The Food Medic - S4 E 7 - PART 2: SUPERIOR: The Return of Race Science

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

In this two part episode, Dr Hazel is joined by Angela Saini, an award-winning science journalist who holds Masters degrees in Engineering from The University of Oxford, and in Science and Security from King’s College London. Angela is also author of the books Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and Superior: The Return of Race Science.In part 2 they discuss her second book Superior: the return of race science. They discuss the history of race science and Eugenics, why race science is re-emerging, racial disparities in healthcare - including COVID-19, and ancestry tests. Thank you for listening and please do join in on the conversation and keep it going.Resources to support the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and Anti-racism.Links to donate (copy and paste into your browser): Black Lives Matter - https://blacklivesmatter.com/Black Minds Matter - https://www.blackmindsmatteruk.com/Black LGBTQIA+ Therapy Fund https://www.gofundme.com/f/black-lgbtqia-therapy-fund?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1Black protest Legal Support UK - https://uk.gofundme.com/f/black-protest-legal-support-ukVictim funds - https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/#victimsReading:Me and White Supremacy - Layla F. SaadSo You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma OluoI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya AngelouI Am Not Your Baby Mother - Candice BraithwaiteBrit(ish) - Afua HirschDon’t touch my hair - Emma Dabiri Why I am no longer talking to white people about race - Reni Eddo-LodgeHow to be an Anti-racist - Ibram X.Kendi PodcastsThe NodIntersectionality Matters!Code SwitchPod save the peopleNew York Times: 1619About Race Scene on the radioWhite Lies Slay In your LaneWatch13thJust MercyAmerican SonThe Hate U GiveWhen They See UsI Am Not Your Negro*THESE LISTS ARE NOT EXHAUSTIVE* Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. When does fast grocery delivery through

Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over deliver. Hello and welcome back to the Food Medical Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Hazel Wallace. I'm a medical doctor, a registered associate nutritionist, and author and founder of the Food Medic. So this is part two of a two-part episode I recorded with science journalist

Angela Saini. In this part, we discuss her second book, Superior, The Return of Race Science. With the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BAME communities and the tragic events that have sparked the current Black Lives Matter protests across the world, we urgently need to address racism that exists in society and in healthcare. This is an important conversation for all of us to listen to. So just to kind of jump into the conversation, obviously we, in the first part of the podcast, we spoke about your book Inferior, which explores the effect of sexism and I guess sex and gender in science. And now I want to move the conversation on to your next book, which is Superior, The Return of Race Science. And I guess this conversation is even more

pertinent at the moment, and very much at the forefront of our mind. So I would love to kind of backtrack and ask you what initially inspired you to write this book? Well, to a large extent, this book reflects why I got into journalism in the first place. So I studied engineering at university. I had every intention of becoming an engineer, but I grew up in quite a racist part of South East London. And racism really was a backdrop to my teenage years. When I got to university, I became involved in the anti-racism movement there. I was co-chair of the anti-racism committee.

And that's when I started writing for the student paper. And if I hadn't done that, I don't think I would be a journalist now. So I think it was this feeling that through writing, maybe things could be spoken about and things could be addressed. And that's what got me into journalism. And for most of my career, I've covered lots of other topics, part of it intentionally, because once you're a non-white reporter who writes about race, that's all you're ever allowed to write about. You can't really do anything else. So I didn't want to be kind of pigeonholed. In

fact, I was told quite explicitly at the beginning of my career, don't get pigeonholed into just doing this. And it just felt like the right time with the rise of the far right, the rise of populism and ethnic nationalism around the world. I just wanted to get this down because I felt like things were getting worse rather than better. And I just had to write it. And I'm really glad I did because it was very cathartic.

This is something I've lived with for a very long time. I've turned to these issues. They've really deeply affected my psyche, the way I think about things. And to be able to process it mentally and just meticulously work through all the things that I thought about this issue, reading not just the science but the history and the social science and the cultural aspects and the political aspects of it. It really was a very personal book to write

and it just felt like a weight had been lifted when it was finished. Yeah, I can imagine. And I mean, like we just mentioned before we started recording, there's so much that's gone into this book and you can see that even from the first chapter. And the book essentially covers the history of race and how it came about and also the science of eugenics, which doesn't really exist anymore.

