Closing what has

become known as the ‘attainment gap’, which is the difference in educational

outcomes and achievement between white people and black, has, for more than

sixty years, been an unattainable goal. It is beginning to look to some as though

this enterprise is a hopeless one; the pursuit of a mirage which recedes into the

distance as rapidly as it is approached.

An instance of the attainment gap in Britain will illustrate the nature of the

problem. In Britain, schools have never been segregated and the vast majority of

children are educated at ordinary, state schools. The funding for these schools

does not and never has varied according to the ethnic composition of the pupils.

Today, the government in London pays what is known as an Age Weighted Pupil

Unit, known by the somewhat inelegant acronym of the AWPU for every child at a

school. Nothing could be fairer or more equitable. This means that apart from the

seven % of pupils who attend private, fee-paying schools, everybody in the country

is educated at similar schools according to a National Curriculum which applies to

every school in Britain.

This then seems an ideal test of the doctrine which Ruth Benedict and her

mentor Franz Boas expounded. The most strenuous efforts have been made to

ensure that black children and those of south Asian origin who are pupils at British
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schools are not discriminated against and are, on the contrary, encouraged to fulfil

their potential. When it comes to university admissions, which normally require

the passing of examinations known as A Levels, the situation is welcoming for

those applicants belonging to ethnic minorities. So welcoming in fact are the

universities of Britain, that a higher percentage of ethnic minorities gain places in

them than do white students. In 2020, 71 % of pupils at British schools of Chinese

ethnicity gained a place at university. For students of south Asian origin, that is to

say those whose families came from Indian, Pakistan or Bangladesh, the figure was

53.1 %. For black students, 47.5 % progressed into higher education. White

students had the lowest rate of all. Just 32.6 % of white pupils went on to

university (Gov.uk, 2021).

The figure just given should be sufficient to show that there is no institutional

bias against the admission of black students to British universities. They are

actively encouraged to apply and in some cases the entrance requirements for

some universities are relaxed or lowered, in the cause of promoting diversity in the

student body. To put it bluntly, the situation is all that people like Franz Boas and

Ruth Benedict could possibly have hoped for when they were writing on this

subject in the 1930s and 1940s. Readers will perhaps suspect that there is a ‘but’

and this is indeed the case.

In March 2021 the Office for Students, the government watchdog whose role is

to protect the interests of university students in Britain, issued a statement in

which regret was expressed for the attainment gap in the outcomes for those

graduating from the nation’s universities. The data showed that in the year 2019-

2020,
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Black students were less likely than white students to gain a first or upper

second-class degree at 96 of the 97 universities and colleges considered in the

analysis. At some, the gap in attainment was more than 20 percentage points.

(Office for Students, 2021)

Chris Millward, who was the Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office

for Students, said,

While there is evidence that the gap in attainment for black students compared

to their white peers is closing, it remains far too high. At 96 of the 97 higher

education providers for which the dashboards report ethnicity attainment gaps,

black students’ attainment is lower than we see for white students.

(Office for Students, 2021)

In Britain, universities are subsidised by the government and when they are told

that such and such a figure is, ‘far too high’, this is of more than academic

interest. Since the government hold the purse strings, financial sanctions could be

brought to bear on those institutions which did not take the hint. What was clear

though was that despite heroic efforts to ensure that black students were

recruited to the best universities, this sometimes being achieved by requiring

lower grades for entry, known as ‘contextual’ offers, the fact remained that they

were not reaching the same level of achievement as white students. Since it was

unthinkable that this might be because the black students were simply less able to

cope with the demands of the courses, it must surely mean that the universities

were failing somehow in teaching and supporting them. The grip which the modern
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ideas on equalitarianism have on political thought is so firm that no other

explanation could be considered.

Having explored the origins of modern anti-racism, we look now at the

overarching concept to which all those who think of themselves as opposed to

racial prejudice subscribe. Even if they have never troubled to reason the matter

out, such individuals hold subconsciously to the idea that every ethnicity has equal

intellectual potential and any observed differences in outcome at any stage must,

as Ruth Benedict asserted, be due to the influence of society and the upbringing of

the child. Abolish racial prejudice and we will make all the members of society

equally prosperous. Any differences in achievement will fade away and we will find

as many black nuclear physicists and architects as there are white ones. The next

chapter will look closely at this doctrine or, as it might more properly be called,

dogma.
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Chapter 2

What is the Equalitarian Dogma?

In the first section of this book, we saw the way in which a vague idea among

white people of European origin that certain groups of people in other parts of the

world were inherently different, in ways other than the purely physical, gradually

hardened into certainty and became a fixed and immutable set of assumptions

about various ethnicities. Black people were brutal and only semi-human, the

Chinese were cunning and cruel, Jews avaricious and so on. These stereotypes

embedded themselves in the minds of many ordinary people and it was felt that

‘blood will out’. Whatever was done, either educationally or socially, would be

largely pointless as the essential racial nature was the deciding factor in how

people behaved or the extent to which they might benefit from educational or

professional opportunities. In the twentieth century, this attitude has first

softened and changed and then reversed entirely. From believing that there are

unchangeable differences between the character, disposition and intelligence of

ethnic groups, views have now altered so radically that it is currently accepted by

most academics and researchers that there are, and can be, no innate differences

at all between black people and white; everything is a product of environment,

either in the home or society at large. If black students do less well at school or

have an increased tendency to go to prison, rather than university, then this must

be due to poverty, racism or a toxic combination of both.

This extreme and opposite view to that held for so many years has created

problems of its own; not least because it has in the last 60 years or so become
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petrified into a rigid and unyielding orthodoxy. Any difficulty encountered by black

people and other ethnic minorities is, by definition, the fault of other people;

either individually or as a society. We shall look in a later chapter at the doctrine

of Critical Race Theory, which has codified this point of view into a handy set of

easily remembered set of rules, but for now we need only understand that part of

this belief system is the firmly held view, regardless of any evidence to the

contrary, that there are no differences between white, black and Asian people and

that any advantages which they enjoy or disadvantages which militate against their

advancement, are entirely a product of their environment. This perspective is

inextricably linked with the theory that race is no more than a social construct

with no external and scientific validity. A popular modern book on Critical Race

Theory sets out the case succinctly,

People with common origins share certain physical traits, of course, such as

skin color, physique, and hair texture. But these constitute only an extremely

small portion of their genetic endowment, are dwarfed by what we have in

common, and have little or nothing to do with distinctly human, higher-order

traits, such as personality, intelligence, and moral behavior. That society

frequently chooses to ignore these scientific truths, creates races, and endows

them with pseudo-permanent characteristics is of great interest to critical race

theory.

(Delgado & Stefancic, 2017)

This set of beliefs was described 60 years ago by the former Chair of Columbia

University’s Psychology Department as the ‘equalitarian dogma’ (Garrett, 1961).

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Already, when Garrett wrote about what he called a dogma, these views had

imperceptibly become the accepted, and indeed acceptable, way of viewing the

world; at least by those with any desire to be thought progressive and liberal.

When one strongly held idea is overthrown and cast down, then a vacuum is left

which cries out for a new belief to take the place of the old and discredited one.

Historically, we observe that this new ideology is often one which is diametrically

opposed to that which it replaces. When the absolutist rule of the Russian Tsars

was abolished in 1917, the political system which was then adopted was not a

liberal democracy or constitutional monarchy, but rather an extreme republican

dictatorship. Something very similar took place when the view which had been

held for centuries, that some ethnic groups were more clever, physically stronger

or likely to make good and dependable citizens, became regarded as wicked and

wrong and in its place was installed a new belief-system; that there is no

fundamental difference between any ethnicities and that the way they behave and

their level of intelligence is almost entirely due to the environment in which they

are raised.

This is a perfectly natural reaction when a paradigm-shift occurs and our view

of the world changes. It happened of course when Einstein’s ideas about the

universe displaced those of Newton in the early twentieth century, but this was a

purely scientific process, which allowed anybody to test for themselves what was

being claimed by the proponents of relativity. Although the cases are comparable,

there is one very great difference between the adoption of Einstein’s worldview

and the change in perspective on race and ethnicity which took place in the middle

of the twentieth century. It is that the new ideas, which overturned widely held

views on the subject, in this case the idea that black people, white people and
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those of Far Eastern heritage had precisely similar intellectual potential, for

instance, were founded not on scientific observation but upon ideology. This did

not, and does not, necessarily mean that the ideas are wrong; merely that they are

not held on strictly rational grounds. This is a bold assertion and before looking in

more detail at the implications, it might help to examine one or two concrete

examples which will make this a little clearer. These will show us the way in which

the equalitarian hypothesis is treated by those who champion it as being not only

factually correct, but also ethically virtuous. Those who question it are therefore

not only fools, but rogues.

In ordinary academic discourse, the political leanings of chemists and physicists

have little bearing upon what theories they hold or the results of any experiments

which they conduct; they are certainly not a matter of common observation. It

would be surprising to read of work with a polymerase chain reaction which had

been carried out by ‘Professor Brown, who is politically on the far right’ or an

astronomical measurement made by ‘Dr Smith, who is of course a member of the

communist party’. These hypothetical cases look grotesque and yet whenever

scientists deviate from what is accepted as the correct view on the matter of race,

their political allegiance and every other aspect of their lives is immediately seen

as being immensely relevant to the work which they conduct. This suggests that we

are dealing with a political or ideological phenomenon, rather than one which is

purely scientific.

Here is Steve Jones, formerly Professor of Genetics and Head of the Galton

Laboratory at University College London, writing in a popular science book which

won the Rhone-Poulenc Prize for the best science book of 1994; ‘Much of the work

on inherited differences in intellect between races is contemptible...’ (Jones,

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1993). One can hardly imagine a professor writing that, ‘Much of the work on

quantum mechanics is contemptible...’ At the very least, this might be expected

to raise eyebrows. Adam Rutherford, a geneticist by training, although better

known as a science writer and television personality, is writing here about a

psychologist he evidently dislikes; Richard Lynn, who was mentioned in a previous

chapter.

It should in principle be possible to consider Lynn’s work independently of his

racist and white supremacist views. But issues over questionable data and

cherry-picking of results puts heavy strain on his credibility as a scientist

(Rutherford, 2020).

He helpfully explains that Lynn is on the far-right of the political spectrum and has

also spoken at conferences alongside some very dubious types. The only part of

this which has any bearing on the question of inherited intelligence is of course the

psychologist’s work, but beyond mentioning questionable data, nothing more is

said.

The book from which the quotation by Adam Rutherford is taken is called How

to Argue with a Racist and it provides an excellent introduction to the subject of

this chapter. Published in 2020, it received glowing and enthusiastic reviews from

newspapers and magazines. Because the views expressed in it were so orthodox

and in keeping with the accepted wisdom of the age, nobody saw fit to draw

attention to the various tricks used to put across the author’s point of view. After

all, here is a book written by a scientist; the word ‘science’ occurs three times in

the blurb, along with the word ‘scientists’. To be fair to Rutherford, he is not
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alone in the methods which he uses to promote the dogma to which he adheres,

but since he uses them more elegantly than some others, we will focus on his

work.

After spending no fewer than 18 lines denouncing psychologist Richard Lynn,

Rutherford mentions casually on page 185 of the book that;

The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that ‘in a racist society

it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.’

No background is given about Angela Davis, because of course she holds correct

views and readers are not expected to want to know any more than that here is a

dedicated anti-racist. However, since mention was made of Richard Lynn sharing a

platform with some unpleasant people we should, in the interests of balance at

least be told that Angela Davis was photographed shaking the hand of former East

German leader Erich Honecker, from whom she received a medal. This is the same

man who was, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, indicted for the manslaughter of 68

people killed trying to escape to the west. Since Adam Rutherford says nothing

about it, we could also enquire into Angela Davis’ unconventional views on Jews.

A common tactic of those who uphold the equalitarian dogma is to try and

show that people who have other views are right-wing fanatics. A good way of

proving this is by demonstrating that they are anti-Semitic or subscribe to anti-

Semitic conspiracy theories. This is deliberately done to summon up the spectre of

the Holocaust, of course. Writing about Henry Garrett, the man who coined the

expression ‘equalitarian dogma’, a critic had this to say;

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He accused the Jews of spreading the dogma, and wrote that most Jewish

organizations ‘belligerently support the equalitarian dogma which they accept

as having been 'scientifically' proven’

(Winston, 1998).

This sounds pretty awful and causes us to wonder what sort of man Henry Garrett

might have been. Is this kind of thing typical of those who believe that there are

essential differences between some ethnic groups? Do they all go on about Jewish

conspiracies? Are they neo-Nazis? But wait, let us see what Angela Davis said when

she was about to visit the Soviet Union when it was under the rule of Leonid

Brezhnev. At the time, many Jews wished to leave the country, as they did not

feel able to practice their religion freely. Some wanted to travel to the United

States, others to Israel. Those who made too much fuss about not being able to

travel freely were known as ‘refuseniks’ and they were apt to end up in prisons,

labour camps and psychiatric hospitals. Alan Dershowitz contacted Angela Davis’

secretary and asked that when next Davis was in Russia, she could raise the

question of these political prisoners.

Several days later, I received a call back from Ms. Davis’ secretary informing

me that Davis had looked into the people on my list and none were political

prisoners. ‘They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.’ Davis

would urge that they be kept in prison where they belonged

(Dershowitz, 1992)
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Describing Jewish political prisoners as ‘Zionist fascists’ is at least as distasteful

as suggesting that Jews ‘belligerently support the equalitarian dogma’ and yet a

quick glance at Wikipedia, many people’s first stop these days when in search of

information, reveals that only Henry Garrett’s odd views about Jews are to be

seen. Wikipedia’s article on Angela Davis says nothing of her own views on Jews,

even though she is still viewed in some quarters as anti-Semitic for her

enthusiasm for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement which seeks to

inflict economic harm on the state of Israel.

All this may perhaps seem trifling and of little significance to some people, but

it is indicative of the mindset shared by many anti-racists and supporters of the

equalitarian dogma. Great attention is paid to the shortcoming or idiosyncrasies

of those awkward customers who do not subscribe to the standard narrative,

while precisely similar behaviour is ignored completely in anybody with more

conventional views. If, for instance, Richard Lynn had stood trial for his life in

connection with a murder which had racial overtones, one suspects that

Rutherford would not have scrupled to mention the fact. That it was Angela Davis

who was actually tried for such a crime means that it must be overlooked.

What has happened is that views of race and ethnicity are no longer framed in

terms of being correct or incorrect, true or false, backed by evidence as opposed

to speculative, and all the other usual ways in which we traditionally distinguish

between sound and faulty ideas. Opinions now are divided up on ethical and
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political grounds. Those who feel it possible that there are real and measurable

differences between black people and white, other than the visible and external

ones of skin colour are dismissed as right-wing and quite possibly ‘racist’. This

word no longer has various shades of meaning. It now means somebody who

probably supports apartheid, segregated schools, discrimination in housing and

education and quite possible approves of lynching people. That this word could

simply be a neutral descriptor, signifying a person who thinks that differences

might exist, is inconceivable to many people in the modern world. It means now

only someone who wishes to act on those differences and is likely to exhibit racial

prejudice.

That the equalitarian dogma is strongly associated with left-wing politics is of

course natural and indeed inevitable. If once we grant the premise that all

humans of whatever origin and ethnicity are endowed with similar intellectual

ability and that there are no inherent differences in any group as regards to

temperament and behaviour, then it follows as a matter of course that any

differences in life-outcomes of one group or another must be due to the

shortcomings or defects of the society in which they live. If we find that black

people are more likely to end up in American or British prisons than their white

neighbours or if they do less well in school examinations, then this is because of

things like poverty and racism. If only we change society and make it more just

and equitable for all, then these aberrations will automatically correct
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themselves. This was of course what was supposed to happen educationally with

the desegregation of American schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Once black pupils

had identical educational opportunities to white pupils and those of Asian origin,

then of course they would do just as well as anybody else. When this failed to

happen, the blame was laid on other aspects of societal inequality; income,

health, housing and so on.

This is why left-wing political ideas tie in so easily with the doctrine of

equalitarianism. To make sure that everybody, black and white, really does have

equal opportunities, then it will be necessary to revolutionise not only the

educational system, but to restructure society as a whole. It is only by moving

towards a state of affairs where no citizen has more wealth than another that the

disadvantages facing black people can really be dealt with. As long as black

children are being raised in poorer and more cramped homes, living cheek by jowl

with drug dealers and gangs, then of course they might drift into that life, rather

than striving to go to Harvard. All these things are manifestations of both a flawed

society and imperfect political system.

When we see something like the Black Lives Matter movement, it will come as

no surprise that looking more closely at what is actually being demanded, we find

that it is the dismantling of traditional society and its replacement by a Marxist

utopia, where there will be no police and every man will be a king. Sometimes,

well-meaning white people who wish to be seen as ‘allies’ of black people do not
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altogether realise what is being proposed and so find themselves in the position

of what are sometimes described as ‘useful idiots’. Nevertheless, these useful

idiots now comprise a large part, perhaps the majority, of people running

universities and dictating policy in Britain and the United States.

Those who hold orthodox and correct views on the subject of race and racism

were probably congratulating themselves at the end of the last millennium that

their world-view now reigned triumphant and that one last push would ensure

that all enlightened people would soon subscribe to the equalitarian dogma.

Apart from half a dozen malcontents and trouble-makers like Arthur Jensen, the

battle was over. In fact, just when it appeared that the equalitarian hypothesis

was on the verge of triumph, things began to go wrong. Let us look at one

instance of the way in which this happened.

We will end this chapter with two quotations from David Reich, at whose work

on genetics we looked in the first section of this book, which indicate what we

might expect to see in coming years as the current orthodoxy on race begins to

collapse.

We cannot deny the existence of substantial average genetic differences across

populations, not just in traits such as skin color, but also in bodily dimensions,

the ability to efficiently digest starch and milk sugar, the ability to breathe

easily at high altitudes and susceptibility to particular diseases. These

differences are just the beginning (Reich, 2018).

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After going on to speak about the possibility of differences in cognition and

behaviour between population groups which might be attributable to genetic

factors, he ended with a warning to those minded to defend the equalitarian

position at all costs. It is worth reminding readers that these are the words of no

crackpot or apologist for racism, but one of the leading geneticists in the modern

world.

The approach of staying mum, of implying to the public and to colleagues

that substantial differences in traits across populations are unlikely to exist,

is a strategy that we scientists can no longer afford, and that in fact is

positively harmful. If as scientists we wilfully abstain from laying out a rational

framework for discussing human differences, we will leave a vacuum that will

be filled by pseudoscience, an outcome which is far worse than anything we

could achieve by talking openly

(Reich, 2018).

The vacuum ‘filled by pseudoscience’ which Reich feared is already upon us.

How this pseudoscience is now being used to defend the equalitarian doctrine from

assaults by modern science will be the subject of the next chapter.

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Chapter 3

Defending the Dogma

Any theory or doctrine which is true and founded upon evidence should not need

to be defended with falsehoods and deceit, any more than it should depend upon

logical fallacies. If we found that those who work in the field of quantum

mechanics were only able to explain their ideas by misleading people about history

or hurling abuse at those who held a different view of the behaviour of sub-atomic

particles and so on, then we might be a little suspicious about this. Why, we would

perhaps ask ourselves, are these people telling lies and being rude, if their belief

system is a rational one based upon scientific enquiry? This is the question which

some ask about the champions of the equalitarian dogma. Worse still, those who

are fiercest in their advocacy of this cause are now using the very same tools

which were used in the twentieth century by the proponents of scientific racism; a

truly grotesque irony.

The best way of examining what is now happening in the field of anti-racism,

motivated and inspired by the equalitarian doctrine, is to look closely at what one

or two of the more articulate and well-known academics in the field have to say on

the subject. Let us begin by taking a book published by that most respectable of

houses, the Oxford University Press. It is in their series of ‘A very short

introduction’ books, in which leading experts write short books which explain

topics ranging from Accounting to Zionism for the ordinary, non-academic reader.

Ali Rattansi, a Professor of Sociology, is the author of Racism: A Very Short

Introduction. This was published originally in 2007 and then comprehensively

updated and revised in 2020. It is from the 2020 edition that quotations are taken.
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It is perhaps unfortunate that the very first sentence of the book is deliberately

untrue. It reads,

The term racism was coined in the 1930s, primarily as a response to the Nazi

project of making Germany judenrein or ‘free of Jews’.

(Rattansi, 2020)

It is probably fair to assume that an authority in the field of racism like Professor

Rattansi knows perfectly well that he has begun the book with a falsehood and

that he knows that the term ‘racism’ was first set down in print in 1903, 30 years

before the Nazis came to power in Germany. It was an American who is first

recorded using the word, in a speech denouncing racial prejudice against American

Indians. In 1902, General Richard Pratt said,

Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills

the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow.

Association of races and classes is necessary in order to destroy racism and

classism.

(Burrows, 1903)

It is unlikely that Pratt coined the term, but this is the first verifiable time that it

appeared in print. After all, the other expression he uses, classism, had been

circulating for 60 years or more by 1902. The natural question we have to ask

ourselves is why on earth does the author of Racism: A Very Short Introduction try

to deceive his readers in this way? The answer is not hard to find.
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We have seen that the Holocaust, when once the full horror of Auschwitz and

the other camps had become known to the world, dealt an apparently mortal blow

to the whole idea of scientific racism, as well as making both racism and eugenics

taboo subjects to this very day. By associating the word ‘racism’ with the

Holocaust and claiming it as an invention of the Nazis, Ali Rattansi makes sure that

we associate the two things in our minds; the neutral word and the ghastly

historical event. It may interest readers to know that the claim is often made on

right-wing internet groups that it was the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky who first

came up with the word. Pretending that it is something devised by communists

helps, or so they suppose, to discredit anti-racists today.

Still on Page 1 of the book, we find this,

The idea that the Jews were a distinct race was given currency by Nazi racial

science.

(Rattansi, 2020)

This is of course also untrue and another attempt to bring the Nazis into the

picture. On this page, the first in the chapter entitled ‘Race’ and racism: some

conundrums, the word ‘Nazi’ occurs no fewer than four times, just in case we

were to miss the connection between the Holocaust and the subject at hand. The

Jews were regarded as a race at least a century before the Holocaust. The first

mention in print of a Jewish ‘race’ was made by the British politician, and later

Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli,

The Jews, for example, independently of the capital qualities for citizenship
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which they possess in their industry, temperance, and energy and vivacity of

mind, are a race essentially monarchical, deeply religious...

(Disraeli, 1844)

Most readers will, it is assumed, be familiar with the idea of Godwin’s Law.

This was formulated 30 years ago by an American called Mike Godwinson and

states, ‘As a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a

comparison of a person's being compared to Hitler, or another Nazi reference,

increases.’ The generally accepted interpretation of this is that accusing a

debating opponent of comparing some person or practice to Hitler and the Nazis is

intellectually lazy, a way of scoring points which tells us little about the actual

merits of an argument. In the case of Ali Rattansi, he appears to be so eager to

violate Godwin’s Law and invoke the spectre of the Nazis, that he cannot even

wait for a debate to begin. For some readers, scattering references to the Third

Reich around in this way like confetti raises the suspicion that the person using

such a tactic must be short on persuasive and logical debating points.

It would be easy, but perhaps wearisome, for any reader to go through this

book listing the errors and misleading claims which are to be found on every page.

Instead, we shall limit ourselves to a few egregious examples. Just to remind

ourselves, the object of the exercise is to show that even in an apparently neutral

account of racism written by an academic for the average person, the aim is less

to shed light on the subject than to ensure that those reading it will be

indoctrinated in the ‘correct’ view of the matter. It is hard to think of any other

reason for including within a short book of fewer than 200 pages so many

untruthful statements.
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One of the enterprises which has been launched in recent years by those who

are enthusiastic about the equalitarian doctrine is the rewriting of history in order

to demonstrate that people with dark skin played a far greater role in the past

than has previously been acknowledged. In the United States this is done by

suggesting that black people, the descendants of slaves of African heritage, have

been responsible for many innovations and inventions, such as the electric

lightbulb. This is quite a cottage industry in America, the attribution of everything

from peanut butter to the internet as originating with black inventors. It ties in

with a British project, which is designed to prove that there never was an

exclusively white culture or civilisation in the country. The idea behind the

enterprise of rewriting history is to demonstrate that the achievements in Britain

and America of supposedly white people are really a product of a multicultural

society. Rattansi plays to this idea on Page 39 of his book when he talks of the DNA

testing carried out on a 10,000 year-old English skeleton known as Cheddar Man.

Several rather crafty tricks are played on the reader. The first is to set up a

straw man and then claim that it has been knocked down. We are told that,

In February 2018 scientists unveiled a sculpture of the first modern Britons.

They had lived about 10,000 years ago and the DNA analysis of the skeleton,

which had in fact been unearthed more than a hundred years ago in Gough

Cave, in the Cheddar Gorge area of Somerset, revealed that these Britons were

far from the light-skinned, straight- and fair-haired humans that they had been

supposed to be.

(Rattansi, 2020)
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Supposed by whom, one might reasonably enquire? Illustration 18 shows an artist’s

impressions of early men in Britain, as shown in a children’s encyclopaedia which

was published in 1957. These swarthy-looking men with shaggy black hair are how

the first cavemen in Britain have been pictured since the Victorian era. Offhand, I

do not believe that I have ever in my life seen an image of the earliest men which

shows them as pale and blond! Rattansi goes on to claim that the skin of Cheddar

Man was ‘dark to black’ and says that this was based on the DNA testing.

18. How early men are traditionally portrayed; with black hair and dark
complexions.

Here is another little bit of deception, because he fails to mention that this is

not at all what the researcher who studied the DNA claimed. It is true that

London’s Natural History Museum commissioned a bust of Cheddar Man showing

him with black skin and that this received a good deal of publicity in newspapers

and other media. It was said that this must be a shock to racists everywhere, to
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find that their earliest ancestors were not white at all, but black. Even the British

magazine New Scientist joined in this. On 7 February 2018 New Scientist

confidently reported that, ‘The first modern Briton, who lived around 300

generations ago, had “dark to black” skin.’ (New Scientist, 2018). Two weeks

later, New Scientist conceded that perhaps there was some uncertainty about the

story, because the geneticists who had actually carried out the work said publicly

that the Natural History Museum’s reconstruction was purely speculative and other

experts asserted that there was no way at all of deciding skin colour on the basis

of ancient DNA. A week later, an editorial in New Scientist admitted that the

television company which had been involved in the affair might have exaggerated

the results for their own reasons, saying,

The whole episode smacks of a publicity stunt to hype up the show. There is

some truth in that, but dismissing it outright does a disservice to the scientists.

According to the state of knowledge at the time, the genetic analysis did

suggest that Cheddar Man’s skin was dark. But science progresses, and since the

analysis was done last year, many more genes affecting skin colour have been

discovered. Understandably, the new science did not make it into the

documentary.

(New Scientist, 2018)

Not a word of this is mentioned by Professor Rattansi, despite the fact that he

must surely have kept up to date with the developments, since he was writing two

years after the scandal emerged. He includes in the book a photograph of the

discredited reconstruction, with no comment about its dubious nature.

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It is hard to avoid the conclusion when we see this sort of thing that academics

like Ali Rattansi and Adam Rutherford are determined to defend the equalitarian

doctrine at all costs and will cheerfully deceive people by both omission and

commission.

One more passage from Race: A Very Short Introduction will probably be

sufficient for our purposes, for it will lead us neatly to the way in which those

fighting for ‘equality’ are happy to use the weapons and tools of scientific racism

if they will advance their aims. Here is what Rattansi says of the quotas used in the

past to limit the number of Jews being admitted to Harvard,

And the application of covert quotas against Jews in the past with regard to

admission into elite institutions of higher education, for example Harvard, for

fear they would gain a ‘disproportionate’ number of places, was no less racist

for being based on the supposedly ‘superior’ intelligence of these groups.

(Rattansi, 2020)

The author goes on to mention that Harvard once used what he describes as non-

academic criteria’ to limit the number of Jews in the university and very properly

describes this as being a racist practice. What he fails to mention, and once more

it is fair to assume that he knew about it at the time that he was writing, was that

Harvard is still engaged in such practices. Despite discussing ethnic inequalities in

educational opportunities in the United States, Rattansi carefully avoids discussing

the current use of quotas, for reasons which will become apparent. Let us now

look at the story of quotas which were, and are, used at Harvard to limit the
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numbers of certain ethnic minorities at the university and see what Rattansi has

neglected to mention.

Three years before the beginning of the Second World War, an American

sociologist called Robert Merton dreamed up what has now come to be known as

the ‘law of unintended consequences’ (Merton, 1936). Although similar ideas had

been put forward as early as the seventeenth century by thinkers such as John

Locke, Merton was the first to set out in detail the possible way in which

deliberately interfering in a complex, social system could result in wholly unlooked

for effects. The struggle against racism provides no more vivid example of this

process in action than the way in which attempts to prevent prejudice and

eradicate racism in education have produced the grotesque situation where people

are being denied access to certain universities solely because of the colour of their

skin.

On Thursday, 8 October 2020, the United States Justice Department sued Yale

University for allegedly violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Assistant Attorney

General Eric S. Dreiband said in a press release that,

All persons who apply for admission to colleges and universities should expect

and know that they will be judged by their character, talents, and

achievements and not the color of their skin

(New York Times, 2020).

That it should, two decades into the twenty-first century, be necessary for the

Justice Department of the United States to issue such a statement, redolent of the

days of segregation, was truly extraordinary. The most startling aspect of the
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whole affair was that this legal action was being taken not against racists who had

vowed to deny ethnic minorities access to their institution, but against one of the

country’s most prestigious educational establishments, whose policies had been

adopted with the sole intention of making their admissions policy more just and

equitable to African Americans. To see how the proponents of anti-racism could

possibly have ended up using methods which fell foul of the Civil Rights Act, we

need to go back a few years and see what the situation was in places like Harvard

and Yale within living memory.

The United States has, of course, a long history of segregation in education. In

the southern states, as well as those knowns as ‘border states’, separate schools

for black children and white were the general rule until after the end of the

Second World War. This was perfectly legal. In the late nineteenth century a

landmark legal ruling in the Supreme Court, Plessey v Ferguson, established that

segregated public facilities such as schools were acceptable, as long as they were

equal in quality. This gave rise of course to the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine

which was the foundation of segregation, and in particular segregated education,

in the United States.

In 1954, the situation for schools changed with another ruling from the Supreme

Court. Brown v Board of Education of Topeka was a turning-point and it was

declared by the court that racial segregation in public schools was

unconstitutional, even if the facilities were indeed separate but equal; which, by

the by, they seldom were. The implications of this judgement extended beyond

ordinary schools, because some of the best universities in America also had policies

which discriminated racially against ethnic minorities. Sometimes, these were

practiced discretely; at other times they were quite overt. Milton Winternitz, Dean
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of Yale’s medical school until 1935, once declared that his policy regarding

admissions each year was, ‘Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian

Catholics, and take no blacks at all.’ (Burrow, 2008).

Harvard were a little more subtle about their quotas for Jews. They based their

discrimination against them on the basis of their character. A. Lawrence Lowell,

Harvard's president from 1909-1933, was instrumental in a policy put in place in

1926 that did not judge applicants on their academic achievements alone, but on

‘character and fitness and the promise of the greatest usefulness in the future as a

result of a Harvard education’ (Karabel, 2006).

So far, so good. At one time there were in the United States various

unacceptable practices and traditions based upon racial discrimination in

education, but they are, thankfully mere historical curiosities today. We then

remember the launching of the suit by the United States Department of Justice

against Yale in 2020 and feel uneasily that perhaps it is a little early to assume

that this sort of thing is entirely over and done with. The problem is caused by

some of those differences between ethnic groups at which we have already looked;

ones which give the impression that there may be genuine and inherent ways in

which people whose origins lie is in varying parts of the world are not the same as

each other. In the case of the medical school at Yale, it is intelligence which lies

at the heart of the matter.

To get into Britain’s Oxford and Cambridge universities and their equivalents in

the United States, those of the so-called Ivy League, one needs to have very high

scores in either the British A Levels, the American SAT; the scholastic Aptitude

Test, or various other, similar, examinations in other countries. Those whose

families come from East Asia tend to score more highly in such things than either
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black or white students and at the top end of the scale, the very highest marks,

Chinese students dominate the field. It does not matter for now if this is a cultural

phenomenon or if people from East Asia really are more intelligent.

At Harvard and Yale, which are committed to ensuring that their student body

reflects the demography of the nation as a whole, this poses a conundrum. If the

very best applicants, academically, are nearly all East Asian, what should they do?

Operate a colour-blind admissions system and just accept that there will in the

main only be Asian Americans and white students at these universities? Because

that is what would happen with a fair and unbiassed admission process. But then of

course, neither university would have any black students, which would look

terrible. The solution is of course as plain as a pikestaff. You introduce a quota

system and fix things so that you can keep out people of Chinese ancestry.

