Instant Genius - Subhadra Das: What part has science played in racism?

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Not so long ago, English scientists believed that they could study differences between people and that certain ethnicities were ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than others – of course, white Europeans were put at the top of any list. In the 19th Century, anthropologist and statistician Francis Galton took this even further when he coined the term ‘eugenics’, the idea that science could better the human race by promoting the spread of certain genes, deemed ‘good’, and by halting the distribution of those deemed bad. While these Victorian ideas have since been refuted and discarded by the scientific community, there are those in society that turn to race science in an attempt to justify their bigotry and racism. Subhadra Das has spent the last eight years as a museum curator for the science collections at University College London, specialising in the history of scientific racism and the history of eugenics. She tells us how Francis Galton’s idea spread through Victorian society, and why it’s important to understand science’s racist history in order for us to move forward. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription [this will open in a new window] This podcast was supported by brilliant.org, helping people build quantitative skills in maths, science, and computer science with fun and challenging interactive explorations. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Adam Rutherford: Can science ever be rid of racism? Pragya Agarwal: When does bias become prejudice? Robert Elliott Smith: Are algorithms inherently biased? Caroline Criado Perez: Does data discriminate against women? Angela Saini: Is racism creeping into science? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. So it's certainly the case that modern genetics has demonstrated. First of all, that there's no biological basis for the scientific understanding of race,

which is a really, really good thing and an important message to get across. But in and of itself, science isn't the only thing that's going to save us here. We need to be mindful of our own history as well. And just to what degree Galton, his science and his ways of thinking have shown. shaped our ideas today. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team, with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world.

Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor of BBC Science Focus. Not so long ago, English scientists believed that they could study differences between people and that certain ethnicities were better or worse than others. Of course, white Europeans were put at the top of any list. In the 19th century, anthropologists and statistician Francis Galton took this even further when he coined the term eugenics, the idea that science could better the human race

by promoting the sped of certain genes deemed good, and by halting the distribution of those deemed bad. Now, while these Victorian ideas have since been refuted and discarded by the scientific community, there are those in society that turn to race science in an attempt to justify their bigotry and racism. Supadre Das has spent the last eight years as a museum creator for the Science Collections at the University College London,

specialising in the history of scientific racism and the history of eugenics. She tells our editorial assistant Amy Barrett how Francis Galton's ideas spread through Victorian society and why it's importance to understand science's racist history in order for us to move forward. My name is Subadur Das. I am a writer, historian, sometime comedian, and I specialise in the history and philosophy of science in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the science of race and eugenics.

And my day job is that I am one of the curators of the science collections at University College London. And as a curator, what does that involve? Well, at UCL, it involves making sure that the museum collections that we have are accessible, both physically and intellectually to as many people as possible. So we use our collections a lot for teaching, but we also make them accessible to researchers, and we also do public engagement,

so things like exhibitions, podcasts. We try to, when we can, research our collections and share the stories that we find in them. You mentioned eugenics. Just tell me a little bit about how that relates to your current role. Well, I had never meant to become a historian of eugenics. it kind of turned out to be an occupational hazard because in 2012, when I first started in this job, I was put in charge of a thing called the Galton Collection. And that's the collection of

Sefrances Goulton, who is probably the most famous Victorian scientist. Not a lot of people had heard of him. I had never heard of him until I started curating the collection. And Goulton is, well, these many things. He was an explorer in Africa. He was a meteorologist, a statistician, a biologist. And he's also the man who came up with the word eugenics. He coined the term. So I had a lot of learning to do when I first started curating this collection about eugenics and what that means and also about the history and ideas that were inherent in Victorian science that made eugenics a thing. I think a lot of people, if they hear the word eugenics, they probably think about the Nazis and the horrors of the Holocaust. But actually the story is.

