One of the key charges made by the hard of thinking is that because the devastating accusation ‘racist’ has been thrown around so casually in these days of febrile public discourse, it no longer has meaning. Similarly, ever since Rik called Vyv (and a bank manager and the BBC) a fascist in The Young Ones, that insult has been devalued to the point of meaninglessness. Or has it?
One can never truly know the heart of another person, so short of them lighting a crucifix on their front lawn and perpetrating violence exclusively against one racially designated group over another, we are compelled to only assume that if you often say things that sound a bit racist you might be legitimately given the identity of ‘a racist’.
When a powerful nation freely chooses a leader who has consistently expressed racist views, and whose political discourse is alarmingly redolent of the only two examples in history when a free people elected an actual fascist and racist leader, we are in a bit of a pickle.
If we have devalued the term racist through overuse – and I don’t necessarily accept this charge – a question that follows is: ‘Does racism exist?’ The answer, obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention, is ‘yes’. Specific interpersonal racism exists, including abuse aimed at racialised people – the desecration of Jewish graves, or such as when a third of Roma or black people report that they have been subjected to physical assault as a result of their ethnicity, race or religion. Structural racism also exists as embedded prejudices in institutions and society, evidenced by the fact that black and minority ethnic people are more likely to receive custodial sentences than white defendants who have committed similar crimes. We live in a society whose history includes deeply held racisms that were widely accepted, built with the credibility of specious science, and though things were different then, and are better now, the legacies of our racist past echo in our present.
West opens with a startling statistic: only 50 per cent of British people accept that racism exists
These are facts. Not uncomplicated facts – they are statements that should encourage unpicking and scrutinising. But there is a chasm between what expert and academic analysis reveals and what the general public often thinks. This is the meat and drink of the psychologist Keon West’s The Science of Racism. He opens with a startling statistic: only 50 per cent of British people accept that racism exists.
The ‘science’ of the title is not the biological bases of difference, and how the foundations of race were built upon an 18th-century, pre-genetics understanding of human variation and evolution. West makes a big show of the strength of the scientific methods of replication, of data collection and curation, its self-correcting nature and the gold standards of peer review and academic publishing. I am a scientist – a geneticist – and I found this a bit uncomfortable. ‘Evidence is the coin of the realm in science,’ West says quite correctly, not popularity nor eloquence nor opinion. But I know that the politics of scientific research, of funding, of university and corrupted publishing incentives frequently mask the pursuit of truth in favour of popularity, eloquence, opinion and also money.
West’s own field of psychology is among the worst offenders, with the ongoing ‘replication crisis’ – a well-established phenomenon whereby published findings are subsequently shown to be untrue or never re-tested, but, once published, no one outside of a frustrated cadre of purists seems to care. Nevertheless, he presents reams of evidence (and references it all) that point to the consensus scientific view that racism is real, exists and has serious consequences.
His style is breezy yet detailed – perhaps a bit too much so in some cases, with short chapters dedicated to one chunk of experiment and analysis; the case study of job applicants that receive callbacks based on black-coded or white-coded names. People with white-sounding names are roughly twice as likely to get a call back even if the CVs are identical. Similarly, in the United States, black people are three times more likely to get fatally shot by police than white people, but twice as likely to be unarmed. Voter suppression via strict ID regulations restricts African-American voters disproportionately.
West deals with the issue of where racism lies in society. Most people are not card-carrying Nazis, but racism in institutions is perpetrated by people almost all of whom don’t think they are racists. West is persuasive and precise about the body of work on implicit biases, and the levels of self-deception – sometimes deliberate but mostly because we are often unaware of the racist tropes baked into our culture.
The book this most resembles is Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women (2019), in that the argument is presented and reinforced with data and evidence and studies, and then it just keeps coming. West has done the work so that we don’t have to, and it’s a freight train of evidence. No doubt some internet man with too much time on his hands will scrutinise the cited studies in a blog or on Twitter – using the bigot-friendly techniques of gish gallop (bombardment of semi-relevant deviations) and whataboutery (responding to a question with a different, possibly irrelevant, question) – and come to the clearly wrong conclusion that because some of them are weak or underpowered, the whole thesis is bogus.
This then is my main problem with the book: I believe the thesis; I know this field; I know racism, both interpersonal and systemic. I see it on campus, in the media and in our institutions. But I have less faith in the scientific methodology and studies presented. Consider Churchill’s 1947 maxim on governance: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ I think this is how I feel about the way we do science today – not science itself as a pure and noble concept, but how we conduct and disseminate research. The fuller Churchill quote starts: ‘No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.’ I think a lot of people do think that about science – that it is perfect or all-wise. I, a scientist, do not.
Nevertheless, have faith (though science doesn’t require it). The strength of this book is that it is relentless. There is a useful how-to section on reducing racism in institutions. In a world of dis- and misinformation, the best way to counter bigotry surely is with robust, data-driven, evidence-based, forceful argument. The Science of Racism is a book that shouldn’t have to exist, but I am glad it does. Inequality abounds, racism persists, and racists walk among us. The fight is real, and this book is a weapon.
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