Put so bluntly, this sounds shocking, as indeed it is, but those who are

dedicated to fighting their own idea of what constitutes racism can be so single-

minded in their pursuit of what they consider to be ethically correct and virtuous

conduct that they disregard the possibility that their actions might ultimately be

harmful to others. Their meddling in matters such as admission to colleges is

undertaken with the best of intentions, but looks, objectively, more than a little

dubious. Indeed, in this particular case, they are happy to use the same language

as that of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. If this sounds like a gross

exaggeration, let us see what a leading scholar on racial equity, Shaun R. Harper,

had to say when the United States Department of Justice was pursuing Harvard for

doing the same thing that Yale was later accused of; that is to say fixing quotas for

the admission of racial minorities. Harper, who was at the time head of the Race
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and Equity Centre at the University of Southern California, was quoted in the press

as saying,

Is the DOJ saying that it is in favor of Harvard being 100 percent Asian-

American because if we are looking just at GPAs and test scores, it could very

well be that those with the absolute higher scores would be Asian-Americans,

(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2020)

Let us compare this with something said almost 50 years earlier by a thoroughly

unrepentant Nazi, a man called Dietrich Allers. Allers was a lawyer who played a

major part in Nazi Germany’s ‘euthanasia’ programme, which saw more than

70,000 mentally ill and disabled people murdered in gas chambers (Cesarani,

2016). He spent years in prison after the end of the Second World War for his

complicity in these crimes. In 1971 Gitta Sereny, who was writing a book about the

death camp at Treblinka, in German-occupied Poland, interviewed Dietrich Allers.

Talking of the situation in Germany in the early 1930s, before Hitler came to

power, Allers said,

I remember when I said I wanted to study law, somebody in my family took

me to the Ministry of Justice in Berlin. We walked along a corridor and he told

me to read the names on the office doors we passed. Almost all of them were

Jews.

(Sereny, 1974).
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On the one hand, we have a man who worries that there might be too many

Asian-Americans at Harvard and on the other somebody who thought that there

were too many Jews in a government department. Both anxieties are the same and

founded upon a similar mentality. There is in both cases an assumption that once

the matter has been described, hearers will immediately see the nature of the

problem. This is taken for granted when such statements are made. How could

anybody not find the idea of a corridor full of Jewish names on its doors an affront

to be rectified? In the same way, a university full of students whose families have

their origins in China is plainly unthinkable. It simply cannot be right for Jews or

Chinese people to do so well and there should be some provision for ensuring that

gentiles, white people and black people are not squeezed out by these pushy

characters. That, essentially, is what both the head of the Race and Equity Centre

and the senior Nazi from the ‘euthanasia’ programme are saying. Far from

preventing or discouraging racism, some of the most vociferous advocates of ‘anti-

racism’ today have simply changed the target and are still convinced that this or

that minority is getting more than its fair share of jobs, houses or places at elite

universities.

Before seeing how Harvard and Yale stop Asian-Americans from over-running

their universities, let us just check that it is certain that these institutions are

indeed operating a quota system. In 2020, 14.8 % of the students admitted to

Harvard were African American (The Harvard Crimson, 2020). By an astonishing and

uncanny coincidence, that is precisely the same percentage as the previous year.

In 2020, the percentage of Hispanic students admitted was 12.7 %. The previous

year it was 12.4 %. In 2020, the percentage of Native Americans and Native

Hawaiians was 2.2 % and in 2019 it was 2.6 % (The Harvard Crimson, 2020). It is
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perhaps stretching credulity to imagine that the very close correspondence of

these two sets of annual figures really was accidental. They had of course been

decided upon previously. The percentage of Asian Americans admitted was also

very close in both years; 25.4 % and 25.5 %.

This of course is how a quota system works and it differs in no material way

from Yale’s medical school in the 1930s, with its avowed policy of taking no more

than five Jews and two Italians. Yale was concerned that if they did not take this

action, they would end up with nothing but Jews in their medical school. More

recently, Harvard decided that they did not want to run the risk of being swamped

with Asian Americans and so capped their numbers at 25 %. It’s really very simple.

If you want to make sure that your company or college does not have too many

Jews, Chinese people, whites or blacks in it, then you draw up a plan and decide

what proportions you are prepared to tolerate. Suppose that you settle, as Harvard

have, upon 25 % of Asians and 15 % of black people. If you are expecting to recruit

300 employees for your business or students for your college, then you know in

advance how many Asians you will be prepared to tolerate; that is to say in this

case 75. If any more than this number are applying, then no matter how well-

qualified they might be or whatever their previous experience, you will reject

them. This will leave room for other ethnicities, some of whom will be less

suitable than some of the Asians whom you are planning to reject, but you cannot

unfortunately have both the best candidates and also a diverse body which, to use

the modern jargon, ‘reflects the community’.

Something will at once be seen, which is the downside of increasing ‘diversity’.

This is that any attempt to give a ‘leg up’, to use the demotic expression, to one

ethnicity, must automatically militate to the disadvantage of those belonging to

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other ethnicities. This is obvious of course, but it is felt indelicate to mention it.

Put plainly, any increase of fairness in one place leads inexorably to a

corresponding increase in unfairness elsewhere.

Readers will doubtless be curious to know about the mechanics entailed in

undertaking such an outrageous piece of work as the quotas enforced in some of

the best American universities. After all, Asian-American applicants tend to have

the highest test scores, the best academic records at school, together with

impressive extracurricular activities. By any normal standard, they would make the

ideal students. How do you make sure that you don’t take any more Jews or

Chinese people after you have reached the limit which you have set beforehand?

You can’t really put up a sign saying, ‘Jews not welcome here’ or perhaps ‘No

admittance to those of Chinese origin’. That would be, well, racist. There is a

method, although it depends, unfortunately, on accepting some outdated and

offensive racial images.

By great good fortune, Harvard discovered that people of Chinese origin really do

tend to conform to the negative image of the brilliant, but cold-hearted,

Orientals, as portrayed in media such as the old Fu Manchu books of Sax Rohmer.

They are in fact more unkind, cowardly and unlikeable than the rest of us and do

not have such warm personalities (New York Times, 2018). Not at all the kind of

people that one would wish to see too many of in the student body. This discovery,

which ties in with all the worst stereotypes of Chinese people as being crafty and

cruel, was made by admissions tutors whose job it was to assess applicants. The

exact means by which they uncovered these traits is a closely guarded secret.

According to the universities which engage in such practices they are anxious not

to reveal too much, lest people should learn how to ‘game’ the system.
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It is because black applicants tend to have more positive personalities and are

kinder and generally more agreeable people that so many are admitted with

inferior academic performance to Asian-Americans whose applications are

rejected. It is very disconcerting in this day and age to witness these racial

stereotypes of the cheerful, smiling black person with an outgoing and likeable

personality being contrasted with the cowardly and unkind Chinese people, whose

personalities are, according to Harvard, not ‘positive’.

One suspects that many readers will be reading this with the idea at the back

of their minds that the author must be exaggerating or at the very least distorting

the situation. Surely, they might think, this kind of racial prejudice cannot really

be going on in the best universities in the United States? And yet, the facts are

there for everybody to see. The New York Times reported in the summer of 2018

that,

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on

traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being

“widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student

records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a

lawsuit against the university

(New York Times, 2018).

Less kindness, less courage, less likeable, not so widely respected and more

negative personalities all round. It will hardly come as any surprise to learn that

Harvard fought tooth and nail in the courts to avoid having all this come out into

the open. It need hardly be said that ‘character’ was used up to the 1960s as an
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excuse to exclude Jews in precisely the same way from Ivy League colleges

(Karabel, 2005)

Perhaps it is unfair to single out Harvard in this way, because many other

colleges and schools are clearly up to the same game, with the percentages of

various ethnic groups scarcely differing from year to year, despite wide variation in

the ethnicity of those applying for places over the years. Somehow, however many

Asian-Americans, black people and white apply to these places, and however

different the proportions are from year to year, the percentages of the groups

actually given places never seems to change.

The racial balancing which is engaged in so often today is a classic illustration

of the phrase used by Hermann Busenbaum, a Jesuit theologian who died in the

seventeenth century (Barrett, 1913). He wrote that ‘Cum finis est licitus, etiam

media sunt licita’, which translates roughly as, ‘When the end is lawful, the means

to achieve it are likewise lawful’. In this instance the end being worked towards is

a just and equitable state of affairs where all racial groups flourish to the same

extent, according to their abilities. Nobody will be held back by poverty, racial

discrimination and so on. Since it is a central plank of the equalitarian dogma that

there are no inbuilt differences of intellect between populations, this means that

the natural and right state of affairs would be for the same proportion of black

people to be reaching the standard necessary to get into medical school at Yale or

to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, as exist in the

country as a whole. Otherwise, something must be artificially distorting the

admissions.

The racial balancing which is being engineered in some quarters is meant to be

a temporary and necessary expedient, the need for which will fade away once
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society has been transformed. As soon as poverty and all kinds of economic and

class—based inequality have been phased out, together with nationalism,

xenophobia and racism, all ethnicities will be free to reach their full potential.

Until that happy day though, ruthless and sometimes racist methods will need to

be used in order to create this state of affairs, until it occurs quite naturally. Using

racist methods like this is regrettable, but since it is ultimately in a good cause, it

can be justified. The end is lawful and desirable, therefore the means to achieve it

are acceptable.

Returning to what Professor Ali Rattansi had to say about the racist nature of

quotas at Harvard which used what he called, ‘non-academic criteria’ to keep out

Jews, one cannot help but wonder why such a dedicated anti-racist did not tell his

readers that the practice is alive and well to this day in the United States. One

suspects that this could only be because he broadly approves of what is currently

being done, as it decreases the number of white students at top universities and

ensures that more black people and Hispanics are admitted.

Ali Rattansi is one man who will cheerfully direct his readers up the proverbial

garden path in an attempt to lead them astray and discourage them from thinking

in the wrong way. Another such person, one of the most famous geneticists in the

world, was Richard Lewontin.

Richard Lewontin was for over half a century, before his death in 2021, at the

forefront of the ideological struggle to establish the equalitarian doctrine as the

only game in town where race is concerned. He is often quoted by those who

would denounce the notion of scientific racism. This is because of something which

he announced in 1972 after a particular piece of research. We saw earlier that he

said that the great majority of human genetic diversity occurs within geographical
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groups, rather than between the traditional racial classifications (Lewontin, 1972).

This is of course true, but horribly misleading. When in 2005 two papers were

published which might have cast doubt upon the equalitarian doctrine, Lewontin

was swift to pounce; declaring them ‘egregious’. We examined the claims made in

these papers in the final chapter of the first part of this book. That he would take

the trouble to speak out like this suggests strongly that Lewontin was aware that

his position on such matters was untenable and his viewpoint hard to defend.

Working, presumably, on Clausewitz’s famous dictum that the best defence is

attack, he thought it expedient to strike first. He had claimed many years earlier

that 80 % of genetic diversity occurs withing population groups approximating to

the traditional ideas of races, rather than between them. No doubt this true, but it

tells us nothing at all about the role or value of the 20 % of genes which do differ

between ethnic groups. If one version of a gene did in fact confer an enormous

benefit in terms of the size or efficiency of the brain, then of course that would be

of greater significance than variations which merely produced minor effects such

as straight or curly hair. As a self-declared Marxist though, Lewontin presumably

believed in equality between genes.

The idea that there is far more variation within, rather than between

ethnicities is also misleading and irrelevant, although one will often hear it

parroted when the topic of scientific racism is aired. Let us apply the idea to IQ

levels and then see how impressive it looks. We will take it as given that that the

vast majority of difference in IQs is found within ethnic groups, rather than

between them. This sounds as though it would demolish the traditional view of

scientific racism that there is a tendency for some populations to have higher

levels of intelligence than others, but the opposite is true; it confirms that this is
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perfectly plausible. To see why, we need to insert a few figures and see how the

situation looks.

Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the average IQ a white

person in the United States or Europe is 100. Let us further say that the range of

IQs on either side of this average runs to 50 points in either direction. This is a

highly simplified estimation, but it would mean that at one end were very dull-

witted individuals whose IQs were 50 and at the other end of the scale some rare

geniuses with IQs of 150. The variation within the group would therefore be 100

points. Let us now imagine that the average IQ for people from sub-Saharan Africa

was found to be 90. Again, we will say for the sake of argument that on either side

of this average, IQ scores run 50 points down on one side and 50 points up in the

other. This means that, just as with the white people, the variation within the

group will be 100 points. What conclusion are we able to draw from these figures?

The difference between individuals in both the black group and the white is 100

points. The difference though between the two groups is just a tenth of this. This

agrees precisely with what Richard Lewontin suggested was the case, but still

leaves us with a situation where black people tend to have lower IQs than whites.

More than that, they are, in the scenario which we have constructed, less likely to

be of very high intelligence and more likely to be of very low intellectual ability.

From this hypothetical case, it may be seen with clarity that the idea of

differences within groups being far greater than that between groups may be

perfectly correct and yet at the same time utterly irrelevant.

We have looked at a couple of rather ingenious ways of defending the

equalitarian dogma. We might pause for a moment and ask ourselves why, if the

case for the doctrine is sound and founded upon fact, it is necessary to resort to
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tricks of these sorts to support it. Still, the examples cited above might perhaps be

due to the enthusiasm of those who mistakenly feel that they are helping matters

by rigging entry systems at universities. What of the academics and intellectuals

who have been the driving force behind the doctrine? Surely, they cannot be guilty

of relying upon bare assertion or the deliberate distortion of facts and figures?

In the last chapter we made the acquaintance of Ruth Benedict, one of the

founding members of the group of anthropologists who devised, propagated and

defended the anthropological doctrine of equalitarianism. In a book published

more than 10 years before the United States entered the Second World War, she

wrote the following,

An Oriental child adopted by an Occidental family learns English, shows

towards its foster parents the attitudes current among the children it plays

with, and grows up to the same professions that they elect. He learns the

entire set of cultural traits of the adopted society, and the set of his real

parents’ group plays no part.

(Benedict, 1934)

Here then is indeed a magnificent piece of bare assertion, for Benedict gives no

references or evidence to back up what she is claiming; we take it, or not, on

trust. She may have been sound enough when writing about the Indians of

America’s Pacific coast, into whose lives she had conducted some field research,

but the passage above is an expression of ideology, rather than scientific

investigation. When we delve into the subject and see what has been discovered,

this becomes startlingly clear.

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One study, which involved 5,942 adopted children in Sweden; half of them from

East Asia and the rest from various other parts of the world, showed a picture very

different from the one with which Ruth Benedict presents us. We read in this study

that,

There were considerable differences between adoptees from different

geographical regions with better outcomes in many respects for children from

the Far East

(Lindblad et al, 2003)

What are these considerable differences? They relate to such disparate matters as

those from East Asia being adopted into Swedish families being more likely to have

university degrees than those adopted children of African or Latin American origin,

more likely to be working, less likely to be admitted to hospital for psychiatric

illness and less likely to be in receipt of welfare payments. To put the case

bluntly, they were more successful than the other groups in ways which we

traditionally associate with people of East Asian origin. Other studies have

suggested the same trend.

Of course, there are other factors at play and the matter is by no means as

clear cut as it might appear at first sight, but the fact remains that Ruth

Benedict’s claims are not backed up by much of the available evidence. When

faced with this sort of thing, when real life outcomes do not apparently coincide

with the ideological expectations, then one might hope that the staunchest

advocates of equalitarianism might ask if their strongly held views needed to be

modified or even abandoned, but nothing of the kind seems to happen. Instead,
 227

they tend to fall back on rhetoric, rather than research. They become even more

vociferous in support of their world view and seek to batter down opponents not by

reasoned argument, backed up by solid evidence, but rather by means of

invective.

Perhaps it was unfair to quote an anthropologist who was writing in 1934 and to

look at what a geneticist had to say on the subject in 1972. David Gillborn is a

Professor of Critical Race Studies at England’s University of Birmingham and in

2020 he wrote a piece for The Conversation, which is a website based in Australia

and publishes material by academics and researchers which is intended to spark

debate. The background to the article by Professor Gillborn is that a young man

called Andrew Sabisky had been an aide in Downing Street, the official residence

of the British Prime Minister, until some tweets of his relating to his views that

intellectual ability and ethnicity are linked, came to light. He was obliged to resign

in early 2020 and on 26 February, Gillborn contributed his piece to The

Conversation. It was headed, ‘Is dangerous thinking about race and IQ at the heart

of UK government?’

Just to be clear, we have an academic who is an expert in modern anti-racism

and a staunch defender of the equalitarian dogma, who intends to explain why it is

wrong to think that intellectual ability is hereditary. The article began in a

forthright fashion,

An outrageous, racist and outdated belief in the innate intellectual inferiority

of black people periodically re-enters public debate, usually masquerading as a

bold initiative at the forefront of science; challenging convention and thinking

the unthinkable.
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(The Conversation, 2020)

This tells us little, other than that the writer does not agree with the idea of racial

difference in intelligence. What are the grounds for his fierce opposition to such an

possibility? There’s a bit of waffle and then Professor Gillborn goes on to say,

Sabisky’s view that black people are genetically pre-determined to be less

intelligent than whites was widely attacked in the media and politics. Yet the

evidence suggests that his thinking about the nature of intelligence may not be

entirely out of step with those in power in the UK.

(The Conversation, 2020)

So far, all that we know is that Professor Gillborn does not think there is any

difference between the intellectual ability of different ethnic groups and that he

thinks that some people in the government do hold that belief. He goes on to talk

about a press conference at which,

The prime minister’s deputy spokesman refused more than 30 times to state

Boris Johnson’s views on eugenics and the supposed intellectual inferiority of

black people. The press secretary repeatedly stated that “the PM’s views are

well publicised and well documented.

(The Conversation, 2020)

OK, so we don’t know what Boris Johnson’s views on eugenics are; except that

they might different from those held by Professor David Gillborn. Remember that
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this is a well-known expert on racism, an academic who spends his life teaching

and researching the subject. It would surely not be unreasonable to expect an

explanation of why there actually are no differences in cognitive ability between

different groups, but all we know so far is that Professor Gillborn says that there

are not and that some people close to the British government, at least according

to Gillborn, think that there might be.

I have been researching racism in education for more than 30 years and, at

regular intervals, this means revisiting the question of supposed racial

differences in intelligence – a topic that refuses to die despite the wealth of

evidence against it.

(The Conversation, 2020)

Right, now we are getting somewhere. What is this wealth of evidence? We are

sitting up and taking notice now. Unfortunately, Gillborn then starts talking about

something which the Prime Minister said about IQs in 2013 and the professor talks

about how IQs are periodically recalibrated, which most of us know. Still nothing

about this wealth of evidence. Then comes this, which sounds a little more

promising,

A few years ago, I wrote a paper challenging many of the myths that surround

IQ. I included analysis of Dominic Cummings’ 237-page essay, Some Thoughts on

Education and Political Priorities. At the time, Cummings was special advisor to

the then education secretary, Michael Gove.

(The Conversation, 2020)

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Dominic Cummings was at the time that Professor Gillborn wrote this piece, an

adviser to the Prime Minister. The essay about which he talks though has nothing

at all to do with race. Gillborn ends this section by saying,

I have called this strategy “racial inexplicitness” – a careful avoidance of clarity

about race and education amid a long and winding discussion that prompts the

reader to join the dots without ever stating clearly where he thinks the dots

lead us.

(The Conversation,2020)

Professor Gillborn observes that one of the sources quoted in Cummings essay is a

man called Professor Robert Plomin, an American who is a fan of the book the Bell

Curve. This is another example of what was known in America during the McCarthy

Era as ‘guilt by association’. I make no apology for quoting at such length from

such a rambling and incoherent defence of the equalitarian dogma. I do so,

because it is fairly typical of what those working in this field say when they wish to

explain to others why they hold such views. There are many words, but few

relevant facts. The article ends thus,

These views are bad news for many groups in society, especially those deemed

less “gifted”. And it’s not so unlikely that we could see them entering policy.

Despite the negative press coverage generated by Sabisky’s beliefs, such dogma

could conceivably be translated into a superficially acceptable policy brief. One

way would be for education reforms to claim to apply “scientific” methods to

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identify the “brightest and best” and single them out for special attention. This

would be presented as a meritocratic exercise, intended to fast-track clever

children regardless of their social background.

The methods would include “cognitive assessments” (often a code for IQ

tests) and the talk would be of “social mobility” and “colour-blindness”,

whereby the approach treats everyone “as an individual”. No one in authority

would worry about the fact that such assessments seem to always place a

disproportionate number of black kids in the less-able bracket. That’s how

institutional racism works.

(The Conversation, 2020)

The ending of this masterful defence of the equalitarian doctrine is absolutely

priceless; ‘That’s how institutional racism works’. How is that precisely, one is

tempted to ask. By testing intelligence? This is a classic example of how anti-

racists, and professors of Critical Race Theory, work. They deal not in facts but

ideology. People are condemned for the views they hold, but no attempt is made

to explain in detail why those views are wrong. In the end, such diatribes are

simply bare assertion. We are urged to believe them merely because somebody

says that a thing is true.

There is another way of propagating the equalitarian dogma and that is

focusing on the past, rather than the present. Such a strategy makes perfect

sense. We recall the maxim of the Party in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four.

‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the
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past’. The next chapter will show us how the past is now being controlled by those

who largely control the present.

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Chapter 4

Rewriting the Past

One way in which the equalitarian doctrine is being advanced in modern society,

rather than in the halls of this or that university, is by the manipulation of

historical facts, so that the distinctions between the history of people of African

origin and those from Europe are blurred and obscured. This process helps ordinary

people to be subconsciously indoctrinated into accepting the tenets of the

equalitarian idea without their ever having to read a word on the subject.

Sometimes, it is done via visual images on their mobile telephones, computers and

televisions screens, but public figures also encourage the confusion. Lest this

should sound like some vast and insidious conspiracy to control the hearts and

minds of people across the world, I must hasten to add that there is no reason at

all to suppose that this process is part of any deliberate and coherent plan on the

part of any individual or group; of which, more later.

There are two chief strands to the way in which history is being adapted to

enhance the idea of equalitarianism in the past. One is to suggest that Europe was,

from at least ten thousand years ago, inhabited by people with black skins; some

from the Middle East and then later from Africa. This can then be used to suggest

that even the British royal family is really of mixed race which, it is hoped, will

demonstrate that there is no such thing as black or white people, that we all of us

have black African ancestry. The second theme which has emerged is an attempt

to show that black people have actually made far more of a contribution to the
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modern world than is recognised and that they have been cheated of their place in

history by unscrupulous white supremacists. Perhaps turbocharged by the internet,

claims which were once regarded as the stuff of crank, pseudo-history have now

leaped into respectable discourse. On Thursday, 3 September 2020, presidential

candidate Joe Biden was addressing a meeting of mainly African-Americans at the

Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Possibly in an effort to ingratiate

himself with the black people present that day, he made the surprising claim that,

‘A black man invented the light bulb not a white guy named Edison’ (Daily Mail,

2020). This is of course quite untrue and we shall examine the idea later. It is

enough now to see that the sort of urban myth which a few years ago would have

been limited to websites devoted to strange conspiracy theories is now being

passed on by a man who a few months later became the President of the United

States.

Let us begin with the idea that Britain has always been a multicultural and

ethnically mixed society and that as a result it makes little sense to talk of ‘white’

people or ‘Caucasians’, because these indicate nothing objectively real. Since

many Americans have their ancestry rooted in the British Isles, this means of

course that they too must be in the same position. Now there is of course

something in this point of view and the truth is that all of us are likely to have

jumbled ancestry with all kinds of ethnicity mixed up in our genes. This applies to

African-Americans and white British people alike. If this were all that was being

asserted, then it would hardly be worth debating the point, but it is not. Very

specific claims are made which although based upon this idea are utterly fanciful

and also use the methods of traditional racism to support them. Here is one such;
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that Queen Charlotte, the wife of the British king George III was black. Charlotte

of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was born in 1744. She married George III in 1761.

That Queen Charlotte was black, so demonstrating that the present queen,

Elizabeth II, is of dual heritage is, like the claim that a black man invented the

electric lightbulb, one of those bizarre pieces of pseudo-history which have now

found their way into mainstream thinking. It will be remembered that the Netflix

historical drama series Bridgerton cast a black woman as Queen Charlotte. The

theory behind this mad belief can be summed up very simply. Queen Charlotte, or

Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz as she was at birth, was born to a noble family,

part of whose ancestry was Portuguese. A very distant ancestor of Charlotte’s was

Afonzo III, who was born in 1210 AD and ruled Portugal until 1279. Afonzo had a

mistress called Madragana Ben Aloandro, who had two children by him. One of

these was also an ancestor or Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It is possible, but

by no means certain, that Madragana was from North Africa, that is to say she

might have been an Arab or even a black woman from sub-Saharan Africa. It is

upon this shaky and slender foundation that the British newspaper the Guardian

published an article about Queen Charlotte on 12 March 2009 with the headline

‘Was this Britain's first black queen?’.

Let us consider this madness. Readers are invited to imagine that five hundred

years ago, roughly at the time that the English king Henry VIII was marrying Ann

Boleyn in 1533, one of their very remote ancestors had an affair with somebody

from Africa. Does anybody seriously imagine that this would have the effect of

making a man or woman born five centuries later, in the twenty-first century, in

any conceivable sense ‘black’? Five hundred years separate Queen Charlotte from

her possibly African ancestor and so the case is precisely similar. Yet it is fast
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becoming almost an accepted fact that Charlotte was in some bizarre way

‘Britain’s first black queen’; hence the black actress being chosen to play the role

in Bridgerton.

It was remarked earlier that those who follow the equalitarian dogma have an

alarming habit of falling back upon the use of weapons which once formed part of

the armoury of racism. We saw that at Harvard and Yale, quotas are used to

restrict the numbers of certain ethnic minorities. In the case of Queen Charlotte’s

supposed blackness, we observe the use of the old one-drop rule. In the United

States, during the days of slavery, it was informally acknowledged by many people

that anybody with a single black ancestor, no matter how distantly in the past,

should properly be considered black. We are not talking here of merely

grandparents or even great grandparents. Any black ancestor was considered

enough to categorise a person as black. This was the one-drop rule and it was,

needless to say, quite monstrous. It may seem almost beyond belief, but this

informal rule was introduced into legislation in some southern states in the

twentieth century.

In 1910 Tennessee passed a law which placed the one-drop rule on a legal

footing, defining as black anybody with any black ancestry whatsoever. Other

legislatures in the South followed suit, including Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina,

Mississippi, Virginian and, in 1927, Alabama and Georgia (Murray, 1997). It is

shocking enough to find that less than a century ago American states were passing

such laws, but to find that dedicated anti-racists are now following the same

principle in their efforts to distort history is almost as bad.

Let us look at another aspect of this willingness to use the tools of racism in the

cause of anti-racism. The Nazis were very fond of measuring parts of people’s
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bodies so that they could decide to what race they belonged. This was a popular

means of assigning people to their proper place in the order of things, whether as

Aryans or Jews, Slavs or Gypsies, Alpine Europeans or Mediterraneans. The

Germans of course did not invent this nonsense, it was popular all over the world.

The calculation of Cephalic Indices, at which we looked in the first section of this

was at one time accepted as having at least some validity, although its use

plummeted after 1945. The pseudo-science of craniometry has enjoyed a

renaissance in recent years though, which ties in neatly with the current efforts to

prove that black people have lived in Britain for thousands of years.

After the end of the Second World War, the mania for trying to establish

somebody’s race by using callipers and a ruler to measure noses or parts of the

skull came to be seen for what it was; little better than the Victorian practice of

reading a man’s character and disposition by means of phrenology. It was in any

case hopelessly discredited by the very fact that the Nazis made such extensive

use of techniques of this kind when working out which citizens were Aryan and

distinguishing them from others who were subhuman. The results of measuring a

cephalic index could mean the differences between life and death. In other words,

such measurements were at best pointless and at worst used for wicked purposes.

Readers may be surprised to learn that a form of craniometry has now been

rehabilitated and is being enthusiastically embraced by campaigners for anti-

racism. To see the return of callipers and careful measurement to determine the

racial group to which a human skull ought to be assigned is more than a little

disconcerting. To understand how racial classification of this kind has made an

unwelcome return, a little background information will be necessary.

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In the United Kingdom, strenuous efforts are being made to prove that black

people have always lived in the British Isles and that their presence dates back

thousands of years before the arrival of the first wave of post-war immigration

from the Caribbean in the later 1940s. This, it is felt, will help everybody in the

country to accept that diversity is no new phenomenon, but rather part of the

tapestry of British history from the earliest times. It is clear that this kind of thing

might enhance the self-respect of black children, but to achieve the goal, a

certain amount of deception is required. There is of course no actual evidence of

any black Africans in the country before the sixteenth century, and then only the

occasional musician or servant, so the old system of craniometry has been

resurrected for the twenty-first century.

Consider the case of the so-called Ivory Bangle Lady. In the northern English

city of York in 1901, a stone coffin was unearthed. It dated from the 4th century

AD, the time when Britain was part of the Roman Empire, and contained the

skeleton of a young woman, together with various grave goods. Among the items

found in the coffin were ivory bangles, a glass bracelet and a mirror. These all

suggested that the body had been that of somebody of high status and not a slave

or ordinary working person. It was the presence of the bangles which caused the

remains to be labelled in later years the ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’. Let us see now how

this skeleton has become transformed into something of a leitmotif for modern

Britain.

Three tricks are used to persuade the gullible that black people were living in

Britain 2,000 years ago. One of these is linguistic, another relies upon the

pseudoscience of craniometry. The final technique is bare assertion, in which the

presence of sub-Saharan Africans in a country at some time in the past is simply

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stated and expected to be accepted as fact. An article published on the website of

the BBC, the national broadcasting service in the United Kingdom, during the Black

Lives Matter disorders in Britain which followed the death of George Floyd,

illustrates all three methods as commonly used. The piece was headed ‘The black

British history you may not know about’ and was put together with the help of a

young woman called Lavinya Stennett, who was campaigning for more emphasis on

the history of black people to be included in the curriculum used in Britain’s state

schools. Although this first appeared on the BBC website in June 2020, it was still

there in April 2021, so presumably the BBC believe it to be accurate. The passage

relating to the Ivory Bangle Lady is as follows,

Some might think the first black people in Britain arrived from Britain's colonies

- the countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia that Britain ruled over, in some

cases for centuries - after World War 2. But that's not true, says Lavinya from

The Black Curriculum.

"We know that black people were in Britain since Roman times - and there's

specific examples."

The Ivory Bangle Lady is the name given to remains discovered in York in 1901

which are now on display in the York Museum. Archaeological analysis reveals

that although she was born in Roman Britain, she's likely to be of North African

descent.

The remains have been dated to the second half of the 4th Century. She was

found with jet and elephant ivory bracelets, earrings, pendants, beads, a blue

glass jug and a glass mirror. In other words, she wasn't poor.

"It puts into question assumptions that black people have never been
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aspirationally wealthy or had any kind of wealth," Lavinya says.

(BBC, 2020)

Let us look first at the linguistic devices used in this passage. We note, for

instance, the use of the phrase, ‘elephant ivory’. Ivory is almost invariably from

the tusks of elephants. Very rarely, objects have been carved from the tusks of

walrus or the horns of narwhals, but in general, unless otherwise specified, ivory

means elephant tusks. Putting the word ‘elephant’ before ‘ivory’ might look odd

and superfluous, but it serves to suggest a connection with Africa. Describing the

woman as having come from North Africa reinforces this point. When this is

combined with statements such as, ‘We know that black people were in Britain

since Roman times’, which is a classic case of bare assertion, the stage is set for

the creation of an impression that we are talking of a skeleton belonging to a black

African. The final piece of evidence is provided by the casual mention that,

‘Archaeological analysis reveals’ that the woman, ‘is likely to be of North African

descent’. Case closed; here is strong evidence that wealthy black people from

Africa lived in Britain thousands of years ago. The British newspaper the Guardian

said plainly after the skeleton had been examined, a process at which we shall

look in a moment, that this, ‘was a woman of black African ancestry’ (Guardian,

2010).

What are we to make of all this? Leaving aside the confident claims of black

ancestry, what actual evidence is there? There are two strands of evidence in this

case. Analysis of the isotopes in the teeth of the skeleton indicates that the

woman did not grow up in York, where she was buried, but rather somewhere

warmer and on a coast. This might have been southern England, somewhere in
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Europe or even North Africa. There is no way of telling. So, what made the BBC

and the Guardian so confident that she was from Africa? The answer is that some

people from the University of Reading in the south of England undertook to

measure the bones, especially the front of the skull, and so decide what race the

woman had belonged to when alive.

Having presumably already read what has been said on this subject in this book

and the reasons that it was found to be a pretty useless way of determining racial

or ethnic origins, readers may well be tempted to raise their eyebrows at this

point. Surely everybody in the field of anthropology must be aware of the

shortcomings of such techniques by now? One might think so, but it is not so. The

researchers at Reading University used a programme called FORDISC, which is

designed to aid forensic scientists and archaeologists to determine the ethnic

origins of skeletons. Obviously, if it was possible to state reliably whether the

skeleton of an unknown murder victim belonged to a black person or white,

somebody from East Asia or a person of mixed black and white ancestry, then this

would be of inestimable use to a police force investigating an historic murder.

