A few tales from my early years growing up in apartheid South Africa:
1981: I was hitchhiking to Zimbabwe and was picked up by a middle-aged, English-speaking couple who proceeded to discuss the mental capacity of African people. The woman explained: ‘The problem with the black mind is that it can only learn things one way and when things don’t work that way it gets confused. You can teach him that the wheel goes clockwise when it goes forward but if one day the wheel goes anti-clockwise, he won’t understand. It’s a known fact and that’s why he won’t ever invent anything and he’ll always rely on us.’
1975: A group of my white South African classmates was mimicking African accents, prompting a discussion of why they spoke differently. ‘It’s because of their brains and their mouths – it’s impossible for them to learn to talk properly,’ one thirteen-year-old volunteered.
1972: Mr B, the deputy head at my Cape Town state primary school, was teaching us about the hardy heroism of the godly Voortrekkers, who conquered the treacherous Zulus at the Battle of Blood River on their Great Trek north. He drew our attention to the implications of the humanity of his hardy ancestors. ‘The reason we have so much trouble with our natives today,’ he said, ‘is because unlike the Americans and Australians we didn’t wipe ours out. They criticise us but think about it: we wouldn’t have so many problems if we had.’
1970: Mr O, my teacher, watched H, a Jewish boy, examine his change to see if he had enough for a tuck-shop bun. ‘Counting your Shekels again, hey H,’ Mr O said knowingly, nodding his head while stroking the tip of his nose. The bell had already rung so he couldn’t beat H this time. Usually he managed to find an excuse; at least once a week in woodwork class he’d send H off to find a two-by-four plank, which he would then break on the poor boy’s bum. Every year he seemed to pick a fresh Jewish boy as his favoured victim.
Each of these vignettes suggests a racism resting on a belief that there are profound deficiencies among population groups – the unintelligent, linguistically challenged blacks, the treacherous Zulus, the miserly, money-grabbing Jews. This, if you think about it, is what all forms of racism, whether ‘scientific’ or otherwise, have in common: the notion of innate distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, invariably to ‘our’ advantage.
I was born in London but grew up mainly in a state that elevated faith in profound difference into a doctrine of racial dominance. As with so many forms of racism, it was spawned by conquest and colonialism, with first Dutch and then British colonists dispossessing the majority of its land, consolidated by segregationist white self-rule from 1910. Nazi-influenced racial science flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, informed by a faith in IQ scores, ‘ethno-psychology’ and mythology about the ‘native brain’.1 It began to be applied after the apartheid government came to power in 1948, through policies that led to the forced removal of 3.5 million black people from their homes to make more room for white people. Each race group had its own in-built characteristics and was ascribed its own destiny. Whites comprised less than 15 per cent of the population but owned 87 per cent of the land, more than 90 per cent of the wealth, and all the power.
Growing up as a member of the ‘European’ population meant all this land, and all the privileges accompanying it, was taken for granted. The contact most whites had with black people was with their servants or workers and most seemed comfortable with this system, which helped to mould their views of the world. It was the only life they knew; the appropriate order of things. White children would socialise solely with other white children. The only black people they knew worked for their parents and they found it hard to consider the inferior position of these employees as anything other than natural.
Under apartheid, black Africans were divided into tribal categories, allocated ten little parcels of land to express their ‘national’ identity, and had only contingent rights to live in white South Africa (contingent on having a ‘pass’ permitting them to work there). ‘Coloureds’ (mixed race people) and ‘Asiatics’ (people with ancestry in the Indian subcontinent) had more rights in ‘white’ South Africa than Africans but considerably fewer rights than ‘Europeans’. These divisions and subdivisions, and the living conditions they created, reinforced perceptions of the ‘other’. White South Africans therefore tended to view black South Africans as less intelligent, lacking powers of invention or innovation, oversexed, dishonest and, essentially, child-like; ‘Coloureds’ as lazy and alcoholic; and Asiatics as sly and scheming. ‘Europeans’ were not legally subdivided but the backwash of the historical conflict among them lingered; hardly surprising since the Brits were responsible for history’s first concentration camps. Twenty thousand Boer children and eight thousand Boer women died in these camps between 1900 and 1902, along with twenty thousand black servants, who are rarely mentioned.