Can you talk us through how the concept of race came about briefly as brief as you can and the science of eugenics and what it essentially it set out to compare and find out well I think in modern society race feels like such a tangible thing we feel that it has some biological basis. It's actually quite a shock to people, I find. It shouldn't be, but in fact, it was quite a shock to me to find out how little biological basis it really has. The racial categories we use are ridiculously arbitrary. So when we talk about black, white, brown, things like that, they really hardly mean anything at all and even as a correlation to skin color they are very very vague because even within those categories there is such a variety of skin colors so there is hardly any basis there and the reason for this is that these categories were invented

around the time of the European enlightenment and the idea was in the same way we categorize the natural world, we can categorize people. So these Western thinkers who often had very little exposure to the rest of the world, they just didn't know how variation played out in the human species, they would guess. And some of them, not all of them, they all had different ways of categorizing people, but some of them categorized by color, which, you know, even if you just think about it a little while is really arbitrary, you know, it really doesn't mean anything. It unites someone in an Aboriginal Australian and a West African, you know, people who live in completely different parts of the world, who have completely different ancestries and histories, and yet they're all lumped together under this one category.

So it was always very vague and very arbitrary, but what it served was the politics of the time. So the politics of colonialism, the politics of slavery, injected meaning into these categories. And then scientists ran with it. So in the 19th century, you see rather than scientists debunking or turning away from the idea that race is real, actually reinforcing it again and again and again, it gets used to justify colonialism. It gets used to justify slavery and genocide and so many other horrible mistreatments of one group by another, because it was so politically useful. It really meant that you could dehumanize people. It allowed people to dehumanize others. And the science kind of gave it a veneer of credibility, but it never had. It was always pseudoscientific.

It was always nonsense. And that is where we land today. It is an idea that has huge political power, social power over our lives. It defines how we live. It defines our health outcomes. Black Americans live shorter lives than white Americans. In this current COVID crisis, it's played out. It plays out in so many different ways because it has so much political and social power over how we live,

but it never had any basis. So eugenics, coming back to your question, was really one manifestation of racism in practice. It again, at the time was a science. It was part of mainstream science. There were many eugenics labs around the world. It was born in London. And essentially, it was an ideology that said that there are certain beneficial traits that we should encourage. There are other bad traits that we should get rid of. And the way to do that is by encouraging certain people to breed and other people not to breed. And of course, this played out most obviously in the Nazi program of racial hygiene, in which they literally took that to its ultimate devastating limit and exterminated entire groups of people. They committed genocide and it was in the name of race science.

Yeah. And you mentioned in your book there that it also kind of happened in London and in England. And I think lots of people wouldn't think that kind of like they had a eugenics, I guess, office here in London. Well, eugenics started its life here in London. This is where it was invented it was invented actually by a cousin of charles darwin francis galton and he was very much committed to this idea that beneficial traits were passed over generations passed through generations and he in fact looked at his own family you know the fact that he was related to darwin and he had all these great people in his family he had many people who weren't great in his family as well he

overlooked that but this idea that that there was some kind of hereditary genius that ran through families and that this could be nurtured that entirely was born here in london not far from where i live at university college london was where he had his first eugenics lab. It was nurtured here. There were people within very respectable circles on the left and on the right who were very much happy eugenicists. They really believed it. Virginia Woolf, Bernard Shaw. I mean, so many people that we admire as intellectuals

were actually also eugenicists. Yeah. And I found that really interesting in your book and also really, really disappointing because we want to believe that scientists are unbiased, not politicized and are intelligent enough to understand that as you said that race is not a biological category but it's a socially constructed one and then you have famous scientists like yeah but it's never i mean you don't have to dig back very far into the history of science to see that it has always been intertwined with the politics of its age. It still is. I mean, this is the hardest thing to explain to people is that if a society has prejudices and assumptions, they will play out in the science. It's just impossible for them not to because the people doing this are humans at the end of the day. And that is really the job of science journalists like me is to not just communicate the science,