Using FORDISC other than within very specific parameters is all but useless.

Even within those parameters, in optimal circumstances, it is successful in only

one case in a hundred in divining the ethnicity of a skull (Elliott & Collard, 2009).

One need only read a study which ran 200 skeletons of known ancestry through the

FORDISC programme and then collated the results. The findings are damning,

The results of the analyses suggest that Fordisc's utility in research and medico-

legal contexts is limited. Fordisc will only return a correct ancestry attribution

when an unidentified specimen is more or less complete, and belongs to one of

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the populations represented in the program's reference samples. Even then

Fordisc can be expected to classify no more than 1 % of specimens with

Confidence.

(Elliot & Collard, 2009).

The reason for this low success rate is no mystery and it is the same reason that

Nazi attempts to measure and categorise Europeans were doomed. There are very

few pure racial groups to be found anywhere in the world and certainly hardly any

at all in Europe or North America. The DNA of the average African-American is

about 20 % European. Many white Americans also have black ancestry. In Europe,

ancestry is so jumbled up that it is almost impossible to draw any conclusions

about ethnicity simply from measuring a person’s skull. All this makes it

enormously difficult to say anything with confidence about the appearance in life

of somebody whose skull one is measuring, when you have no other information

about the individual. Nevertheless, the FORDISC programme has been used in

Britain to advance an historical perspective for which there is literally no

evidence. The so-called Ivory Bangle Lady is one example, but there are others.

Another famous, and supposedly black, person from Britain during the time of

the Roman Empire is the skeleton known as the Beachy Head Lady. This is from

roughly the same period as the York skeleton and, just as in that case, there is no

reason to think that the person was anything other than a native of Britain. Once

again, a study of the skull has led to the claim that she was a sub-Saharan African.

The use of dubious analysis of old skulls to bolster the case for a multicultural

Britain existing 1500 or 2000 years ago is one way of supporting an entirely modern

idea. Linguistic tricks are now a regular feature of this campaign as well. The coast
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of North Africa 2000 years ago was occupied by three chief ethnic groups. There

were the Berbers who, as far as can be determined, were the original inhabitants

of the area. Then there were Phoenician settlers, Semites from what is now

Lebanon who had established colonies on the Mediterranean coast of Africa,

including the city known as Carthage. Rome had also conquered and occupied

North Africa, a process which began in 146 BC with the defeat of Carthage. None

of these three groups were black.

During Black History Month in Britain, the claim that there was an ‘African

emperor’ of Rome is made each year. The implication is clearly that African in this

context equates with ‘black African’. If not, then the name of Emperor Severus

Septimius would not be brandished around in this way for a celebration of black

history. The idea of the ‘African’ or ‘black’ Roman emperor has now spread to

many more places and is fast becoming something of an urban myth. The website

for Historic Environment Scotland published on 17 October 2017 a piece entitled,

Scotland’s African Emperor. The subheading for the piece reads, ‘This Black

History Month, we take a look at the ethnic diversity in Roman Britain by

uncovering the life of Septimius Severus, Rome’s first African Emperor, and his

time in Scotland’. This was still on the site in the spring of 2021. It contains the

following claim,

the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus is sometimes referred to as Rome’s Black

Emperor… We can’t verify the exact tone of his skin, but we can say Severus

was born and brought up in Libya, he was the first Roman Emperor from Africa,

and he came to Scotland.

(Jones, 2017)
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One of this emperor’s parents was Roman and the other Phoenician, so

although we cannot, it is true, ‘verify the exact tone of his skin’, we can be fairly

confident that he was not black. One suspects that the author of this piece was

perfectly well aware of this. The use of the word ‘African’ as a synonym for ‘black’

is now common and allows all manner of historical characters to be roped into the

fantasy that Britain was once a nation as full of black people as is now the case.

These endeavours to show the past as full of black people enable the claim to

be made that black people have always played an important part in Britain’s

history and are as responsible for the success of the nation during the Industrial

Revolution and so on as white people are. This accounts for the minting of a 50p

coin in Britain in 2020 with the slogan emblazoned upon it, ‘Diversity built Britain’.

It is an aspect of the same scheme, to suggest that black and Asian people have

always lived in Britain and been an integral part of the country’s development.

Before going any further, it is time to draw attention once more to the ease

with which anti-racists adopt the old weapons of racial prejudice and use them for

their own purposes. To find, well into the twenty-first century, that anybody is

still using the ‘one drop rule’ when deciding ancestry is horrifying. When we

realise that those who are keen on this mad idea are supposedly anti-racists, it is

hard to know what to say. In the same way, watching people who work according

to the tenets of Nazi ‘racial science’ and feel that measuring the proportions of a

human skull is a reliable way of determining ancestry, also causes many ordinary

people to gape in astonishment.

Hand in hand with the efforts of those who would have us believe that Europe

was always the home of black people are the barefaced attempts to alter the
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historical record by suggesting that black people played a far greater role in

history than has so far been recognised and that racism has expunged their

contribution from view. This method is typically done by selecting a white man or

woman famous for laying the foundations for something which we all take for

granted, such as nursing or electric lighting, and claiming that they have taken the

credit for something which more properly belongs to somebody of African origin.

In Britain, Florence Nightingale, the Lady of the Lamp, was for well over a

hundred years a secular saint. She was, as any schoolchild knew, the heroine of the

Crimean War; the woman who singlehandedly invented the tradition of modern

nursing and laid the foundations for good practice in hospitals across the world. In

the 1980s, with increasing concern about racism and the introduction of Black

History Month to British schools, it was felt that it might be better to have an

important black woman to whom schoolchildren might look up. So began the Mary

Seacole myth.

Mary Seacole was a Jamaican woman who had run a restaurant in Central

America and also invested in a gold mine there. She travelled to London in 1854, so

that she could arrange for the gold mine in which she had an interest to be floated

on the stock exchange (Seacole, 1857). While in London, she decided to open a

restaurant in the Crimea, thinking that it would be a profitable venture and likely

to be popular with the officers fighting in the war then being waged against Russia.

Although nurses were being recruited at that time to go to tend the wounded from

the fighting in the Crimea, Mary Seacole did not, according to her own account,

make a formal application to join them. Instead, she travelled to the Crimea at her

own expense and set up a combined restaurant and shop which was exclusively for

the use of officers.

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Mary Seacole did not work in a hospital, nor did she provide any

accommodation for anybody at her inaptly named British Hotel. She visited the

scenes of battles from time to time to sell food and drink to spectators and

sometimes she would administer first-aid to casualties whom she came across

there. This was the limit of her involvement. Nevertheless, the legend that she,

rather than Florence Nightingale, was really the nursing heroine of the Crimea has

grown over 30 years into a juggernaut, until she is probably more familiar to the

rising generation of children than Florence Nightingale. In this way, the

achievements of one of the pioneering women of Victorian Britain, whose work in

statistics in the 50 years following the end of the Crimean War were of inestimable

value, is sinking to obscurity. When St Thomas’ Hospital in Central London, which

houses the Florence Nightingale Museum, had a statue erected outside to a

nineteenth century nurse, it was perhaps inevitable that it should be of Mary

Seacole, rather than Florence Nightingale.

In the United States, Thomas Edison is one of the most celebrated inventors. He

is the man associated in the public mind with all sorts of things which we take for

granted in the modern world; ranging from electric lighting to moving pictures and

the permanent recording of music. Over the last few years, the myth has gained

currency that Edison had nothing to do with inventing the electric lightbulb, which

was, it is claimed, devised instead by a black man. Yet another instance, or so we

are told, of the way that black achievement has been hidden and suppressed.

Joe Biden did not dream up the idea that electric lightbulbs were invented by a

black man. It is an urban myth which we must suppose he thought would be

popular with a black audience. Thomas Edison in America and Joseph Swann in

England both separately developed the incandescent lightbulb, although there had
 247

been earlier efforts (Homer, 2006). The early bulbs though did not last long and

Edison and Swann’s breakthrough was to make electric lightbulbs which lasted long

enough to be commercially viable. Both Edison and Swann perfected their bulbs in

1879.

At the time that Edison and Swann were patenting their bulbs, a black

draftsman called Lewis Howard Latimer was working for a rival electric lighting

company run by Hiram Maxim. In 1881, two years after Edison and Swann had

begun producing commercial lightbulbs, Latimer, along with J.V. Nichols, applied

for a patent for a bulb which he helped to design. This was US Patent 247,097. The

following year, he applied for a patent for a new method of manufacturing carbon

filaments for lightbulbs. He later worked for Thomas Edison. From such flimsy

material, the legend of the black man inventing the electric lightbulb was

wrought.

This is by no means the most extravagant of the claims made about the

wonders which unknown black people have produced, only to be cheated out of

their rightful recognition. Everything from the first clock made in America,

allegedly made by a man called Benjamin Banneker who, it is alleged, laid out and

planned the streets of Washington D.C. (Weatherly, 2006), to the discovery of

prime numbers 20,000 years ago. The Ishango Bone is part of a bone from a

baboon’s leg, which was unearthed in Africa in 1950. It bears a number of

scratches, which have been made deliberately. It may be a tally stick of some

kind, but it is now being said that this bone shows that Africans understood

mathematical systems in bases 10, 12 and 60 and also understood the concept of

prime numbers, 20,000 years before anybody in Europe or the Middle East thought

of them (Everett, 2017).

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The wild tales about the largely imaginary history of Africa and those whose

roots lie in that continent swirl around the internet, together with all the other

stories about the earth being flat and the impossibility that men landed on the

moon in 1969. The problem is though that while most educated people feel free to

laugh at the idea of the flat earth or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, both old

favourites on the internet, most are a little more cautious at openly expressing

scepticism about black men inventing the electric lightbulb or working with prime

numbers 12,000 years before writing first appeared. They are afraid of appearing

racist. Increasingly, this hesitation to denounce pseudo-history is leading to such

nonsense appearing in schools, especially during Black History Month.

While this is going on, films and television series increasingly project a

distorted and unrealistic view of the past by inserting black people into all manner

of places and situations where they would in fact never have been. In Britain, this

is done by various means. One is to scatter black extras around liberally in any

street scene from the past, ranging from Victorian London to Tudor England. In this

way, those watching, especially younger viewers, are persuaded that the

multicultural society which they see today is no new phenomenon and is actually

how things have been from the time of the Roman occupation through to the

present day. Sometimes, there is a temptation on the part of those making such

fantasies to overegg the pudding, as when an historical drama about Henry VIII’s

wife Anne Boleyn featured black actress Jodie Turner-Smith as the Tudor queen.

Various members of her family were also played by black actors, which gave the

entire production a surreal air. Something similar happened in the Netflix series

Bridgerton, which also had a black queen of England, together with various black

aristocrats.
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The aim of the revisionist view of history at which we have looked in this

chapter is twofold. On a mundane and mercantile level, many companies are now

under pressure to diversify their workforce and sometimes, there is difficulty

obtaining contracts unless they have a certain percentage of black and other

minority people working for them. Complaints that this or that award ceremony,

such as the Oscars, is ‘too white’, makes it politic for producers to include as many

black actors in films and plays as can reasonably be managed. Then too, the whole

thing fits in well with the zeitgeist, in that it enables black people to share in the

successes and achievements of Europe’s and America’s past.

Readers may, at this point, be asking themselves what it is which is propelling

this general feeling that we must allocate a greater historical role to black people,

while at the same time trying to play down the achievements of white civilisation.

Sometimes, that very civilisation is portrayed as hopelessly tainted by, and

founded upon, colonialism and the trade in slaves. To answer that question we

need to look at an ideology which was, until relatively recently, confined to the

groves of Academe and of little interest or significance to anybody other than a

handful of students at places like Harvard’s law school. Many people have heard

vaguely of Critical Race Theory, but few of us have bothered to investigate it to

any great degree. Since the influence of CRT, as it is known for short, is so wide

ranging and profound, everybody in the West should have at least a passing

acquaintance with the basic beliefs of those who subscribe to it.

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Chapter 5

Critical Race Theory

The equalitarian doctrine, or dogma, depending upon one’s perspective, is one of

the two main strands in modern anti-racism, which is why so much attention has

been devoted to it and its advocates. It forms a background to any debate of

racism or racial prejudice and is, for many, their default position. There is another

current though, one which has been slowly growing in strength since first it

appeared in the early 1980s. This is known as Critical Race Theory and it

increasingly permeates much of the discourse on racism in the western world.

Many of the expressions which we hear being bandied about so often today, such

as ‘institutional racism’, ‘white privilege’, ‘microaggressions’ and so on, have their

origins in Critical Race Theory. Although the theory is woefully deficient in logic

and rationality, the very fact that it is so influential means that it must be dealt

with and examined in a book such as this.

The most well-known advocates of equalitarianism before the Second World

War, anthropologists like Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, were of course white. This

was the case too with many of the pioneers who fought to establish equal

opportunities for all racial groups, both in Britain and the United States, in the

decades following the end of the war. They undertook this struggle in the main by

using traditional methods of academic discourse. Evidence was produced,

intelligence measured, statistics gathered and analysed. Some black people found

it a little galling that what was essentially their own struggle for equal rights was

being spearheaded and superintended by white liberals. In the 1970s and 1980s
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ideas began to circulate in America which originated at Harvard Law School and

evolved into a separate theory about what the struggle against racism should

entail. This became known as Critical Race Theory and some of the reasoning

behind it have now became part of mainstream thinking about race. Among the

pioneers were academics like Richard Delgado, the son of a Mexican immigrant, at

one of whose books we shall shortly be looking. It is his ancestry and consequent

minority status that bestows upon Delgado the supposed authority to speak on

behalf of other ethnic groups such as African-Americans.

Whether in deliberate opposition to the usual way in which white academics

went about things or for some other reason, a lot of Critical Race Theory is based

on altogether different methods from those generally used in the West when

debating or studying ideas. One might even say that the theory is based upon

axioms or revealed truths which are not in themselves accessible to reasoned

debate.

Some of the key aspects of Critical Race Theory are a dismissal of classical

liberalism of the kind which arose with the Enlightenment, rejection of rational

and objective enquiry, affirmation of subjective experience, whether in story-

telling or personal testimony, sometimes known as standpoint epistemology, and a

tendency towards cultural or racial separatism (Delgado & Stefancic, 1993). Since

these may sound abstruse and a little difficult for the average person readily to

grasp, perhaps it would be easiest to look at how Critical Race Theory works in

practice. We shall begin with standpoint epistemology.

A year after the Covid-19 epidemic first swept Britain, it was clear that it had

had a deleterious effect on employment prospects, particularly among young

people. On 14 April 2021 a news item appeared on the BBC website which
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emphasised that this situation might affect a disproportionate number of young

black and Asian people. Headed, ‘Employers ignore you if they can't pronounce

your surname’, the piece focused on the experiences of a 21 year-old woman from

Glasgow called Mary Ibiyemi. A key feature of standpoint epistemology is that

members of racial minorities, Ibiyemi was of African origin, have access to truths

which are not evident to the white, majority population. Their testimony should

therefore be treated with special and particular respect (Ansell, 2008). This is of

course very different from the usual western tradition, where the nationality,

colour or religion of an individual is ideally treated as being irrelevant; it is on the

evidence and power of reasoning that we normally decide if what a person is

saying is sensible and worth listening to. What did Mary Ibiyemi say? Here is the

account of her views, as described in the article,

‘My surname isn't one a lot of people can pronounce, and I feel employers are

more likely to skip over it,’ she said, ‘I feel if you're from the black or Asian

communities, if you have a hard-sounding name then they are less likely to

take the time to get to know the person, the pronunciation and try to work

with you as a person.’

(BBC, 2021)

Now the first thing we should note is that because this is a black woman

speaking about what she perceives to be her own experience of racism, it would be

considered very poor form, according to the mores of those who embrace the

tenets of Critical Race Theory, to question her closely or unsympathetically about

what she says. By virtue of belonging to a minority ethnic group in a white-

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dominated society, Ibiyemi’s views on race are pretty much off limits to anybody

other than a member of her own racial group. We observe secondly that she says

twice that she ‘feels’ this racism and not that she has actual, solid and verifiable

evidence for it. This too is part of the ideology. We may not ask her to debate this

subject, neither should we enquire too deeply into the grounds for her belief in

the idea that racism relating to her name is a factor in her unemployment. She

‘feels’ this and there is an end to the matter. To press her on this point might be

seen as an oppressive, or even racist, act in itself.

Some readers might be thinking that this is a little unfair, because it allows

members of ethnic minorities a ‘free pass’, as it were, to make any statement at

all and then be relieved of the consequences of explaining or defending what has

been said. This ability to make unsubstantiated and sometimes tendentious

allegations without the need to back them up with facts is a privilege which few of

us enjoy and it is not difficult to see how such a practice might be abused. Let us

look at what might be said in response to Mary Ibiyemi’s ‘feelings’.

We are told specifically that members of Asian communities in Britain with

what are described as ‘hard-sounding’ names might be victims of discrimination

and that this might affect their employment prospects. Here is something which

we can certainly investigate. We might begin by looking at the statistics for the

percentages of young people belonging to one or two Asian communities in Britain

and seeing how many of them are neither employed nor in full-time education.

It turns out that Chinese names, which are famously difficult for westerners to

pronounce correctly, pose no handicap to young people of Mary Ibiyemi’s age in

Britain who are of Chinese origin. The figures show that just 6.2 % of Chinese

people aged between 16 and 24 are not in employment, education or training. This
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is compared with a national average of 12.8 % (UK Government, 2020). Let’s look

at another Asian community, those of Indian origin. There, the figure for young

people who are not working or studying is also below the national average (UK

Government, 2019).

All this makes us stop and think a little more about the young black woman’s

feelings; her ‘truth’, if you like. It is clear that her ‘feelings’ were not an accurate

gauge of the state of affairs in the real world. But then, her story sounded

inherently implausible from the start. Do Polish plumbers and builders find

themselves standing idle because they have ‘hard-sounding’ names? The whole

idea sounds dubious.

This reliance upon subjectivity was of course displayed to great and telling

effect when Meghan Merkle, married to the British queen’s grandson, was

interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 2021. After the former actress had given her

perspective of events, she was asked, ‘'How do you feel about the palace hearing

you speak your truth today?' This was revealing, because of course allegations of

racism had been made. Both Oprah Winfrey and Meghan Markle are African-

Americans and so it was inconceivable that either would doubt anything the other

had to say about racial prejudice. It was taken as given that when a black woman

talks about supposed racial prejudice, then he or she is ‘speaking her truth’.

One very important point about Critical Race Theory which is sometimes

overlooked is that most of those who subscribe to it reject the rationality of the

Enlightenment (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). During the Enlightenment, that period

during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sometimes also called the Age of

Reason, human reasoning and the scientific method became the touchstone for the

falsity or truth of hypotheses. Rather than religious revelation or spiritual insight,

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evidence gathered through the senses and analysed by rational thought became

seen as the wisest way of studying the world. Followers of Critical Race Theory are

often dismissive of this method of dealing with history or current events, believing

that their own intuition can provide a surer path to the truth as it relates to such

matters as racial prejudice and the essential nature of the society in which they

live.

Abandoning the paramount role of reason can be a hazardous undertaking, of

course, and leads on occasion to one exceedingly undesirable consequence; which

is to say an increase in racism. When Oprah Winfrey asked her widely reported

question about Meghan Markle’s own ‘truth’, this was mocked and derided in some

newspapers and magazines. The fact that the two people taking part in the

conversation were both black had the unfortunate effect of giving a racial tone to

what looked like a patronising dismissal.

In a broader context, declining to abide by the generally accepted customs and

rules of discussion and debate can lay the followers of this philosophical system

open to the charge that they are actually incapable of coherent and logical

reasoning. One eminent American jurist, Judge Richard Posner, has explicitly said

of those who are proponents of Critical Race Theory that,

by repudiating reasoned argumentation, they reinforce stereotypes about the

intellectual capacities of non-whites

(Posner, 1997).

Posner has also written disparagingly about the practice of abandoning rational

enquiry and depending instead on narrative to uncover truth.

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Standpoint epistemology dovetails neatly with the use of narrative to study

society and its problems. Storytelling, the relating of narratives and construction

of myths are very popular in Critical Race Theory. Most people are aware that the

stories which we tell about our experiences are all too often unreliable and

coloured by our own feelings and prejudices. For that reason, we usually compare

mentally what we are being told with what we already know of people and the

situations about which they are telling us. In this way, we subconsciously work out

whether or not we are hearing an accurate and unvarnished account, rather than

one which has been edited and exaggerated or even perhaps a complete pack of

fairy tales. This is how most of us operate, perhaps without even thinking too

deeply about what we are doing. This attitude is anathema for the adherents of

Critical Race Theory. When a member of an ethnic minority relates a narrative

about prejudice or oppression, the very act of doubting what is said or even

suspending belief until evidence is provided, can be seen as further oppression.

In a sense, dismantling the foundations upon which Critical Race Theory is built

is too easy, but alarmingly few journalists or commentators appear to have the

appetite for such an undertaking, probably because of the fear that they will be

accused of racism. Let us look at what some of the most significant figures in CRT

have to say about the idea of storytelling, which we mentioned above. The

temptation to remark that in the vernacular ‘telling stories’ is a euphemism for

lying is strong, but must be resisted. It might though be instructive at this point to

examine in detail the concept of narrative as outlined in a well-known and

authoritative book on Critical Race Theory. Let us read what is said about

storytelling by its proponents.

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Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, has, since its first publication 20 years

ago, become the standard introduction to the topic of CRT and is used as a

textbook in university courses. The two authors, Richard Delgado and Jean

Stefancic, are acknowledged to be experts in the field. All quotations are taken

from the third edition of the book, published in 2017. The chapter with which we

are currently concerned is called, ‘Legal Storytelling and Narrative Analysis’. One

of the ideas expounded is that of so-called ‘counterstorytelling’. The authors of

the book explain, quite correctly that all societies have myths or accepted

narratives to which most people in a nation or community subscribe. They outline

one such narrative in the western world; one believed by most white people. This

is that while slavery and colonialism were indeed dreadful things, the horrors

which black people and Asians suffered because of them are now essentially

historical curiosities and the world has moved on and become a very different

place. However, as Delgado and Stefancic go on to remind us, few white people

can appreciate the ghastliness which slaves and other victims of colonialism were

forced to endure, quoting another author to make the point, that the period was,

‘filled with more murder, mutilation, rape, and brutality than most of us can

imagine or easily comprehend’ (Bell, 1987).

Had the authors of this primer in CRT stopped at this point, few of us would be

minded to contradict them. They do not, and go on to perform the intellectual

equivalent of the three card trick. Having talked of murder, mutilation and rape,

things which are of course inflicted by people on unwilling victims, they continue

without a pause, saying,

That history continues into the present and implicates persons still alive. It
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includes infant death rates among minorities nearly double those of whites, as

well as arrest and incarceration rates that are among the highest in the world.

School dropout rates among blacks and Latinos are worse than those in

practically any industrialized country, and the gap between whites and

non-whites in income, assets, educational attainment, and life expectancy is as

wide as it was thirty years ago, if not wider.

(Delgado & Stefancic, 2017)

It is a breath-taking piece of effrontery and only the fact that white people feel

embarrassed about calling out intellectual dishonesty relating to race when it is

coming from a member of an ethnic minority can explain why a passage like this is

not met with cries of derision. Delgado is the son of a Mexican immigrant and so

fortunately enjoys a degree of immunity from ridicule.

On the off chance that readers have not spotted the fraud being perpetrated, it

is this. In the first paragraph quoted, Delgado and Stefancic are referring to things

which ethnic minorities have in the past had done to them against their will;

murder, mutilation and rape. They follow this with the claim, ‘That history

continues into the present’ and then write of things which ethnic minorities are

doing to themselves. To equate injuries carried out against individuals with

injuries which individuals inflict on their own bodies is a shocking piece of

sophistry, even for those who reject the rationality of the Enlightenment.

The best way to make this clear is to look at a couple of real-life instances of

what the two authors are describing, one from Britain and the other from the

United States. We will begin with Britain, whose history of colonial cruelty and

abuse is indeed grim and by no means lacking in murder, mutilation and rape. The
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question we are addressing are two points specifically mentioned by Delgado and

Stefancic as being related in some way to the past treatment of people with dark

skins; what causes infant mortality rates to be high among ethnic minority

communities and why is life expectancy sometimes lower than for white people?

Approximately 3 % of the British population is of Pakistani heritage; that is to

say people who were either born in Pakistan or are born to parents whose families

have their origin in that country (Office for National Statistics, 2011). The infant

mortality rate among members of this community is double that of white British

babies, a shocking figure indeed (Alberg et al, 2014). Is this evidence of what

Delgado and Stefancic meant when they wrote of the cruelties of colonialism and

claimed, ‘That history continues into the present and implicates persons still alive.

It includes infant death rates among minorities nearly double those of whites’?

Well, let us see what is causing the exceptionally high infant mortality rate in this

community before we rush either to endorse or discard this notion.

The infant mortality rate for babies of Pakistani origin in born in Britain is

combined with a very high number of stillbirths, in which a baby is born dead. This

too is running at twice the national average (Guardian, 2021). Not only that, but

babies born to parents of Pakistani heritage account for a third of all babies with

genetic birth defects in Britain. Reflect for a moment on this figure. Just 3 % of

the population have 33 % of the babies with genetic defects. A baby born to

parents of Pakistani heritage is roughly ten times more likely to be born with

genetic defects which in many cases lead to disability and a shortened life span.

Could this really be, as has been suggested by experts in Critical Race Theory, a

legacy of colonialism?
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As a matter of fact, the high rate of infant mortality, stillbirths and children

with disabilities and life-limiting conditions is something which is being inflicted

upon babies not by racism but by the families themselves. Over half of all

marriages in Britain between people of Pakistani heritage are between either first

or second cousins (BMJ, 2019). Cousin marriages are a terrible idea and although

legal in Britain are the object of a popular taboo as steering closer than is

comfortable to incest. Very few marriages in Britain between white people are

between cousins; roughly one in 25,000.

The chief reason that cousin marriages are undesirable is that they hugely

increase the chance of any offspring being sickly, dying young or suffering from

some genetic defect or other. One remembers the royal families of Europe who

were, in the past, very fond of this practice. The Habsburgs notoriously preferred

to marry into their own line and this led not only to distinctive physical

characteristics such as the so-called ‘Habsburg jaw’, but also a powerful strain of

mental deficiency. Charles II of Spain was a classic example of this tendency, being

unable to speak until he was four, due to a very large tongue and of course an

extreme form of the Habsburg jaw. He did not walk until he was eight and always

had trouble, even as an adult, in talking. His mother and father were uncle and

niece and the complicated family connections meant that his father was also his

uncle and Charles was his mother’s cousin, as well as her son. His grandmother was

also his aunt (Barton, 2009).

The British royal family too fell victim to the perils of inbreeding within a small

group. When one person is a carrier of a defective gene such as that for sickle cell

or haemophilia, then there is a risk not only of passing this onto children, but if

such a person has children with a person who shares the trait, then the full-blown
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syndrome may result in their offspring. Of course, if you and your relatives have

for centuries been marrying each other, then traits such as haemophilia may

become more common than in the general population. Queen Victoria carried the

gene for haemophilia and married her cousin Albert, who was also a carrier of the

gene. This led to one of their children, Leopold being born with the disease itself.

He died from a haemorrhage after a fall. Because Victoria’s children married into

the other European royal families, the disease showed up in the Russian and

Spanish royal families too; most famously with the son of Tsar Nicholas who died in

the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

The Pakistani community in modern Britain are a perfect example of the

minorities referenced in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. The problem is

though that they are freely choosing a course of action which is having

catastrophic effects upon their children. Rather than being a natural continuation

of the horrors of colonialism, as Critical Race Theorists would have us believe, the

high infant mortality rate in these families means that they are victims of their

own, indigenous culture. Neither racism nor colonialism have any bearing on the

case.

We turn now to the United States and think about something else which was

mentioned as being a natural continuation of the suffering of minorities in the

past. This is the gap in life expectancy between whites and non-whites. Again, we

look at a specific case; that of African-American women compared with non-

Hispanic white women in the United States.

According to the Office of Minority Health, which is part of the United States

Department of Health and Human Services, the situation at the time that Richard
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Delgado and Jean Stefancic published the latest edition of their book on Critical

Race Theory, was as follows,

African American women have the highest rates of obesity or being overweight

compared to other groups in the United States.

About 4 out of 5 African American women are overweight or obese.

In 2018, non-Hispanic blacks were 1.3 times more likely to be obese as

compared to non-Hispanic whites.

In 2018, African American women were 50 percent more likely to be obese than

non-Hispanic white women.

From 2013-2016, non-Hispanic black females were 2.3 times more likely to be

overweight as compared to non-Hispanic white females.

(US Department of Health and Human Services, 2020)

They go on helpfully to point out why being overweight, which is of course a direct

consequence of eating and drinking too much, might be injurious to health,

People who are overweight are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure,

high levels of blood fats, diabetes and LDL cholesterol – all risk factors for heart

disease and stroke.

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In 2018, African Americans were 20 percent less likely to engage in active

physical activity as compared to non-Hispanic whites.

People who marry their cousins or eat too many hamburgers are not, as

Richard Delgado evidently imagines, latter-day victims of slavery, which is being

perpetuated by other means. They are rather individuals who are likely in the

future to suffer the ill-effects of their own foolish or ill-considered lifestyle

choices. In a free country, and where the law does not forbid it, I should of course

be free to marry my cousin and have children by her if I wish to do so. In the same

way, should I wish to eat unhealthy foods to excess or drink whiskey too

frequently, these are also courses of action which I should have the liberty to take.

However, ass with any choices which we make, there might be downsides to being

a greedy and immoderate eater. One of these is obesity and others are heart

disease and strokes. Overindulging in alcohol can be harmful, while marrying a

close relative might harm any children we have.

To blame the natural consequences of the actions which we, as free human

beings, take, on events which took place two or three hundred years before we

were born will strike many people as grotesque. This though is what Critical Race

Theory requires us to do. This absurdity pales into insignificance besides the

central tenet of CRT which calls upon us to abandon reason itself, which was

mentioned above. This can have the most momentous effects, not the least of

which being that it can create an impenetrable barrier to communication between

people belonging to different ethnicities.

The difficulty is that not all those trying to discuss race and racism with black

people are aware that they are effectively speaking a different language to those
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with whom they are attempting to establish a dialogue. This can lead to problems.

Most white people in Europe and North America, whether crane drivers or

university professors, work unconsciously to a common framework. They are

assuming such things as the paramount role of human reason when working out if

something is true and also take it for granted that reality is accessible to

investigation by the scientific method. They seldom take the trouble to put it into

those words and express this clearly of course; it is just the background in which

we have all been raised and which has been operating since the eighteenth

century.

In the same way, we ideally disregard the religion, social class, skin colour or

nationality of a person with whom we are debating and concentrate instead upon

what is being said, rather than by whom. We hope, in other words, to set ideas

against each other according to certain conventions and see how they fare when

everybody thinks, talks or writes about them. Discussion is therefore turned into a

bloodless and academic exercise. Critical Race Theory will have none of this. The

things with which it is concerned are too important to be analysed in this cold-

hearted and objective fashion and the personal history of the person putting

forward a view is most definitely of importance.

In the modern, Western world, if somebody expresses an opinion about the

history of Europe, the inequalities of society or the existence of atoms, then we

are likely to ask, ‘Why do you think that?’ or perhaps, ‘Do you have evidence for

this belief?’ Of course, in day-to-day life we might not phrase the questions in such

formal language, but that is the general meaning. For the greater part of human

history, questions like this were not part of ordinary people’s intellectual toolkit.

If asked about beliefs, then the answer would be likely to end the conversation and
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close off any supplementary enquiries. Until the nineteenth century, asking, ‘Why

do you think that?’ might typically have been met with a response such as,

‘Because it says do in scripture.’ Delving into our beliefs by dissecting them with

the tools of logic and requirements for strong evidence would have appeared a

dangerous doctrine to many people.

Today, almost all of us know, however vaguely, that we need to have evidence

and good reasons to hold a view. We may not actually have those things for some

of our opinions, but at least we know that we should have them. Critical Race

Theory works according to quite different rules. The scientific method itself is

seen as a tool of white hegemony, and reasoned debate is a rabbit hole down

which an oppressive system tries to lure people. These are little more than

stratagems devised by powerful and cunning white men to confuse issues relating

to ethnicity, race and the true structure of society. As was mentioned above, the

very act of asking, ‘What grounds do you have for supposing this to be so?’ can be

interpreted as an act of racist aggression when asked of a black woman by a white

man. This leads us to another important feature of Critical Race Theory, which is

white privilege.