a lot older and it's a lot more British than that. So it's been it's been an interesting learning curve these last few years working with that collection. So eugenics has a big history in the UK then? Absolutely if you it's not something to be proud of but it is a British invention. So Galton probably was as famous in his lifetime as his very famous cousin, a man called Charles Darwin, and Galton added on to Darwin's theory of evolution, his own particular genius. And what he said was, if it's the case that humans are like any other animal, then we should be able to breed better humans in the same way as we breed animals to suit our own purposes. The thing that he was particularly interested in was

intelligence, so the ability to measure, to quantify intelligence, just to work out how different people are intelligent. And because that was what his idea was, and because of the time in which he was operating, his theories built on existing ideas to do with scientific racism. These were ideas that came out of the Enlightenment in Europe, and they were ways of classifying different kinds of humans incorrectly, we now know, and also probably the most dangerous thing about those ideas was that there was a hierarchy involved. So having classified different human beings as being white or being European, or being black and being African,

or being brown and from India like me, there was an inherent hierarchy that was put in place by European scientists, which was that white European people were, they mistakenly believed better than everyone else. But it extended beyond Galton, didn't it? it impacted the entire scientific community. It did entirely. So Galton's ideas were, his ideas about eugenics

weren't necessarily all that popular until kind of the turn of the 20th century where they were very much the focus of a political moment. But Galton's ideas to do with statistics, so he is essentially one of the founding fathers and modern statistics, he comes up with the principles of correlation, regression to the mean.

He's one of the founders of the School of Biometrics. So a lot of the work he did is fundamental to contemporary science and how it works. And the thing that I'm mainly concerned about is that we need to be mindful of where his ideas were coming from and the ways in which they shape our ideas today. That doesn't mean to say that we throw all of Victorian science out the window and start again. Of course it doesn't. These things are extraordinarily useful ways of approaching the world. but I think that when we leave out those aspects to do with race science, it becomes, that's where we start to trip up on things and we start to make mistakes.

So Galton's ideas, eugenics and aside from eugenics, were hugely influential at the end of the 19th century. He was a well-established club man. And so, you know, he was a member of the Royal Society. He was a member of the society for the advancement of science. And so he wasn't just some lone crank. I think that's the most important thing we need to remember about him was that he is part of the scientific establishment in Victorian England.

And as such, was a hugely influential person. He, in the years before he died, he was instrumental in giving money to University College London in order to be able to set up the first ever eugenics' reprimed. records office. And then when he died in 1911, he left in his will money for the first ever professorial chair of eugenics, which was taken by a man called Carl Pearson, who was professor of statistics at UCL. And by dint of that association with the university, that was Golton's way of legitimizing eugenics as a science. So he knew that he was one of the last in a line of

gentlemen scientists, like his cousin Charles Darwin, and he felt that that was something that he didn't want to, he was reluctant to take on that kind of amateur status. He wanted science to be a profession. And in order for that to happen, one of the ways to do it was to have it associated with a university. So his influence is not just simply in the ideas he came up with, but also the fact that his collaborations with universities in order to be able to get those ideas out there. So the idea wouldn't die with him? The idea definitely didn't die with him. In point of fact, the idea probably took off considerably bigger after his lifetime than during it. and I think it's probably most historians of Galton and his history would say that it's fair to say that he would have been horrified by the things that, by the ideas and the results that his ideas were put to.

So he would have been horrified by the sterilization of people without their consent in the United States. He would be horrified by the sterilization and the extermination of people in the Holocaust. caused. My view on that is a little bit different insofar as he may well have considered these to be the important and earth-shattering historical developments that we think them to be. I don't know whether he would necessarily have thought they were a bad thing. But yeah, I need to kind of explore that idea a little bit more just in terms of how he would feel about these things. For a point of reference, he, he, There's an example of an interview that he gave to a newspaper called The Jewish Chronicle.

So he's being interviewed by a Jewish journalist who asks him what he feels about the persecution of Jewish people in Russia. And Galton's response was that it's difficult to talk to any individual political moment, but that in general, this person, this Jewish person that he was speaking to should be grateful that those weaker and lesser individuals within that person's race, as he saw it, were being exterminated for them, because it meant that the Jewish race would become stronger as a result. My goodness. It's pretty horrific stuff.

