4th Estate
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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Angela Saini 2019
The right of Angela Saini to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
Cover: Michelangelo (Buonarroti, Michelangelo 1475–1564) David – detail (head in profile). Florence, Accademia. © 2019. Photo SCALA, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali e del Turismo. Francis Harwood (1726/1727–1783) Bust of a Man. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008293864
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008293840
Version: 2020-04-21
‘This is an essential book on an urgent topic by one of our most authoritative science writers’
SATHNAM SANGHERA, author of The Boy with the Topknot
‘Whether you think of racist science as bad science, evil science, alt-right science, or pseudoscience, why would any contemporary scientist imagine that gross inequality is a fact of nature, rather than of political history? Angela Saini’s Superior connects the dots, laying bare the history, continuity, and connections of modern racist science, some more subtle than you might think. This is science journalism at its very best!’
JONATHAN MARKS, author of Tales of the Ex-Apes
‘Angela Saini’s investigative and narrative talents shine in Superior, her compelling look at racial biases in science past and present. The result is both a crystal-clear understanding of why race science is so flawed, and why science itself is so vulnerable to such deeply troubling fault lines in its approach to the world around us – and to ourselves’
DEBORAH BLUM, author of The Poison Squad
‘This deeply researched and unsettling book blends history, interviews, and the author’s personal experiences growing up as an Indian girl in a white working-class section of London … An important and timely reminder that race is “a social construct” with “no basis in biology”’
Kirkus (starred review)
‘Angela Saini’s Superior is nothing short of a remarkable, brilliant, and erudite exploration of what we believe about the racialized differences among our human bodies. Saini takes readers on a walking tour through science, art, history, geography, nostalgia and personal revelation in order to unpack many of the most urgent debates about human origins, and about the origin myths of racial hierarchies. This beautifully-written book will change the way you see the world’
JONATHAN M. METZL, author of Dying of Whiteness
‘Some writers have tackled the sordid history of race science previously, but none have gone so deep under the skin of the subject as Angela Saini in Superior. In her deceptively relaxed writing style, Saini patiently leads readers through the intellectual minefields of “scientific” racism. She plainly exposes the conscious and unconscious biases that have led even some of our most illustrious scientists astray’
MICHAEL BALTER, science journalist and author of The Goddess and the Bull
For my parents, the only ancestors I need to know.
Contents
Copyright
Praise for Superior
Dedication
Prologue
1 Deep Time
2 It’s a Small World
3 Scientific Priestcraft
4 Inside the Fold
5 Race Realists
6 Human Biodiversity
7 Roots
8 Origin Stories
9 Caste
10 Black Pills
11 The Illusionists
Afterword
References
Index
Acknowledgements
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
‘In the British Museum is where you can see ’em
The bones of African human beings’
– Fun-Da-Mental, ‘English Breakfast’
I’M SURROUNDED BY DEAD PEOPLE, asking myself what I am.
Where I am is the British Museum. I’ve lived in London almost all my life and through the decades I’ve seen every gallery in the museum many times over. It was the place my husband took me on our first date, and years later, it was the first museum to which I brought my baby son. What draws me back here is the scale, the sheer quantity of artefacts, each seemingly older and more valuable than the last. I feel overwhelmed by it. But as I’ve learned, if you look carefully, there are secrets – secrets that undermine the grandeur, that offer a different narrative from the one the museum was built to tell.
When medical doctor, collector and slave owner Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed the British Museum’s founding collection upon his death in 1753, an institution was established that would come to document the entire span of human culture, in time and space. The British Empire was growing, and in the museum you can still see how these Empire-builders envisioned