Phrases such a ‘white privilege’ and ‘institutional racism’ were, until a couple

of decades ago, unknown to the average person. They have been around for many

years, but their use was restricted to scholarly circles and their meanings very

clearly and precisely defined. In a book published in 1986, the section on

Institutional racism is headed, ‘The problem of institutionalised racism’ (Rex,

1986). This academic work, published in Britain by the Open University, explores

what was then described as, ‘the problematic concept of ‘institutional racism’’

(Rex, 1986). It was made plain at that time that this was a term and an idea about
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which there were many difficulties and that unless those using it were very

careful, it might easily lead to misunderstanding. There may, 45 years ago, have

been many reasons to avoid phrases such as ‘institutional racism’ and ‘white

privilege’, but all such reservations have now been swept away and a day scarcely

passes in which we do not read or hear these terms being bandied about.

That society, which was created by and for white people, is of itself and by its

very nature racist, is one of those things which I mentioned at the beginning of this

chapter as being more like revealed truths than carefully argued positions. White

people who eve attempt to debate the topic are likely to find themselves being

eyed askance as closet racists. They are, to use another popular expression,

probably unaware of their ‘white privilege’. Encountering this dogmatic framework

can be irritating and the irritation can sometimes spill over into offence. After all,

if a white person was discussing some aspect of the modern world with a black

man and then announced, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand what I’m talking about,

because you’re black!’, eyebrows would be raised. Once more, as in other areas of

this theory, there is a belief that black people have access to insight and

knowledge which can only be acquired by lived experience and cannot be

transmitted to others by words alone, however articulately expressed or rationally

argued. In that sense, it is perhaps more akin to mysticism than anything else.

It will not have escaped notice that white people are placed at a distinct

disadvantage when talking about Critical Race Theory. The very act of asking for

explanations or evidence can be interpreted as hostility and another instance of a

white person not ‘checking’ his or her privilege. About one key aspect of Critical

Race Theory though, white people may feel entitled to express an opinion, since it

is something of which white societies have had a good deal of overwhelmingly

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negative experience. This is the vigilante justice of lynch law advocated by all

proponents of CRT. It is not called that of course, but that is certainly what is

being suggested when we read passages such as the following. After a discussion of

the difference between African-Americans who adhere to an ‘assimilationist’ or

‘nationalist’ position, this is said of so-called ‘nationalists’,

Persons of this persuasion identify with the “race rebel” aspect of some black

criminals and support them, at least if they are young, redeemable, and a

potential asset to the community. African Americans who hold this view want

the police to leave certain black offenders alone and let the community handle

them. Antisnitching campaigns in black neighborhoods are evidence of this

attitude.

(Delgado & Stefencic, 2017)

Let us think a little about this subject, which is presented as being an

innocuous, even sensible, proposal. During the Black Lives Matter disturbances in

2020, there were calls to ‘defund’ the police, although few people seemed to have

any real idea of what that might actually entail. We ask ourselves to begin with,

what might be meant by letting the ‘community’ ‘handle’ those supposed to be

guilty of criminal offences? Will the guilt of such individuals be assumed or would

they be brought before some kind of judicial tribunal; a ‘people’s court’, perhaps?

What of those found guilty by such ad hoc proceedings? How will they be

‘handled’? Perhaps by being put on probation or given a suspended sentence? Will

social workers be involved in pre-sentence reports? Such proposals usually raise

more questions than they answer.

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A clue to the likely course of events when once a suspected offender has been

apprehended may perhaps be gleaned from the mention of ‘antisnitching

campaigns in black neighbourhoods’. This brings unbidden to our minds the saying

popular in some such neighbourhoods, to the effect that ‘snitches get stitches’.

Sometimes, the warning is even more stark, ‘snitches get stitches and wind up in

ditches’. Stitches are needed for those who have been badly cut and of course

ditches are a traditional location for the disposal of the corpses of murder-victims.

If such penalties are mooted for those who speak unguardedly to police officers, it

is unlikely that the punishments dealt out to thieves, rapists or child molesters

would be any milder.

Whenever communities of any kind have been allowed to ‘handle’ offenders

themselves, rather than relying upon the police and judicial system, the results are

usually grisly and often entail death. One remembers with horror the lynchings

which took place in the United States well into the twentieth century. More

recently, there were in the United Kingdom province of Northern Ireland ‘No Go’

areas in the 1970s, where law and order was maintained by the ‘community’. At

that time snitches really did end up in ditches; death being the punishment for

those thought to be passing information to the army or police. Theft was

sometimes dealt with peremptorily by what was known as kneecapping. This

involved shooting a man through the knee and so crippling him for life.

The history of communities handling offenders themselves, without official

involvement is a grim one and there is no reason at all to suppose that any version

devised and operated by black people would be any less bloodthirsty. That a major

thread in modern anti-racism looks even vaguely in a favourable way upon such a

state of affairs is disturbing.

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Despite the best efforts of those who subscribe to the doctrine of

equalitarianism and also to the ideology set forth in Critical Race Theory, scientific

racism shows no signs of dying in the immediate future. However often those who

disapprove of it claim that science has shown that the idea lacks any merit, new

developments keep appearing which suggest that there could, after all, be

something in it. Mark Twain remarked on hearing that he had died, that ‘The

report of my death was an exaggeration.’ Much the same might perhaps be said of

the reported death of scientific racism as a viable and verifiable theory.

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Chapter 6

The Corpse Which Would Not Lay Down

At the end of many horror films there comes a point at which the audience is

convinced that the narrative has reached a satisfactory conclusion and the

monster, whether a human killer, vampire, supernatural entity or murderous alien

from outer space, has finally been vanquished. The creature lays prostrate on the

ground and we all breathe a sigh of relief that the struggle has climaxed with the

triumph of good over evil. Then, just as the heroine turns to walk away, a hand,

claw or tentacle grabs her ankle. It is not over after all!

Those who are opposed to the concept of scientific racism must feel like a bit

like this. However often they declare the success of their ideology and prove, at

least to their own satisfaction, that science has disproved any possibility of

inherent differences between ethnic groups, along comes a piece of evidence

which indicates that the opposing view to their own is still breathing. Scientific

racism not only refuses to die, but appears today to be in better health than it was

before anthropologists like Franz Boaz and Ruther Benedict launched their crusade

with the intention of putting an end to it once and for all. It must all be very

disappointing for those subscribing to the equalitarian dogma.

The problem is a simple one. All the things suggested by the opponents of

scientific racism over the last century or so have now become part of mainstream

life. In the United States, segregation has been dismantled and access to all types

of education, from nursery to university, are as open to black people as they are

white. According to people like Ruth Benedict, such a state of affairs should have
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ushered in a utopia of equal achievement by black and white. Since all differences

were social and cultural, once all children had equal opportunities, then all would

make similar academic progress, provided of course that they all received the

same kind of education. Britain has never had a segregated educational system,

but there too the theory held that all that was necessary was to ensure that the

publicly funded schools which black children and white attended were of the same

quality and then, as surely as night follows day, the same number of black students

would be getting to medical school, training to be quantity surveyors, qualifying as

lawyers and so on. It was all so simple. Except of course, that it was not.

Despite the provision of equal educational opportunities, the most academic

universities stubbornly remained the province of white students and a large

proportion from Chinese or Indian families. The black school pupils were unable to

gain the necessary qualifications to gain admission to the medical schools and best

universities.

In the same way, once Civil Rights laws in the United States and Race Relations

Acts in Britain had been placed on the statute books, then racial prejudice in

employment would also come to an end. Once this happened, then of course black

people would soon be seen taking up posts in the professions which were

dominated by white people. The problem was that they did not and as the years

turned into decades it became apparent that racial prejudice alone was not a good

and sufficient explanation for the divisions along racial lines which were observed.

Clearly, other causes were at play and would have to be dealt with before black

people could enjoy equal success. Before the dawning of that happy day, it would

be necessary for some temporary measures to be put in place to help things along.
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It is an unfortunate, but undeniable, fact, that some of these remedies looked

to the unbiased bystander like a return to the way things had been in the past. We

have glanced already at the return of quotas as a means of bringing about racially

balanced student-bodies at the best American universities, so that it at might at

least look as though black people were doing as well academically as whites and

those whose families were of East Asian origin. Seeing quotas for ethnic minorities

was for many a retrograde step but it was not nearly as bad as another of the ideas

which was mooted by, among other, Critical Race Theorists. This was the return of

segregated education, against which so many people fought so vigorously in the

years following the end of the Second World War. It is almost beyond belief that

black people themselves should wish for a return to separate schools for black

children and white, but there it is. We have quoted already from the works of

Richard Delgado, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. Here he is talking

about the subject of segregation as though it might be a viable and desirable

scheme,

One strand of critical race theory energetically backs the nationalist view,

which is particularly prominent with the materialists. Derrick Bell, for example,

urged his fellow African Americans to foreswear the struggle for school

integration and aim for building the best possible black schools. Other CRT

nationalists advocate gun ownership, on the grounds that historically the police

in this country have not protected blacks against violence, indeed have often

visited it upon them. Other nationalists urge the establishment of all-black

inner-city schools, sometimes just for males, on the grounds that boys of color

need strong role models and cannot easily find them in the public schools.
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Others back black- or Latino-run charter schools in big cities.

(Delgado & Stefancic, 2017)

These measures are advocated on the grounds that black pupils, boys in particular,

do not thrive in the school system and appear not to do as well academically as

their fellow white pupils. Suggested explanations include racism on the part of

teachers and a lack of strong, black role models. The volte face from opposing to

supporting segregation has been largely unremarked upon, but it is of great

significance. To an outsider, it looks as though all the assurances of those who

adhered to the equalitarian doctrine have been proved mistaken. For many years,

such people claimed that as soon as racial prejudice in education and the

workplace was removed, then everybody’s outcomes would, as a matter of course,

become similar. This has not happened.

The explanations which are brought forward to account for the obvious fact

that black surgeons are nowhere near as common as white surgeons and Asian

shopkeepers a good deal more common than black ones often seem a little

strained. The average citizen may not have any hostile attitude towards ethnic

minorities, but he or she has almost certainly noticed that black scientists and

inventors are rare, while black athletes and footballers are seen routinely. This

cannot help but shape their perceptions, perhaps subconsciously, and incline them

towards the view that black people are better at physical activities rather than

those which require high levels of intellectual ability. This may well be infuriating

for progressive types, but it shows how the old racial stereotypes have never really

gone away.
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There are two important points about which we need to remind ourselves at

this point. The first of these is that it must always be emphasised that there is all

the difference in the world between being racially prejudiced, on the one hand,

and on the other simply acknowledging that it is very likely the case that black

people and white are born different and that as they grow to maturity, these

differences tend to become more pronounced. Racial prejudice, in the sense of a

system which denies opportunities to black people in any area of human life, is

abhorrent. Accepting that differing ethnicities have individual weaknesses and

strengths though will not by itself lead to unfavourable outcomes for anybody.

The second point which must be borne in mind is that almost all the latest

research in genetics, anthropology, archaeology, biology and education seems to

support the idea of scientific racism. This a bitter blow for those who suppose

themselves to be anti-racist, but it is a risk one takes when following an ideology

in matters relating to science, instead of keeping up to date with the science.

Many of the more opinionated people in the anti-racist movement like to present

themselves as scientifically minded and forward-looking people, trying to defeat

an outdated theory which has by a long margin passed its sell-by date. This is not

at all how matters really stand.

No ideology or theory which conflicts with the available evidence can, in the

long term, survive; let alone flourish. Ideology cannot dictate the nature of the

world or alter reality. From time to time in history, movements have emerged

which claim that their own way of looking at the world is the only true and correct

one. When scientific discoveries are made which cast doubt upon this world-view,

they are ignored or suppressed. This is how some Christians reacted to Charles

Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the long term, all such enterprises are in vain. It
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may be that those who cling to the equalitarian dogma find themselves no in the

same position. If so, then they are on the wrong side of history.

It is too soon to be definite about it, but it is beginning to look as though the

days of equalitarianism may be drawing to a close. If so, then it is high time that

consideration was given to what will or should replace it. In short, what happens

now and how can new discoveries be reconciled with old ideas?
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Chapter 7

A Possible Way Forward

We have seen that anti-racism is not a simple solution to the problem of racial

prejudice and that despite having some pleasingly clear and easily remembered

catchphrases and slogans, things like ‘institutional racism’ and ‘white privilege’,

there are serious problems with the current approach to the friction and

inequalities between different ethnicities in modern society. What, if anything can

be done about this? There seem to some to be fundamental and irreconcilable

differences in the wishes and desires of the white majorities in Europe and North

America and the ambitions of the minorities who live alongside them. With the

possible fall of the equalitarian doctrine, which appears more likely with each

passing year, this may in the future lead to serious confrontations between the two

groups. It need not happen.

In the next part of this book, we will be exploring possible ways in which the

findings of modern science might be reconciled with the fixed and immutable idea

held by many people that all human populations are equally endowed with

intellectual and physical potential. Before going into detail on this topic though, it

might be profitable to spend a little while at the end of this section on anti-racism

by asking ourselves a few questions of the kind which are seldom put. Perhaps we

could begin with a simple one, the matter of intelligence.

Enough information has perhaps been uncovered so far in this book to make it

seem at the very least possible that intellectual ability is not evenly distributed
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between all ethnic groups. To put it bluntly, and in traditional terms, it may be

that some races are more intelligent than others. For many readers, this would not

be a shocking and unexpected revelation, but rather something which they had

long suspected but hesitated to speak of aloud. Such is the nature of modern,

Western society that to hint that one finds black people to be, on the whole, not

as clever as Chinese or white people is to invite ruin and disgrace. Since few of us

wish to become social outcasts, it usually seems better policy to keep our

heterodox views and opinions to ourselves. In a book of this kind though, we do not

need to pussyfoot around and avoid thinking about what so many people suppose

to be true. Let us then follow the idea of this possible inequality between

ethnicities to its logical conclusion and see where it might lead us.

What if it does prove to be the case that people of African heritage are, on

average, five or ten IQ points below Chinese or white people? What would be the

implications for society and the relations between different ethnic groups? Would

acknowledging such a state of affairs lead inexorably to an apartheid society of the

kind which once existed in South Africa? If it should be true that black people are

generally less intelligent than white people, who are in turn slightly less

intellectually able than those from East Asia, should we conceal this fact? Do we

have to talk about it? This attitude, typical of liberals, intellectuals and

progressive people in general, calls to mind the, probably apocryphal, anecdote

about the Bishop of Worcester’s wife in 1860, when she was told of Darwin’s

theory of evolution. According to a book on popular science published many years

ago,

On hearing, one June afternoon in 1860, the suggestion that mankind was
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descended from the apes, the wife of the Bishop of Worcester is said to have

exclaimed, ‘My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but

if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.’

(Leakey& Lewin, 1977)

We must hope that the average reader does not share the Bishop of Worcester’s

wife’s view of the questions at which we have been looking. So, assuming that we

are able to talk about the subject of intelligence without fearing the possible ill-

effects if the knowledge spread, what can we say? To begin with, we must pose a

question which may come as a surprise. It is this; how much does intelligence

matter in the usual way of things; that is to say in our day-to-day lives? We are

talking here neither of those with severe learning difficulties nor of geniuses, but

rather the people we routinely meet and with whom we regularly associate; our

family, friends, work colleagues and so on.

Readers might care at this point to ask themselves if they have any idea of

their own IQ or that of the people with whom they usually come into contact?

Among these are likely to be a spread of intellectual abilities with an average of

100, but wide variation from individual to individual. Put simply, some of the

people at our place of work will have IQs of 90 or 95, while others would perhaps

score 110 or more if they sat a test. This is not something about which most of us

think very often, mainly because it doesn’t matter. Stopping for a moment to

consider this fact, I invite readers to ask themselves this simple question; do they

find that the most intelligent people with whom to be the the ones whom they

most like? Are they the kindest and most helpful? Conversely, think now about the

staff who might on the lower end of this broad spectrum which we call ‘normal’ IQ
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Do we find that those individuals are less agreeable or more cruel and unpleasant

than anybody else? If we repeat this thought experiment with our family and

friends, then something will probably strike us.

The truth is, that although most of us spend our lives associating with people of

roughly similar intelligence to ourselves, we don’t usually think about intelligence

as such. We are rather more concerned about qualities such as kindness, empathy,

good nature, sympathy, tastes in music or television programmes and a hundred

other things. The possible IQ score of those with whom we rub shoulders in our

everyday lives is seldom something about which we give any thought at all.

Turning now from those whom we meet in our own lives, let us ask ourselves

about how we view intelligence in the famous. Pope John-Paul II, who died in

2011, is well on the road to sainthood and widely regarded as a good person. Let us

imagine that somebody discovered that he had taken an IQ test in 1953 and scored

only 95; about five points below average. Would this affect in the slightest how

John-Paul II was viewed by those who adore him and venerate his memory? What if

his IQ was found to have been only 90? Would this make him any less of a deserving

candidate from canonisation and sainthood? Consider the opposite case. Suppose

that the former Cambodian leader Pol Pot, responsible for between one and two

million deaths, had been given an IQ test in 1971 and scored an incredible 160.

What difference, if any, would this make to his posthumous reputation? Would a

genius level IQ exculpate Pol Pot in even the least degree for the many murders

which took place under his leadership? Or would it, just as in the hypothetical case

of Pope John-Paul II be disregarded as irrelevant?

Neither in our own lives, nor those of our families and friends, does intelligence

count for much at all. Unless there is a gross deficit, we value kindness and
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affection over intelligence every time. This is something of which most of us are

well aware, so much so that it seems hardly worth stating explicitly. Black people,

white people and those of Chinese heritage, along with the rest of the world’s

population of any and all ethnicity will fall broadly into the ‘average’ part of any

bell curve or other way of describing intelligence. This means that almost all the

people we meet at work or in a bar are likely to have IQs between say 90 and 110.

There will be some who are a bit lower and others who are higher, but by and

large we are going to encounter people who are roughly as intelligent as we are.

The possible differences at which we have looked might make getting into

America’s Yale University or England’s Oxford a little easier for those of Chinese

heritage and a bit harder for people whose ancestry is African, but this hardly

affects most of us. It may also be that in schools and other institutions for those

with severe learning difficulties, more black people will be found and fewer East

Asians. Again, this will not make any difference to most of us.

It might help at this point to look again at Illustration 17. This shows us

schematically how matters probably stand. Although the proportions of very clever

or very dull individuals vary a little according to ethnicity, the great majority of

people, whatever their skin colour, are of average intelligence.

For all practical purposes, even if it could be established without the shadow of

a doubt that IQ followed a gradient with those from East Asia at the top and

people from sub-Saharan Africa at the bottom, it would affect nothing and make

little difference to anybody. In our personal lives we do not select our husbands

and wives on the basis of their IQ and nor do we screen our friends according to

their level of intelligence; rejecting those who fall below an arbitrary level.

Normal people value their partners and social acquaintances for reasons which
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have little to do with IQ. We certainly tend to marry into, and conduct our social

lives among, those of the same ethnicity as us; this goes without saying. But as far

as setting any particular value to intelligence in an abstract sense, this is not

something which most people consider for a moment.

At the moment, the positions in government and industry, academia and

science, to give but a few examples, are in the Western world occupied

overwhelmingly by people of white European heritage. There is a small, but

increasing, number of people of south and east Asian origin among them and

almost no black people at all. This situation would be unlikely to change either if

conclusive proof were furnished which showed that the IQ of black people lagged

five or ten points behind that of whites or if it were to be found that the scores

were identical.

Would anything at all change if the mounting evidence for inherent differences

between white Europeans and those of African heritage were to be accepted? It

seems unlikely. Obviously, schools and universities would still do their best for all

students and of course there would be no bar to black students doing as well as

any white student if he or she were gifted with sufficient intelligence. In the same

way, we know that some black people are perfectly able to rise to the top of any

business. The differences in intelligence are a matter not of absolutes, but of

percentages.

All this being so, it is hard to see what harm would be caused if free debate

were allowed on the topic of human intelligence and if the consequence of that

debate were to be an acceptance that black people were, on the whole, likely to

be slightly less intelligent that white people. It would make no difference to

anybody.
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A far more interesting question might be whether or not people of differing

ethnicities had any other inbuilt features, as it were, which distinguished them one

from another and led them to exhibit more kindness or less, or more cruelty or less

concern for the suffering of others. It is not easy to see how human characteristics

of this sort could be measured and reduced to a single number in the way that IQs

are. It is possible that having a lower intelligence might make one less patient and

not as likely to delay gratification of wishes, but this is by no means certain.

There is of course a vested interest on the part of many people in society to

maintain the stance that intelligence does not vary from group to group. The effort

to ensure that Chinese students are prevented from entering top American

universities so that room can be made for black students is part of this industry, as

are the army of people who monitor the percentages of different ethnicities in

company boardrooms, various professions, good schools and a thousand and one

other settings. The determination to assert that black people are being cheated

out of their rightful places in the upper echelons of society is a full-time job for

many people. It is this body of experts in racial prejudice and discrimination who

would really be the sufferers if the equalitarian hypothesis were to fail, not

ordinary black people and white.

In the next part of this book, we shall see if any resolution is possible between

the two themes at which we have been looking. That is to say, can we visualise a

synthesis between scientific racism its antithesis, the doctrine of anti-racism?

Part 3
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Synthesis

1. The Dialectical Process

2. On the Nature of Hybrid Vigour
3. Accepting Racism, Rejecting Racial
Prejudice
4. What is to be done about Poverty
5. What can we do about Education?
6. The Problem of Anti-racism
7. The Fable of Homo sapiens+
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Chapter 1

The Dialectical Process

In the first part of this book we looked at how the idea of scientific racism came

into being and the terrible harm which it caused when it became used as a weapon

of active discrimination against, and hostility towards, those belonging to various

ethnic groups, including Jews and people of African origin. This kind of bellicose

and aggressive racism, fuelled by a chauvinist enthusiasm for white, European

heritage, culminated in the Holocaust, when millions of people were murdered

because they belonged to supposedly ‘inferior’ races. The awful events of the

Holocaust brought into focus, and caused many people to think about, other forms

of systematic racial prejudice being practiced throughout the world, which

included of course the segregation of black people in the United States, where it

was enforced with lynchings and other violent actions. From the 1920s onward,

acceptance of the equalitarian doctrine grew slowly, and then accelerated rapidly

in the years following the end of the Second World War, due in large part to the

effect of the Holocaust.

The doctrine of equalitarianism was the antithesis of any kind of scientific

racism. In the second part of the book we examined some of the problems

associated with a blind adherence to this idea, especially when it became

enshrined as dogma. Where then does this leave us? Must we exchange one faulty

dogma for another? It does not have to be that way.

The German philosopher Hegel wrote that, ‘History is mind clothing itself with

the form of events’ (Hegel, 1896). By this, he meant that ideologies, religions,
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political theories and so on play themselves out on the world stage by the actions

of those who support them. We might note at this point that Karl Marx thought

that the case was precisely opposite and that in fact it was the actions of men and

women which produced the ideas; not the other way round (Marx, 1970). Both men

though subscribed in different ways to a dialectical view of history, which might

help those of us who are now struggling to make sense of what seems to be an

ideology running counter to all the available evidence, but which never-the-less

has a powerful grip upon anybody with any pretensions to being thought of as

progressive and humane.

The idea of dialectics is a simple one, similar in some ways to the syllogism in

logic. This entails putting together two ideas and seeing a third one emerge from

the first two; one which includes features of both the original statements. For

instance, in its simplest form a syllogism might run like this,

All men die

Smith is a man

Therefore, Smith will die

When one political system, religion or philosophy becomes strongly entrenched in a

society, a movement often emerges which is in direct opposition to the existing

ideology on almost every point. Dictatorships bring forth demand for free

elections, religious intolerance creates demands for freedom of conscience and so

on. When these opposites clash, there often develops a new system which

incorporates the best parts of both the old way of seeing the world and the radical

notions which sought to overthrow this world-view (Macrone, 1994). The process is
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seldom smooth and often lengthy. It is rare for an absolutist monarchy, say, to be

transformed overnight into a liberal democracy. Invariably, there are intermediate

stages, some of which are likely to be at least as bad as the original system which

has been cast down and overthrown. In technical terms, the original ideas,

methods or system are known as the ‘thesis’, the opposing set of beliefs as the

‘antithesis’ and the resulting new arrangement which eventually emerges and has,

it is to be hoped, the best parts of both, the ‘synthesis’. This idea may be new to

some readers and a real-life instance of how it works might be helpful.

Between 1625 and 1649 England was ruled by the increasingly autocratic King

Charles I. A firm believer in the Divine right of kings, he had no use for anything

which smacked of democracy. On the scaffold, moments before he was executed

by having his head chopped off, the king explained with great succinctness his own

view of government;

I must tell you that the liberty and freedom [of the people] consists in having

of Government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most

their own. It is not for having share in Government, Sir, that is nothing

pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.

(Carlton, 1983)

It is not to be wondered at that the movement which overthrew the king and sent

him to his death, should have been opposed on principle to all kings and

subsequently declared a republic in England. Here we see perfectly two ideas

clashing, one against the other, with the rebellion and armed resistance eventually

developing into what is today known as the English Civil War. It might have been
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thought that simply replacing the autocratic monarchy with a more moderate

system, a constitutional monarchy perhaps, might have been better than killing

the king and instituting a harsh republic, but that is not how things generally work.

First, there would be a battle between those who represented the opposing

theories and when one was triumphant, it would rule the roost; at least for a spell.

However, within a few years, the antithesis gave way to a synthesis of the two

sides which had championed very different ideas. The republic would pass away

and a King would once again rule the land, although stripped of much of his power

and authority. The best parts of the Royalist and Parliamentarian ideologies had

been retained and most of the extreme parts of both abandoned. The new regime

of Charles II could be thought to be a happy compromise between the worst

excesses of his father, Charles I, and the more fanatical parties of the republican

cause.

The case of England after its civil war in the seventeenth century has been

examined for the light which it sheds on all such dialectical processes in history. It

is very germane to our examination of racism, for we are currently at that point

following the victory of an ideology which has seemingly vanquished the old ways

of thinking, at which the flaws and shortcomings in the new theory are becoming

ever more apparent. Professor David Reich, of the Department of Genetics at

Harvard Medical School, describes the ‘implausible orthodoxy’ (Reich, 2018) to

which some adherents of the equalitarian dogma are clinging. By which it may

perhaps be inferred that equalitarianism has passed its zenith and is beginning its

slow, but inexorable decline.

Historically, we would expect that disillusion would by now be setting in about

what at first appeared to be a peerless and wonderful set of beliefs and some
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people, while admitting that the old way of thinking had many bad consequences,

will be feeling that perhaps we have been too hasty in ditching every aspect of the

previous theories about race. Such a reaction would be quite natural. Returning to

the aftermath of the English Civil War, we observe that once the exultation at the

fall of the king and the adoption of a new system which precluded any need for a

hereditary monarch had abated a little, the disadvantages of the new social order

began to reveal themselves. Those who thought ridding themselves of a monarch

would usher in a golden age soon found that they were greatly mistaken. The new

ruling doctrine made their lives irksome in different ways. After a few years, the

good points of the old regime began recommending themselves. Not that anybody

wanted a return to the absolutist rule of the executed king, but they certainly

wished to be able to celebrate Christmas again in traditional style. It was such

sentiments which led to the Restoration, which was felt to be an improvement on

both Cromwell’s rule and that of Charles I. In short, the synthesis had been arrived

at.

It may seem that this has been a circuitous way of approaching matters, but it

was necessary to demonstrate that it is not always helpful to describe things in

terms of right and wrong, virtuous or wicked, foolish or wise. Most systems have

sensible aspects, mingled with misguided aims; just as they contain good and bad

parts, along with a mixture of all kinds of other things. Rejecting any religion,

political system or way of life almost invariably entails throwing out a lot which is

worthwhile in the process. It was only after the people of England had been

persuaded to see their king killed and the whole idea of any sort of monarch

abandoned that they realised that actually, some aspects of a monarchy are quite

pleasant and useful.

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We are now at, or perhaps a little past, the peak of the triumphalist claim that

the equalitarian dogma has trounced racism and led to more enlightened societies

in Britain, America and other nations of the Western world. This attitude might be

summed up as, ‘Racism was wicked and wrong, the new way of thinking about race

is wise and good. We know better than all those people in the old days’. However,

all is, as we have seen, not well with the foundations of the doctrine which has

replaced the old notions of racism. It has been demonstrated in this book, perhaps

to the satisfaction of most fair-minded and objective judges, that the assumptions

which most progressive people now hold are built on shaky foundations. The next

few years are likely to see even more cracks appearing in the equalitarian doctrine

to which so many of us now pay lip service. It might be as well to prepare for that

day and ask ourselves what we are to do if and when it becomes glaringly and

unavoidably obvious that there are very real and fundamental differences between

the behaviour and cognitive abilities of ethnic groups. This day cannot be long

delayed, for even the most respected academics are beginning to hint that the

scientific consensus is changing.

In 2015 the British science magazine Nature described David Reich of the

Harvard Medical School as one of the ‘10 people who matter’ in all fields of

science (Nature, 2015). His special area of expertise is ancient DNA. We looked in

an earlier chapter at one particular piece of work in which Reich was involved; the

discovery that ethnic origins are without doubt a factor in the prevalence of

prostate cancer among African Americans. Reich’s book Who We Are and How We

Got Here, which was published in 2018, contains some startling admissions hidden

away in the accounts of Neanderthal DNA and the different genomes associated
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with various ethnic groups. In the chapter entitled The Genomics of Race and

Identity, Reich has this to say;

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries about

differences among populations may be misused to justify racism. But it is

precisely because of this sympathy that I am worried that people who deny the

possibility of substantial biological differences among populations across a

range of traits are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one which

will not survive the onslaught of science.

(Reich, 2018)

Reich goes on to discuss, among other things, work which shows a very strong link

between certain genes and the likelihood of a person studying at university. The

implication is very plain. Just as some sequences of genes can indicate clearly a

predisposition towards cancer of the prostate, so too can others show a propensity

for academic achievement. This is a stunning challenge to the orthodox position of

those who insist that race and ethnicity are merely skin-deep.

Although he did not spell out the case explicitly, it was plain to see what Reich

was hinting at. He mentions within a few pages both the genetic propensity of

African Americans towards cancer of the prostate and also the work on predicting

academic achievement by examining genes. It is no great leap to wonder if those

stretches of genetic coding which enable us to make accurate predictions about

who goes to university might be more common in some ethnic groups than others.

This is such a shocking speculation, that it is little wonder that Reich draws up

short from connecting the dots on that particular line of thinking.

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It is extremely unlikely that a man like David Reich is advocating discrimination

against any group based upon ethnicity or race. He is, after all, a Jew, and who

should know better than the Jews the possible end game when once we begin

discriminating against members of certain ethnicities? It is obvious though that

neither is he wholeheartedly in favour of the equalitarian dogma. Rather, he is

seeking a synthesis between these two extreme ways of thinking. He is opposed to

racial prejudice, but is also aware that there are real and inherited differences

between different groups. This is a bind in which many people, scientists and the

laity both, are increasingly finding themselves. Like Reich, they are hoping to find

a middle ground which may safely be claimed. This is likely to prove no easy task.

We talked earlier in this chapter about the idea of the dialectic, that is to say

combining the best features of two opposing theories so that they are incorporated

into a new way of seeing the world. The English Civil War was used to illustrate the

point. Another analogy might be the modern problem of reconciling the theory of

General relativity with that of quantum theory and so producing a quantum theory

of gravity. Einstein’s ideas on gravity work very well on the scale of stars and

galaxies, but when we come down to activity at the level of sub-atomic particles,

then it is quantum theory which explains their behaviour, rather than relativity. It

is not that either General Relativity or quantum theory are wrong; more that a

synthesis of the two is required (Hawking & Mlodinow, 2010).

Quantum theory might be helpful when we consider new ways to think about

ethnicity and race, because the element of uncertainty and unpredictability is

present to no small degree in both topics. Up to now, ideas on race have tended to

be absolute and although this may be reassuring and allow us to adopt a simple

framework, it probably does not correspond to the real world. Look again at
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Illustration 5, which shows how race was viewed by many nineteenth century

scientists. We see here discrete races in which we can say definite things about

black people from Africa. From this perspective, we are able to take it for granted

that every black person is on a different and lower level than every white person.

This is a wrongheaded view of reality, but one which is easy to grasp. Now turn to

Illustration 15. This shows the accepted modern view of race, where all ethnicities

are placed in the same category and there are no essential differences between a

black African and a person from Europe or East Asia. This too provides a sense of

certainty, for we are as likely to meet an extremely intelligent person from any of

those ethnic groups as any other. All are equal and we do not need to bother our

heads about race any more. This too, is almost without doubt an incorrect way of

looking at the matter.

How can quantum theory aid in understanding the reality of racial differences?