I feel like everything I talk about needs to come with a content morning. I've gotten terribly used to talking about all of these really horrible ideas, but you can see the horror that's inherent in someone talking about science, scientific concepts being applied to people. And this was a question actually that that journalist asked him. And he said, don't you feel that that's a very immoral position to hold? And what Goldson said was it's neither immoral or moral. It is amoral. It is nothing to do with morality. And that's where things start to become really dangerous. Because if scientists believe their work to be apolitical or if they believe that their work is nothing to do

with morality, then that is where disaster strikes. And for how long was eugenics seen as a valid scientific study after Carlton died? For a good few decades. So it took off probably more in the States than it did here in the UK. There was Charles Davenport setting up his Eugenics Records office in the States. And actually, probably what happened was that in the States it was more taken in as sort of a political philosophy and apply. much more widely. So you had people, including people with learning disabilities, but also lots of non-white people in the United States being subjected to sterilization without their consent, because the goal there was to make sure that they didn't pass their genes on to the next generation.

We didn't have any kind of legislation like that here in the UK particularly, although my colleague Debbie Chalice has argued that the mental. Deficiency Act of 1913, even though it wasn't a eugenic law per se, it kind of an effect, it had the same effect because what it was doing was that it was taking people with learning disabilities. And also actually women, unmarried mothers, were being locked up in order to kind of take them out of society in ways that would prevent them from reproducing. So it's not the case that in the UK we don't have that same history. We certainly do. It's possible that we're just not that o'fay with the history and we're not very good at talking about it. Of course, probably the

most disastrous effects of eugenics was the science that was put in place by the Nazis. In the 1930s, Professor Tom Shakespeare has talked about this, that the Nazis were essentially practicing their eugenic science in terms of, well, in terms of essentially of euthanizing disabled children in the run-up to the Holocaust. So all of the techniques, the gas chambers, the sterilisation, everything that was done in the concentration camps had previously been tested on disabled people. So the legacy of eugenics is a horrendous one

as far as those atrocious acts are concerned. And at what point did the scientific community then realise that the study couldn't go on? This is going to come across as excessively harsh and excessively anti-science, and that is definitely not what I'm trying to do. I'm a rationalist. I'm a firm believer in the value of science. And it was certainly the case that in the aftermath of the Second World War,

when it became horrifically clear what the Nazis had done, the scientific community and the world in general came together and said that this should never be allowed to happen again, quite correctly. But the way that they did that was to say that these were not legitimate lines of science to pursue any further. The idea of race was essentially it was exorcised, but it wasn't necessarily scientifically disproved. That came later with advances in the modern science of genetics. So the more that we learned about the structure of our DNA and understood more accurately about how heredity works and how traits are passed from parents to change. children. The development of that science is what has disproved the idea that eugenics could

exist. It's disproved the idea that you can control heredity because it turns out that heredity is considerably more complex than Galton would ever have understood it to be. But that being said, a lot of Galton's ideas to do particularly with intelligence are still very much with us. So the idea that intelligence is somehow quantifiable, So all those IQ tests that people take in order to be able to just demonstrate numerically how clever they are. We still have those. They're still, and also it had effects because of the ways in which it was enacted in the early half of the 20th century. So probably the most influential person here is a guy called Cyril Bert, who's the first, he was again professor at University College London,

and the first person to be knighted for his services to psychology, despite kind of infamously having faked a lot of his results. But the thing about Bert is that he was responsible for influencing the government in setting up grammar schools. So this idea that you have children who at the age of 11 take a single test and that determines what school they are then able to go to, that's still very much with us. You know, grammar schools, they tend to have a,

that they tend to have a moment sort of every, on like a five-year cycle, about whether they're going to come back or whether they're going to be a good thing or how good are they for society, how fair are they? And all of those discussions happen in the context of what is essentially eugenic thinking, which is the idea that, first of all, intelligence is quantifiable, second of all, that it's innate and unchangeable, and also then what are we going to do about how we deal with people's education? So it's certainly the case that modern genetics has demonstrated.

First of all, that there's no biological basis for the scientific understanding of race, which is a really, really good thing and an important message to get across. But in and of itself, science isn't the only thing that's going to save us here. We need to be mindful of our own history as well. And just to what degree Galton, his science and his ways of thinking have shaped our ideas today. Of course UCL has a building named after him. Is that a problem when we look back on it now? Well, so I should clarify, UCL has a lecture theatre named after Galton.