but also explain the vested interests, the politics, the funding, the thinking that goes on behind the research that we see out there in public. It is not neutral. It is never neutral. And it can't be because we are not neutral as people. So while there is this goal of objectivity, which I think is a very noble goal, it is only really an ambition rather than always fulfilled in practice, because we are always constrained by our prejudices. That's true. And I mean, I think, as you mentioned in the beginning, you said that you feel like it's becoming, it's re-emerging, race science is re-emerging. And why do you think that is? Why now? Well, I think it's always been there. It's kind of been bubbling

under the surface for a long time. And of course, there are those on the far right who have always been committed to this idea that race is real, that there are tangible, deep differences that can explain, for instance, why some countries are wealthier than others, why some people are more successful than others. Essentially, these kind of eugenic ideas about groups being different. But I think we're seeing a resurgence of it now, in part because of the rise of ethnic nationalism and the rise of populism which really does hinge on selling people this intellectually vacuous idea that racism is somehow justified because of because there are really differences there and so you see on the internet i mean one of the things i did when i was writing superior is i interviewed some of these people who are still trying to peddle scientific racism in journals, on the Internet, working within these groups.

I mean, I think sometimes we imagine racists are thugs, that they're only thugs, they're ignorant, and that's why they're racist. But these are very well-educated people. They just are very, very strongly racist at the same time. And so they choose to believe certain sets of evidence over others. Yeah. And coming back to COVID, and it's now very well known that the BAME communities have been disproportionately impacted by COVID. And also, all of the events that have sparked the current Black Lives Matter protests have demonstrated that we urgently need to address racism in the UK and across the world. And that also includes healthcare, which is obviously an area where I work in. And I was

really interested to read that chapter in your book where you cover some of the racial disparities in healthcare. And I'd love to discuss that next. One of the examples that you used was hypertension. And I think I had to sit back and really think about that one, because obviously, throughout my training, I'm fed that this is what you would prescribe someone who has this ethnicity, and this is what you'd prescribe someone who's white, and not questioning those guidelines before. And just I found that really confronting to read. It's interesting, because I think the idea of race lives on most strongly out of any science in the area of health and medicine. And as you say, many doctors, in fact, in the guidelines, many of the guidelines,

there are differences in treatment and diagnosis depending on ethnicity for certain conditions. Hypertension, I look at in particular because it's probably the most racialized condition there is. Of course, there are many people around the world, millions of people around the world who have persistently high blood pressure. But what we see in the US in particular, but also in the UK, is that black people are identified as having a greater risk of hypertension. And that's why guidelines suggest that they be treated differently. So you can be treated differently depending on your skin color in the UK. The guidelines actually spell that out, skin color.

So what I wanted to do was just interrogate that because we know from genetics that racial categories are not borne out. So is there an innate difference here? Now, I should say at this point that billions of dollars have been poured into looking for genetic differences that could explain racial differences in hypertension prevalence, and they do not explain it. So the genetics has come up with nothing so far. What we do have, though, are differences that have been seen in terms of responses to certain hypertension drugs. So this is a statistical issue. It really becomes a statistical issue. How big are these differences and are they profound enough to justify using different drugs? Now, in terms of healthcare,

as I said before, the regulatory bodies, the government bodies around this have decided that, yes, they do rise to that level. But actually, we haven't really interrogated that except there is an epidemiologist in Canada, Jay Kaufman, and a hypertension expert, a global hypertension expert, Richard Cooper, who's American. He studied hypertension all over the world. And I interviewed them for Superior, what they did was they took all these studies that show small but measurable differences in responses to hypertension drugs and they collated them and they asked how likely is it that someone in a given racial group who is given this drug will benefit from it and how likely is it that if they weren't given this drug, they could have benefited from it from another racial group. And what they found was that assigning treatment by race was actually barely better than tossing a coin. That's how statistically marginal the effects