Both rely upon statistics to interpret the world and in both cases, the results are

messy and do not at first sight appear to be at all satisfying. If we take a

radioactive element like uranium, we know that individual atoms will decay and

turn into lead. For a given quantity of uranium-238, half the atoms will decay over

the course of 4.5 billion years. For radium-226, the figure is 1600 years (Vergara,

1980). This is known as the half-life of the element. It is, for reasons into which we

need not go, impossible to predict the time at which any individual atom will

decay in this way. All we can say with confidence is that if we look at 100 atoms of

radium-226, then within 1600 years, 50 of them will have turned into radon gas.

We can’t guess which ones. That’s just how the quantum world is.

How on earth, some readers might perhaps be asking themselves, can this

process have anything at all to do with ethnicity and race? The connection is
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statistics, which means that we are unjustified in making any statements or

drawing any conclusions about anybody of any ethnicity. We can only think in

terms of percentages and proportions. The old-style racists who thought that all

black people were inferior in intelligence to all white people were of course

foolish and incorrect. There are black people whose IQ is greater than almost

every person one is ever likely to meet; men and women with great minds who

tower above the average intellect. There are also Chinese people who are more

dull-witted than almost any black African one will meet. These two facts alone

dispose of the scientific racism which enjoyed a vogue in the nineteenth century

and even lingered on well into the twentieth.

What then of the equalitarian doctrine, which holds that there are no inherent

differences between one ethnicity and another; especially in relation to

intellectual ability? Enough has perhaps been said here to raise doubts about this

theory and more doubts will be cast upon the idea in this part of the book, but if

we assume for now that this too, like the old type of scientific racism is a spent

force, where does that leave us? Illustrations 5 and 15 set out the two opposing

perspectives of nineteenth century racism and the modern, equalitarian view. If

these two ways of seeing race are both faulty, what then what are we to do? What

might be the synthesis which emerges from this thesis and antithesis? The answer

is that we are left with a fusion of these two, opposing notions, at which we have

already looked in Illustration 17. Here, the three categories into which we have

arbitrarily divided humanity for the sake of simplifying the concept, have been

almost, but not quite, superimposed: one upon another. Now things are a good

deal more complicated than they are with either the equalitarian view or the one

which it supplanted. Things appear, at first sight, to be muddled and confused.

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We can see that most people of all ethnicities are found in the central portions

of the circles, where those of average intelligence are to be found. At the

extremes of high intelligence, found at the right-hand edge, it will be seen that

there are likely to be more people of East Asian ancestry than there are those

whose heritage is European. The people of African origin lag behind a little, which

is to say that there are those whose IQ is tremendously high, but they are less

common than among those of the other ethnicities. The position is reversed for

those of very low intelligence. It will immediately be seen that this new

illustration reproduces the situation which we actually see in the world, rather

than being a free creation of the mind, undertaken with the intention of proving

this point or that. If we look at the ethnicity of those offered places at the

University of Oxford, Britain’s most prestigious educational establishment, one

sees at once that every year hundreds of undergraduates of East Asian origin are

admitted and a very small number whose families originally came from Africa.

There appears to be a similar correspondence in the least prestigious British

universities, that is to say those which habitually rank very low down in the league

tables compiled by various newspapers and magazines. Those with very high

numbers of black students, such as the University of East London, scrape along at a

place or two from the very bottom of such tables, while the fewer black students,

the higher up the charts are the establishments (Thomas, 2021).

Looking at the statistics for children with learning difficulties will show a

similar discrepancy, although this time the positions are reversed, with East Asians

under-represented and black students greatly over-represented. In other words,

the idea shown graphically in Illustration 17 is one which may be tested in the real

world. It is more than simply a philosophical exercise in dialectics; we are able to

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use it to make predictions about what we are likely to see. It might be proved or

disproved by examining evidence.

Readers must bear in mind of course that this is a highly simplified version of

what we actually see in the world. Most black Americans, to give one example,

have inherited between 15 and 20% of their genes from white Europeans. There are

of course more than three main ethnicities in the world as well, but this schematic

diagram is intended merely to convey a principle, rather than to be regarded as

providing a wholly accurate representation of the actual state of affairs.

What evidence might cause us to adopt or discard the synthesis suggested

above? We have so far in this book looked the defenders of scientific racism on the

one hand and, on the other, those who adhere strictly to the tenets of

equalitarianism. Two disciplines have aided us in understanding what might really

be going on; archaeology and genetics. The reason for this is that until fairly

recently ideas about human origins tended to support the equalitarians. Things

have now changed and we know enough to sketch out a possible scheme which

might explain some of the things at which we have looked in this book. In the next

chapter, and the one which concludes this section, we shall oyline a scenario

which is at the very least plausible. It might provide a blueprint for resolving the

current antagonism between anti-racists and the scientists whose findings

undermine the doctrine of equalitarianism.

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Chapter 2

Hybrid Vigour – the Clue to Human Success?

Including the words ‘hybrid’ and ‘human’ in the same sentence will inevitably

conjure up the spectre of eugenics. We know that this is a revolting idea for most

people, due largely to its association with the horrors of the Nazi regime. Today,

many of us feel an instinctive repugnance for anything which smacks of the

deliberate breeding of humans to enhance or eliminate certain characteristics.

Some would say that such squeamishness is incongruous and misplaced in countries

like the United Kingdom, where every 12 hours a baby is aborted for reasons of

eugenics; killed because he or she is found to have the genetic defect known as

Down’s Syndrome (Hansard, 2020). Whether or no, the fact remains that eugenics

has a very poor reputation in the developed world. In the aftermath of the Black

Lives Matter disturbances in the summer of 2020, University College London

decided to change the name of the Galton Lecture Theatre in the university to

Lecture Theatre 115. The man after whom it was named, the Victorian scientist

Francis Galton, coined the word ‘eugenics’ and was both an enthusiastic exponent

of the practice and also a firm believer in the superiority of his own ethnic group

above all others (Jones, 1993).

Readers may rest assured that the hybridisation which will be discussed in this

chapter has nothing whatever to do with eugenics. It is about an unplanned series

of events which took place 50,000 years ago or so ago, between Neanderthals,

Denisovans and members of our own species, Homo sapiens. It is not being

suggested that any mixing of modern ethnic groups is undesirable, nor that it

would have been better if any such couplings in the past had not occurred. This is
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purely a discussion of the possible implications of something which happened many

thousands of years ago, long before the dawn of recorded history.

Let us once again remind ourselves of the generally accepted modern view of

the idea of human races; one which it is not the intention of this book to

contradict. This is that there are no such things as separate and distinct races in

the world and that all humanity shares, by and large, a common heritage. The old

and discredited view on race, that Tasmanians and Bantus, Chinese and Eskimos,

Anglo-Saxons and Jews all formed different groups and that some of these were

more advanced and superior to others has been shown to be quite false. This may

be summed up by stating bluntly that almost all people in the world today are

really mongrels, with blends of various ethnic groups in them if you track back

their ancestry by analysing genomes. An African-American may look as though he

belongs to a different race to his white neighbour, but on average black Americans

have inherited between a fifth and a quarter of their genes from white, European

ancestors. Similarly, many white people who take ancestry DNA tests find that

they have distant ancestors from Africa or Asia and that they are not of the 100 %

pure, Anglo-Saxon stock which they have always assumed to be the case.

Nevertheless, differences between people who look black and those who look

white often really do exist. We saw one example in an earlier chapter, with the

case of prostate cancer in African Americans. These differences though are not a

simple either/or situation. They boil down to percentages and likelihoods, rather

than definite characteristics and traits. We remind ourselves of what was said in

the last chapter about the similarities of the present subject to quantum physics.

Just as we must accept that every atom of uranium or radium has an equal chance

of decaying in a certain period of time, when looked at in the aggregate, we know

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that half will actually have done so after a fixed time. This time might vary from a

fraction of a second to many thousands or even millions of years. In the same way,

we can say little about a single, random individual from any ethnic group, but it

may be that we can make an accurate prediction about the percentage of the

group as a whole when it comes to distributions of IQ, chances of developing

certain cancers or possessing the ability to metabolise alcohol.

To understand what the concept of hybrid vigour might have to do with modern

humans, and how it ties in with what we have been looking at, we need to ask first

what the term means. The correct name for the process by which offspring can

have better traits than parents is heterosis. This has replaced the older word

‘heterozygosis’. When a population of animals or plants is either very small or

becomes inbred, it can suffer from what is known as ‘inbreeding depression’. It has

long been observed that hybrid plants are healthier and more vigorous than pure

strains, although more than one explanation has been advanced for why this should

be so (Carr & Dudash, 2003). Animals too benefit from various breeds being

crossed. This is sometimes true also of the interbreeding of species.

A well-known instance of the crossbreeding of different species which produces

an animal which has better and more desirable qualities than the parents may be

found in mules. The mule is the usually sterile offspring of a male donkey and a

female horse or mare. They are the oldest know case of a humanly engineered

hybrid and have been around for thousands of years, being mentioned in the Bible

(Psalm 32;9, Kings 1:18:5). Mules are stronger and more hardy than horses, but

need less food. They are also alleged to be more intelligent than either horses or

donkeys (Proops et al, 2008). Charles Darwin was enthusiastic about mules and

their hybrid vigour, writing,

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The mule always appears to me a most surprising animal. That a hybrid

should possess more reason, memory, obstinacy, social affection, powers of

muscular endurance, and length of life, than either of its parents, seems to

indicate that art has here outdone nature (Darwin, 1879).

Inbreeding depression can happen in human populations as well. If a breeding

group is too small, or the pool of possible sexual partners too restricted, then the

chances of two people carrying the same mutation marrying and producing

offspring is increased. Often, one copy of a defective gene is harmless enough by

itself, but when both parents have a copy, their child can develop various

disorders. The classic case of this was of course the European royal families up to

the twentieth century, who tended to marry among themselves, rather than with

complete outsiders.

In the modern world, Ashkenazi Jews provide a good example of how genetic

disorders may be perpetuated in a group which tends to avoid mating with

outsiders. Ashkenazis, who make up 80 % of the world’s Jews, lived for centuries in

closed communities in Eastern Europe; marrying only among themselves. This

provided the perfect opportunity for genetic disorders to become established. It

has been known for many years that Tay-Sachs disease, which prevents the nerves

of babies and children from working properly, is especially prevalent among

Ashkenazi Jews. In Britain, the National Health Service website advises,

Speak to your GP if:

you're planning a pregnancy and you or your partner have a Ashkenazi
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Jewish background
(NHS, 2021)

There is a predisposition towards other lethal diseases among Ashkenazi Jews

(Goodman, 1979). In the mid-1990s it was discovered that Ashkenazi Jews had a

one in 40 chance of carrying a mutation on the BRCA 1 and 2 genes; thus greatly

increasing the chances of women developing breast or ovarian cancer (Antoniou,

2000). These became known as the Ashkenazi BRCA Mutations and meant that the

Ashkenazi Jews had the highest risk of any population for this problem.

The propensity for marriage between close relatives adds to the problems of

inbreeding depression. Still thinking of Ashkenazi Jews, we observe that cousin

marriages have traditionally been more popular in this community than most

others. It was noted in nineteenth century England that cousin marriages were

three and a half times more common among Jews than they were between

Christians (Jacobs, 1891). Marriages between cousins, although legal in most

countries, are sometimes looked at a little askance as tending slightly towards the

incestuous. The mild disapproval sometimes evinced is perhaps associated with the

increased risk of genetic problems being passed down. Even more likely to raise

eyebrows among the average person is the fact that the Talmud, the ancient guide

to the practice of Judaism, specifically allows marriages between a man and his

sister’s daughter; which is illegal in most countries and even more hazardous from

a genetic perspective.

The situation with genetic disorders is even worse in England’s Pakistani

community, who have a very high rate of cousin marriages. In 2014 the results of a

research project into the alarming number of young children dying in the Midlands
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city of Birmingham was published. The report of the work, which was carried out

in large part by the Enhanced Genetic Services Project, under the auspices of the

National Health Service in Birmingham, was shocking. It was found that the rate of

stillbirths and infant deaths ‘definitely or probably due’ cousin marriages between

people of Pakistani heritage was 38 times that of white European babies (Alberg et

al, 2014).

It might at first sight seem that we have veered away a little from the topic of

this chapter, which is the hybridisation of humans. A moment’s thought will show

that this is not the case. Groups of humans who are geographically or cultural

isolated and prone to breeding among themselves, particularly with members of

their own families, are likely to suffer ill-effects. These ill-effects may be

balanced out in some ways by advantages which can be conferred by the same

process which gives rise to an increased likelihood of genetic mutations and early

death. Looking at Ashkenazi Jews, it is not immediately obvious that what might

be termed their clannishness has always worked to the detriment of the group as a

whole. Intelligence too may be handed down across the generations and this may

militate against a general relaxation on the tribal taboo against ‘marrying out’ as

it is called in that community.

It may be objected that we can hardly talk of the entire continent of Africa,

either now or 100,000 years ago, as a ‘small’ and closed group which would benefit

from the injection of new genes to give it a little hybrid vigour. After all, Africa

has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together (Rutherford,

2020). This is a fair point, but it is a parallel which is being drawn, rather than a

claim being made that the situation is identical. Inbreeding between ethnic

groups, whether Jews or certain populations from the Indian sub-continent can
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cause difficulties. Looked at over a worldwide perspective, on time scale of a

hundred thousand years, something analogous has happened with Africans, on the

level of species, rather than just ethnicities.

It may indeed be preposterous to describe the population of sub-Saharan Africa

as an instance of inbreeding depression, but there can be little doubt that by

remaining in that continent, people were not exposed to the opportunity of

crossbreeding with other human species and so acquiring some very useful genes,

including one or two which were related to the architecture and development of

the brain. A better way of stating the case might be to say that the Homo sapiens

population in Africa reached an evolutionary bottleneck which held back their

development. Those who moved out into the rest of the world were able to break

free of this dead end by mating with two other human species. Like the mules, at

which we looked above, they thus became more adapted to the world than either

of the parent species.

Let us remind ourselves of what we might term the standard narrative, which

was accepted until a few years ago. It was believed as late as the 1970s that

modern humans, our own species, had evolved from the Neanderthals. Some

people held that this had happened separately in various parts of the world, which

might have left some room for racial differences, in intelligence and

resourcefulness, for instance. This idea, known as multiregionalism, declined in

popularity as evidence mounted that Homo sapiens had in fact evolved only in

Africa, from where they had spread out into the rest of the world. This of course

would support the equalitarian dogma, for it meant that all humans on earth,

whether in Africa, Europe, Asia or the Americas, had a common heritage around

50,000 years ago. It was unlikely that there would have been time since then for
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any fundamental differences to evolve, other than trifling matters such as the

colour of hair or shape of eyes.

The sequence of events, as far as it has proved possible to establish, is as

follows. At a time when the Neanderthals ruled Europe and were expanding south-

west towards the Middle East, a group of early Homo sapiens crossed the Sinai and

for many years occupied the eastern Mediterranean. They flourished there, but did

not move onwards to Europe and Asia. After some thousands of years, the

Neanderthals arrived in the area. According to the general understanding of the

case, the Neanderthals were less intelligent and adaptable than modern humans,

so what happened next comes as something of a surprise. The Neanderthals

displaced the Homo Sapiens who were living in the territory and these pioneers

then vanished from the record of the area for tens of thousands of years. This is

precisely the opposite of what we might expect to happen and to understand what

went wrong, we need to think a little about the Neanderthals and their way of life.

It is often suggested that the Neanderthals were some kind of evolutionary

dead end and that they were stagnating in Europe before the arrival of the

immigrants from Africa. The idea is that for hundreds of thousands of years, the

Neanderthals pursued the same way of life with little or nothing in the way of

technological development or advance. In short, they were hanging on tenaciously

to the territory which they inhabited, but as a species, they really weren’t going

anywhere. This perspective is a by-product of the Victorian idea of an evolutionary

‘missing-link’ between humans and apes. It was thought that the Neanderthals

were such a link, being half human and half great ape. Illustration 19 shows how

the Neanderthals were thought of in the Nineteenth century.

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19. Neanderthals as the ‘missing link’: a Victorian perception

It is from images like that seen in Illustration 19 that we subconsciously form

our modern ideas about the outstandingly successful humans who ruled Europe and

Western Asia for over 100,000 years. This was during a time of Ice Ages and the

landscape of Europe was a good deal less hospitable than it is today. Humans

unable to adapt to change or develop new skills and lifestyles would never have

been able to survive.

If a charge of failing to acquire new skills were to be levelled at Homo erectus,

predecessors of the Neanderthals and Denisovans, then one might be forced to

concede that there is some truth to the suggestion. For the best part of two

million years, this species used the same type of stone tools and apparently

invented nothing of note. True, the style of the hand axes changed somewhat over
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the course of a million years, but they still did not progress beyond this basic tool.

A hand axe is simple a piece of stone which has had bits chipped off it until it may

be comfortably gripped in one hand and a point or sharp edge used to cut open a

carcass or break bones to get at the nutritious marrow within. Hand axes of this

kind have been found at the site of El Ubeidaya in Northern Israel, which may be

seen in Illustration 3. Over a million years later, Homo erectus were still using

similar implements. An example of this million year-long tradition is shown below

in Illustration 20.

20. A hand axe of the type which did not change in a million years

The Neanderthals had the vision to improve upon the hand axe. When

fashioning a hand axe from a lump of flint, the pieces which are removed are

normally regarded as debris and discarded. The Neanderthals though came up with
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the idea of treating the original piece of flint not as the basis for the finished tool,

but rather as the source for many smaller tools. By carefully striking the stone in

different ways with other rocks or pieces of deer antler, they were able to knock

off substantial flakes which could then be turned into knives, scrapers or

spearheads. (Papagianni & Morse, 2013). This activity requires abstract thought.

One must have a mental image of the finished item towards which one is working.

You must be able to imagine a flake which does not yet exist, other than in your

mind and then act upon the external world to bring your idea into existence. After

some more shaping, these items could then be glued to wooden handles or shafts.

Amazing as it might seem to those who still think of them as brutish creatures,

little better than apes, the Neanderthals in Europe discovered how to gather

suitable wood and then distil sticky tar from it which was a perfect adhesive

(Smith, 2019).

Adhesive was not the only thing which the Neanderthals manufactured. In 2020,

the discovery of a small piece of string made from the inner fibres of tree bark was

reported from an archaeological site in France (Hardy et al, 2020). The

implications of this were immense, because the fragment predated the arrival of

modern humans in Europe. Most vegetable matter from 40,000 years ago simply

rots away, but by a miracle, this little bit of three-ply string had somehow

survived. String implies the existence of rope, bags, nets and many other artifacts

which we usually associate with Homo sapiens. It suggests too mathematical

understanding of concepts such pairs and sets. Making string from fibres is a tricky

process which requires a good deal of practice. Little wonder then that some of

those reporting the finding of the artifact were prompted to say that, ‘the idea
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that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to modern humans is becoming

increasingly untenable (Hardy et al, 2020).

The lifestyle of the Neanderthals did not seem to differ very much from that of

modern humans in recent centuries. Like some of the indigenous peoples of North

America, for instance, they had a particular interest in the feathers and claws of

golden eagles. The Plains Indians trapped eagles and used their feathers for war

bonnets. Other parts of the bird were also used to make decorations (Grinnell,

1972). Close examination of the remains of eagles dating to the time of the

European Neanderthals shows that feathers had been carefully removed and also

that attention had been paid to removing claws. Neither activity would have been

part of preparation of the bird for food and so the obvious inference is that these

parts of the creature were used for decoration (News Scientist, 2019).

In other ways too, the Neanderthals appeared to behave in eerily similar ways

to modern people. They cared for members of their group who were disabled and

unable to lead useful and productive lives. One individual, who lived in what is

now Iraq, had lost his right arm, was profoundly deaf, had only one eye and could

only walk with a limp, and yet had lived to old age with these disabilities. This

could only mean that he had been cared for by others for much of his life. They

deliberately buried their dead too, together with grave goods. This strongly

suggested some type of religious belief, perhaps faith in an afterlife. Then too,

they had even begun creating what were almost certainly ritual sites, which also

suggests the dawning of religious belief; as does the paintings in caves which are

now reliably attributed to Neanderthals. In short, these were people at least as

advanced as the Homo sapiens who were to emerge from Africa. Indeed, in some

ways, they were ahead of Homo sapiens.

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In plain language, when we compare early modern humans, of the kind who

first emerged from Africa, with the people whom they encountered, the

Neanderthals or Europe and the Middle East, there is little to choose between

them in terms of intelligence. The Neanderthals might even have had an edge in

what we could call common sense and practical skills. The Homo sapiens were

coming from a land of warmth and plenty, where even clothes were optional. They

came into contact now with men and women who had had to face hard winters and

eke out a living on frozen tundra; hunting mammoths, bison and other fearsome

prey. The people emerging from Africa were able to live largely on fruit and plants

if they wished. They had never even seen snow; let alone had to work out

strategies to cope with it for months on end.

We begin to see why that first foray of modern humans to leave Africa a

hundred thousand years ago failed in the face of opposition from the Neanderthals,

who moved into the territory which had been colonised by Homo sapiens and

prompted them to retreat back into their ancestral continent for tens of thousands

of years, before they dared to venture out again. Those belonging to that first

ethnic group who first crossed the Sinai into the Middle East were not the

adventurous and resourceful people we all know about; the ones who later

occupied Europe and Asia and are sometimes referred to as the Cro-Magnons. What

changed when the second wave arrived in what is now Israel, 50,000 years after

that failed first wave?

What changed was that the Homo sapiens who left Africa for the second time

did something about which nobody knew until a few years ago. Looking at a

popular book on genetics published by a leading researcher in the field at

University College London in 1993, we read the following. In The Language of

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Genes, Professor Steve Jones discusses the likelihood as it was then understood of

modern humans interbreeding with Neanderthals.

If there had been extensive mating between the indigenous population and

the invaders, the modern Europeans would be expected to retain genes from

this distinct branch of the human family and to be genetically different from,

say, today’s Chinese and Indians, whose ancestors never met a Neanderthal,

let alone mated with one. They are not.

(Jones, 1993).

Just reading that passage above, written less than 30 years ago, makes us pause

and consider the absolute assurance with which even experts in various scientific

fields can speak when saying something which is demonstrably untrue. Not that

Professor Jones knew that he was saying something which was false, but his tone is

one which suggests that his view, founded upon all the available evidence is the

one which would prevail, both now and in the future. We remind ourselves that

this is the same author who, in the same book, made this blunt statement, at

which we looked in an earlier chapter, ‘Much of the work on inherited differences

in intellect between races is contemptible (Jones, 1993).

Fortunately, there were researchers who continued to explore the subject of

possible differences between ethnicities and in doing so found that Professor Jones

was quite wrong in many ways about his ideas of the past, and in particular about

certain aspects of early human history. The ancestors of today’s Indians and

Chinese may well never have met or mated with a Neanderthal, but for all that

they carry genes from the Neanderthals. The peoples of south-East Asia have the
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largest amount of Neanderthal DNA of any group on the planet; far more than is

found in Europeans.

Fairly soon after they left Africa, our ancestors had sex with the Neanderthals

who were living in the Middle East. They mated with the archaic humans living in

what is now Israel, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey and produced offspring who were an

interesting mixture of Neanderthals and modern people. This second wave of

immigrants from Africa did not falter, as the first had. They forged north into the

steppes in what is now Russia and the Ukraine and east into Asia, mating with

another human species whom they found there, the Denisovans. It seems to be this

interbreeding which was the making of modern humans, at least those who left

Africa. Those who remained stagnated, but wonderful things began to happen once

those extra genes from the Neanderthals and Denisovans were added to the

genome of Homo sapiens.

It is difficult of course to extrapolate from the inbreeding of different groups of

modern humans, which is what we did earlier in this chapter, to speculating about

the effects of such inbreeding as it might be upon an entire continent, when whole

species, rather than merely ethnic groups, are involved. This is particularly so,

when we do not have all that much information upon how breeding between

different species might lead to a new and improved species. We know that animals

like the mule are thought to be hardier, healthier and even more intelligent than

either of the parent species, but mules are not of course a new species. Although

there have been reported cases of fertility among them, this is not common

enough to allow a breeding group of mules to become established as a separate

species.
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Matters are not made any easier when thinking about the possible consequence

of modern humans producing young with Neanderthals and Denisovans, by the

indisputable fact that scientists are not yet agreed about whether those archaic

human populations even constituted separate species at all. One thing seems

certain though and that is this. The offspring of the interbreeding between Homo

sapiens and Neanderthals must have been fertile or at least more likely to be

fertile than mules. The very fact that all the people in the world today, other than

some Africans, possess a percentage of Neanderthal DNA tells us that the

interbreeding must have produced enough fertile offspring to affect us all.

This whole subject of the possible levels of fertility among the offspring of

modern humans and Neandertals and Denisovans is a matter of the liveliest debate

in professional circles at the time of writing and it is possible that future

archaeological or genetic discoveries will shed more light upon it.

Let us think about some of the known genes which modern people have

inherited from their Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestors. These range from

pretty useful to potentially deadly. One gene we could have done without is one

which is found more commonly in Asians and native Americans than it is in

Europeans. It increases the chance of developing Type 2 diabetes. This gene may

have been handy if you happened to be living through an Ice Age, because it would

help you survive periods of near starvation. In an era though with an improved

climate, the development of agriculture and consequently unlimited quantities of

sweet and fatty food, it can lead to poor health and an early death.

Some of the Neanderthal DNA contributes to our immune systems and provides

definite benefits. These benefits though also have a downside. The Neanderthals

had evolved a resistance to certain pathogens and clearly if modern humans were
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to flourish in Europe and West Asia, they would need immunity from common

diseases. However, a more finely tuned immune system meant that sometimes it

over-reacted to harmless irritants like pollen from flowers, which provoked the

body into unnecessary counter measures (Dannemann et al, 2015). Other

Neanderthal genes have been found to help Tibetans live at high altitudes. Despite

the fact that some of the useful genes which we have inherited from the

Neanderthals have been identified and their purposes understood, it still remains

the case that ‘A great deal of the surviving Neanderthal DNA remains a mystery’

(Papagianni & Morse, 2013).

One thing about which there is no doubt at all is that modern humans living

outside Africa inherited genes from the Neanderthals which related in some way to

the structure and possibly functioning of the brain. It is not clear precisely what

role these genes play. One of the genes, microcephalin, is to be found in 70 % of

humans living outside Africa. The other, the ASPM gene, is present in just a

quarter of those whose origins lie outside Africa (Taylor, 2009). Because both these

genes have survived and been handed down for tens of thousands of years, it is

asserted by some researchers that they must confer a positive benefit on the those

who inherit them (Evans, 2005). A study was conducted to see if the genes

correlated to either skull size or general mental ability in various populations

throughout the world, but no such connection was found (Rushton et al, 2007).

There must surely be some advantage though to possessing the two genes

mentioned above. After all, 97 % of the Neanderthal DNA which modern humans

acquired in the distant past has been ditched long ago; why should just a few of

these genes linger on? Despite the failure to identify any increase in intelligence

using standard methods for testing, there may still be an effect on the brains of
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those with Microcephalin and the ASPM gene. In Europe and America, there is a

pronounced distaste for experiments which involve mixing human DNA with that of

animals; particularly primates. In China, such squeamishness is unknown. As a

matter of fact, there have for years been persistent rumours that Chinese

scientists created in 1967 a ‘humanzee’, that is to say a cross between a human

and a chimpanzee (Lieber, 1985).

It was reported in 2019 that almost a decade earlier scientists in China had

managed to insert the human microcephalin gene into some monkey embryos, by

means of a virus (Regalado, 2019). Although only five macaque monkeys were

produced in the experiment, the results were apparently promising. Although the

brains were no larger than usual, like human children they took longer to develop.

According to the scientists, these transgenic monkeys did better than average of

memory tests involving colours and pictures. Such reports are intriguing, but there

is virtually no chance of their being repeated in the West for ethical reasons.

Although firm evidence is lacking, it seems entirely possible, likely even, that

human intelligence is affected by genetic factors which some people whose origins

are in Europe and Asia have acquired and which those in Africa have missed out on

entirely. This should not however make the least difference to the way in which

we treat anybody, regardless of their ethnicity. We must always be keenly aware

of a distinction which is often overlooked or disregarded today, which is that

scientific racism and racial prejudice are two entirely separate and distinct things.
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Chapter 3
Accepting racism, rejecting racial prejudice

Because the word ‘racism’ is often used to mean both racial prejudice and also the

belief in inherent differences between various ethnic groups, the title of this

chapter might at first sight appear to be a contradictory and confusing. How could

one be an avowed racist and still be strongly opposed to any kind of racial

prejudice? This is a reasonable question and one which this chapter will attempt to

answer.

Prejudice means no more than holding an opinion which is not based upon

evidence or reason. When we talk of racial prejudice, we are suggesting hostility

or dislike relating to some ethnic group which affects how we feel about an

individual belonging to that group, before we have had an opportunity to find out

anything about him or her. Perhaps we have the idea that Jews are grasping and

keen to cheat us out of our money or that black men are aggressive and represent

a physical threat to us. Racism, in the sense of thinking that different populations

might be more likely to suffer from this or that type of cancer or perhaps be

shorter than people from our own country or likely to process information more

rapidly in their brain, is quite a different matter. Whether these things are true or

not, the belief itself is not sufficient to justify any animosity to a person from any

given population, simply on the grounds of skin colour, height, language or

anything else.

In this book we have examined in detail a number of possible differences in the

likelihood that some ethnicities might differ statistically from other groups. None

of the characteristics at which we have looked are absolutes; they are merely
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probabilities. We have seen for instance that white people are more likely to

develop skin cancer than black people. Conversely, we have found that black men

may be more likely to suffer from cancer of the prostate. This does not mean that

we may say when meeting a white person, ‘Ah, here is somebody with skin

cancer!’. That would be absurd. We may perhaps, if we know something about the

age and background of the man or woman, what country they have lived in,

whether they have worked out of doors and various other aspects of their life,

work out roughly how likely it is that skin cancer is present or liable to be

diagnosed in the coming year. In precisely the same way, we cannot meet a man or

woman from China and say anything with confidence about the intelligence of that

individual. It would foolish in the extreme to be introduced to a person of East

Asian heritage and think to ourselves, ‘Here is a person who is likely to be more

agile mentally than I, as a white European, am likely to be.’ As with the case of

skin cancer, the most we could do would be to gather information about how this

individual earns a living, along with various other things relating to lifestyle and

then to work out a very rough figure for a possible level of intelligence.

Two things will occur to any ordinary person reading the above paragraphs. The

first is that no normal person conducts their life in such a way, trying to calculate

the odds of somebody to whom they have just been introduced of suffering from

different types of cancer or being of above or below average intelligence. Why

would we do such a thing? The second point will be that even if we were minded to

attempt the exercise, the results would not be at all accurate. Even knowing a

man or woman’s occupation and life history will not really tells us how intelligent

they will be. We have all of us met accountants, bank clerks, teachers and

plumbers who are sharp witted and others who are a little slow on the uptake.
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Only by getting to know a person are we likely to be able to gauge their character

and mental abilities.

Setting the matter out at length in this way has been necessary to show the

futility of prejudice; whether based upon race, nationality, gender or class.

Denying somebody a place at university solely because of skin colour would be as

absurd as offering a place to that same person for the same reason. Nobody who

thought the matter through for more than a minute would wish to see black people

or Chinese people refused entry to a shop or denied access to housing because of

their ethnicity, any more than we would like to see them targeted by the police

more frequently than white people. It is necessary to state these things explicitly,

obvious though they might be to most people of good will, to show that exhibiting

racial prejudice against ethnic minorities is an entirely different and separate

thing from holding a belief, founded upon good and sufficient evidence, that there

are real and measurable differences between ethnic groups. So febrile is the

atmosphere surrounding discussions in which the word ‘racism’ is used, that this

clarification is vital.

So much for the idea of racial prejudice. Let us turn now to racism. Racism,

scientific racism, means acknowledging that some ethnic groups are more likely to

have certain strengths or weaknesses than those belonging to other populations.

Again, it cannot be too strongly emphasised that these differences are a matter of

percentages, rather than absolute endowments. Children of African origin may well

stand and walk sooner than the average white child of European heritage, but

there are still white children who stand and walk before many black children.

Some black children are delayed in their gross motor milestones, but this is less

likely for black children than it is for white. The same applies to cognitive ability,
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tendencies towards developing cancer of the prostate and every other likely

difference. All is a matter of proportion; none are absolutes.

It might help to look once more at Illustrations 5 and 17. Illustration 5 shows

an inaccurate and unscientific view of the case, with all black people and all white

people in wholly distinct categories. This is not how things stand. Look instead at

Illustration 17, where we can see that there is a huge amount of overlap between

ethnic groups. This overlap applies to intelligence, physical development,

vulnerability to certain cancers and much else besides. Let us look at these things

carefully and see what the implications might be if once we accept the initial

premise that there are differences in the cognitive ability of black people,

compared to those of white or East Asian heritage. Bearing this in mind, we begin

by considering the causes of the poverty which undeniably affects a

disproportionate number of black people both in Britain and the United States.