And it's also got a whole building named after Carl Pearson, who was as ardent, a eugenicist, if possibly not more than Goulton himself, and also a lecture theatre. we've also got a museum named after William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who was an Egyptian archaeologist called the founder, the father of modern archaeology, who also contributed a lot to the science of eugenics at UCL at the turn of the 20th century.

And as a historian, I used to be kind of in two minds about this, because while it was the case that those buildings had those names. It meant that the names, I had thought that it meant that those names were kind of at the forefront of people's minds and it meant that it kept the story alive. But in the interim, and in the last few years, what I have realized is that keeping the names of places of people who were involved in developing a science, which meant that people who looked like me were deemed to not be fit to live, I don't see how that can be anything other than phenomenally painful and inappropriate.

So the naming of buildings is a clear act of commemoration. And I think that in that aspect, it is something that we shouldn't be doing. In a way, it's kind of the same thing as putting up a statue, because what that's doing is saying these are people that we respect and we value their ideas, and we are the kind of society that wants to hold these people up. And I just don't feel like, first of all, I don't feel like that is the society that we are. But also I just don't feel like it's a good thing to do. And that's, you know, happened very recently.

And as statues are pulled down, buildings, lecture that just get renamed. There are those, you know, you read them online saying that by doing so, it's erasing history. It's almost hiding away history. What would you say in response to that? First of all, I'd say that isn't how history works. And second of all, I'd say that it was exactly the opposite. So this is just based on my personal experience, but it's also based on the experience of teaching at a university and teaching the history and philosophy of science at a university, which is, as I said, right at the beginning, Francis Galton is the most famous and influential Victorian scientist most people have never heard of. And to me, the fact that his story has a allowed to be forgotten. And also the story of scientific racism more widely has been allowed to be forgotten really is part of the problem. And it seems like it's contrary to everything that I kind of work towards in terms of decolonizing and diversifying the curriculum and

thinking about ways in which we can make our society more equitable, our education more equitable. but this really is one old dead white man that needs to be written back into the history books because it's kind of like the byword in a lot of museums and with a lot of history or history programs we talk about hidden histories and that isn't actually inaccurate but the point is that if these histories have been hidden it means that someone hit them and so in order to be able to bring them out into the clear light of day that's the thing that is that is not erasing history being telling these stories is actually widening the frame and and telling a fuller picture and it's certainly been my experience that the more I learn about Galton and the more I learn about eugenic thinking it's it's

definitely the case that a lot of the history that I learned in school makes much more sense But a lot of these conversations that we're having and a lot of people are having when we see statues being teared down obviously there's a lot of anger around the world at the moment when we see what's happened to George Floyd and others in the US it's shown this light on racism but in the midst of a conversation that's hugely about

fundamental human rights are we getting distracted is it taking away from these fatalities by having these conversations about science and its racist history and museums right now. Sorry, I'm just going to take a second because this is such a painful thing. And it's such a moment. So I think it's interesting even the way that you phrased that question. I'm not having a go at you.

But the death of George Floyd has shone a light on the situation of racism. what it's known is it's for white people hasn't it for white people exactly um so so black people uh living in the united states and in the UK brown people living in those places we've known about this for a long time and that is i think why it's important to seize the moment while we can while people while white people um and while uh you know the um the the the light of the media is shining on this idea to be able to seize the moment and say, you know what, these ideas have been here for a very long time. And actually, science and scientific thinking, in part, but mostly eugenic thinking, is the reason why we've ended up here.

The reason why black people are unfairly deemed to somehow be inherently criminal is it has a very, very long history. It's part of the work that Galton did. it goes again back to Enlightenment science and the idea of physiognomy that you can tell about people abstract things like their intelligence, their behavior, whether or not they are a criminal, simply by looking at them. It isn't the case that we have always been racist. Race is a relatively new invention in human history. And so is it the case that talking about science is more important than calling out the death of things? people unfairly at the hands of the police. Absolutely, no, those lives and commemorating those lives and calling attention to those actions is hugely important. But what we can also do is interrogate why these things happen. And the reason why they happen is the answer lies in part in the history of science. And you've mentioned educational reforms and what needs to happen.

