Scientific racism today must be seen and rejected for what it truly is
—a hollow attempt to dress discrimination in the garb of science and reason
Across Europe and the U.S., racist and anti-immigrant groups have embraced
long-discredited ideas that races constitute biologically separate groups
differing in everything from intelligence to birthrate.
With immigration a defining topic in fractious debates on both sides of the Atlantic,
#scientific #racism is now explicit in right-wing discourse.
In October an exposé in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed a network dedicated to proliferating race science worldwide had received years of funding from Silicon Valley.
That same month came Donald Trump’s comment decrying immigration as
“a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
In June it was revealed that a U.K. Reform Party candidate had previously insisted that sub-Saharan Africans were lowering IQ in the country.
But while its modern advocates rebrand scientific racism as “human biodiversity,”
such insidious euphemisms are just attempts to give a veneer of respectability to hateful, pseudoscientific beliefs.
These beliefs have a dark history tied to the racial pseudoscience of #eugenics,
and its popularity sadly continues unabated.
On social media, avowed racists misrepresent genetic research to bolster the narrative that white people are intrinsically superior.
In the rarefied world of Silicon Valley, race science has made a dark renaissance,
elevated by Google and other search engines.
(In response to a request for comment from Scientific American, a representative of Google cited a statement from the company that had been included in a Wired article on this subject:
“Our goal is for AI Overviews to provide links to high quality content so that people can click through to learn more,
but for some queries there may not be a lot of high quality web content available.”)
Last year a then forthcoming book,
"The Origins of Woke", by right-wing author #Richard #Hanania was lauded by tech industry figures
#David #Sacks and #Peter #Thiel.
That same year the Huffington Post reported that Hanania had previously written under a pseudonym for white supremacist websites.
He then wrote an essay in which he claimed to give “an explanation for why I wrote such things,
and why I no longer hold such views.”
But critics suggest those views are reflected in his book and in racist comments he has continued to make,
including his suggestions that people of color need aggressive policing and more incarceration.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silicon-valley-is-reviving-the-discredited-and-discriminatory-idea-of-race/
