Episode 47: Transcript

Episode: 47: The legacy of scientific racism

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and society. I'm Annalee Newitz, I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:09] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science. 

Annalee: [00:00:16] And in today's episode we're going to be talking about scientific racism, both how it gets expressed in the world of science and especially historically in science, but also where we see it in science fiction and we're very lucky to have special guest Angela Saini, whose new book is called Superior, The Return of Race Science. She is a science journalist in the UK. You might've seen her work in The Guardian. She's a presenter on BBC Radio and she's been fascinated for most of her career with the idea of how science has propped up the idea of race and where race kind of fits into the scientific project. So she'll be joining us to talk about that and her new book. So. All right, let's get started with the show.

[00:01:01] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:28] Annalee, what is the origin of scientific racism? How long has science been exploring this kind of obviously bogus idea of race?

Annalee: [00:01:37] Scientific racism, which is just a term for using science to validate racist ideas or prejudices, that's been going on since really the first examples of science becoming a real methodology. So, a place that's easy to trace it back to is the work of Carl Linnaeus, who invented the taxonomies we use for animals. He's the guy who categorized all life on earth using Latin terms. So the term Homo sapiens is actually something that Linnaeus coined, and so he's writing back in sort of the mid-18th century. And when he comes up with Homo sapiens as a category of life in his Systema naturae, which is his book of all of life categorized, he didn't think of Homo sapiens as a single species. He divided humans up into several categories.

[00:02:36] There was Homo sapiens europaeus, which is Europeans, Homo sapiens afer, Homo sapiens asiaticus and Homo sapiens americanus. He also had a couple of grab bag categories such as Homo sapiens ferus for feral children and Homo sapiens monstrosus for monstrous people, which in many ways just meant people who were disabled. For him, they were monsters.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:06] And he, he didn't really know about genes, but he thought that there were like categorized bold differences between these groups. 

Annalee: [00:03:11] Yeah, this is before genetics, so this is just when we're in the very earliest stages of understanding which animals and plants belong in which categories. So he's saying look, there's not just a random bunch of animals and plants across the planet. We can actually see how they're connected across space. We can see how different species are related to each other. And from the outset, this incredibly scientific system, which we still use today when we use Latin names for animals, we're using the Linnaean system. Built into this system is the idea that there are different kinds of humans and they're categorized by color and continent. 

[00:03:52] And he lined up those different subcategories of Homo sapiens with the humors, which were of course believed to be scientific at that time. 

Charlie Jane: [00:04:01] And these are liquids basically in your body, right? 

Annalee: [00:04:04] Yeah. Like blood and bile. And they cause you to have certain kinds of traits. So not surprisingly, he believed that the traits of Europeans were heroism and adventurousness. People who were African tended to be lazy and impulsive. And people who were Asian were governed by opinions rather than laws. Whereas he felt that Americans, which would have been indigenous Americans at that time were governed by customs. 

[00:04:38] So the idea was that, Europeans were the superior group who had discovered reason. And his ideas lead really right into Darwin's evolutionary theory. And of course, Darwin is working with Linnaean categories and he's trying to figure out not just the relatedness between species, but how did this relatedness evolve? What are the original species that we all kind of evolve from?

Charlie Jane: [00:05:04] Right. And of course, lots and lots of people use Darwin's theories to advance a racist agenda. But was Darwin actually invoking these racial categories himself? 

Annalee: [00:05:14] It's controversial, but yeah, I mean, he has certain moments in his work where he talks about the superiority of Europeans. It wasn't his main agenda. His main agenda was really just to say that humans evolved from a previous common ancestor with apes. His project was not a racist project. However, he wasn't against that idea and it just wasn't that. He wasn't super into it. And so later thinkers and contemporaries of Darwin took up his ideas and said, look, I mean, this explains why certain groups of people are one way and certain groups people are another way. And one of the big areas that other scientific racists who were using evolution, the kinds of traits they were interested in were intelligence. 