We have seen time and again in this book that unfavourable life outcomes for

black people are almost invariably attributed to a combination of racism and

poverty. Often, the implication is that the poverty is a direct consequence of the

racism. This provides an easy answer too when people are asking why black people

seem more vulnerable to many physical ailments; from diabetes to Covid-19.

Lifestyle is often at least partly to blame for many health problems and this in turn

brings racism back into the equation. During the Covid epidemic, it was said to

begin with that black people and certain other minorities were more at risk of

dying of the illness than white people. Government research in Britain towards the

end of 2020 did not exactly, or at least unreservedly, back this claim. Instead,

they found that there was a correlation between poverty, lifestyle and

susceptibility to Covid-19 (Hansard, 2020).

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Because racial prejudice, poverty and education are often jumbled up together

when people talk about the disadvantages faced by black people, it might be

helpful to disentangle them and examine each topic alone. Although there is of

course a connection between doing poorly at school and being poor in later life, as

well as coming from a poor home and then doing badly at school, it is not clear

that racial prejudice plays any direct part in either topic. We shall begin by

thinking about poverty and asking ourselves what the reason could be for the fact

that more black people than white are poor in Britain and the United States.
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Chapter 4

What is to be done about Poverty?

In the modern, Western World poverty is often treated as an unfortunate condition

which afflicts some members of society, often as a random misfortune. We know

that it affects certain ethnic minorities more than others and we know too that

there are other ethnicities which are less prone to poverty than the majority of the

population. People of black African origin, including African-Americans and those

whose families are from the Caribbean, are among those more likely to be poor,

while Jews and individuals of East Asian origin are less likely to be struggling on

the breadline. It is not fashionable today to enquire too deeply into the causes of

poverty, that is to say why this or that family barely have enough to feed their

children, while another, whose beginnings were no more auspicious, thrive. The

aim is to alleviate the condition of the poor while sedulously avoiding the

apportioning of blame, other than in a general sense in acknowledging with regret

that we live in an unequal society and that some people are not as fortunate as

others. This is a lazy and short-sighted approach and one which practically

guarantees that, as scripture suggests, the poor will always be with us.

It is important to be clear about the connection between ethnicity and

poverty, because otherwise there is little chance that inequalities will ever be

reduced. One difficulty is that nobody really wishes to delve too deeply or enquire

too keenly into what it is which causes people to be poor. Sometimes, this

avoidance of the issue may be accomplished by skirting around the unpleasant

things brought about by poverty and pretending that they are caused by something

else entirely. The British Medical Journal, in April 2021, championed a view of the
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matter which implicitly attributed health care problems among certain ethnicities

to racial prejudice, rather than poverty. In an article beneath the headline, ‘Doing

the work to end health inequalities caused by systemic racism’, there was an

account of various health inequalities which were associated with poverty and yet

claimed to be a result of racism (British Medical Journal, 2021). By contrast, the

British Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, gave a speech in parliament in October

2020 in which she specifically asserted that the less favourable outcomes for

members of ethnic minorities suffering from Covid-19 were caused by social

circumstance and low income, rather than racial prejudice. She said,

We know more in particular about why people from ethnic minority

backgrounds are more likely to be infected and die from covid. The current

evidence shows that it is a range of socioeconomic and geographical factors,

such as occupational exposure, population density, household composition and

pre-existing health conditions, that contribute to the higher infection and

mortality rates for ethnic minority groups.

(Hansard, 2020).

The orthodox account of structural or institutional racism in society is able to

account for everything from low wages and cramped living conditions all the way

through to deaths from Covid-19, diabetes and heart disease. Black people suffer

racial discrimination in employment, leading to lower than average incomes, which

in turn means that they are stressed and poor, causing them to drink alcohol,

smoke cigarettes and be unable to eat healthily. All these things are society’s fault

and, being victims of racism, the black people themselves are exculpated from any
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role in their own misfortune. Mental illnesses are also triggered by poverty and

racism, which allows us to ignore research which indicates that black people have,

racial prejudice apart, much higher polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia than

white people (Curtis, 2018). According to this version of society, racism causes

poverty, which in turn produces ill-health and shortened life-expectancy. It is a

vicious circle, because the poverty also results in poor educational outcomes for

children, who in turn are doomed to lowly paid employment, this continuing the

cycle.

What happens to this simple and appealing picture if, as a thought-experiment,

we remove structural racism from the scenario and hypothesise that it does not

exist? A vital part of the whole sequence is now missing and in its absence we are

compelled to ask some searching questions such as ‘Why are black people poor?’ If

racism is not the cause of many of their difficulties, then how does this state of

affairs arise? Would the removal of racial prejudice improve the material wellbeing

of black people, or do the reasons for their lack of wealth lay elsewhere?

In London, many black people live in areas which have a reputation for poverty,

crime and disorder; Hackney and Tottenham are good examples of this tendency.

These are both classic, inner-city districts. In the outer suburbs of the capital and

small towns just beyond the suburbs, there are fewer black people. Leafy places

like Chigwell, Loughton and Buckhurst Hill, which are towns in Essex close enough

to London to count as suburbs in all but name, are mostly white, but have

substantial minorities of Jews, people of Indian origin and a few Chinese. In the

most expensive streets in these areas, the ones with large houses with swimming

pools, it is not at all uncommon to find families of Indian origin occupying the most

prestigious properties. In such streets, one knows perfectly well that none of the
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families are likely to be from Africa or the Caribbean. This is not a question of

racist estate agents who refuse to sell houses to black people or hostile neighbours

who do not want to see the neighbourhood going downhill, it is simply that while

people of white European heritage, including Jews, together with some others of

Indian or Chinese origin can afford the more luxurious homes in these wealthy

areas; no black person could even dream of affording such properties.

Obviously, racism alone cannot account for the state of affairs outlined above.

If it did, then it would be a very peculiar and atypical kind of racism, one which

favoured some visible minorities and militated against others. It might be helpful

to see how poverty was viewed until relatively recently. This is because older

views of the subject are not muddled up with theories about racism and may

therefore give us a perspective which is unfamiliar to many in the modern world.

In Victorian Britain, philanthropists often drew a distinction, even an

opposition, between the ‘deserving poor’ and other types of paupers. Some people

in workhouses and slums were felt to be the victims of circumstance through no

fault of their own; others were feckless and idle and ought to be encouraged to

pull themselves together and change their attitude to life. This idea was

incorporated into legislation, specifically the 1834 Poor Law. This distinguished

between the ‘deserving’ poor, who were old, incapable or had fallen upon hard

times despite doing their best, and the ‘undeserving’, whose poverty was a result

of their idleness or feckless lifestyle (British Journal of Social Work, 2016).

There was in the nineteenth century, and not only in Britain but what we

might call the Anglo-Saxon world generally, a strong belief in ‘self-help’. In 1859

Samuel Smiles published what has been described as ‘the Bible of mid-Victorian

liberalism’ (Cohen & Major, 2004). His book Self-Help was meant to be a guide and
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an inspiration for ordinary people, encouraging them to lift themselves out of

poverty by adopting the principles of hard work and thrift. Poverty at that time

was viewed as a mischance from which men and women might be able to extricate

themselves by being sufficiently diligent, avoiding alcohol and saving regularly.

Here is an instance of Smiles’ practical philosophy,

Simple industry and thrift will go far towards making any person of ordinary

working faculty comparatively independent in his means. Even a working man

may be so, provided he will carefully husband his resources and watch the little

outlets of useless expenditure. A penny is a very small matter, yet the comfort

of thousands of families depends upon the proper spending

very small matter, yet the comfort of thousands of families depends upon the

proper spending and saving of pennies. If a man allows the little pennies, the

results of his hard work, to slip out of his fingers, — some to the beershop,

some this way and some that, — he will find that his life is little raised above

one of mere animal drudgery. On the other hand, if he take care of

the pennies, — putting some weekly into a benefit society or an insurance fund,

others into a savings-bank, and confiding the rest to his wife to be carefully laid

out, with a view to the comfortable maintenance and education of his family,

— he will soon find that his attention to small matters will abundantly repay

him, in increasing means, growing comfort at home, and a mind comparatively

free from fears as to the future.

(Smiles, 1859)
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This view of poverty has rather fallen from fashion today and it is all too often

seen as an unexpected act of God, which the state should feel obliged to mitigate

in any way possible. If it is not a chance misfortune, then it must always be

somebody else’s fault, but never that of the poor person himself. Thinking in such

terms is seen as heartless and cruel. For want of any other obvious explanation,

then racism on the part of society as a whole may be invoked. But if it is true that

poor health, lesser chance of owning one’s own home and a host of other things

associated with low income are connected with some of the poor outcomes in life

which affect black people, then it might be worth enquiring into why black people

in Britain and the United States tend to be poorer than those of Asian origin, who

might also be reasonably expected to suffer the ill-effects of racial prejudice.

We know that education is linked with how well people tend to be doing in

adulthood and in the next chapter we shall look closely at this idea. One of the

things we shall also consider is the idea of delaying immediate gratification for the

purpose of receiving a greater reward in the future; in other words, planning

ahead. Research will be cited which seems to indicate that black children are not

as likely to delay satisfying their desires as are white children. If this is a genuine

difference between black children and white, and there is good reason to suppose

that it is, then it might go some way towards explaining poverty. At the very least,

it could be a contributory factor. Readers will note that it makes not the least

difference whether this tendency, if indeed it exists, is somehow inbuilt or rather

a habit acquired in early childhood from those around them. In neither case would

it be a fixed and immutable aspect of character.

Material success in life is of course not entirely brought about by industry and

thrift; a good start in life certainly goes a long way towards helping a young person
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along a trajectory which leads to working in a high-status profession, which in turn

usually brings about financial stability and a good standard of living. Not everybody

in society starts from the same position. It is by looking at those who did start from

the same position that we might glean some insight into the sort of things which

might bring about poverty and other actions which might mitigate or even reverse

that unfortunate and undesirable condition. What about those people who arrived

in a foreign country with no money and little more than the clothes which they had

on their backs? How do they and their families do?

In Britain, during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, many people arrived from former

colonies like the islands of the Caribbean and the countries of the Indian Sub-

continent; India and Pakistan. Families of Indian heritage also came to Britain from

Africa, having felt the need to leave countries such as Kenya and Uganda. Those

leaving Uganda came to Britain as refugees, having been stripped of all their

wealth and belongings. It is impossible to track the origins and progress of all

families belonging to various nationalities or ethnic groups, but we are certainly

able today to see how well they are doing relative to the average British citizen.

According to the Office for National Statistics or ONS, a department of the

United Kingdom’s government charged with collecting and publishing data on life

in the British Isles, there is a great disparity between how those who come from

Indian families are doing, as opposed to black people who come primarily from

Africa and the Caribbean. The figures for income between 2016 and 2019 make

fascinating reading.

The highest incomes, more than £1000 a week, are earned by 28 % of British

people (ONS, 2021). There is wide variation though between the ethnic groups who

make up that average. Two figures are of special interest. Among those of Indian
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origin, 46 % are earning at this highest rate, while only 20 % of black people are

doing so (ONS, 2021). The percentages are reversed, the lower down the income

scale one moves. Looking at those who earn between £300 and £399 a week, which

makes up 11 % of the population, it is observed that just six % of Indians fall into

this bracket, set against 15 % of black people (ONS, 2021).

We note too that rates of unemployment for those of Indian origin are half those

for black people. The figures for January 2021 show that 8 % of black people were

out of work, while only 4 % of those of Indian heritage were in this position;

roughly the same as the percentage of unemployed white people. Once again, we

remark that if racism is really to account for this greatly increased proportion of

unemployed black people, then it is a very selective kind of racism; one which

affects Africans and Caribbeans, but not Indians.

What are we to make of such disparity of income and unemployment? The first

thing to remember is that none of these people come from long established and

wealthy British backgrounds. It may well be that the children of an English Duke or

banking magnate come from families with inherited wealth stretching back to the

eighteenth century, but that is not the case with almost any person in Britain from

an Indian or black family. The overwhelming majority came to the country in

search of better fortune than they enjoyed in their place of birth. Any difference

in income are likely to be rooted in their attitude and behaviour after arriving in

their chosen destination.

Anybody buying a newspaper at a privately owned shop in England, that is to say

somewhere which is not a branch of a supermarket or chain of garages, will have

noticed that the odds are that the proprietor is likely to come from a family with

its origins in the Indian sub-continent. Conversely, it may be noticed that no such
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shops are run by black people. This is also the case in parts of cities which are

predominantly black. Even in those districts, it is Indians who own and run the

small shops. This is curious and a personal anecdote, relating to a family known to

the author, might shed light on how this situation arose in at least some cases.

In August 1972 the leader of the African country of Uganda, Idi Amin, ordered

the expulsion of around 80,000 people of Indian heritage who were living in the

country. This order was made on the grounds that the Indians, mostly Guajarati

Hindus, were disloyal and engaged in dubious commercial practices. Many were

running small businesses. Those who left Uganda were penniless, the government

of that country having seized all their assets before deporting them. Over 27,000

of the refugees came to Britain. Among them was a young man who was just 17

years of age. This boy, for he was scarcely more than that, decided that he wanted

to run a business of his own.

For the first few years after arriving in Britain, the young Ugandan Asian

worked ferociously hard in factories and any other jobs, in order to raise money to

buy the lease of a small shop. He worked almost every waking hour to achieve this

end. The shop was a newsagents in North London. He married, and he and wife

devoted their lives to the shop. It meant being ready at 5:0 AM to take delivery of

the morning newspapers and then staying open later than any other local shop in

order to attract customers. After they closed at night, there was paperwork to be

done, tax returns to fill in, VAT to deal with. They had two sons over the next few

years. By the time that the boys were of school age, the couple managed by the

most stringent economies to send them to an independent, fee-paying school.

After all, they had no time to go out anywhere and nothing else on which to spend

their money.
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Forty years later and one of these boys is a consultant at a well-known London

hospital and the other is a successful solicitor. In a single generation, the family

has leaped from a man who was a poorly educated factory worker to middle-class

prosperity for his children. Many similar stories could be told about those of Asian

heritage who left an African country with literally nothing, but very few such tales

about black Africans who also came to Britain with nothing. This is also the case

with the majority of immigrants and their families from the Caribbean. It is this

which explains why 46 % of people in Britain from Indian families are in the top

bracket for income, but fewer than half as many black people.

None of this will come as a surprise to any reader. Readers in the United States

may have noticed something similar with convenience stores run by those of East

Asian origin. None of this is unknown to the British or American governments.

Instead of thinking hard about the reason for the gap in incomes and standard of

living between those whose roots are in Asia and those whose families are from

Africa and the Caribbean, the aim of most policies which aim to address this

discrepancy in prosperity is simply to rig the figures, so making it look as though

things are improving and black people are drawing level with everybody else. The

commonest way of doing so is by announcing measures to ensure that this or that

workforce will ‘reflect the community which it serves’. This is code for fixing the

deck, a strategy which, in the United States, goes by the name of racial balancing.

The thinking behind the scheme is that since black people are apparently

unable to get into good jobs or move up the ladder of promotion by their own

efforts, whether due to institutional racism or some other reason, they will need

to be given special treatment. This will reduce poverty among in this particular
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community, because eventually, the same proportion of black people will have

lucrative jobs as white people or those of Asian heritage.

In Britain, Lloyds Bank announced in 2020 that they were worried about the

lack of diversity in their senior management. It had been noticed that only 0.6 % of

senior management were black, whereas 3 % of the British population were black.

There was obviously a clear and pressing need for some racial balancing (Daily

Telegraph, 2020). The bank said that by 2024 they intended to ensure that 3 % of

their senior management would be black. There was no suggestion that capable

black employees had been held back in their promotion, nor that the company was

discriminating against black job applicants. Neither did racial prejudice appear to

be operating to prevent minorities becoming part of the senior management; 7.3 %

of senior management were either black or minority ethnic; chiefly of Indian

origin.

There is only one way that the number of black people in senior management

could be increased five-fold at Lloyds Bank and that would be by promoting black

staff in preferences to those of other ethnicities who might be better qualified for

the job. If those black people were already able enough to join the senior

management, then they would presumably have been promoted before and so it is

a reasonable guess that they are not. The other way to fill this quota would be to

advertise externally and then rig the selection process against people of Indian or

Chinese heritage and give preference to those applicants whose family came

originally from Africa.

Put bluntly, actions of this sort, whatever the terminology used to describe

them, entail racial prejudice. Since few of us are in favour of seeing discrimination

or racial prejudice in the workplace, most people, other than the most dedicated
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and doctrinaire social engineers, would be glad to see an end to such practices,

rather than for them to be expanded, as is the case today.

For some people, abandoning affirmative action, quotas, racial balancing and

all the rest of it would present a serious problem. This is that the number of black

people in medical schools, at the most academic universities, in certain

professions and roles would, as time passed, inexorably decline.

Contemporaneously with this trend, the proportion of people whose families were

East Asian in origin would rise in those settings. If the aim is purely cosmetic, that

is to say manipulating the criteria for this or that post so that the overall

workforce has roughly the same percentage of different ethnic minorities as

society as a whole, then of course this is easily done. There is an unexpected and

undesirable downside to this though, in that it will tend to increase racial

prejudice. An example from the past will help us to see why this should be.

In May and June 2021 a scandal hit the headlines in the United States over what

is sometimes known as ‘race norming’ (Philadelphia Enquirer, 2021). This is the

practice of adding to the scores which black people achieve on aptitude tests to

make them appear more suitable for a job requiring intelligence and also

subtracting marks from those of East Asian origin, to reduce their score until it is

more in line with those achieved by black people. This sounds, as indeed it is,

quite appalling, but it is a system which has been used for decades in America and

was throughout the 1980s operated by the federal government without too many

people knowing about it.

One of the targets towards which both education and employment in

Britain and the United States is geared today is racial balancing. This is seldom

explicitly stated, because such an enterprise is of dubious legality. Instead, all

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manner of euphemisms are used to obscure what is being done. An organisation

which employs many people will make a pious and vague-sounding statement to

the effect that they wish their workforce to reflect the community which they

serve. In straightforward terms, this means that if 15 % of the community, or

perhaps country as a whole, are black, then the aim will be to ensure that 15 % of

their employees are also black. However, as it is approached, this goal has a

disconcerting habit of receding toward the horizon. The more closely it seems to

be within grasp, the more it ultimately eludes us.

In the later 1970s, some clever people in the United States came up with what

looked like a sure-fire method for helping black people into the same jobs which

whites seemed to monopolise. Since black people did not do very well on aptitude

tests and IQ tests, then this must be a product of the racial prejudice to which

they were subjected and also connected with the poor living conditions, inferior

schools and lower standards of health which bedevilled them. It would only be fair,

given all this, if a few points were added to their scores when aptitude tests were

being taken to assess their suitability for various kinds of employment. Unless this

is done, black people trail behind in aptitude tests of all kinds which are looking

for certain levels of cognitive ability. It will be recalled from the final chapter of

the first section of this book, that the RAF aptitude tests revealed this starkly,

grading applicants scores with Chinese Applicants at the top and black ones at the

bottom of the scale. This is simply what happens if you just administer aptitude

tests or IQ tests to mixed population; those whose families have their roots in Asia

come out at the top, while people of African heritage tend to congregate at the

bottom.
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Nobody has ever been keen to call this fiddling of the data by its correct name.

The commonest expression used was race norming, but experts in the field

referred instead to ‘within-group score conversion’ or ‘score adjustment strategy’.

This was to disguise the nature of what was being done and to conceal, both from

applicants and potential employers, what was going on (Newsweek, 1991). It was

simple enough. The General Aptitude Test Battery or GATB was a government

employment exam taken not only in public services but also used by private

companies. Applicants for jobs were tested and the scores calculated by a people

who were in on the racket. Chinese applicants had their scores arbitrarily reduced,

while the scores of black people were enhanced. This was done by comparing the

scores of a black person with other black people, rather than the general

population and doing the same with applicants of East Asian origin. Employers

were not told what was being done (Newsweek, 1991). As if by magic, companies

and public agencies found that the ethnicity of their workforce began to mirror the

percentages of different minorities in the population as a whole. Another popular

aptitude test, the Wonderlic Test, was produced in the 1970s by a company in

Illinois called the E.F. Wonderlic Personnel Test Inc. The results of this test were

processed through ‘ethnic conversion tables’, which added points to the scores of

black people and took them off when Asian applicants were tested (Newsweek,

1991).

In an earlier chapter we looked at the Law of Unintended Consequences and in

the case of race norming this struck in two ways. The first was that employers

found during the 1970s and 1980s that they were employing men who were not

really capable of doing the jobs for which they had been hired. It was

unfortunately the case that most of these men were black. They had been assessed
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for specific jobs, by means of tests similar to the RAF aptitude tests at which we

looked earlier, and their scores indicated that they were not really suited for some

of the jobs for which they had applied. This fact was concealed though from the

potential employers and it was represented to them that the black applicants had

scored more highly than was actually the case. This created a poor impression of

the abilities of black workers in the offices and factories where they worked. They

struggled to do their jobs and this was noticeable to fellow workers who were

white or of East Asian heritage. The impression gained by those working with

them, that these people were not really capable of performing to the same level

as other ethnicities.

Any enterprise whose effect is to produce negative ideas about some ethnic

group is obviously flawed and on this ground alone the race norming scheme was a

failure, but there was worse to come. What had begun life as a well-meaning, if

patronising, enterprise launched by white people to help African-Americans get on

in the workplace ended with being denounced as a racist measure by the very

people it had been intended to help, which could scarcely be called anything other

than an unexpected consequence which none of those involved with the creation

of the idea of race norming could ever have envisioned.

American football is best thought of as a combination of the English sports of

rugby and soccer; although it is rougher than either. A particular hazard is

repeated slight concussion which can cause brain damage in later life. This is

similar to the effects on boxers of the head being regularly shaken and struck,

which results in the condition known as being punch drunk. In 2021, a scandal

became public about the compensation paid to American players who developed

cognitive problems as they grew older, problems which were a directly caused by
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the sport in which they played. It emerged that two well-known players of

American football, Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport, both of whom were black,

had been denied compensation, despite their cognitive abilities have declined to

the point at which white players had been judged to have been adversely affected

by the injuries received during their careers. On the face of it, this seemed unjust.

After Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport sued the National Football League,

following their failure to obtain compensation, it emerged that race norming was

commonly used in such cases, as well as more widely in medica assessments. In

other words, after assessing the functioning of the men’s mental faculties, doctors

had decided that although in a white person they would consider that both were

operating at a greatly reduced intellectual level, for black people, their scores

were not all that unusual, because black people were assumed to be less

intelligent to begin with (Guardian, 2021). Accusations of outrageous racism were

freely thrown about and the Law of Unintended Consequences kicked in with a

vengeance as a scheme designed to make employment fairer for black people

ended up being portrayed as a racist conspiracy.

We have considered what might really happen if a level playing field were to be

established for all ethnicities, with everybody competing on equal terms for

different jobs and it appears, at least on the face of it, that such a state of affairs

would be anything but beneficial to black people in Western society. Whether it is

passing academic examinations or aptitude tests for practical tasks, black people

perform, on average, at a lower level than white people or those of Asian origin.

In this chapter we have considered various topics such as poverty and its

relation to employment. The aim has been to help understand why black people,

both in Britain and America are usually more poor than most white people and also
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some other ethnic groups. Fully to understand why this should be, we really need

to make a slight excursion into the past. The purpose for this will, it is to be

hoped, become apparent.

Two hundred thousand years ago, the most intellectually taxing task that any

human might be called upon to undertake was scraping flesh from an animal hide

or fixing a piece of sharp flint to the head of a wooden spear. Such things require

some manual dexterity and a limited ability to visualise the needs of the future;

both well within the capabilities of both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. For most

people in their day-to-day lives, this situation remained unchanged for many

thousands of years. While those of greater insight and imagination might have been

able to devise technology like the potter’s wheel and horse-drawn cart, once the

idea was provided for them anybody of reasonable intelligence would have been

able to use the things. This remained true until the twentieth century.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, an agricultural labourer in Europe or

America would be able to guide a plough effectively whether his IQ was 90, 100 or

150. This same ability to undertake undemanding and often repetitive tasks

applied also to people serving in shops, painting houses, digging ditches or working

in mines. A strictly limited amount of intellectual ability was required to survive in

ordinary life. Even the ability to read and write was superfluous for almost the

whole of human history. Within living memory, it was quite possible for men and

women in the West to live and work without being able even to write their own

names. As late as the 1960s, it was not unknown for workmen receiving their

wages in Britain to indicate their receipt by signing with a cross or thumbprint.

To sum up, a variation in IQ of 10 or 20 points would hardly have been noticed

in the average workplace until perhaps 50 years ago. An IQ of 90, rather than 100
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would not have impaired anybody’s employability in most jobs. Things are now

very different. It would be impossible, for instance, for somebody wholly unable to

read a single word to find employment in practically any occupation. Even working

at the counter in McDonald’s, often held up as epitomising lowly paid and menial

employment, requires the skills to operate a cash register and to read and write.

The very definition of literacy has changed, to reflect the increasing sophistication

of the world in which we live. In the 1960s, an illiterate person was adjudged to be

the grown man or woman who could not read or write a simple note. The current

meaning of literacy embraces such concepts as ‘document literacy’, that is to say

being able to understand train timetables and make sense of charts.

We saw above how even routine and undemanding jobs are often allocated now

by the performance achieved on aptitude tests like the American General Aptitude

Test Battery, which is an IQ test in all but name. It is at this point of course that

any slight difference in IQs will begin to manifest themselves, to the detriment of

those whose Intelligence Quotient falls a mere five or ten points below average.

Such a relatively small degree of difference from the national average is now liable

to harm a person’s employment prospects and this in turn makes it far more

probable that they will fall into poverty.

It is undeniable that black people do tend to score less on aptitude tests and in

academic examinations than white people and those of East Asian heritage. One

way of accounting for this is to assume that poverty is a factor in this

underachievement. Once incomes and everything else is evened out, then these

discrepancies will vanish. The problem is that however much money is spent and

whatever efforts are made to improve education for everybody, the achievement

gap still persists. What if we view poverty as an effect of poor academic

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achievement, rather than a cause? Would this make what is observed any easier to

understand? In other words, rather than thinking along the lines of racism

producing poverty, which in turn means unsatisfactory housing and lack of money

to spend on books or educational activities, leading to poor academic outcomes,

what if the poor academic outcomes and poverty both had a common cause?

The simple shift in perspective which allows us to consider the idea that black

people tend to have lower incomes than average and live in less commodious

accommodation, situated in particular neighbourhoods, not because of white

racism but rather some characteristic which is inherent can be disconcerting to

those of us accustomed to thinking in orthodox terms. Yet it follows quite logically

if once we concede that those lacking those vital extra Neanderthal genes which

everybody else has, that such people are operating at a disadvantage when it

comes to academic study and complex thought in the modern world. At once,

many things are explained. These range from the fact that without concessions and

extra help, black people are unlikely to gain admission to medical schools and the

best universities, to the low scores in aptitude tests for less demanding roles such

as those of gunner with the air force. If the best jobs, whether in the armed

forces, industry, science, medicine and law go to those with the best qualifications

and greatest ability to pass tests, then, on this reading of the situation, such jobs

will be snapped up by white people and those from East and South Asia; leaving

black people to pick up the less desirable and lower paid work where they are

able. Little wonder then that they are poorer than other people.

This thought-experiment is interesting for the light which it sheds on our

prejudices as much as anything else. There is a natural reluctance to think in

terms of poverty being in some way a natural consequence of biological variation

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and yet this is at least as plausible as the complicated explanations which are

usually trotted out about the wickedness of society and the disadvantages against

which black people are forced to struggle. This version of the world is too, a

simpler and more economical explanation for what is observed. Rather than the

dozen causes which are usually invoked to account for such things as the academic

achievement gap and the poor socio-economic condition of many black people, we

are left with a single underlying factor which adequately accounts for all which has

been observed. It may not be the correct explanation, but it is without doubt as

plausible as the ones which we are accustomed to hearing. It has too the

undeniable advantage of not falling foul of Occam’s Razor; the principle which

urges us that the simplest explanation which covers all known facts is the one

which we should adopt.

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Chapter 5

What can we do about education?

If poverty is associated with a slightly lower average IQ for some population

groups, something we considered at the end of the last chapter, then perhaps

targeted education might help alleviate the situation. Despite the huge efforts

though which have been made over the last 50 or 60 years in Britain and the

United States to ensure that all children in schools funded by the taxpayer succeed

academically to the best of their ability, the so-called achievement gap stubbornly

refuses to vanish. Sometimes it appears to be shrinking and at other times growing,

but it has never gone away. Initiatives like that in America of the No Child Left

Behind programme illustrate the point with great clarity. Equality of opportunity

simply does not equate with strict equality of outcome. That such inequalities are

produced by a combination of nature and environment is undeniable and every

effort should be made to improve the environment of, and opportunities available

to, all children and adults. In the end though, it seems very likely that the

outcomes of black people and white will differ, no matter how many efforts are

made by the well-meaning and despite the various laws passed to discourage or

prevent racial prejudice. Accepting this reality is not defeatist, nor is it an excuse

for doing nothing to ensure that all children and adults of any and every ethnicity

have the same chance to succeed academically and also in employment and all

other aspects of life.

The ideology which insists against all the evidence that white people, black

people and those from East Asia will, given similar life-chances, flourish in
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precisely the same proportions in any endeavour has for decades been given more

or less free rein in the United States, Britain and other parts of the Western World.

The practical consequences of this belief have been disappointing in the extreme

for those who have enthusiastically acted to advance the equalitarian ideas. This

failure has not prompted those pursuing these aims to pause and ask themselves

whether or not they are on the correct path; indeed, it has had quite the opposite

effect. Lack of progress in the goal of equality of outcome is attributed not to an

inability to recognise fundamental and ineradicable differences in certain ethnic

groups, but rather to malign intent of the part of either individuals determined to

perpetuate a racist system or sometimes ‘institutional racism’, which pervades an

entire country like some evil miasma. That the ideology might itself be faulty

seldom or never seems to occur to the zealots who drive this agenda.

We begin our consideration of this topic by observing that it is incontrovertibly

true that to treat anybody less favourably, simply because of their skin colour or

ethnicity, is wrong. It is wrong today and was plainly wrong at the time that such

practices were widely accepted and legal. That racial prejudice in housing,

employment, education or any other field is, or should be, a thing of the past must

surely be a cause of satisfaction to us all. It is also true that those who subscribe

to the equalitarian dogma were instrumental in bringing about such a state of

affairs and those who fought to this end are to be admired.

We would all agree too that any person, of any ethnicity, has the same rights as

any other person and that a situation where civil rights vary according to some

arbitrary classification of supposed race is unjust. All people, regardless of

intelligence, ethnic origin, gender, age or disability clearly have the right to live

and flourish as best they can in society. Just to make this perfectly clear, even if,
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as has been suggested in this book, people of African origin were proved to have

IQs which averages a few points lower than that of others with European of

Chinese heritage, this would not mean that they should be treated differently. We

do not afford anybody in a civilised society greater rights or more protection under

the law simply because they have a higher IQ. The very idea would be absurd.

On the scientific front, nobody would seriously suggest that humanity is divided

into discrete and separate races and nor would anybody doubt that all humans on

the planet today belong to a single species. On the other hand, it would be a rash

person who asserted that the only difference between various population groups is

merely skin deep. We know that this is not the case.

Few people will disagree with any of what has just been said. The population of

any country consists of many people of average intelligence and small numbers

whose intellectual ability is either exceedingly high or unusually low. We may

perhaps offer some extra consideration and protection to those whose IQ is so low

that they are unable to function independently in society, but this will be available

for anybody in that category, regardless of ethnicity.

So far, we have simply stated the obvious, which is that all the existing civil

rights which protect every citizen and ensure that none are victimised or made the

object of discrimination should of course be retained. What then might we

profitably lose or do away with as far as education is concerned? Is there anything

which might be added? Perhaps racial prejudice in applications for employment

and admission to university might be a good place to begin. We have looked at the

practice of ‘racial balancing’ and also the supposed need for ‘diversity’. However

this is disguised, it ultimately means denying some people jobs, university places

and promotion on the grounds of skin colour. If an attempt is made to ensure that
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the number of employees of a certain ethnicity in a company or students at a

university match the percentage of that group in the country as a whole, this will

often militate against the interests of those whose family origins lie in Europe,

East Asia or the Indian sub-continent. It is simply a return to the old quota system

which ensured that Jews would not be allowed to enter workplaces or institutions

of higher learning in anything other than small numbers. This is plainly wrong and

patently unfair. Might there be a way of improving schools so that black children

do better and so do not need to be given special consideration when it comes to

applying for a place at university? This is an interesting point.