And what part do museums and their collections play in this? So it's tricky because, of course, museums are as much a tool of empire as science ever was. Museums were set up in order to be able to foreground these ideas. And science museums in particular, these very particular ways of thinking. So it is extraordinarily tricky and we have to acknowledge that the very idea of a museum in and of itself is a colonial tool. So as a way of putting forward ideas to do with empire within science and communicating that to people. And also the idea that science is somehow neutral in this circumstance. That's what a museum does.

A museum legitimizes the ideas of the scientific mainstream. And for most of the time, they do a really good job and they do a really important job. But they're not doing the job entirely. And as a museum curator, I am actually quite hopeful because our museums contain the objects which are testimony to these particular histories. The stories are there associated with the objects. What we really need to start doing now is to start telling them more accurately. And that's to do with the histories that we relate. So first of all, being honest about the history of scientific racism, about the history of you,

It's about the language we use. So it's important that I call Goulton a racist and a colonialist because those are the things that he was. And also those ideas were inherent in shaping his science and his scientific thinking. So the role of museums, and I've looked into this kind of more broadly looking at the idea of natural history museums, is to rather than just focus on the science, to focus on the history of science. and work out or sort of shed greater light on the motivations of individual scientists and science as a community. Because I think while science museums are very good at communicating scientific principles, they're not great at the moment at interrogating why it is that scientists were doing what they were doing. And it's a fairly straightforward thing to be able to do.

It just takes a bit of courage and a bit of gumption to be able to stand up and say, understanding race and white supremacy were motivating factors for a lot of the science that was happening in the 18th and 19th century and actually we do need to be mindful of that and we need to reflect on that history because some of those ideas remain racist today in ways which are actively harmful to people. There's a lot of change that needs to be seen

and I wonder also how much this current situation, the pandemic, will change. the way we visit museums and I'm sure it will affect a lot of ways that museums are run. Yes, although how is it kind of really remains to be seen at this point in time. We're so in kind of a moment of flux. One thing though that has become very clear is that those museums which have made the effort to make their objects, their research and their stories more accessible in digital formats are the ones that are really, really thriving at the moment

because what's happening is that their content is available to people without having to step foot inside the museum doors. And so the great thing about that is that that means that hopefully museums will be encouraged to make that content accessible to people just beyond that kind of immediate community in ways which are hopefully a lot more accessible and engaging than we've been able to do at present. The other thing that museums are doing is that they are in the light of this most recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement is acknowledging their own racism, their own role in perpetuating these ideologies.

So a really good example is the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of New York City. They've always been a very politically actively minded museum and they've made it very clear that they have. have listened and taken on the message of the problems to do with race in in in in in US society and UK museums are starting to do it as well so Somerset house I think has just put out a statement which I think is hugely commendable so the more that we all start to realize that this is to do with all of us and scientists people who work in museums people who are science communicators people who are public historians the responsibility is on all of us to start telling these stories more accurately

and to acknowledge, you know, the privilege and the position that we're in. And of course, UCL are renaming at the Gulton Lecter Theatre and a couple of other buildings, aren't they? And it seems like we are at the very start of something. Yes, I hope so. So, yeah, UCL announced the announcement went out last week that they were considering renaming the buildings. And to me, that really is, I'm very pleased

because it's something that people have wanted for a long time. and it's definitely the right thing to do. But I hope that my community at the university also realises that this is really just the beginning that we've got so much more work to do when it comes to these ideas and these ways of thinking. That was Supadra Das, discussing eugenics, race science and how pulling down statues and renaming buildings

is actually revealing history instead of erasing it. In the magazine this month, we find out why cheese is so tasty, learn the benefits of cold water swimming, and get a dermatologist to look after our skin. As always, there are loads more science stories inside and available on ScienceFocus.com. And if you like what you've just listened to, then please leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you and goodbye. Thank you for listening

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