[00:06:05] And there was a contemporary of Darwin's named Samuel George Morton who invented something called craniometry, which is also known as skull reading basically. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:15] Oh, God.

Annalee: [00:06:15] And he had a theory that was incredibly popular and which you can actually see continuing up through even today, which is that different racial groups have different capacities for thought and that you could base your understanding of a sub species by measuring their skull, by looking at lumps on their heads. 

[00:06:37] At the time, this is mid-19th century. They're using it as a justification for slavery in the United States, but also for just in general for prejudices against particular groups. The other areas that scientific racists are really interested in other than intelligence have to do with strength and an idea of basically delayed gratification. Who’s able to obey the law instead of giving into their animalistic impulses. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:04] Ah, fuck.

Annalee: [00:07:04] And so, yeah. So I mean these are all things that we see a lot in science fiction. We see different aliens labeled as the smart aliens, the impulsive aliens, the strong aliens. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:16] Even more recently, the Klingons are like one way on the Vulcans are another and it…

Annalee: [00:07:21] Right. So we haven't let these ideas go. It's just that in the 19th century and early 20th century scientists, respected scientists, people at Harvard, were looking at these ideas and saying, oh, well we can see how different racial groups exhibit them. And, like I said, this is something that continues into our modern day. There's this idea that there's a distribution of intelligence between races. There's also an idea that persisted throughout the 20th century that African Americans are stronger than European Americans, which is why, for example, even now you'll see doctors more reluctant to give painkillers to African American patients or just more reluctant to treat them generally. 

[00:08:04] And partly that's just straight up racism. But partly it comes out of this very specific kind of scientific racism where in fact you can find medical textbooks from the mid-20th century actually saying, well because black people are stronger, they don't need as much medical help. And that was used to justify these kinds of situations where there just wouldn't be room at a hospital for black people because hospitals were segregated in the early 20th century. 

[00:08:28] So this is a kind of a corner of racism. There's the larger racist project and then scientific racism is kind of one corner of it, where you see science, which is supposed to be the method of rationality, being used to justify what are basically irrational prejudices. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:45] And meanwhile you've got the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century, which became very trendy among kind of scientifically-minded people who were not very smart but thought of themselves as scientifically-minded. You have all of this literature being produced in the early 20th century about the necessity of keeping the white people pure and avoiding contamination. Butt also this idea that there is, basically the concept of eugenics implies that there are good genes. That's kind of what it means and that we need to select for those genes as part of a project to kind of improve on evolution kind of in a way. 

[00:09:21] And you have a lot of science fiction in the 1930s and ‘40s which kind of deals with this in a somewhat approving manner, particularly The Lensman books have this whole thing. It turns out that the aliens, the Arisians have been doing a secret eugenics project to create the superior humans who turned out to be these five people are the sort of end results of that, the pinnacle of human evolution who can become Lensmen. 

[00:09:45] Olaf Stapledon deals with this in his books, The First and Last Men [Last and First Men] and Odd John, and then on the other side in the 1930s you have Aldous Huxley who is dealing with the idea of eugenics and people being selected for different traits or being bred for different traits in kind of test tubes in a more critical way in his book Brave New World.

[00:10:04] A lot of pop culture in the 1930s and ‘40s kind of advances the idea of eugenics in a kind of positive way, but then there's kind of a shift after World War II, especially after the defeat of the Nazis. 

Annalee: [00:10:16] I always think about X-Men in this context. 

Charlie Jane: [00:10:18] Right.

Annalee: [00:10:18] Like, how does that fit in? 

Charlie Jane: [00:10:20] I mean, I think that the X men are kind of advancing this idea in a different way. There's a whole trope that arises in the ‘60s and ‘70s with books like The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, but also with the X-Men comics of people who have… mutants basically, who have developed superior powers, who are being hunted and hated and mistreated by the normies. And it's sort of mostly aimed at people who feel like they're underappreciated and that their intelligence or their kind of special gifts are not being recognized by society. But there is kind of an undercurrent of these people are kind of the next step of evolution and you know the X-Men actually talk about being Homo superior, which does have kind of eugenic overtones to it.

