“Civilisation is going to pieces … if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” Sentiments like this will be familiar to those who lurk in the less wholesome corners of the internet, where racism and other bigotries flourish. As a geneticist who specialises in racism and eugenics, I lurk so that you don’t have to.
However, this particular phantom threat comes from Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s brutish husband, barking these unsolicited words at supper in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald paints a picture of upper-class ghouls that is fundamentally accurate: eugenics, race and the menace of immigrants were defining campaigning issues in Jazz-era America, as they were in Edwardian Britain.
One would have hoped the fall of empire and the defeat of nazism marked their demise. But as a new Guardian investigation shows, these views are creeping back into the mainstream, fuelled by the concerted efforts of international networks of activists – and American tech money. What we are witnessing is a coordinated renaissance in eugenics and race science. One of these new race scientists, Emil Kirkegaard, leads a group that claims to have access to the sensitive health information of half a million British volunteers. Kirkegaard wrote on his blog in July that “Africans are prone to violence everywhere”.
Eugenics was formalised as a scientific discipline in the 19th century by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton, who dedicated his life to promoting the idea that certain populations could and should be improved via selective breeding of humans. So entrenched were his convictions that he believed it should be pursued as a “jehad”, a holy war against customs and prejudices that “impair the physical and moral qualities of our race”.
With Galton as inspiration, and with the support of scientists, philosophers and politicians – as well as funding from philanthropic tycoons – eugenics came to be an idea supported on the political left and right. Beatrice and Sydney Webb were advocates, as was Winston Churchill, who drafted compulsory sterilisation legislation that thankfully never made it through parliament. New progressive movements such as the Suffragists and advocates for birth control such as Marie Stopes were also keen eugenicists. Their views on the innate superiority of white people, though abhorrent to us now, were typical of the time.
Britain never had formal eugenics policies, but Galton’s American disciples later exported the idea to the US, where compulsory sterilisation became commonplace in the majority of states for most of the 20th century. It also became a regular talking point for America’s upper classes, as Fitzgerald’s Buchanan character shows. The hive of scientists in America responsible for the spread of eugenics even provided inspiration for the Third Reich, which drew direct intellectual, legal and financial support for their policies of mass sterilisation, persecution and murder. There was even direct collaboration. Nazi and US eugenicists combined to found the Pioneer Fund in 1937 – a pot of cash that was formed to support eugenics, and “the problems of race betterment”.
Despite the thorough debunking of race science by contemporary genetics, and the growing acceptance of our multiracial and multicultural reality, the Guardian reporting shows that such thinking has not been extinguished. In fact, the line between the early and contemporary race scientists can quite easily be traced. Mankind Quarterly, which today publishes Kirkegaard, was founded in 1960 as a mouthpiece for a grim cast of eugenicists, including Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, the Nazi PhD supervisor of the Auschwitz “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele. But while it was the Rockefellers and Carnegies who funded the US and Nazi eugenics movements as part of their philanthropic outreach, the current eugenicists and race scientists seem to have courted tech multimillionaires. The plan appears to be to infiltrate the mainstream and normalise views that historians and scientists have long debunked.
It can feel strange to discuss something as anachronistic and outdated as race science. Most right-minded people occupy a world in which the idea of genetic superiority between races is disproven and disturbing. They are right on both counts. Group differences, of course, are real and people are different – and genetics plays a huge role in influencing those differences, in physical appearance and in our behaviours.
Does that mean race is a biologically meaningful definition? It does not. Race as we currently use it is a socially constructed idea, but one with biologically meaningful consequences, such as in healthcare where many disease outcomes are significantly worse for racial minorities. The impact of disease correlates significantly with socioeconomic factors, primarily poverty, and in our society racial minorities are mostly in lower social strata. Black and brown people endure worse medical outcomes not because they are black or brown, but because of this fact. The science very clearly evidences this, and no amount of cosplay race science – or human biodiversity, as they euphemistically brand their propaganda – can debunk it.
In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan ends his racist rant with a call to arms, one that echoes in our present: “It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” Just as it was then, the current renaissance of eugenics and race science is nothing more than bigotry dressed up as biology.
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