When I was at school and we played rugby against an Afrikaans school, we might absorb insults such as rooinek (red neck), pommie, sout piel (salty penis) and even poes gesig (cunt face), and we were viewed as softer, weaker and less patriotic. We, in turn, imitated their accents in a tone of derision, told jokes about thick Afrikaners, referred to them as ‘Dutchmen’, ‘rocks’, ‘rockspiders’ and ‘crunchies’ and generally viewed them as lacking in brain power and sophistication. Even among English speakers there were subcategories of prejudice; people of Portuguese descent were sometimes called ‘sea kaffirs’ and, of course, the usual range of anti-Semitic prejudices were never far from the surface. This was the world I grew up in: a place that defined its existence in race categories.
However, my family history offered me a glimpse of a different view. My father, a Jewish South African, was raised an atheist but converted to Christianity in his twenties. He went on to become an evangelical Anglican clergyman. His relatively liberal mother despised the National Party government, and his own experience of anti-Semitism during the war reinforced his hatred of prejudice. After returning to South Africa in the early 1960s, his first church was in an area where his ‘coloured’ congregants were being forcibly removed from their homes to make way for white people. His colleagues included black clergymen who were regular visitors to our house but had to live under the country’s notorious pass laws.
The result was that I grew up with more exposure to non-racial ideas and to black people than was common for white children at that time. From my late teens I became active in anti-apartheid activities, both legal and illegal, which meant working closely with black activists, some of whom became comrades, friends and eventually family members. It also meant spending time in black townships and ‘homelands’; access that was further facilitated by my academic research and journalism.
The more I witnessed and experienced the brutal inhumanity of this system, the more I came to despise the deep-rooted racism at its heart. What had once been a mainly cerebral contempt became ever more visceral and personal. I would bristle whenever racism raised its head, so often in casual, unconscious forms, such as apparently well-meaning ‘madams’ referring to their domestic workers as the ‘girl’ and ‘garden boy’ and addressing them in slow voices of command.
I regarded these as peculiarly South African failings, way behind attitudes in the enlightened world. By the time I travelled to Texas in 1978, for a year as an exchange student, I’d read widely on the American Civil War and the segregation of the Deep South but I assumed this stuff was in the distant past, a view affirmed by the apparently easy racial mixing I was delighted to observe at my Texan high school and university. But along the way I discovered I didn’t have to scratch too deep to find the spirit of Jim Crow. I remember one discussion I had with a Texan rancher who told me he had ‘nothing against niggers and Mescans’ and illustrated this point by reminding me that one of the young ropers who used his rodeo arena was black, and that his oldest son was dating a ‘Mescan girl’. What he really hated was ‘uppity niggers’, which brought him to the subject of Martin Luther King. ‘You know son,’ he drawled. ‘If at that time, nine years back, they’d asked me to contribute to a fund to shoot that uppity nigger son-of-a-bitch, I would’ve paid up, no problem at all.’ He thought about this for a moment and nodded his head. ‘Still would, still would.’
I also harboured enlightenment illusions about the British before returning to live in London twenty-seven years ago. I knew all about the brutality of colonialism, about ‘No dogs, no blacks, no Irish’ and about the National Front but I assumed this was the past or limited to a diminishing rump. And for the most part that proved to be true. Now and then, however, I’d find myself enraged by public displays of racism, sparking street confrontations with the culprits. And I soon discovered such attitudes could extend to more salubrious surroundings.
My first foray into investigative journalism after returning to London in the early 1990s focused on the Conservative Monday Club, a fringe group on the edges of the Tory Party, which met in the House of Lords. One of its ennobled leaders took me into his confidence, expressing his sadness at the decline of apartheid rule. He proceeded to tell me how cold European weather created the conditions for the evolution of the European brain, leaving Africans behind, which was why ‘we’ had the Industrial Revolution and ‘they’ had tribalism. What exasperated me so much about this kind of thinking was that it so precisely echoed the stuff we’d exposed and fought against in apartheid South Africa. I thought it had gone away, shown up for its illogicality, and yet for this tweedy lord it took nothing more than my reassuringly pale skin and South African accent to bring it to the surface.
Early in the new millennium I noticed new variants of this old cancer on both sides of the Atlantic. At first it was just fringe players such as Richard Lynn, the University of Ulster evolutionary psychologist, who wrote that white and Asian people were inherently more intelligent than black people, with Bushmen and Pygmies at the bottom of the intellectual pile; all based on his take on IQ scores. Reading Lynn alerted me to a network of far-right academics and publishers who were relentlessly pushing out their papers in tame house journals and looking for entrée into the mainstream media.