Annalee: [00:11:03] I’d say it has completely eugenics overtones. And it's funny because it's, again, it's using the Linnaean system, right, to kind of talk about how there's this new species, which is better, probably better than the euros and the afers, and the asio, whatever those were.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:20] And the ferus and the…

Annalee: [00:11:22] But yeah, I don't know Homo sapiens ferus is totally my favorite subspecies. Wild children. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:26] It’s so upsetting. But anyway, yeah, so you have stuff like that where it's kind of still hinting at the idea that there is a superior branch of humanity that maybe it's not… the X-Men are very careful to include people of color, especially after the ‘70s, but it is this idea that there are superior people who have higher potential and that they're liable to be oppressed unless we kind of recognize their worth. 

[00:11:52] And you also have a lot of science fiction in the ‘60s and ‘70s, either stories where the Nazis won World War II. And so we witnessed the kind of worst aspects of eugenics. Or stories like, Star Trek had a string of stories starting with Khan who is basically eugenicist and ending with like the whole thing of Dr. Bashir and the question of whether Dr. Bashir ought to have been enhanced genetically. Star Trek kind of tries to critique that idea in various ways.

Annalee: [00:12:18] Oh yeah. I mean the Eugenics Wars are like a bad scene. That was a thing that happened because we had to stop eugenics basically. 

Charlie Jane: [00:12:25] Right.

Annalee: [00:12:25] Yeah. It's so interesting. I think the other place that we really see scientific racism coming up in science fiction and fantasy is really in the horror genre. And I was thinking about this a lot last night because I was watching A Discovery of Witches, which is a TV series about witches and vampires and other creatures who are, basically they're treated like a species that's dying out. And it's not, that's sort of the premise of the show. I'm not giving you a spoiler. The premis is, they're dying out. What's going on? Why is this happening? But it's very clear that the show is playing with these kind of Linnaean ideas that there's a Homo sapiens. But then there's these other kinds of Homo sapiens that have been around for a long time and that could suffer an extinction the same way a species would.

[00:13:16] And we see this also in a lot of other vampire stories, like the Underworld series where there's vampires and werewolves and there's all of this racial tension between the two of them. We see it in True Blood where the vampires are kind of another species. And we see it in a lot of science horror, like the movie Species for example, or Alien, where again, it's that kind of fear of what if there's another species, a Homo superior-type species that will knock us off the top of the food chain. Or off the top of our, pinnacle of greatness. And—

Charlie Jane: [00:13:53] It's, yeah, the fear of being replaced. 

Annalee: [00:13:56] It's the fear of being replaced. But what I would say that all of these kinds of stories have in common is playing with Darwin's ideas of evolution and playing with Linnaeus as ideas of what is a species. And they are really very much in a tradition of biology and evolution in their approach to how their monsters function. And so I think when you're looking for traces of scientific racism, and it's not just traces, when you're looking for that strong thread of scientific racism in a lot of contemporary work, the best places to look are… I shouldn't say the best places, but the places that tend to be stained by that tradition most are stories about, like you said, mutants that are kind of Homo sapiens superior. Or stories about monsters that are treated like other species. And as soon as you realize that those stories are kind of coming out of the racist Darwinian tradition, you start to hear the language people are using and realize oh my God, this really is borrowed from 19th century science and they really are playing, it's not just fantasy tropes. These are science tropes.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:07] Right. And one final thought is, and this is a whole other topic, but stories where magic is inherited, like the Harry Potter universe. 

Annalee: [00:15:14] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:14] The Harry Potter universe goes out of its way to sort of show that muggles should be treated as equals by the magic born or whatever, by the people who have inherited magic from their parents. But at the same time, they're not as good. Muggles kind of suck.

