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During the pandemic, I watched the news with the alarming rates of infections and deaths from COVID 19 affecting African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans disproportionately. Why? Are these groups genetically predisposed? Are they more exposed because of their jobs of the “essential worker status”? Are they affected more because of the food desert climate they inhabit? Is it because of the lack of medical facilities within their neighborhoods? So it is either socioeconomic or genetic, but it became clear that socioeconomic inequalities were the dominant factor.

The fundamental biological fact is that genetic variability among humans is less than any other species on earth and is approximate 0.1 per cent. Also, there are more DNA variations between black Africans than between black Africans and white Europeans. The popular superficial characteristics that define race, e.g. hair texture, skin color and facial features, only represent a few of the thousands of traits that define us as a species. These superficial traits are tied to migratory patterns, population histories and gene to environment interactions. Therefore complete genetic segmentation of populations is complex and non-discrete, and on a gradient.

These scientific facts irrevocably end the fallacy of race as biological but simply a political-economic-social construct. But through time, geneticists, archaeologists and anthropologists either willfully or naively “mold” genetic data to justify the idea of racial biodiversity. Even clear-eyed antiracist scientists often fall into the trap of studying genetic data and end up actualizing such racial differences. For example, highly-educated scientists in academia in Europe, the US and India hold on to biased old ideologies of racialized genetic pre-determination despite lack of biological evidence for racial difference in humans. The scientific method is simply corrupted as these scientists start with illogical conclusions of the existence of a racial hierarchy of biological racial differences and walk backwards into theory, experiments, hypothesis and observations to validate their “prior racialized bias”. It is “subjective and mythologized” scientific inquiry; science in this frame is influenced by time, culture and place. It also goes against the scientific standard that “correlation is not causality”. These pseudoscientific beliefs have implications in today’s culture, medicine, science, education, religion, social policy and foreign relations.

Angela Saini writes a historical, personal, sociological and journalistic piece on the origins of the pseudoscientific concept of “race” and its resilience through time till today. She adds a tone of humorous-cynicism confronting fallacies in the logic of scientists, anthropologists and academics. The roots of the ideas of “race” ironically began in the “Age of Enlightenment”, prominently including Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm, Fredrich Hegel, which coincided with Europeans colonizing the world and particularly transporting enslaved Africans to the Western Hemisphere. It resorted to setting European civilization as the benchmark to define other non-Europeans. Colonialization, slavery, Holocaust, Jim Crow, apartheid and imperialism were, therefore, justifiable means of engagement in dealing with “nonwhites” since they were “biologically inferior” by their irrational European standards and pseudoscience. So, any civilization outside of “white” was seen as “savage or inferior” even though societies in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and America existed thousands of years ago with cultures, trade, religion, science, language, urbanization and governments.

Europeans met Native Americans, saw and were amazed by the advanced agriculture, bigger cities, gold, many subcultures, trade by barter based on needs, weak social hierarchy, non-taxation and simplified government structure. So who is truly a “savage”?

Race is wrongly defined as innate, genetic and biologically deterministic of certain groups, thereby deadening the truth of a “universal human race or Homo sapiens” but instead “predisposed traits within certain populations headed to fateful racial destiny”. “Socioeconomics”, “history”, “lifestyle”, and “nurture” are non-genetic casualties that are commonly willfully neglected in investigating differences within the human species.

The reductionist view of tying intelligence and behaviors to race and wealth of nations has been a tool to promote racial hierarchy through time. There is a choice of neglecting the consequences of colonialization, slavery, genocide, Jim Crow, apartheid and imperialism, which have caused non-white populations to have suffered rampant inequalities. This counters the argument of genetic inferiority. These pseudoscientific ideas led to the rise of KKK, Eugenics, Nazism, Pioneer Fund-Mankind Quarterly publications, Richard Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and political right-wing extremist movements. It is no surprise that people of European descent either directly or indirectly participate in the social ideology of “whiteness” based on the pseudoscientific notion of superior intelligence relative to others.

There is a thin wall separating the eugenics of pre-World War 2 from the genetics of Post World War 2. Even the scientifically respected field of genetics found its roots in Eugenics. Angela exposed the celebrated James Watson of the “double helix structure of DNA” discovery was a racist. The need for categorization resonating from non-human species research in works of Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin extended into human beings led to “scientific racism” then “eugenics and quietly rebranded into genetics. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science, a staple for eugenics research during the Nazi regime, was rebranded into Max Plank Society, the perfect example of this historical whitewashing. Otmar von Verschuer and his infamous diabolical protégé, Josef Mengele, were part of the Kaiser Wilhelm eugenics research group.

The horrid examples in the book about the cruelty that “Ota Benga” and “Sarartjie Baartman” faced is a testament to how the indoctrination of “superiority” made those white spectators become inhumane and vacuous entities akin to barbarism.

One comical part of the book was how “race” was expanded for superior racial talents to selectively pick “Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo and Da Vinci” to be of “Nordic descent” despite their origins from southern European ancestry, which had been stereotyped as “unintelligent”. Another ludicrous pseudoscientific claim on enslaved Africans called the “slavery hypertension hypothesis” from Clarence Grim suggests that Black Americans are genetically predisposed to retain more salt because of an accelerated natural selection process during the Middle Passage voyage. So salt-driven evolutionary process protected the surviving Africans on the ships. Still, it retrograded them into a medical predisposition for hypertension. It is beyond humorous. Race categorization is regressive and a terrible proxy for human variation in the space of medical research. Grouping people of different ethnicities into the race columns in conducting medical research by assuming genetic differences fail to account for dietary, socioeconomic and environmental underlying causes. For example, lumping Middle Easterners, North Africans and Europeans as “whites” or African Americans and Africans as “black” in studying patterns and prevalence of certain diseases renders such research highly flawed.

Race inherently can be reconstituted, expanded or even abandoned since it is tied to sociological framing rather than scientific facts. Race was solely built for “social hierarchy/caste system”. In human history, no civilization is dominant, but instead, it is tidally short-lived. Finally, we refuse to realize that humans are more ethnically mixed but “genetically singular” than the artificial walls of race.

My only critique of her book is that the racial hierarchy concept had its roots before the Age of Enlightenment. The Post Constantine era and dark to medieval times in Europe where rampant antisemitism and islamophobia was a function of “religious superiority” worked similarly to race. English church and state created laws calling for the surveillance, herding, incarceration, legal murder, and expulsion of English Jews. Muslims were seen as “subhumans and evil”, so their murder was justified. This racist principle also justified the Spanish Inquisition sanctioned by the church and Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand to “cleanse” Spain from “Muslims and Jews”. This “supremacist” ideology in conjunction with religious superiority and pursuit of economic imperialism was also used as a predicate for military invasion and/or Christian Crusade to claim/steal Jerusalem from the “heathens and subhumans who were seen as unchristian by the joint European amalgam of “Western Christendom” which includes the Holy Roman Empire, English Kingdom, Spanish Kingdom and other European mini kingdoms “.