Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science.
After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races.
If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela …
Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science.
After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races.
If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists.
At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.
It is my hope that you will never have to read this book, because the subject matter that it deals with is truly vile. However, sometimes you have to be around that one person who keeps suggesting that there's an essential difference between races. That is when you break out this book. This book clearly and methodically outlines the history of racism as well of the (lack of ) science surrounding race and genetics. It is a great guide not for debunking racists because racists tend not to care about facts, but for demonstrating the unreasonableness of it to others.
This is by no means a bad book, but it's very...pop history/criticism. It's going to be great for lots of people, and I'm glad Saini wrote it. But if you're already familiar with the history of eugenics or want a more scholarly take, this isn't the book for you.
A very important book, and it clearly makes the case not just that biological race does not exist, but that nevertheless science all too often still uses race as a category - leading not just to reinforcement of stereotypes but also junk science. And of course on top of that there has been a strong resurgence of fascism and the anti-intellectualism coming along with it. The book reads like a long journalistic article, I think it could have benefited from more editing to make the central points stand out more crisply from the narrative.