Annalee: [00:15:27] And I mean this was also the problem in Star Wars when they introduced the idea of midichlorians, which again, totally, it could be Carl Linnaeus coming up with that. If he'd known about genetics, you know what I mean? 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:40] Let’s go back in time.

Annalee: [00:15:40] Like you have been like Homo sapiens midichlorianus and that would have fit perfectly into his schema. So I think, yeah, anytime you start to hear this idea that, oh, there's another species, maybe it's superior, you're in the corridors of scientific racism. 

[00:15:56] After the break we're going to talk to science journalist Angela Saini about her new book on the history of scientific racism.

[00:16:05] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Angela: [00:16:19] So my name is Angela Saini. I'm a science journalist based in London and I write books, and most of my books are about science and society and politics.

Annalee: [00:16:30] And I specifically wanted to have you in here to talk about your latest book, Superior, which is about the history of race science and what we call scientific racism. And so I wanted to start out by just having you give us a quick or not so quick definition of what we mean when we say scientific racism and, and where it comes from, historically.

Angela: [00:16:55] Well, scientific racism, it's a difficult term because for a large chunk of the history of modern science, it wasn't scientific racism, it was just race science. And it was kind of, it was quite mainstream and respectable. So the idea that humans could be subdivided into categories called races and that there were palpable, meaningful biological differences between these races emerged around the time of the enlightenment. So it's been around for a while. It hasn't been around forever, but it's been around for a while. And there were centuries of research looking at how these differences manifested, how many races there actually were, what those races were, how humans can be subdivided. That led to its own kind of, scientific fields like eugenics. 

[00:17:45] Eugenics was the belief that there are beneficial traits in individuals which are passed down to their children. And that if we could encourage people with those beneficial traits to breed and discourage people who don't have those traits to breed, then we would create a better race of people or that we'd improve the whatever race it was, the British race or the American race, somehow. 

[00:18:10] That of course manifested in the 20th century in Nazi racial hygiene and the Holocaust. But throughout the 19th and early 20th century, race science manifested itself, and scientific racism manifested itself in many different ways. It was, I argue in the book, one of the underlying philosophies of colonialism, of all the genocides that happened even before the Holocaust. Of many—of slavery, of many of the ways in which some people were treated better than others, and some people were enslaved or treated as inferior. I think racial ideas about who they were kind of underpin that. And science itself was a handmaiden the entire time.

Annalee: [00:18:54] Yeah, because I think often when we look back in history and in the United States, when we talk about the history of the slavery of Africans here, or when we think about colonialism elsewhere, there's this idea that, oh, that was a bunch of people who were sort of misled by superstition and misinterpretations of religion. And yet you're saying that no, actually they, they thought of themselves as rationally scientific thinkers.

Angela: [00:19:20] Well, there were lots of ideologies that fed into this idea that some people were better than others. And that encompass not just sciences, but also religion. So, for example, in South Africa, the kind of Boer, or Afrikaaan assumption that they had a right to rule over the majority and that apartheid was somehow justified because of this was partly driven by religious notions. So there was scientific racism there, but there were also religious ideas there about them being the chosen people. This kind of chosen white race who were destined to dominate others. 

[00:20:03] And those narratives you also see, for example, in American exceptionalism, this idea that the colonists who went to America from Europe were somehow destined to be there and they were chosen to rule and that whatever atrocities they committed and they did commit atrocities, were somehow justified because of this wider, broader kind of manifest destiny. And those ideas were reinforced by scientific theories around race. So it all played a part. 

[00:20:33] I wouldn't say that scientific racism is what drove the injustices and atrocities that happened, but it was certainly there, always playing a part in rationalizing them and trying to make them seem intellectual rather than spurious, which they were.

Annalee: [00:20:48] Yeah, exactly. And this is something that we're grappling with today as we're seeing, the rise of populism and nationalism around the world and racism of various kinds. And I'm wondering how do you see this history of scientific racism coming up again to be, as you put it, a handmaiden to these, not so rational beliefs about people?