In the 1950s, it was taken for granted by all forward-looking and thoughtful

people that any difference in educational outcomes between black children and

white must inevitably be caused by racism. There were certainly good grounds for

this supposition at that time. There was endemic discrimination against black

people in both Britain and the United States and this had the effect of ensuring

that most black children received an inferior education to that of the average

white child. In the southern states of America, this situation was formalised in

segregated schools, which were until 1954 perfectly legal. The Supreme Court

ruling which had allowed for segregation stipulated that educational provision

should be ‘separate but equal’. In practice, this was not the case and white

children received a higher quality of education than black children. Under such

circumstances, it was hardly surprising if black children were less likely to get into

university or enter the professions. Then too, there was opposition to the idea of

allowing black people equal opportunity with whites. We saw in an earlier chapter

that at least one medical school, that at Yale, had an explicit policy of excluding

black people from the opportunity to train as doctors (Burrow, 2008).

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There are certain differences between the provision of schools in Britain and

the United States. In Britain, all children at publicly funded schools study the same

National Curriculum and the funding for each school is allocated by central

government according to the number of children enrolled. It is true that some

children come from less advantaged backgrounds or homes where English is not

spoken, but as far as humanly possible, all receive a similar standard of education.

There are of course some variations in the quality of the education provided for

black children and white according to the location of a school. Those in run-down,

inner city areas often do not have examination results as good as others in well-to-

do parts of town and these are the very schools at which the proportion of black

pupils tends to be the highest. This though relates more to social class than

ethnicity. In Britain roughly one child in seven attends fee-paying, private schools.

Such schools generally have a much lower number of black pupils than the average

state school and also better exam results. Again, this is not racial segregation, so

much as a system operating on the lines of class and income.

Despite the differences in the educational systems, in both Britain and

America, the same thing is noticed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, which is

that white pupils tend to do better academically than black ones and that those

from families of East Asian heritage do better than either. All policy has since the

1960s been predicated on the assumption that this is an artificial effect produced

by differing socio-economic factors, cultural differences and other causes which

might with sufficient effort be countered or eradicated. How if this perspective

were found to be mistaken? In other words, what might we do if these differing

outcomes turned out to a perfectly natural phenomenon, rather than a distortion

caused by societal inequality?

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Huge amounts of money have been poured into efforts to reduce the academic

attainment gap between black students and white at school. It has proved a vain

endeavour. It is true that increased stimulation and educational activities for

children at an early age, combined with better schools have had the result of

raising attainment overall for black children. However, programmes of this sort

are, quite rightly, directed at children of all ethnicities. The consequence is that

the attainments of the white children and those of East Asian heritage rise also and

to a higher rate than the black children. The gap, though, remains, with black

children still lagging behind other groups. Whatever is done, the attainment gap

stubbornly refuses to go away. This is freely acknowledged by black educationalists

as well as white (Rowley & Wright, 2011). Initiatives such as the American No Child

Left behind Act 2001 do not appear to eradicate the achievement gap between

black children and white. Despite 60 years of bussing and affirmative action in the

United States, along with various pieces of legislation, the gap in achievement

remains. In Britain too, the differing academic results between these two groups is

still very noticeable. Whatever is tried, whether the promotion of positive images

through the celebration of Black History Month or increased nursery provision, it

persists.

This refusal of the attainment gap between black and white children and

university students to fade away like the morning dew in the face of the fierce

onslaught of social engineering, backed by the almost unlimited funds directed at

the problem by both central and local government, is mortifying and perplexing to

those who hold orthodox and progressive views on the matter. Since it is an article

of faith among such people that there are no genuine and inherent intellectual

differences between black children and white, they are compelled to fall back
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upon the familiar explanations of racism and poverty. When an American journal

devoted to the education of black children, written by and for black people,

analysed the effects of the No Child Left behind Act 10 years after the passing of

the law, they discovered that the gap still existed. The conclusion was

inescapable;

The findings from this study suggest that discrimination based on race as well

as family factors outside the school setting contribute to this difference in test

scores between Black and White students

(Rowley & Wright, 2011).

In other words, if we only redouble our efforts to eradicate institutional racism

and spend more money to ensure that black families have an increased income,

the problem can be defeated. Precisely the same attitude may be seen in the

United Kingdom. When a Professor of Education at the University of Oxford

discovered that more black children than white had been found to have learning

difficulties, he thought that this was probably due to what he described as ‘socio-

economic factors’ and black children suffering from, ‘an inappropriate or narrowed

curriculum from unwarranted over-identification of social, emotional and mental

health needs’ (Strand & Lindorff, 2018). In short, poverty and racism caused the

problem.

After decades of work in this field, the situation does not appear to have

changed to any great degree. White children still do better educationally than

black ones, while those of East Asian heritage do better than them both. There

may come a point in the future where it is recognised that a choice is to be made
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between three possible courses of action. Either huge, and ever-increasing,

amounts of tax-payers' money should continue to be thrown at schools and colleges

in the hope that eventually it will all have an effect, or society will have to be

revolutionised in the hope that equality of income and material wealth will set

things right, or the situation as it has been for many decades must be accepted as

simply the natural order of things.

One suspects that there will, at this point, be howls of execration from those

who will immediately see this as a call for a return to segregated schooling or even

apartheid of the kind which was once seen in South Africa. It is course nothing of

the kind. The present state of affairs is undesirable for two chief reasons; one

minor and the other of greatest importance. The minor and less important of these

two reasons is that current efforts have proved to be a waste of time and money.

This may be seen with great clarity when we look at admissions to the most

academically demanding and prestigious universities in Britain and America.

In the United Kingdom getting into the best universities requires three A levels

at grade A or A*. In other words, even to be considered for a place at these

educational establishments, three A levels are required at this grade. In 2019, 11 %

of white pupils gained at least three A levels at grade A. For black pupils, the

figure was half as many; just 5.5 % of those studying A levels achieved at least

three at grade A. For those of Chinese origin, the percentage was 25.7 (UK DfE,

2020). Because they are under pressure to ‘widen access’, which is code for

increasing the number of black students, British universities now make what are

known as ‘contextual offers’; allowing people from poverty-stricken areas or

poorly performing schools into their institution with lower grades than anybody
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else. This benefits black students who tend to live in such areas and attend the

schools so designated.

In the United States, elite universities such as Harvard and Yale are suspected of

rigging the entrance requirements to favour black students at the expense of those

of East Asian origin. In October 2020, the United States Department of Justice

began legal action against Yale, alleging that their admissions policy violated the

1964 Civil Rights Act (Washington Post, 2020). The suggestion was being made that

Yale discriminated against students of Chinese origin in order to increase the

number of black students. We examined this case in detail in a previous chapter.

That efforts to ensure that black students achieve strict parity with white ones

may be a waste of time and money is a trifling matter compared with the long-

term effects of such endeavours. These are pernicious and act to poison relations

between different ethnic groups. This is a bold claim, but one which is easy

enough to justify.

Telling any sizable group of people in a society that many people hate them

and that they are being cheated out of things which are rightfully theirs is hardly

likely to promote good relations between them and those who make up the

majority of the community. Whether or not this is being done deliberately or

unwittingly makes no difference to the state of affairs. Talk of institutional racism,

white privilege, discrimination and so on persuades black people that the reason

that they are not achieving as well academically and socially as well as both the

majority population and also various other minorities is nothing to do with them,

but is rather a consequence of bad behaviour on the part of others. This is bound

to create a sense of grievance. Emphasising what is euphemistically referred to as

‘socio-economic disadvantage’ will have the same effect. If anybody had set out to
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devise a strategy to sow discord in a multicultural society and encourage strife

between ethnic groups; the prevailing ideology might well be what would have

been decided upon. It is a prefect recipe for discontent and rebellion. If it is white

people who are holding back black students by their racism and also keeping them

poor by the way that they are running the political system and society in general,

then obviously these people are wicked and cruel. Resistance against institutional

racism and social inequality is as necessary and justified in modern Britain and

America as it was in apartheid-era South Africa or in the United States when

schools were segregated and black people routinely denied their civil rights. And

remember, this is not just a small group of people doing this; it is white people in

general. This is a crucial point of Critical Race Theory.

Of course, from this reading of the situation, it is not only whites who are

culpable in this matter, although they should bear the brunt of the blame. If black

students are, in effect, being cheated out of their rightful places at medical

schools and top universities, then those who get to those places in

disproportionate numbers must be engaging in sharp practice to do so. Just as

black people are being cheated out of the places, so too must Chinese people and

Jews be cheating in some way to maintain their lead academically at the best

institutions. Anybody who has dealings with black students will know only too well

that such sentiments are by no means rare. One is irresistibly reminded of a joke

circulating some years ago. What is the definition of a well-balanced Caribbean?

One with a chip on both shoulders.

The festering sense of grievance inculcated among black school pupils and young

people by the widespread and semi-official acceptance of the supposed state of

affairs outlined above is not the only cause of friction and discontent created by
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such beliefs. The very expression ‘white privilege’ is galling to young, working-

class white youths who feel that they are very far being in any sense ‘privileged’.

In June 2021 British Member of Parliament Robert Halfon, Chair of the

Parliamentary Select Committee on Education, expressed the view that talking of

‘white privilege’ promoted disharmony and created division in society. He said

that,

We also desperately need to move away from dealing with racial disparity by

using divisive concepts like white privilege that pits one group against another.

Disadvantaged white children feel anything but privileged when it comes to

education.

Privilege is the very opposite to what disadvantaged white children enjoy or

benefit from in an education system which is now leaving far too many behind.

(Daily Telegraph, 2021)

It was sufficiently rare for a British politician to speak openly about this, for

Halfon’s remarks to be widely reported in all the national newspapers. This then is

the serious risk when young people are told that one group of them are being

systematically robbed of their future happiness by the society in which they live.

Such a notion is likely not only to make them feel embittered but also to infuriate

those members of the white, majority group who are not doing very well

themselves. Although this division is not be fostered deliberately, in a spirit of

mischief, there is still a very real danger that it could be setting the stage for even

worse disorder than that seen after the death George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
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Since, according to Critical Race Theory, the lack of black surgeons,

architects, engineers, judges and captains of industry is an act of historic injustice

perpetuated by white people, it would surely be just and equitable to correct the

situation by finding a way to lend a hand to these victims of a racist society and

help them to reach their full potential? We have seen how this has been attempted

in the United States and the way in which it has militated against the best

interests of many students of East Asian origin, branding them as cowardly and

unlikable. Similar schemes in the United Kingdom have also ended with unlooked

for and undesirable outcomes.

Attempts to rig the admissions processes for universities are fraught with

hazard and the Law of Unexpected Consequences soon kicks in. That Yale

University in America is being accused of violating the Civil Rights Act is terrible

enough, but even the subtler attempts to ‘widen access’, as it is known in Britain,

can lead to difficulties. Take the case of the University of Birmingham Medical

School.

In the late 1990s, the then British government suggested that it would be a

good thing if more people from what were described as non-traditional groups

should somehow be encouraged to enter higher education; that is to say staying on

after the age of 18 and studying at university. This initiative was known as

Widening Participation. The Medical School in Birmingham joined enthusiastically

into this programme by greatly expanding the number of students recruited for

their five-year course (Popovic, 2007). This was following recommendations from

the Medical Workforce Standing Advisory Committee in 1997 which suggested that

medical schools should, ‘seek to attract an increasing number of students from

local, socially deprived areas’

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Although launched in 1997 and concerned initially with just ‘social deprivation’,

the widening access agenda received an enormous boost in 2000 when what

became known as the Laura Spence Affair appeared in the news (The Observer,

2000). A working-class girl from the north of England who had 10 GCSEs at A* and

was predicted four A Levels at top grades, applied to study medicine at Oxford

University. She was not offered a place and a political row developed about

whether the university was prejudiced against working-class students. This

mutated into a wider debate about the fact that many of the best British

universities were not only filled with middle and upper-class students, but that

nearly all of them were white. This led to a desire to increase the numbers of both

working-class students and also those belonging to ethnic minorities. It is

interesting to see how this worked out in one instance.

At Birmingham University’s Medical School in 1992/1993 a small percentage of

medical students, just 6 %, failed at least one of the examinations which they

took. To put this another way, 94 % of students sailed through the course without

failing any of their examinations (Popovic, 2007). Ten years later, in the year

2002/2003, the percentage of medical students at Birmingham failing at least one

of their examinations had soared to 48 %. In other words, from 94 % of students

passing all their examinations, within a decade only about half of them were doing

so.

Something which staff at the university noticed was that although just 25 % of

students on the course were of south Asian origin, they made up a hugely

disproportionate number of those failing their first-year examinations.

The audience and sponsors of my research within the School of Medicine

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require research to be conducted into the potentially embarrassing

observation that students with Asian-sounding names appear

disproportionately on the fail list after the Year 1 Exam Board.

(Popovic, 2007)

It was clear that something was going wrong with the ‘widening participation’ at

the medical school. American readers might find this a little puzzling at first sight.

In the United States, ‘Asian’ is generally used to indicate people from East Asia;

Chinese, Koreans and so on. In Britain, ‘Asian’ means somebody from South Asia,

specifically the Indian sub-continent. Some members of communities from this part

of the world, especially those whose families have their origin in Pakistan, under-

achieve at school. It will be recalled that since over half of schoolchildren of

Pakistani heritage in Britain are the product of cousin marriages, the incidence of

genetic birth defects is 10 times that of the white, British population. Academic

under-achievement in this community is widespread and, according to a survey of

children in English schools in 2011, ‘Profound multiple learning difficulties are

more common among ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Bangladeshi’ children’ (Emerson et al,

2011).

One of the problems at the University of Birmingham’s Medical School tied in

with the ‘Laura Spence Affair’. Although the idea of elitism has fallen rather into

disrepute in Britain these days, it served a very useful purpose when choosing who

should be admitted to medical schools. By restricting the number of available

places and forcing applicants to fight fiercely if they wished to secure a place on

the course, it was ensured that those who ended up in a medical school were there

because they truly wished to study medicine. They had not chosen to become
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doctors just because it was a respectable career or because their relatives had

urged them to become doctors for the prestige which this might lend to the family.

Unfortunately, when courses were made more widely available, this is precisely

the kind of thing which had happened; especially among ethnic minorities. Rather

than a vocation to which they were passionately devoted, medicine became seen

as just another career option which might lead to a good standard of living. This is

the situation which faced Birmingham. Studying medicine is a very taxing business,

more so than qualifying as an accountant or solicitor. Unless one is prepared to

devote one’s self to the process, rather than viewing it as just another university

course, then the chances of failing are high. By opening up the course and creating

more places, all that had been achieved was gaining students who were not up to

the required standard in various ways.

The medical school at Birmingham University does not appear to have learned

anything in the 20 years or so since they began to see the ill-effects of the policy

of widening access. According to their website in March 2021, they are still

resolutely pursuing the same course, by means of what they call, in common with

many other universities, ‘contextual offers’. This essentially means that ethnic

minorities and working-class school pupils are given special preference when

decisions are made about whom to interview and admit.

Because it is thought to be a good and desirable thing in itself that those

studying medicine should reflect the community from which they are drawn as a

whole, ways have to be devised by universities to ensure that more members of

visible minorities, together with working-class students instead of those from the

white, middle classes, are recruited. To do this, one begins by lowering the

qualifications needed to get onto courses. By analysing the postcodes of those

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applying, using either a system called ACORN or another known as POLAR, it is

possible to spot those who live in poor districts and even identify individual streets

in which few older adults have been to university. The schools which applicants

have attended are also scrutinised and if few pupils do well at A Levels or go to

places such as Oxford or Cambridge universities, this is another positive mark.

Children who have been in care are also singled out for special attention. Because

black people and certain other visible minorities, those whose families are from

Pakistan or Bangladesh, tend to be poorer and less well educated than the average

white family, studying postcodes and schools in this way will provide one not only

with poor, working-class pupils, but often those who are black or whose families

have their origin in parts of the Indian sub-continent. Those applicants for a place

at the University of Birmingham’s Medical School who fulfil these criteria are

allowed in, if they pass an interview, with an A Level score of AAB, rather than the

AAA which everybody else is expected to get (University of Birmingham, 2021).

Of course, to find the roots of later academic under-achievement, we must

look further back than university of course and ask ourselves why it is that black

children in particular do not, on the whole, thrive academically at school. After

all, the mechanism for failing to get into medical schools or top universities is

fairly plain. In both Britain and the United States, black people of African or

Caribbean origin tend not to do as well at school as white pupils, while those of

East Asian heritage tend to do better than both black and white students. This in

turn means that black pupils are less likely to gain places at the best universities

and are more likely to leave formal education at the earliest opportunity. A long-

term consequence of this is that black doctors, architects, engineers, lawyers and

so on are less common than those who are white or of Asian origin. Black pupils are
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also more likely to get into trouble at school and to be excluded. What causes this

situation?

One main strand of the modern explanation for black underachievement at

school is that it is the effect of a racist society. The curriculum used in most

schools is geared to white society and emphasises white achievement. The famous

people in fields as varied and diverse as science, art, music and philosophy all

seem to be white, which means that black children do not feel engaged, they have

a subconscious feeling perhaps that this is all nothing to do with them. Combined

with the fact that teachers are, or so it is alleged, more ready to come down hard

on black children, especially boys, and see them as being a problem, this leads to

a feeling of alienation and a desire on the part of such pupils to leave school as

early as possible. Many come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds too,

which means that money is tight and the prospect of building up debt as students

is an unappealing one.

It will be observed, of course, that there is something a little inadequate in this

account, despite the fact that it is one to which so many professionals in the field

of education adhere. For example, why is it that pupils of Indian or Chinese

heritage do not feel disengaged by having only white people shown in many

lessons? Pupils of Chinese origin do not need to be shown images of Confucius or

May Tse Tung to get them to do their homework. Nor do those from Gujarati Indian

families need their history to be emphasised in school. Then again, If racism is to

blame for exclusions, why do these racist teachers not target unfairly children of

Indian families or those from East Asia? This must be a very strange and selective

kind of racial prejudice that singles out pupils of African heritage alone. And yet, if

racism and alienation are not to blame for the situation which causes black
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children to fail at school, what else could be behind the phenomenon? In other

words, racial prejudice alone could account for both the educational

underachievement and poverty which are seen in black families, but this would

entail ignoring several other factors, all of which almost certainly play a part in

what is seen.

Black people differ from white people in a number of ways, some of which are

not related to culture or upbringing. We have already seen that black children

tend to stand and walk at an earlier age than white children. This may well give

them a slight edge in sports as they are growing up. The fact that young black men

have higher levels of testosterone circulating in their bloodstreams might also help

in this regard, as the most successful competitive athletes tend to have higher

levels of testosterone. It is also the case that black boys, at least in the United

States where research has been conducted into this, reach puberty a year earlier

than white boys (Herman-Giddens et al, 2012).

Another thing which distinguishes black people from white is the greater

prevalence in those of African origin for the biological markers indicating

susceptibility to schizophrenia. In some countries, Britain for example, black

people are nine times as likely as white people to be diagnosed with a psychosis.

We have looked in this book at the fact that IQ tests indicate a slight difference

overall between the cognitive abilities of black, white and Asian children, but this

would hardly make teachers take disciplinary action against them, solely on the

grounds that they were falling behind a little academically. It is time to look at a

field of research which was yielding promising results in the 1960s and 1970s but

has fallen a little from favour in recent years. This is the exploration of ways of
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behaving which could have a deleterious effect upon the educational prospects of

black children.

Two things are very important if a child is to benefit fully from any education

which is being offered. One of these is the ability or desire to curb his or her

natural impulses. This means, to give a simple case, that the child must sit still

and look at a teacher and follow her instructions, rather than jumping up and

running outside to play. Another, subtler necessity is that the child, especially as

the teenage years are reached, can see the point of education and realises that

the process is a form of deferred gratification.

A willingness to delay present gratification in order to reap a greater pleasure

in the future is of great importance in adulthood. It allows people to make

decisions which will have the effect of improving their living conditions or

prolonging their lives. At the age of 18, a young person might take a job which

would give him immediate money to spend and sufficient leisure time to relax at

weekends with his friends, spending the money which he has earned during the

week. On the other hand, he might undertake a gruelling university course which

would leave him with very little spare time or disposable income for three or four

years, following which he might qualify as an architect or engineer. His chances in

later life of owning a property and having a good income would thus be vastly

enhanced. Another example of how delayed gratification works in later life is one

at which we have already looked, the fact that African-American women in the

United States and Britain tend to be more obese than white women.

Choosing only to eat a certain amount of nutritious food which one has chosen

carefully and prepared can mean waiting longer between first feeling hungry and

the time at which one eventually has a meal. By avoiding snacks and fast food,
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gratification is regularly delayed with the ultimate aim of feeling better and living

longer. Those who gratify their hunger instantly with biscuits and takeaways are

liable to become fatter and have shorter lives. In this case, delayed gratification

can be a matter of life and death.

It is impossible to say if a reluctance to delay gratification, whether of hunger

or anything else, is due to nurture or nature. Perhaps in families where eating

takes place at set times, with the whole family seated around a table, children

grow up with the expectation that they will have to wait to enjoy food. Perhaps

this creates in turn a different mindset from children raised in homes where

everybody eats biscuits and sweets the instant that the first pangs of hunger are

felt.

Experiments were conducted in the 1970s with small children, in which they

were given the choice between having one marshmallow immediately or two after

a short wait. It was found that those children, aged between three and five years

of age, who deferred their rewards had better outcomes in life at a later age,

including academic achievement. White children apparently did better at black

children when deferring their gratification in this way. Some doubt has been cast

upon the results of this work, it being suggested in recent years that the fact that

the black children tended to be poorer and perhaps hungrier accounted in large

part for their eagerness to eat their marshmallow at once, rather than waiting in

the hope of some future benefit. This was not the only experiment though to yield

such a result.

In 1972 a similar thing was tried with 11 and 12 year-old children of different

ethnicities. This time, the reward for completing a test for the researcher was

either the immediate gift of a 45 rpm record, the kind of vinyl disc which had one
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song on each side, or three such records if the subjects waited until the

researchers came back in three weeks (Strickland, 1972). Once again, it was found

that the white children were far more likely to decline immediate gratification by

waiting three weeks and then claiming three records instead of one. There was one

other difference between the attitudes of the white children and the black

towards putting off an instant reward in favour of a greater one in the future.

More than 80 % of the white children chose to wait for three weeks an receive

three records, rather than one that day. Some of the researchers making the offer

were black and others white, but this did not seem to affect the children either

way in their decision. For the black children though, the ethnicity of the

researcher was a big factor in which choice they made. When the researcher was

white, only 33 % of the black children would take up the offer of the three records

if they waited three weeks, but when a black researcher made the same offer 56 %

accepted. It looked as though the black children were not only less likely to defer

gratification, but that they were also mistrustful of white authority figures. The

mistrust of white authority figures is interesting, because in many schools the

authority figures, the teachers, are more often than not white. It is by no means

impossible that the friction observed between black schoolchildren and teachers is

connected with this seemingly instinctive reluctance to trust white people in

positions of power.

We come now to the way in which the idea of anti-racism, which increasingly

permeates schools in Britain and America, might have a pernicious effect on the

educational prospects of black students. There is a strong tradition in East Asian

families for children to take responsibility for their academic failure or success.

This is the subject of popular memes on the internet known as ‘Asian Dad’ jokes.
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These feature a fierce-looking Chinese man speaking to his child and saying such

things as, ‘Your sister got a B, I have no daughter!’ or ‘First do your homework and

then you can play…the piano’. The humour lies in both the high expectations of

the father and also the fact that any failure is laid squarely at the child’s door.

There is a similar stereotype of the white ‘pushy parent’, determined that a child

will achieve his or her full potential. Middle class parents are renowned for

behaving in this way. It can hardly be mere coincidence that in Britain, the

children of middle-class, white parents, along with Chinese and those of Gujarati

heritage dominate not only the most prestigious universities, but also certain

professions, such as medicine and law.

The events at a school in London in 2021 showed the stark difference in outlook

between the type of parents whose children tend to get places at the top

universities and the families of those who generally do not. When a new Head was

appointed to the Pimlico Academy, a secondary school in London, he decided to

make a few changes. The area in which the school was situated was ethnically

mixed and the new Head thought that flying the national flag over the entrance to

the school would serve as a unifying symbol; showing what everybody had in

common. He also banned beards and moustaches for boys. The history curriculum

was changed too, so that the subject was taught chronologically. Very little here

would seem controversial to many people, but the pupils and their parents thought

otherwise. The union flag was seen by some as a symbol not of national unity, but

of slavery and colonialism. The new curriculum for history meant that too much

time was supposedly being spent studying white kings and queens. Black pupils

complained that they were not seeing enough black people featuring in their

history lessons.
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The discontent felt by black families culminated in hooliganism and vandalism,

as pupils pulled down and burned the flag. The police had to be called to the

school to contain the disorder. Now there is a long tradition of unruly school pupils

running wild, this has nothing to do with ethnicity. What was unusual about this

case though was that many parents sided with their children, in effect endorsing

their actions. One mother of two teenage pupils at the school, Lucinda Merritt,

spoke to a newspaper reporter and said the following,

I am a mixed race woman who has mixed race children. I always thought

Pimlico was a beautiful, diverse place. It was where I felt the safest and it

would have been my dream to teach there. The flag issue has become a bizarre

symbol. The school were aware of how it was making students and parents feel.

The timing of putting it up was so insensitive and inappropriate– where students

felt like they were backed into a corner and that’s why they removed it.

(Guardian, 2021)

She added that pupils were not, ‘seeing themselves or their backgrounds

represented in the curriculum’. It appeared that one of her children had been

suspended by the school before these incidents and the other recently disciplined.

Another parent told the reporter that, ‘flying the union jack had been

unnecessarily antagonistic and had fostered division’.

This really is an extraordinary state of affairs and yet nobody commenting on

what happened at the school, the events were covered by British national

newspapers and the BBC, seemed keen to consider the implications of all this for

the children. When a mother is enthusiastic about school pupils engaging in acts of
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vandalism at the school attended and expresses the view that the history

curriculum there is faulty, what will be the effects on her children? How do white

parents and those of Chinese heritage view such conduct?

Traditionally, middle-class parents have taught their children to behave at

school and to study what they told. Families of East Asian origin hold very similar

views and it is hard to imagine a Chinese parent in Britain encouraging a son or

daughter at school to commit acts of vandalism on the premises or condoning such

behaviour. In the same way, the average middle-class white parent would probably

be advising their child to study the curriculum used for history or any other

subject, irrespective of whether they liked it or not. Reminding ourselves that the

complaint is sometimes made, both in Britain and America, that the best

universities are monopolised by white students from well-to-do families and those

from families of East Asian origin, we ask ourselves if they might be a connection

between the attitudes sketched above.

On the one hand, a parent who believes that school pupils have a perfect right

to commit vandalism and argue with teachers about the content of curricula used

in the school, and on the other, parents who urge their children to obey the school

rules, complete their homework on time and to learn what is taught; regardless of

how they feel about it. Which pupils do readers suppose will be more likely to get

good marks in their examinations and then go on to good universities? One set of

values is surely more likely than the other to lead to academic success.

We have in this chapter discussed a number of factors which are liable to affect

how well children do at school and the likelihood of their progressing to good

universities to study things such as medicine, law, architecture and other

traditionally high-status subjects. Some of the things which we have looked at may
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well be innate to the ethnic groups to which the young people belong, but this

might not, in the final analysis, make a huge difference. It is entirely possible that

the single most important thing affecting the educational outcomes relate not to

inherent qualities, but rather to attitudes. As we all know, attitudes are chosen

and may be changed. The attitudes of the parents quoted above do not seem

calculated to produce students who will be likely to gain places at the best

universities in the country.

Among the different traits which might determine which child ends up at

Harvard or Oxford and who leaves school at 16 to take up a dead-end job, some

are without doubt beyond the control of the individual. These include the age at

which gross motor milestones were reached, the age at which puberty begins and

the levels of hormones circulating in the body. A child’s IQ can be nurtured and

encouraged to develop by parents or, conversely, a child who lacks stimulation

may never reach his or her full potential. Some traits of character, delaying

gratification or persisting with an unrewarding but necessary task, can also be

altered first by parental input and in later life by the will of the individual

concerned. This means that even if there are certain statistical likelihoods relating

to intelligence and so on, these are not fixed and immutable.

Let us for a moment allow that it may be possible that black Africans tend to

score lower in IQ tests, academic examinations, aptitude tests and various other

things not because of poverty, poor schooling or institutional racism, but simply

because of a slight difference in their brains. Where would this leave us? Would it

mean that we should forbid black people to attend the best universities in the

country if they were intellectually qualified to do so? It is hard to imagine anybody

suggesting such a thing for a moment. Would barriers be put in the way of black
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people with sufficient qualifications who wished to enter medical schools? Again,

this is improbable. Would this acceptance of what may be a real difference affect

the opportunities available to a single black person? It would not. In fact, it is hard

to come up with any practical disadvantage to acknowledging the existence of real

differences between ethnic groups.

This is one practical step which could be taken; acknowledging that certain

ethnicities may be more likely to reach the top in academic spheres than others. A

second move might be to accept that disproportionate numbers of black children

could need extra help to reach their full potential. The present ideological bias is

against such a view, of course. A larger proportion of black children being assessed

as having learning difficulties is generally seen in educational circle now as a

product of biased tests and racist psychologists and teachers. This modern

approach to the matter reached its reduction ad absurdum in the United States

where the case of Larry P. is still legally binding. In 1979 a group of black

psychologists in California were so enraged at the disproportionate number of

African-American children receiving special educational provision, that they went

to court with the claim that the IQ tests being used to assess the intelligence of

black children were culturally biased against them. Since that time, it has been

unlawful in California to give an IQ test to a black child when deciding if he or she

would benefit from extra help at school.

In the introduction to this book, the Oxford professor was mentioned whose

study showed that black children in Britain were more likely to be diagnosed with

mental illness or as having learning difficulties. Let us recall his solution to this

problem. Viewed through his ideological spectacles, the nature of what he saw was

simple,
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some Black Caribbean children may be suffering an inappropriate or

narrowed curriculum from unwarranted over-identification, particularly in

secondary school.

(Strand & Lindorff, 2018)

It was precisely this interpretation of what was happening in schools which led to

the Larry P. case in California (Frisby & Henry, 2016). Some people working in the

field of special education have suggested that this kind of inflexible approach

actually works to prevent some black children from getting the help which would

enable them to make educational progress; in other words that it works against

the best interests of needy black children.

Rather than reducing extra help for black children, a case could easily be made

for being quicker off the mark in providing it. We know that the No Child Left

Behind Act in the United States had the effect of raising the academic level of

black children. Of course, it also raised the level of white children, leaving the

achievement gap intact. Targeted work with young black children whose family

circumstances and social backgrounds might put them at risk of falling behind

might be a better way of tackling academic underachievement in this ethnic

group. It could be combined with help and support aimed at parents, encouraging

them to show more enthusiasm and support for schools and to get their children to

obey rules, rather than fight against them. This single step would almost certainly

make a huge difference.

Apart from a change in attitude towards authority, which might well pay

dividends as the children grow into adolescents and clash with the police and
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others whom they often see as representatives of a racist system, there is

something else which could be done to ameliorate what all agree is an

unsatisfactory state of affairs. Even those black children who have done well

enough in the educational system up to the age of eleven or so, often tend to lose

interest and drift into confrontations with teachers and other authority figures as

they reach their teenage years. In some parts of Britain, exclusions rates from

school for poor behaviour are running at five times the rate for black children of

Caribbean origin than for white pupils (Guardian, 2021). Although there has been a

decline in all ethnicities sent to prison in the United States in the last few days,

the situation for black males is still pretty much the same as it was a decade ago,

which is to say that there is a one in three lifetime chance of black males born

since the turn of the millennium spending time in prison (Guardian, 2012). Can

anything be done about this?

Disaffection and loss of interest in formal education is very often the precursor

to juvenile delinquency and petty crime; both of which can lead to worse things.

This is of course true not only of black youths but those of any ethnicity. It does

appear that black school pupils are at an increased risk of ending up on this

pathway as they become teenagers. At least part of the answer might lie in

biological factors. Being able to stand, walk, run and jump at an earlier age than

other ethnic groups might, together with having many role models who are

footballers, boxers and athletes, give black children a greater propensity for

moving about vigorously and this in turn could lead to their being less keen on

sitting quietly on chairs for an hour or so at a time. It is easy to see that a result

could be fidgeting and getting up and walking around when the rest of the class is

supposed to be sitting down and working at some uninspiring, academic task. Such
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conduct could lead teachers to regard the children involved as being disruptive or

disobedient.

A tendency to move about and exercise the body would hardly be improved by

the onset of puberty, which occurs on average a year earlier in black children than

in white (Herman-Giddens et al, 2012). That after the onset of puberty, black

youths usually have more testosterone circulating in their bloodstream than white

boys (Richard et al, 2014) might also have the effect of exacerbating any

inclination both to engage in physical activity and also challenge authority. In the

United States, it has been observed that higher levels of testosterone in inmates of

the prison system correlate to increased incidents of confrontations between such

prisoners and guards at the prison (Dabbs et al, 1995) These three things, the

parental attitude to school, early gross motor development and puberty might

work together to make black pupils more at hazard of failing academically than

other ethnicities.

