The title of Adam Rutherford’s new book, How to Argue with a Racist, is tempting and ticklish, though ultimately it’s not much more than literary clickbait, designed to entice browsers to pluck the book from a shop’s display table (perhaps pickbait would be a better term).
That is because, naturally, there is no mileage to be made in arguing with a racist; racism is illogical, and as Jonathan Swift recognised 300 years ago, “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.” This will not be news to anyone who has read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, which showed how hard it is for any of us to change our views about emotionally charged issues – or indeed to anyone who has foolishly ventured outside their filter bubble on social media.
The aim of Rutherford, a geneticist, is to show that any claim of a genetically founded justification for racial differences is unfounded in science. Race certainly exists, but it is a social construct, not a genetic one – “two San people from different tribes in southern Africa will be more different from each other in their genes than a Briton, a Sri Lankan and a Maori.”
Cradle of humanity
It’s universally accepted that Africa is the cradle of humanity, and that lighter skin colours emerged as an adaptation in the diaspora living in cooler climates, so how could we be fundamentally distinct? Also, “the pigmentation of a pale-skinned redheaded Scot is a long way on a colour chart from that of a typical Spaniard, though we call both of them white.” Traditional racial categories, Rutherford emphasises, are not a consistent or scientific way of grouping people, but we fail to see this because “we yearn to categorise things and fail to recognise continuity.”
None of this stops people from attributing certain qualities – or lack of them – to particular cultures and skin colours. Some of our greatest thinkers were racist, including Voltaire (“Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence”) and Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson.
Rutherford devotes most of the book to debunking a few classic race myths: that West Indians are better at sprinting; that black people have lower IQs than white people; and, crucially, that there is any such thing as “racial purity” – so talk of “indigenous” (translation: “white”) people can be seen for the racist cant that it is. “Every Nazi has Jewish ancestors,” Rutherford notes, and shows.
Too technical
All this is useful and vital to keep saying, in our times of febrile social media where bad research is as easy to circulate as, and often more eye-catching than, good. Indeed, where Rutherford falls down is in failing to put his case with more vim and dazzle: his explanations are meticulous but very technical. He doesn’t seem to believe in the analogies, personal stories or illustrations that science popularisers like Richard Dawkins or Malcolm Gladwell use to great effect.
If you were to try to argue with a racist using Rutherford’s text, the idea of succeeding by starting with an explanation of the difference between a genotype and a phenotype is about as likely as the risible scene in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday where a woman disarms a violent criminal armed only with a reading of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.
Instruction manual
It certainly wouldn't hold much force against the determinedly illogical bigotry which is satirised in Michela Murgia's How to Be a Fascist. This slim and punchy book, translated by Alex Valente, uses an instruction-manual format to throw a light on our times and on how many of the political manoeuvres we see today in western democracies resemble the practices of fascism in the 20th century.
Fascism, after all, has so many advantages, doesn’t it? Democracy – peddled by “democracy extremists” – is “so unstable – today you have their approval, tomorrow you don’t”. And rule by consent is so inefficient: “the fewer people you need to consult, the sooner you make a decision”.
Fascistometer checklist
The canny fascist, Murgia reminds us, sees not “opponents” but “enemies”, and uses rhetorical sleight of hand so that “a white man who rapes a woman will always and forever represent himself, while a black migrant will represent all black people and all migrants too”.
At the end, a “fascistometer” checklist enables you check how far along the road you are yourself, with phrases to tick if you agree, including Trumpisms such as “There are fine people on both sides” and “This is a witch-hunt.” The final message, although lightly delivered, is that “othering” isn’t good enough: the price of avoiding fascism is eternal vigilance, of our own words and deeds as well as those of others.