Angela: [00:21:10] Well, we imagine that race science kind of died away, or scientific racism kind of died away after the second World War because now we accept that racism is unacceptable and it is wrong. And to think about people in this way is unjustified. But we have to remember that those ways of thinking didn't completely disappear. Of course, the Civil Rights movement happened after the second World War. Apartheid happened after the second World War. 

[00:21:36] You would have thought that Nazi racial hygiene would have killed off academic eugenics, but it really didn't. It was still being practiced in America, in Japan. There were still women being sterilized in the name of this so-called scientific idea until the 1970s. So in fairly recent history and now even now there are those who cling to these ideas. I still get emails from them. I still get messages from people saying, do you really believe there aren't intellectual differences between the races? Do you really believe that some people aren't better than others?

[00:22:09] And so that way of thinking it shouldn't really surprise us because part of what happened after the second World War is in the process of realigning what was acceptable in society and what wasn't, what didn't happen was a kind of mass education of why these ideas were unjustified. So what has happened since the second World War is that genetic evidence has reinforced the idea that we are actually very similar. We have common origins. The differences between us are not only superficial but they lie on kind of spectra. So to divide people into races is really an exercise in choice. You can divide people any way you want. 

[00:22:52] You could start at the level of the family and say, so for example, I have a lot in common genetically with my parents and with my sisters and with my child. I have less in common with my grandparents and with my cousins and less still with my extended family and so on and so on and so on. So where you want to place this idea, these boundaries, is really up to you beyond the level of the family. It used to be that, people would only think about these kind of differences at the level of the family. Now we think of them in continental terms and at that level, at that broader level, it really starts to lose all meaning whatsoever because more than 95% of the differences, individual differences that you see are individual differences. They're not group differences, so you're really kind of scratching at the corners of our genome then and even then it's statistical. They're all no racial genes. There's no gene that exists in all the members of one so-called race and not another.

[00:23:50] There are no black genes, there are no white genes. This is really about how statistically you want to define people and if you want to define people in races, especially the way we do in common, our social categories as black and white, it really has very little biological meaning at all. It has a lot of social meaning, of course, out there in the real world. And we have become psychologically very fine tuned in learning how we can categorize people depending on the place that we live in. 

[00:24:18] So for example, in America there are very different categories depending on how to define white and black than South Africa or Australia or India or Britain. So the categories are different depending on where you live, but wherever you live, you grow up learning how to pick out the kind of subtle physical clues that will help you to categorize someone. But those subtle physical cues, those superficial physical cues that you're picking out do not betray some kind of deeper genetic difference underneath at all. That really doesn't exist, but because race has such power socially and politically because of the history of racism, we feel that they do.

Annalee: [00:25:03] Yeah. You were saying that there's been sort of no counter education to this cultural idea that there's these racial differences or maybe we're going to discover there's a British gene that means that Brexit was genetic destiny. But I'm wondering, you do a great job in the book almost kind of going on a pilgrimage to talk to a lot of the people and research a lot of the people who still today are respected scientists who believe in this stuff. Particularly, one of the things that I thought was so interesting was people who are still insisting on intellectual differences between the races. And of course this is becoming really important now in industrialized countries cause so many jobs depend on this notion of being smart or being able to do mental labor. And so it becomes a class marker as well as everything else. And so I'm wondering who are these people that are still engaging in this kind of thought and why are institutions propping them up?

Angela: [00:26:02] When I've looked at the history of how academics are treated, when they have these very controversial ideas that are not shared by the mainstream scientific community. They're very rarely edged out. It happens in so few cases. I mean one case is Richard Lynn. So he used to be the editor of the Mankind Quarterly, which is a race science journal that was set up after the second World War by people who still believed in scientific racism, including some Nazi race scientists. And Richard Lynn was ousted from the University of Ulster in Ireland some time ago. 