I began to pry deeper and realised I needed to examine the underlying premises of these beliefs. My postgraduate academic background was in economic history and law, and my PhD was in politics. Other than taking a module in neurology when studying psychology as an undergraduate, my reading on biology hadn’t progressed much beyond high school level. But these new expressions of scientific racism – when combined with my parallel intellectual interest in genes and gender – nudged me to read on. I delved into more serious scientific books and academic papers on genetics and neuroscience, periodically probing the brains of friends who were biologists, neurologists and psychiatrists when I needed help. Along the way I returned to the source – Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace – and branched out to devour books and academic papers on IQ theory, twin and adoption studies, and on archaeology, anthropology and palaeontology.
While I was undertaking this process of auto-didactic research, a new wave emerged, this time from closer to the establishment than the likes of Lynn (though often drawing on his writing). Their thin-edge issue was an ostensibly innocent claim about superior Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence, first made in papers by Lynn and a trio of anthropologists from Utah. It was based on an ahistorical snapshot of Ashkenazi IQ scores and a misreading of Ashkenazi disease profiles and genetic history. Yet the doyen of evolutionary psychology, Steven Pinker, piled in with a positive endorsement. He was joined by others such as the super-blogger Andrew Sullivan, the political scientist Charles Murray and the journalist Nicholas Wade. The notion that different race groups had different innate mental attributes, including intelligence, was edging its way into the mainstream. Wade, a former New York Times science correspondent, wrote a particularly noxious book claiming that African tribalism, English enterprise, Chinese conformity and Jewish business sense had a genetic basis.2
By then, I’d started writing about this stuff; newspaper articles and blogs showing why views such as these were unscientific and dangerous. Eventually, I wrote a book, Black Brain, White Brain, published in South Africa in 2014, which dissected the key arguments of race science and showed why they were mistaken and based on key errors regarding the archaeological record, IQ theory and biology. Hardly surprisingly, the book and the media exposure that came in its wake drew a fair amount of heat from people who hated seeing their cherished prejudices challenged. For example, the YouTube version of a minor television interview I did in South Africa drew 50,000 unique hits and some very racist comments.3 It seemed clear that the international far right were finding each other on the Web, and the issue of race and intelligence was the one that really got them going.
In the penultimate chapter of that book, I wrote that publicity for the claims of race science came in waves, and that we could expect more of the same in the future. But I hoped I was wrong or that at least this latest wave, launched by the Ashkenazi fallacy, had been seen off for a while. Sadly, the opposite happened. The election of Donald Trump gave a huge boost to the American alt-right (alternative right) with its race-obsessed agenda. Through YouTube, Reddit, 4chan and other social media platforms, and through its blogs, podcasts and websites, the alt-right has relentlessly pursued the cause of race science. Those such as Wade and Murray, whose work had been eviscerated through peer review, were given new life. Sullivan returned to the fray, joined by others from outside the alt-right faithful, such as the writer and podcaster Sam Harris and the YouTube pontificator Jordan Peterson; all backing the claims of race science advocates and all attacking their critics as politically correct and intolerant. The sad truth is that the revival of race science has been far more expansive, determined and vigorous than I anticipated.
However, there have been several far more lasting developments in this field, which have largely stayed under the radar, over the last few years; in particular, a stream of exciting new discoveries by archaeologists and geneticists. These have helped to shift many assumptions about our shared origins, pushing our roots back 120,000 years and changing our understanding of how we populated the world. They have also upset the few remaining shibboleths of those clinging to traditional ideas about race groups.
This book picks up on what is new and interesting in a range of complementary areas of research – evolutionary theory, genetics, biological anthropology, archaeology, IQ studies and twin and adoption studies – to present a fresh picture of what we know about humans and intelligence. It also takes readers down the dark warrens where the alt-right breed, showing how the ideas of race science blend with more traditional and visceral forms of racism to produce a truly dangerous brew.
This evidence should close the door on the thoroughly unscientific idea that different population groups have significantly different, biologically innate, mental and emotional attributes. But that won’t happen. There are too many vested interests, too many reputations resting on pseudoscience and far too much anger and hate circulating on the Web for a mere book to tip the balance. The racist world view is alive and well and kicking in Trump’s nativist America, in Hungary and Italy and Brazil, in Brexit Britain and beyond, spurred on by the same faux-scientific racial prejudice that inspired the fathers of apartheid. This book is for those who instinctively reject racism but who have not known how to fight back when confronted with its claims to be authentically scientific.