were. And yet we use them. And this is the problem that we're so committed to this idea that racial difference must be there, that we allow it to play out in the way that we treat patients. And then the question becomes, of course, then why is it that black Americans suffer higher rates of hypertension? If it's not something innate in their bodies, then what is it? Well, the answer, of course, there is that hypertension is caused by so many different things the biggest one is salt you know it's one of the biggest causes of hypertension it's one of the reasons my mum has high blood pressure is because she adds a lot of salt to her food and we know that if you're poorer you are likely to have a diet that is fattier and saltier because processed foods tend to be fattier and saltier. We also know that blood

pressure is affected by things like stress. Even there has even been a study to show that immigrants have higher blood pressure. You know, there are so many different social effects. There are now people studying possible links between blood pressure and racial discrimination, you know, a lifetime of the stress caused by racial discrimination, what effect does that have on the body? So there are lots of different social explanations, environmental explanations for the gaps that we see. What is remarkable is that scientists kind of want to rest on a biological explanation, some kind of innate genetic explanation for the differences. But I

have to say what I do see happening in America, and I got a really lovely email from Mary Bassett, who's the New York City Health Commissioner after Superior came out. She is one of these people who is looking at these social determinants of health in New York City. And she was just, you know, very grateful that as a journalist, I was covering this issue, because she said, we just don't focus on it enough. We are so quick to look at genetics, we don't focus on all the other factors that cause bad health. And it makes sense that they cause bad health, because it makes no logical sense that black Americans have a lower life expectancy than white Americans due to genetics. I mean, that's just ridiculous. Yeah. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. They die of almost everything at higher rates

than white Americans, including infant mortality. And there is, you know, I defy anyone to justify that using genetics. I mean, it's just impossible. We see those kinds of life expectancy gaps, I should say, here in the UK too we see see them between rich and poor people yeah and we we discussed how we can't keep pinning it down to biology and there's it's just not something that there's any biological basis to and the more I kind of read your book the more angry I found myself getting because I almost felt like there was a lot of undoing that I needed to do as well as a healthcare practitioner. And I think it's really important though, that we understand the racial disparities that exist in healthcare

and rather understand the differences in the social conditions between racial categories because what it's not a biological categorization racial categories exist and in order to give people better health care we need to understand why certain groups are not getting the care that they require and I guess my question is, as you know, for anyone who's listening, who is a researcher or a scientist, or those like myself working in healthcare, how can we do this whilst without being racist? It's a real challenge. I get that because we are basically having to counter many, many decades, if not centuries of certain ways of thinking about groups of people. There is a brilliant new group that's been set up called Race and Health led by

academics, medical professionals. It's led by Delan Devkumar at UCL. And what they're doing is looking at the social determinants of health. So they're on social media right now. I think they will be stepping up their efforts. We just had one of our first webinars the other day talking about this. We had the UN Special Rapporteur for Racism and Discrimination included in that conversation. She was brilliant. And what it really is, is about changing the narrative around how we talk about racial differences in health from moving away from this old, outdated, sometimes even pseudoscientific biological narrative to a broader narrative looking at how living in the world as a racialized person, as a victim of racism, or even just living in a racialized society,

in a society in which it matters how that interacts with biology and how that affects your body and mind from the second that you're born. And it really does in some societies, I think, affect you from the second that you're born. I don't think there's any doubt about that. But a lot of research needs to be done because we're talking about so many different factors here and they intersect with gender they intersect with class socioeconomic status so many different things and it's complex I think and that's we need a complex answer to it yeah I agree I'll definitely check them out and direct other people to that. And in the Lan is the researcher you mentioned who stated that there was a particular genetic variant linked to brain size and intelligence.