[00:26:42] There was Chris Brand. So Chris Brand was a researcher at the university of Edinburgh on intelligence. And intelligence researcher is still riven with a lot of problems. There are a lot of characters and faces within intelligence research who if not heavily flirt, very deeply have their feet within the race science community and write for places like the Mankind Quarterly, still

[00:27:07] I know that Chris Brand, who has since passed away, but he expressed many sexist and racist views. And in fact there are people who have contacted me as a journalist who were students of his telling me, do I know about him? This is what he did. These are the terrible things that he said. And he was only ousted from Edinburgh University after he condoned pedophilia. He said something along the lines of pedophilia is okay if the child is smart enough to understand what's going on and only then did Edinburgh University finally get rid of him. So the sexism, racism part of his character was actually fine. That was not what damned him in the end, what damned him was the pedophilia. 

[00:27:44] So where we draw the lines in the sand, I think, are interesting in academia and I think there are many people within academia who are willing to tolerate some level of racism and sexism in their colleagues.

[00:27:59] James Watson is a case in point here. Here is like a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, very well respected for a long time, openly sexist and racist. And he was tolerated for a very long time. It's only very, very recently that his honors have been taken away. But even while I was writing the book, there was a party that was held for his birthday. I can't remember which, 90th birthday or something, at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and hundreds of people came. Hundreds of scientists, among them, Nobel Prize winners themselves. 

[00:28:34] So I think it is a murky and dangerous territory, but because of this need to maintain academic freedom to not censor people, which I completely understand, there are some elements within academia then who manage to get, for some time at least, a free pass.

Annalee: [00:28:51] Yeah. I feel like in the United States, the field of evolutionary psychology definitely dipped into that area. And you have people like Steven Pinker arguing that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQs and Geoffrey Miller kind of almost barely getting fired and then not getting fired for claiming that fat students are dumber than smart students. It's still, it lives on. But I guess because of what you're saying, that people say, well there's science and then there's opinion. And since these are people who are just expressing an opinion, we can't really tread on it in some way.

Angela: [00:29:22] There was a time that these people were complete outsiders. They were individuals with very little power and very little influence. They were very controversial and they were criticized for the controversial things that they said, which is good, but they weren't really a problem. Now they're a problem because the internet has allowed these people to amass followers online in quite large numbers and the pseudo-scientific ideas which they have become have just gained such weight and such prominence online that they are filtered into the mainstream. 

[00:29:57] So you can hear that kind of rhetoric amongst politicians now, these kind of subtly eugenic ideas or scientifically racist ideas. You can hear that rhetoric all over the world. Through white supremacy, through ethnic nationalism, you can hear it playing out and they love this kind of science, this kind of pseudo-science because it gives them some kind of feeling of intellectual credibility.

[00:30:20] So I think we need to worry now. There was a time when maybe academia could say, well these people exist, but they don't really matter. We are becoming more progressive as a society. So sooner or later they'll just die, and then it won't be a problem anymore. But as we can see, bad ideas don't always die off. And even the most crazy ideas, for example, flat earthers now, have never been more popular. How the hell did that happen? We all ask ourselves how did that happen? And I think the mechanism by which that has happened is the same mechanism by which this kind of very virulent racism and sexism has relented mainstream discourse. 

Annalee: [00:31:00] Yeah. So I wanted to take a quick turn into thinking about how we get ourselves out of this. One thing as you were pointing out that's been happening is that a lot of these ideas are becoming very mainstream online. People are coming across them all the time.

Angela: [00:31:15] So I'm working now, I've set up kind of a group of journalists, academics, people who work in countering extremists, all these experts, technical experts to try and come up with some rational, workable ways to deal with pseudoscience as it manifests itself online and in academia. Whether that is climate change denial, whether that’s anti-vaxxers, whether that is pseudo-scientific racists, whoever they are, to understand them and then think of strategies to stop them falling into these rabbit holes or draw them out once they're already in them. And I hope we can come up with something. We have ideas. It's difficult, if you want to publish something in the newspaper here, you can't publish hate speech, you'll be, you can be prosecuted for that. But online you can do whatever the hell you feel like. And this is part of the problem that the rules are different online and any efforts to curtail this spread of pseudoscience is met with the charge of, well you're trying to silence us, now you're stopping us from doing what we want. And that’s, again, that’s a difficult one to counter.