In Britain at one time, there was a tradition of educating boys at separate

schools from girls. It is perhaps a pity that such a system could not be brought

back, for it would certainly enable an interesting experiment to be carried out.

What if parents were persuaded to work with schools and encourage their children

to do as they were told? At the same time, schools for boys could institute a new

regime in which classes were shorter and breaks for physical exercise were longer?

It might mean extending the school day a little, but perhaps restless, teenage boys

of all colours would find that they were more able to sit still and get on with their

work, since such bursts of concentration would be shorter and interspersed

perhaps with kicking balls about and other physical activity. It should not be
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beyond the wit of educationalists to come up with a programme of this kind and

see if it changed the atmosphere of the classroom.

I can see no disadvantages, and many possible advantages, in trying to put

together some experimental variations of the traditional structure of the school

day and trying them out. Girls might benefit too from the adoption of different

routines and perhaps more physical activity. There might even be a benefit in

reducing the juvenile obesity about which so many people are concerned. There

can be no doubt that unless bold and innovative schemes are devised, then the so-

called attainment gap is liable to widen further in coming years.

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Chapter 6

The Problem of anti-racism

We have in this book looked in some detail at the origins of humanity and of

racism. A close examination has been made too of the modern idea of anti-racism.

It might be helpful to draw together the threads relating to anti-racism which have

been outlined across different chapters and place them all together in one place.

Four chief points have been made. These are that any increase in fairness for one

ethnicity results as a matter of course in a corresponding increase in unfairness for

another group; the fact that anti-racism now uses the tools of traditional racism to

achieve its ends; that real science and research are ignored; and that much of the

discourse on the subject tends to create resentment and a victim mentality among

some minority groups.

Specific cases have shown how the supposed desire to make some company or

public body more inclusive leads to the taking of steps to ensure that it ‘reflects

the community’. Invariably, this is a coded reference to increasing the number of

black employees, which can of course only be achieved by reducing the number of

white people working in the organisation or employing fewer staff of Asian or

Jewish heritage. This is done even if those against whom such tactics are used are

better qualified than the black people who will be brought in. Examples of this

were given, such as the ‘race norming’ used in assessing applications for jobs in

the United States and also the determination of the British bank Lloyds to increase

the number of black staff at management level.

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This inequitable process operates too at institutions of higher education. The

admissions procedure at both Harvard and Yale universities were looked at in

Chapter 3 of the second section of this book, Defending the Dogma, and we saw

too the way in which what are known in Britain as contextual offers are made to

students hoping to study medicine or gain places at the most highly regarded

universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. Increasing arbitrarily the number from

one population must inevitably result in reducing those from other populations.

That which is fair to people of African origin often ends in being unfair to people

whose families come from Asia.

That the very people ostensibly dedicated to fighting against any and every

manifestation of racism should be using the time-honoured, traditional,

discredited and unpleasant theories and methods of racial discrimination is a

surprising and unwelcome development. We saw the revival of the so-called ‘one

drop rule’, which holds that any apparently white person with a single black

ancestor, no matter how far in the past, should be considered black. It was

observed that England’s Queen Charlotte has on these grounds been declared black

by some dedicated anti-racists, because she might possibly have had a black

forebear, some 500 years before her birth. This same method has been used to

show that Queen Victoria should properly be regarded as mixed race, rather than

white.

The idea of quotas for minorities hoping to study at certain universities has

been revived in the United States of course, to the detriment of Asian-Americans

and, as if this were not bad enough, we have seen the return of Nazi racial

‘science’ in that skulls are now being measured with callipers to decide whether

they have any traces of ancestry other than white European. This, like the
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assertion that Queen Charlotte was black, is being done in order to prove, at least

to the satisfaction of the ill-informed and gullible, that Britain has for the whole of

its history been inhabited by significant numbers of people from sub-Saharan

Africa.

The practice of craniometry, the measuring of different parts of the face and

skull with a view to determining ancestry and ethnicity, was built into a

pseudoscience that was especially popular with the Nazis. The breadth of the skull

might be measured and then divided by the length, thus yielding a number which

was said to be the cephalic index. This figure supposedly enable one to distinguish

between the skulls of different ethnic groups. Although the practice fell into

disrepute after the end of the Second World War and became viewed as useless

from a scientific point of view, it has been revived as a way of claiming that

various ancient skeletons found in Europe belong to Africans. The object of the

exercise is to prove that Europe has never been the exclusive domain of white

people and has always been a diverse and multicultural region.

If the return of craniometry in the cause of anti-racism raises eyebrows, then

the suggestion that the establishment of segregated schools for black children

might be a desirable move is likely to provoke a gasp of disbelief. However, this

too is an idea being mooted (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). It is said by some black

militants that this would enable black pupils to flourish, by being immersed in a

curriculum more suited to their needs and full of black role-models to whom they

would be better able to relate than the white presidents and kings and queens

whom they are currently compelled to study in history lessons. It need hardly be

said that few people, other than fanatical devotees of Critical Race Theory, find

this an attractive prospect.

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Another difficulty with those espousing the cause of anti-racism in the twenty-

first century is that there appears to the unbiased observer to be a marked

reluctance to take into account any new evidence which might contradict or even

merely interfere with the ideology which motivates them. Having propounded as

axiomatic the assertion that race is nothing more than a social construct, anything

emerging from the fields of psychology, archaeology or genetics which runs

counter to this idea is rejected as dangerous and likely to inflame racial tensions.

Another way of putting this would of course be to describe anti-racism as practiced

in the West as a cult or religion, rather than a rationally held belief-system. This

can make life difficult when theory clashes with the reality of the external world.

We saw how this happened with the efforts of President Carter’s administration in

the United States in the 1970s. It is easy enough to come up with a scheme which

will bamboozle employers into taking on workers who are not up to the job, simply

because they have dark skins, but in the long run this simply serves to confirm pre-

existing prejudices.

More recently, evidence is emerging from the field of genetics which appears to

indicate measurable differences between individuals of differing ethnicities. One

of these differences is the risk factors for developing schizophrenia. Because for so

many years the supposed misdiagnosis of black people in Britain and America as

having mental illnesses has been attributed to racism on the part of white

psychiatrists, it would require a paradigm shift for many liberals now to concede

that there could be a biological reason why a higher proportion of black people are

diagnosed with psychoses; that is that they might be constitutionally more prone

to developing mental health problems than people of white, European heritage.

The discovery that it is possible accurately to predict academic achievement in

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life, simply by examining an individual’s genetic profile is also a development the

full implications of which have yet to be weighed. Let us explore this idea a little.

There is a very real danger in modern, western society of allowing ideology

to trump science and the prognosis when that happens is invariably gloomy. In the

introduction we glanced briefly at the idea of Lysenkoism; a thoroughly discredited

theory of evolution much favoured by the Soviet Union in the later years of Stalin’s

rule. Trofim Lysenko was a Ukrainian biologist who believed that he could increase

the yield of crops by applying Marxist principles to farming. He did not accept the

existence of genes and thought that characteristics acquired by an animal or plant

during its life could then be passed on to descendants; a variation of the

discredited idea known as Lamarckism. Some of Lysenko’s ideas were in strict

keeping with the political theories which ruled in Stalin’s Russia, but proved

ruinous when applied to agriculture. For instance, as his influence grew he insisted

that farmers plant seeds of the same type far more closely together than was

usually the practice. His rationale was that as these seeds were of the same

‘class’, they would not compete for nutrients or space but work cooperatively in

the way that members of the same social class, such as the proletariat, were

assumed to do (Grant, 2007). It need hardly be said that these applications of

social and political theory to the natural world did not end well. After the death of

Stalin, Lysenko’s crank theories were abandoned in the Soviet Union but then

picked up by Mao Tse Tung in China, where they resulted in a dreadful famine in

the late 1950s. How does all this relate to the modern world? One situation in

Britain illustrates perfectly what is happening, especially when viewed in light of

new developments in the study of genetics.

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In January 2021 it was announced in Britain that the Mental Health Act 1983

was to be changed, partly because of the disproportionate number of black people

affected by it. Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock said that the

proposed changes, outlined in the Reforming the Mental Health Act White Paper,

would,

give people more autonomy over their care and will tackle disparities for all

who access services, in particular for people from minority ethnic

backgrounds.

The reference to people to ‘people from minority ethnic backgrounds’ was to do

with black people.

People of black Caribbean heritage in the United Kingdom are nine times as

likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia as white people (Pinto, Ashworth and

Jones, 2008). Those of black African origin are six times as likely to receive such a

diagnosis. Britain’s Mental Health Act makes provision for people to be detained

compulsorily in a psychiatric hospital if they are a danger to themselves or others.

This is commonly known as being ‘sectioned’; alluding to the relevant section of

the act under which this action is taken. It had long been noticed that black

people were more likely to be sectioned than white people. They are four times as

likely to be sectioned and ten times more likely to be the subject of a Community

Treatment Order, whereby they live outside a hospital but are still subject to

compulsory treatment. The same phenomenon has been observed in the United

States (Schwarz & Blankenship, 2014).

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The reason for the large number of black people being detained or compelled

to receive treatment under the Mental Health Act is usually said to be because of

cultural differences. Caribbeans, for instance, might use more florid and

extravagant language to express their feelings and intentions. When a white person

might say something along the lines of, ‘I could kill him!’, which is recognised at

once as a meaningless, idiomatic expression of irritation, black Caribbeans

sometimes say such things as, ‘I’m going to torch that man’s car!’ or ‘I’ll stab him

up!’. These no more show an intention to harm somebody or cause damage than

more traditional English phrases such as ‘I could murder...’ or ‘I feel like

strangling...’, but it is claimed that psychiatrists, who tend to be middle-class

white people, misinterpret black people and too readily take literally what they

say.

There is almost certainly something in the idea that doctor and patient are

sometimes talking at cross-purposes when an assessment under the Mental Health

Act is made and national or cultural differences might very well exacerbate what

would otherwise be a minor misunderstanding. This is not the whole picture

though. Schizophrenia is, at least partially, a genetic disorder. That is to say a

genetic disposition or risk might exist and the disease itself develop under certain

circumstances which are related to the environment. There is no one gene which

tells scientists if a person will develop schizophrenia, it is not like having blue

eyes. Instead, there are many weak genetic markers, the more of which are

present, the more likely will it be that an individual will ultimately have

schizophrenia. This is known as the polygenic risk score or PRS for short.

In 2018 the journal Psychiatric Genetics published a paper which revealed that

the PRS for schizophrenia for those of African origin was very much higher than it
 376

was for white people from Europe or North America. So great was the difference

between the PRS for different ancestral groups, that in the case of Africans and

Europeans, they hardly even overlapped (Curtis, 2018). There was some doubt as

to how best to interpret these results. It is not necessary to go too deeply into the

pros and cons of the argument, the fact remains that the genetic heritage of black

people show different levels of risk for schizophrenia than white people have. This

may well shed light on why schizophrenia is apparently found more frequently in

Britain and the United States among black people than white. It may not be the

whole explanation, but is almost certainly a part of it.

When the British Health Secretary said publicly that he wished to, ‘tackle

disparities for all who access services, in particular for people from minority ethnic

backgrounds.’ he was hinting broadly that he wanted to see an end to such

‘disparities’. Ideally, black people and those of South Asian origin would be

detained against their will in psychiatric hospitals at precisely the same rate as

white people. This would be a kind of racial balancing. If five % of a city’s

population are black, then no more than five % of them should end up being

‘sectioned’ and not the 20 % which is currently the case. The consequence of

adhering to an ideological desire to reform mental health, rather than one driven

by science, is likely to be unfortunate. The ill-effects will not be as catastrophic as

when the Chinese government adopted Lysenkoism in the 1950s, it will not lead to

millions of deaths, but almost without a doubt some people will die needlessly.

Once psychiatrists and nurses are made aware that there is a drive to reduce

the number of black people being detained under the Mental Health Act, they will

become reluctant to section any black people. No health authority wishes to be

thought of as institutionally racist and the word will go out to avoid, where
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humanly possible, increasing the number of black people being held in hospitals or

treated compulsorily in the community. Murders committed by those suffering

from psychosis are mercifully rare, but when they are committed it is often by

those with paranoid schizophrenia. If, for political and ideological purposes, there

is pressure not to detain this person or that because he or she belong to some

group, especially a group with an increased propensity to schizophrenia, then it is

a racing certainty that at least one such person released against the wishes of a

psychiatrist but to fulfil some quota, will go off and kill somebody. It is a recipe

for disaster. It is what happens when ideology dictates policy, rather than science.

Some of the flaws in modern anti-racism as outlined above may perhaps be

ignored. Even if it is true that the doctrine as practiced by its adherents today

does indeed rely upon the methods of old-style racism, this might be no more than

a curiosity with no practical effect on the world. That the followers of this

particular theory also choose to ignore modern research is true of many other

fields where people cling to outdated ideas. Seeing the paradigm which you have

followed for years being overturned is seldom a comfortable experience. Even the

fact that campaigns to ensure that this or that body ‘reflects the community’ may

be harmless enough. After all, we live in an unfair society and it is not likely to

grow noticeably more just and equitable in the near future, even if we managed to

prevent the unfairness of quota systems which militate against the interest of

white people or those of Asian origin.

It is the final current running through anti-racism which is really liable to cause

problems for entire nations in the not-too-distant future. This is the creation of a

permanently discontented section of society who have been indoctrinated into

thinking that they have for centuries been systematically cheated out of things
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which rightfully belong to them. Since this is happening contemporaneously with a

growing feeling among a fairly substantial part of the majority population that

they too are being discriminated against, it is not hard to see that the stage is set

for serious difficulties in the near future.

If one constantly tells a community that they have received a raw deal and

deprived of their rights, then it is hard to see how this can fail to inculcate in them

a sense of grievance. It would not be in the least surprising if they acquired a

pervasive feeling that they were the victims of sharp practice and entitled to some

recompense for the shabby way in which they had been treated. This might take

the form of monetary compensation or special consideration when applying for

jobs or university places. After being systematically overlooked and side-lined for

hundreds of years, surely it would be only right if they were now allowed to take

their rightful place alongside all those of European and Asian heritage who have

done so well out of a corrupt and racist society? It is this feeling which lays behind

growing demands for compensation from present-day western governments for the

historic evils of slavery and colonialism. In Britain, such a bill is about to be

presented to the government by the former colony of Jamaica and will be for

billions of pounds (Reuters, 2021). There are growing demands in the United States

for reparations to be paid to Africa-Americans for the injustice which their distant

ancestors suffered when taken forcibly from Africa and transported across the

Atlantic Ocean (Guardian,2021).

Readers are invited to conduct a little thought-experiment. Imagine, if you

will, that a decision is made to pay compensations to those African-Americans

whose forebears were brought to the country centuries earlier. What kind of

amount might we be thinking of for each person? One suggestion has been that
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every black American might be owed $267,000 (ABC News, 2020). Two

impoverished families live side by side, one black and the other white. The black

family, consisting of a man and woman and their two children are suddenly given

$1,068,000. Overnight, they become millionaires. Their neighbours, who are every

bit as short of money as the black family were until they received their

‘reparations’, get nothing. They have what is popularly termed ‘white privilege’

and thus belong to the class of oppressors and slave owners. One wonders what

effect this hypothetical situation would have upon this white family and others like

them. Would they see it as an act of justice that every black person in the country

were to be given over a quarter of a million dollars? One suspects not. Far more

likely is that such largesse on the part of the government would cause fury and

resentment; both against their government and also those families who had

overnight been transformed into millionaires. It would, at the very least, hardly be

likely to improve race relations in the United States.

It must also be borne in mind that many white families have ancestors who

were exploited for centuries in mines and mills, building sites and factories, all for

the benefit of a handful of landlords and wealthy employers. A lot of impoverished

white people have been systematically robbed of the fruits of their labour to no

less an extent than the average black person. This is, regrettably, the nature of

society. Black people are not uniquely entitled to be compensated for the

inequalities which are an integral part of the capitalist systems in countries such as

Britain and the United States.

Always bearing mind what was said earlier in this chapter about being

scrupulous to avoid any discrimination against anybody on the grounds of race, skin

colour or ethnicity, what would be the practical consequences of ditching our

 380

anxieties about the proportions of black people in various settings; whether on the

sports field or in board rooms and prisons? What would happen if we forgot about

reparations and slavery, dropped the current obsession with the evils of

colonialism and allowed everybody to rise or fall to their natural level, without

apportioning blame when some groups secured fewer jobs in the boardroom or

places at the best universities? The benefits would be immense. The current

ideology, which has been called the equalitarian dogma, puts forward the idea

strongly that there are no inherent differences between any ethnic groups in

intelligence or behaviour. This means that if a larger number of black youths are

arrested for violent crime or disorderly behaviour, it must be that the police are

persecuting them. This mindset creates a sense of simmering grievance which

increases the chance or friction with the police in the future. This feeling of being

picked on gives many young black people a permanent sense of alienation from

mainstream society; a feeling encouraged by prevailing ideologies such as Critical

Race Theory. A febrile preoccupation with ethnicity and skin colour has grown out

of this unhealthy obsession. It contaminates and befouls every aspect of the lives

of black people in the West, having an especially detrimental effect upon young

people.

Throughout this book we have looked at academic underachievement of black

people in the educational system both in America and Britain. It has been

speculated that some of this may be caused by biological factors over which

individuals have no control, but one cause of the failure is definitely avoidable and

dismantling the officially sanctioned ‘anti-racist’ ideology would go some way to

remedying this part of the problem. In the last chapter we looked at the conflict

and tension which all too frequently exists between black youngsters and white
 381

authority figures; whether teachers, researchers or police officers. It was seen that

black teenagers were, according to an experiment conducted into the delaying of

gratification, less apt to trust a white academic researcher than they were a white

one (Strickland, 1972). This was in the United States. In Britain, more recently, we

learned of a black parent ready to justify and condone vandalism and arson

involving her children’s school because of supposed insensitivity to her family’s

ethnicity (Guardian, 2021). Attitudes like these are accessible to change and have

little or nothing to do with biology.

The sense of having a grudge against white figures of authority, white society in

general and indeed white people themselves, has been built up over decades and

is now reaching its zenith. Reversing such a trend will not be easy, but unless we

wish to see permanently fragmented societies in which white people and black are

always mistrustful and resentful of each other, then the attempt must be tried.

The best beginning would be for everybody to be open about current scientific

research and the implications it has for things like employment and education. This

book is, it is hoped, may be the opening shot in a campaign aimed at discovering

which aspects of ethnicity are fixed and immutable and which might be changed by

an alteration of the perspective of both black people and white.

It is time to end this exploration of humanity’s origins. We finish with an

imaginative narrative which describes the roots of European civilisation and then

briefly speculates upon the future. All such accounts of prehistoric history are of

course bound to be inaccurate in one way of another; they are all of them modern

myths based upon limited information. This is the case no less for the latest article

in Scientific American, than it is for popular novels such as The Clan of the Cave

Bear. They will both alike look foolish and inaccurate to historians of the future.
 382

The brief piece which concludes this book may best be thought of as a legend,

although it is one perfectly in keeping with all that is currently known of the

events which saw the extinction of the Neanderthals and the rise of our own,

hybrid species.
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Chapter 7

The Legend of Homo sapiens +

Once upon a time, long ago, there lived on Earth not one kind of human, but four.

One of these groups was brutish and ape-like, but the others were rather like us,

although they were not able to do much of any great interest. One type of human

was able to make crude clothes out of animal skins and they decorated themselves

with feathers and beads made from shells. They had a special liking for the

feathers of eagles and used them to indicate status, rather as some tribes of native

Americans once did. These people also made rudimentary, geometric patterns by

scratching rocks or painting a few straight lines on the walls of caves. Deep within

these caves they built shrines and enacted rituals when they buried their dead,

which suggests the first glimmerings of religion were stirring within them. Today,

we know those men and women as the Neanderthals. They occupied the whole of

what would one day be Europe, as well as a large part of Asia.

In the continent we now call Africa, were other people with similar abilities,

who had reached about the same technological level as the people living in

Europe. This population are commonly known today by the Latin name of Homo

sapiens. It is possible, but by no means certain, that the glacially slow

technological and cultural progress made by those in Africa and others in Europe

and Asia, might one day have led to civilisation. New developments though took

place on a timescale measured in hundreds of thousands of years and it is equally

likely that these primitive humans would, over the course of many millennia, have

remained at the same level or even regressed. One of their forebears, the species
 384

called Homo erectus, continued to use the same kind of stone tool, with no

improvement, for a staggering period of over a million years. There was nothing

inevitable or even especially likely about any of these species eventually emerging

as sentient beings like modern humans. Then, roughly 50,000 years ago, something

remarkable happened.

Groups of explorers in search of food, and perhaps also adventure, left Africa,

followed the coast and found themselves in a new territory, which was inhabited

by strange people; barely recognisable to them as being human. All the same, they

traded with these peculiar individuals and also fought with them at other times.

Something else happened too. Although the women did not look anything much like

their own mothers and daughters, some young men took lovers from these new and

unfamiliar tribes; often by force and at other times because despite the barrier of

mutual incomprehensibility, some spark of attraction was kindled. Women from

the newcomers also had liaisons with those they met in the land in which they

were now making their home, and in the course of time, babies were born who

shared half their characteristics with each of their parents.

It was obvious that the children born from this first generation of mixed

couplings were special. They were sharper, brighter, more adventurous and more

daring than either of the groups from whom they had sprung. They were natural

leaders, having more and better ideas than any of their contemporaries. Perhaps

there was some little prejudice against them to begin with, as is not uncommonly

the case with children of mixed heritage, but by the time they had grown to

maturity their capabilities were so glaringly plain that they acceded, almost as a

matter of course, to the leadership of their various families and clans. Not that

this was sufficient to satisfy their ambitions. These were men and women who
 385

wanted new and different things. They were not content to stay in one place,

doing things in the same way that they had been done for generations; in fact for

thousands, tens of thousands of generations.

After centuries of increasingly frequent interbreeding, groups of these hybrids,

led by the most intelligent and resourceful, began spreading out north, east and

west from what is now the Middle East. They carried with them a vital genetic

inheritance, which they would pass down to their own children. Not all the

characteristics which had been acquired through mating were of use to them. The

shape of the skull, proportions of the body and so on were of no importance and as

the hybrids started to rely more on their own tribes for sexual partners, so those

outward Neanderthal traits slowly faded, until only a small part of the genome of

the original inhabitants of that part of the world was retained. Most vital were two

genes which gave an enhanced ability to the brain.

Within a few thousand years, the blink of an eye, compared with the time scale to

which past changes had been measured, the hybrids had become transformed into

what was almost a new species. The difference between this emergent breed and

those which had gone before was breath-taking. Looking at Illustration 21, we can

see the sort of art produced by the Homo sapiens before they left Africa. These

are nothing more than doodles, consisting of scratches which signify little other

than a vague awareness of the concept of symmetry. In what will one day become

Europe, the Neanderthals who lived there before the coming of the hybrids were

also producing nothing more than similar random scratches and the occasional

pattern of straight lines on the wall of a cave.

 386

21. Red ochre from Blomberg cave

Within a few years of the arrival of what we might as well call Homo sapiens +

in Europe, works of art like that seen in Illustration 22 were being crafted.

It is obvious that whoever made this strange object was quite simply on a different

intellectual plane from those who had gone before. For one thing, this figure,

known as the lion man, is representative, rather than merely decorative. It is

meant to portray something. Not only that, it is meant to show us something not in

the real world, but a figure which existed only in the mind of the creator. Neither

he, or she, had ever seen a man with the head of a lion; it had been imagined and

then the pure thought had somehow been made manifest for all to see. This

achievement, showing in solid form an image which had been conjured up in

another person’s mind, showed the immeasurable gulf which separated Homo

sapiens + from their ancestors.

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22. The Lowenmensch (lion-man)

The new breed of humans took the world by storm and, as they spread out

across Asia and Europe, innovation and invention became their hallmark. They

began building permanent homes, growing crops, and before long the stage was set

for the rise to civilisation. The aboriginal inhabitants of the continents which they

invaded were wholly unable to compete with the incomers. Those older species,
 388

whom we know today as the Neanderthals and Homo erectus, found themselves

outclassed on all levels and faded quietly away.

The human population which had stayed behind in Africa simply stagnated.

Over the next fifty thousand years, in which Homo sapiens + moved from the stone

age to the Industrial Revolution, with its steam engines, blast furnaces and

telegraphs, the root stock of modern humanity, the original Homo sapiens,

remained for the most part in the Stone Age, where they had been when those

first explorers entered the Middle East and encountered for the first time their

Neanderthal cousins.

It does not take a very extensive grasp of history to see that no human

invention since the stone hand axe and, possibly the bone harpoon for fishing,

originated in Africa. The harpoon, which might first have been devised in Africa,

has been around for over 35,000 years. Since that time, nothing more has been

invented by the original Homo sapiens in their homeland. Everything, from the

wheeled cart and written word to jet planes and smartphones has been invented

by those whose origins lie in Europe; the groups who we have called Homo sapiens

+. The population of unadulterated Homo sapiens which has lived in Africa for

perhaps as long as two hundred thousand years has not come up with any new

ideas since the Stone Age.

The matter is not quite as simple as this, because of course those Neanderthal

genes are found not only in Europe, but across the whole of Asia, Australasia and

the Americas too. What is it which marks Europe out as the cultural and

technological powerhouse which has, for the last 40,000 years or so, provided the

driving force for the advance of civilisation? After all, the indigenous inhabitants of

China and Papua New Guinea also have Neanderthal DNA. The idea of those living
 389

in the jungles of New Guinea coming up with the idea of calculus or quantum

computers is an improbable one and yet they have more Neanderthal genes than

people in Europe.

Those whose origin lies in Asia and Australasia have something else of course,

besides their Neanderthal ancestry. They also have another lot of genes from an

archaic human species which are wholly lacking in Europeans. In an earlier

chapter, we looked at the cousins of the Neanderthals who are now known as the

Denisovans. The Denisovans were very widespread across Asia, ranging from Siberia

and Tibet in the north, all the way down to Indonesia. Those Homo sapiens

emerging from Africa 50,000 years ago, picked up Neanderthal genes in the Middle

East, before heading off in all directions. Naturally enough, as they moved into

Europe, they encountered only more Neanderthals, but those who headed east and

north-east found themselves entering territory occupied by the Denisovans. So it

was that after having interbred for generations with the Neanderthals, these bands

then moved into Asia and began repeating the process with the Denisovans.

For some reason, the combination of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes did not

appear to be so advantageous as Neanderthal genes alone. Neither the Chinese nor

the Indians or inhabitants of Indonesia seemed to have the drive for innovation and

exploration possessed by the Europeans, who lacked this Denisovan inheritance.

The more Denisovan DNA which was inherited, the less resourceful and innovative

seemed to be the populations.

The varying combinations and proportions of DNA from the archaic human

species appears to have affected ethnic groups in certain ways. People from East

Asia, who inherited a good deal more Neanderthal DNA than those in Europe,

leavened with small quantities of Denisovan genes, tend to score higher in

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intelligence tests that Europeans and to do very well academically. There is very

little history though of original inventions in that part of the world. The Chinese,

Taiwanese, Japanese and Koreans are excellent at developing and improving other

people’s inventions and finding ways of mass producing them more quickly and

cheaper, but they are do not have a very extensive history of producing new ideas

for themselves. Apart from gunpowder and paper, most people would be hard-

pressed to name a single Chinese invention. Even when such inventions did occur,

they were not exploited for any useful purpose. Magnetic compasses appeared in

China before they did in Europe, but were used only for the pseudoscience of Feng

Shui, rather than for maritime navigation, as they were in Europe. The nations of

East Asia are without doubt good at copying ideas such as transistor radios and

mobile telephones, and even improving upon them, but not coming up with the

original concepts. This may be connected with the way in which the differing

genetic amounts of DNA which those from East Asia have, compared with

Europeans.

There can be no doubt that the modern world is almost entirely a creation of

European civilisation, culture and technology. It would perhaps be more accurate

to say, European and Middle Eastern, because of course Jews and Arabs also seem

capable of that quality of questing and original thought which is such a prominent

historical feature of Europeans. We reflect that Arabs and Jews too are the

recipients only of Neanderthal DNA and that, like Europeans, this is not modified

or affected by the presence of Denisovan genes.

This then, in brief, is the story of the rise of Homo sapiens +; the people who

brought civilisation, science and almost everything which makes our lives worth

living to the rest of the world. Without Europeans, the world we know today would
 391

be scarcely recognisable. Even so basic a thing as the wheel did not appear in the

original homeland of Homo sapiens and certainly such concepts as reading, writing

and printing were never devised there. This is a matter for neither pride nor

dismay. It is simply how evolution has worked to bring one population to the fore.

So much for the first wave of Homo sapiens to leave Africa and what happened

as a consequence over the next 50,000 years or so. It is of course only in retrospect

that we are able to understand the course of events over this vast length of time.

We may be on the cusp now of a similarly momentous time; namely the emergence

of a second wave of Homo sapiens leaving Africa and settling in Europe. What this

will mean in the long run is quite impossible to guess. Indeed, it might be

thousands of years before the full implications of what is now happening will be

properly assessed and understood.

After those pioneering emigrants moved into the Middle East and began mating

with the Neanderthals whom they found there, the great majority of those living in

Africa were content to remain in that continent. For the next 50,000 years, they

simply stayed in their ancestral homeland, mating only with each other and not

venturing out again into the rest of the world. This was the state of play when the

descendants of that first wave to leave Africa returned from Europe in the

phenomenon which we have come to know as colonialism. This was a one-way

process; Europeans entered and left Africa at will, but the Africans remained

where they were. Largely due to the medical knowledge which the Europeans

brought with them, together with improvements in agriculture, the building of

cities and so on, the population of Africa has soared in the last century.

In 1955 there were roughly 250 million people in Africa. Today, six times as

many live there. This number is forecast to double in the next 30 years. There are
 392

signs that many of those living in Africa wish to leave and move to Europe. This is

likely to alter the ethnic composition of that continent. The proportion of Homo

sapiens+ in Europe was, for 40,000 or 50,000 years 100 %. Now, it is declining as

more and more of the ordinary Homo sapiens from Africa move into the area.

Presumably, there will in the course of time be large scale mating between the

two groups, just as there was when the first wave of Homo sapiens moved out of

Africa. It is very difficult to predict what the consequences of this new movement

are likely to be in the long term. A tentative guess though suggests two main

possibilities.

One way of looking at the situation which might develop over the next few

centuries is that the influx of Africans will have a detrimental effect upon the

distinct culture of Europe and that combined with other waves of immigration, will

cause Europe to slowly sink into oblivion, perhaps being eclipsed by rising

industrialised nations like India or China. Instead of being the powerhouse for new

ideas, Europe will degenerate and become similar to some of the less salubrious

parts of the Third World. Those who fear this outcome are often motivated

subconsciously by the ancient and deep-seated anxiety about what was once

known as miscegenation; that is to say the mating of black people and white.

There is another way of looking at things though.

It is a pretty fair bet that the Neanderthals did not exactly welcome the waves

of newcomers from Africa when they arrived first in the Middle East and later in

Europe. After all, they were doing very nicely and had been living quite happily in

these regions for hundreds of thousands of years. What need did they have of

others entering their territory with new ideas and different languages; people who

did not even look like them? Of course, from our perspective, at a distance of
 393

50,000 years, we can see that that influx of Homo sapiens from Africa was

precisely what was needed to kickstart civilisation. The interbreeding of

Neanderthals with the new species was a recipe for success. It was the making of

Europe and also, ultimately, of the modern world in which we live. It might be that

this second wave out of Africa is just what Europe desperately needs.

In the last century or so, Europe has lost its lead in world affairs. It has been

overtaken by America, with China also a rising world power. Looked at in that

sense, Europe has been declining in importance and is essentially becoming a

backwater, with less and less influence in the world. It might be viewed in a

similar light to the Roman Empire, as it slid into decadence in the early centuries

of the Christian Era. From this reading of the case, Europe needs something to

revitalise it and give it new impetus. Otherwise, it will continue to become less

and less relevant as the world changes and other great powers arise, chiefly in the

East but also perhaps in South America.

Although it might seem improbable, it is not beyond the realms of possibility

that the original Homo sapiens now arriving in Europe in ever-increasing numbers

will provide a boost, a sudden flood of new genes. Perhaps after a few centuries or

a thousand years of mating with the human population in Europe, a new group will

emerge, just as Homo sapiens+ were the unexpected result of that first wave out

of Africa. Nobody alive today will see this, but it gives us perhaps some hope for

the future. Those living in Europe today are no more likely to welcome disruption

to their cosy and familiar ways than were their Neanderthal ancestors, of course,

but if the history of the human race has any lesson for us it this; that hominids are

a group which constantly mutates and changes. Although we may not live to see it,
 394

the story of humanity is likely to continue in new and unexpected directions, long

after we ourselves are gone and forgotten.

 395

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