And it just so happens to be more common in those of European ancestry. Can you chat a little bit about that? So this is Bruce Lan and he carried out, I'm kind of digging back into my memory now because my book came out a year ago and I wrote it a year before that essentially he's he's a mainstream researcher he's an academic and he tried to find a link a genetic link between intelligence and certain

groups of people and he really thought he had found it and he found a certain gene that was more common in in European populations and he believed it was linked to intelligence. It turned out not to be linked to intelligence. And lots of studies were done to kind of establish that. But he built an entire world around this theory. appearance of this gene coincided with the rise of certain civilizations that you know this whole kind of historical narrative around it which all crumbled when it turned out that he was wrong so i interviewed him very briefly when i was writing superior and he basically said to me fine i may not be right now but i will be i will be proven to be right later which just seemed to be remarkable because that is not a scientific thing to say if you don't know. But I think this is another dynamic that plays out in the sciences that I think when you're on the outside of science, you think that everything's very fair and objective and everyone's doing their best and they don't mind being proven wrong. People really

hate being proven wrong. They become very wedded to certain theories and there are big egos in this world in the scientific community and these kind of hierarchies that play out a lot of competition between people and those dynamics definitely are there when people become attached to certain pet theories and I think Lan became very attached to this certain pet theory and it became his downfall in the end yeah that's so true and I think it exists in lots of domains in science where you know like there's a huge bias for publishing positive results and if you are kind of going ho on a hypothesis and you're trying your hardest to prove it right and you're not succeeding like a lot of people go to all lengths to prove it right

whatever it may take and you can actually shape the data in lots of different ways to skew it just to get published and I think yeah some people's downfall definitely. And I think, yeah, some people's downfall, definitely. Yeah. And I think it's also where you see the politics play out because obviously I think Lan had a commitment to this certain political vision that he had drawn for himself, this historical narrative that could explain why certain parts of the world were more successful than others. I have to say this is a big feature of modern day scientific racism on the internet. So if you look, if you're unfortunate enough to kind of go online and spend time in these alt-right groups, what you'll see is a lot of people trying to figure out if there's some biological reason why, for instance, some countries are poor or why Asia and Africa are still developing, whereas the west has

been so successful for so long and of course the answer lies in history the west wasn't always successful and rich it's relatively recently empires rise and fall nations rise and fall and i can guarantee you that the us might be powerful now it won't be powerful forever in fact china's already kind of overtaking it's already on the horizon so fates change that's just how history plays out there's not there's no biology playing out there but there's a real desperation for some kind of some kind of proof that will establish white supremacy that will explain and justify white supremacy yeah I mean we've been talking about scientists but I think everyone seems to be fascinated about their ancestry and kind of where

they've come from and these ancestry tests have been absolutely on the rise particularly in recent years and personally I've always wanted to do one um my family comes from Ireland but I don't really know much beyond that and after reading your book I kind of came away with a different view and I'd love for you to share your stance on them and why you don't necessarily recommend doing them it's not that I don't recommend doing them because i do think they play a role which i'll explain in a minute but dna ancestry tests aren't what people imagine them to be so number one they aren't looking at your ancestry you can't do that through one of these tests they're not comparing your dna to people who lived before what they're doing is is comparing your DNA to other people who have had these DNA

tests done. Now, we know that human variation isn't random. You are more genetically related to people in your family. That makes sense. And of course, in small communities, in villages, in towns, there can be some genetic commonality between people if they've lived there for a long time. Because, you know, for many generations, sometimes people don't move and you intermarry and, you know, there is some commonality there. So the wider and wider you draw that circle from the village to the town, to the county, to the country, to the continent, that genetic relationship statistically becomes weaker and weaker and weaker. When you get to the continental level, it really is about as weak as it can get. It almost loses all meaning.

So I'm not pretending that there is no difference between anybody. There is human variation. It just doesn't work the way that we think it works. There's no hard and fast boundaries, and it's very, very fuzzy. So if you have enough DNA data from enough people in a certain place and you have any connection to any of those people in your past for example you share a grandparent or great great great great grandparent or something then you may be able to find those commonalities there which is how this works it works on very large sets of

data and comparing your dna to other groups of people's dna but it's very fuzzy still i mean i had my test done last autumn because i was making a bbc series and we didn't use it in the end but the producers wanted it done i had no interest in doing it for a large part because i know where my family are from my parents were both born in north ind and as far as I know for generations I've lived in that part of the world so I'm North Indian I know that by background by ethnicity but when my test came back and I fully expected it to say Indian at the very least you know because that's not that's a huge country at the very least they should be able because that's not, that's a huge country, at the very least, they should be able to pin me down to there. And what it actually said was 96%