Annalee: [00:32:26] Okay, so this leads into my final question, which is, is there a tradition of anti-racist science and where is that and what does that look like? 

Angela: [00:32:35] Well, anti-racist science I would say is science. Mainstream is anti-racist, not for political reasons but because when you look at the biology of who we are, it really doesn't back up the idea of races. Races as they were invented and whatever form they took. You know, there were some people who thought they were four races, other people who thought they were three or five or 10 or a thousand or a million.

[00:33:00] Like I said before, there are reasons why you can draw the lines wherever you feel like and people have. This idea of race really is so arbitrary. It isn't borne out by biology. A lot of research is done into the effects of racism and discrimination on the body, on medicine, on our behavior, on interpersonal relations, on conflict of course, because race has social meaning. Once socially constructed, it has social meaning just like money is a social construct, but it has value and it has meaning in the real world. 

[00:33:33] So that kind of research has always been done. And within biology when research into human variation has been done, and one very prominent geneticist just told me the other day from Cambridge said to me, he very firmly believes that genetics does not back up racism. It absolutely refutes it because to know the genetic evidence is to know that you can't do this, that you can't make these racist claims, you can't make these pseudo-scientific claims.

[00:34:01] So I would say that science is anti-racist. Now within science has there've also been political anti-racists who have fought against racism in their field. So for example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the population geneticist who sadly died last year, but he was one of the founders of the field of population genetics. And he, his entire life, wore his politics on his sleeve and fought against racism in his field. He debated the famous racists of his time, including William Shockley, the physicist who claimed that black women should be sterilized in America. 

[00:34:37] There are people who try and stay apolitical. There are political anti-racists within science. But I would say science by its nature from what it's shown us is anti-racist. 

Annalee: [00:34:48] Great. Well, so where can people find more of your work online or in real life? 

Angela: [00:34:52] Well, I hope they read Superior and I think everything I wanted to write is in that book. It's a book I've wanted to write for a really long time and what it's given me, it's been very cathartic writing it because everything I've wanted to know about race, everything I wanted to understand about the history of it and the science of it. I feel like I put in that book. I'm still learning. I'm still going through a process, but I got clarity from writing Superior and I hope that my readers get that same clarity. 

Annalee: [00:35:25] Yeah, it's a great book, so thanks so much for that.

Angela: [00:35:27] Thank you.

[00:35:28] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Annalee: [00:35:42] You've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for finding this podcast and you know you can find it again on Apple Podcasts, Libsyn, and all the other fine places that stream content into your ears. 

[00:35:57] Please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts because it helps to maintain the balance of the universe when you do that. And it feeds hungry aliens on Mars who are being systematically deprived by cyber trucks. And you can find us on Patreon. We would really appreciate your support. It helps us have tea and [?kef] during our show. It helps us produce the show. And you can find us on Twitter at @OOACpod. You can find us on interwebs at OurOpinionsAreCorrect.com which is also where you can find transcripts of every episode in case you desperately need to know how many times we said uh in an episode [transcriptionist note: Oops, I take those out. But in this episode it was actually only about 10 times].

[00:36:37] And thank you so much to our Intrepid producer, Veronica Simonetti at Women's Audio Mission, who literally helps us not walk into walls sometimes. So that's pretty amazing. And thank you to Chris Palmer for the music. And thanks Charlie Jane for being the awesome person who's looking at me from the other side of the table. 

Charlie Jane: [00:36:55] Aww. Thank you, Annalee, for being the best human ever. 

Annalee: [00:36:58] Yeah. Okay. 

Charlie Jane: [00:36:59] Yay!

Annalee: [00:36:59] So we'll talk to you guys in two weeks. 

Together: [00:37:01] Bye!

[00:37:05] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.