South Asian. So it couldn't even pin me down to India. South Asia is like a third of the world. Yeah. So even there, that's as fuzzy as it could get. So it might be more accurate in areas where you have loads of people have had these tests done. But, you know, that's as accurate as it's going to get. And also, it doesn't tell you, you know, what does it mean? It's only because we attach stereotypes to certain places that it means anything at all. You know, just say, for example, that your test turned out to have 50% Italian ancestry or some link to Italy. What does that mean? Everyone in Italy is different. Yeah, that's absolutely true.

There's no Italian genetic trait that you share with all Italians. That would just be nonsense. That's just a cultural stereotype. The things that make nations different are culture. And you don't get culture through your genes yeah but but i think what people are wedded to and i think the reason so many people for example especially in america do these tests is because for some people it is all they have you know especially for example black americans take these tests a lot and one of the reasons for that is that, you know, if your history is

rooted in slavery, your ancestors were ripped away from their families, from their countries of origin, their cultures were completely torn out of them, then what do you do? You know, what do you do when you can't reclaim that part of yourself, that history for yourself? DNA tests, I think for some people can feel like the only thing they have left. And I don't then say that they shouldn't do them. Because if that's all you have, then I wouldn't want to deny that to someone. But at the same time, it's very sad that history has made it that that's the case, that that all you have and also it's very sad that a nation like the United States can treat its people so poorly even now that they would feel that they can't feel fully American that they have to claim some other identity as well.

Yeah that's true oh gosh so much to think about when just going through the book. And I'd love to know when, obviously, you started this, you had some kind of background knowledge, but what surprised you the most when you were working on the book? Well, it was a very painful book to write because, of course, I was revisiting my entire life and kind of working through things at the same time as interviewing some people who deny my equal humanity so actual racists so it was a weird and difficult process and I learned so much it really helped me calibrate the way I think about human difference it helped me see race for what it really is and it also helped me I think understand where racism comes from and why it still has such power over us and why some people still cling to

it so it was it was life-changing for me in some ways in fact when it came out I remember telling my family I actually didn't care what anyone else thought of the book because I was just so grateful to have got it down finally. I felt like I had done the subject as much justice as I could and it was all there and it was all for the first time in my life straight in my head. I finally got things clear and in a line in my head and I just didn't care what the rest of the world thought about it because it meant so much to me personally to have finally have done that yeah I think especially at the moment a lot of people are going through kind of a learning process with regards to this subject and are trying to hopefully I'm hoping

that people are trying to order their own thoughts and I guess what would be your message to them or what would you like people to take away from your book if you had one kind of overarching message well I think it's to remember that race is all about power And I think this also goes for sexism when it comes to gender as well. I think this is all about power, about some people trying to assert and maintain power over other people. And when you can understand it that way, I think everything makes sense then. It all starts to fit together and piece together. So I hope that's the message that people get. Yeah, no, I think that's definitely the message I got from your book and so the book's available to buy online and hopefully in bookstores now that they're starting

to open back up yeah yeah amazing well thank you again so much for joining me for the second part of the episode I know that you've been inundated with requests at the moment, so really do appreciate your time. Well, I'm very grateful to be on your podcast, so thank you for having me. No worries. Thank you. Okay, so that was Angela Saini, author of the books Inferior and Superior, two incredibly insightful and important reads. Thank you all for listening, and please do join in the conversation and keep it going. In the show notes I have included some links to donate if you can

to anti-racism charities and the Black Lives Matter movement. I have also included some other educational resources to check out, read and listen to. These lists are not exhaustive and listening to a podcast today or reading an article tomorrow does not replace the work we need to do within ourselves and in our society in order to fight racism part of our privilege as white people is being able to avoid these experiences and conversations but remaining silent or turning the other way is causing more harm. So I ask you to use your privilege to listen and learn and relearn and amplify the voices of black people. Thank you for listening to the podcast and if you feel compelled please do share.