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Is Science Racist?

Article  in  International Studies in the Philosophy of Science · July 2017

DOI: 10.1080/02698595.2018.1463695

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 International Studies in the Philosophy of Science

ISSN: 0269-8595 (Print) 1469-9281 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisp20

Is Science Racist?

Zinhle Mncube

To cite this article: Zinhle Mncube (2017) Is Science Racist?, International Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, 31:3, 319-321, DOI: 10.1080/02698595.2018.1463695

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2018.1463695

Published online: 25 May 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, 2017
VOL. 31, NO. 3, 319–330

BOOK REVIEWS

Is Science Racist?, by Jonathan Marks, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2017, viii + 142 pp.,
ISBN 9780745689210, £35.00, €44.74 (hardback); ISBN 9780745689213, £9.99, €12.77
(paperback)

Racism and science have always gone hand in hand. The late Canadian psychologist, Phillipe
Rushton, argued that ‘the average sub-Saharan African has the IQ of a mentally handicapped
European’ (5). The Nobel laureate and ‘father of DNA’, James D. Watson, has expressed
concern about the ‘inherently gloomy prospect of Africa’ because black people are just not
as intelligent as their white counterparts (Hunt-Grubbe 2007). These twenty-first-century
men of science have espoused erroneous and racist claims under the guise of science. Yet
both continue to be revered not just in science but also in certain parts of the public discourse.
This is the background against which Jonathan Marks, a professor of anthropology at the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, frames the introduction to his important new book,
Is Science Racist?. As Marks sees it, that science tolerates racists like Rushton and Watson is a
problem for science. He defines racism as belief in the inequality of races, and scientific racism
as the use of science to justify this belief. Marks focuses specifically on the content of science
and he carefully shows that despite popular belief, to study human biological variation and to
study race is to do two different things. That is, while the former has to do with science, the
latter has to do with the imposition of politics, culture, and economics onto human differences
—all aspects outside the ambit of science. Marks vividly illustrates that despite this distinction
between human biological variation and race, in just about every generation of science ‘racist
assumptions infuse production of knowledge on human variation’ (126).
Even if only as an exercise in scholarship, you should read this book if you are a scientist,
science practitioner, student of science, or scholar or student of the humanities who is inter-
ested in human variation, in race, in critically thinking about science, and perhaps even in con-
fronting your own biases on these topics. This book is short, engaging, and accessible, and the
exposition is at just the right level for those who need an introduction into the aforementioned
topics. In what follows, I centre my discussion of the book around some of the central myths
and fallacies that Marks highlights.
The first is the myth that races are natural divisions of the human species. Chapter 2, ‘How
Science Invented Race’, is one of the most important chapters in the book. Debates around
defining race, especially in public discourse, have often centred on whether race is biologically
real (‘nature’) or socially constructed (‘culture’). Against this grain, Marks makes the central
claim that human races (which he defines as the idea that there are natural, biologically distinct
divisions of the human species) ‘are bio-political compounds’ (53). By this he means that, of
course, humans differ biologically. But these differences are mostly culturally constituted. In
other words, Marks argues that the division of humans into races is not based on objective
facts of nature. Instead, race exists as the ‘ascription of arbitrary cultural meaning to patterns
of human diversity, often in defiance of biological patterns themselves’ (28).
Marks maintains that there are two ways to explain why there are social inequalities
(especially between races) in the world. One way is to look at the effects of historical injustices
on people around the world. Another way is to argue that social inequalities are natural,
because naturally, people are differently endowed. Therefore, the argument has run, let us
study nature to explicate the ‘innate basis of these social differences’ (37). Of course, the
320 BOOK REVIEWS

argument continues, if social inequalities are natural—if you are poor because you are not very
intelligent—then not much can be done about that.
Marks argues that whether they have studied skull sizes, or skull shapes, or blood groups,
some scientists have used science to provide racist and erroneous biological explanations for
social inequalities (e.g. the allegedly genetics-based ‘illness’ of feeblemindedness). This is scien-
tific racism. Marks contends that races are real only in the sense that being classified as ‘black’,
e.g. a cultural process, has real social effects that lead to human group differences—it is cer-
tainly not just a ‘fact of nature’ that worldwide ‘black’ people are of generally poorer health
than ‘white’ people.
The second myth is that science is value free. Science has been politically co-opted as a
springboard for bias particularly because of the authority that science has in society. In
chapter 3, ‘Science, Race and Genomics’, Marks usefully explains that a large part of the auth-
ority of science stems from the myth that science is value free, apolitical, and amoral. He con-
tends that not only do scientists ‘think like everyone else’ (58) but also they are beset by the
same (often unchecked) biases as everyone else—‘their presuppositions adversely affect the
framing of the research, the collection and analysing of the data, and the interpretation of
the results’ (22). Marks also shows how throughout history, science has served political,
nationalist, and economic interests. His explanation of the way in which genomic ancestry
testing, science’s latest cash cow, is really about ‘fabricating meaning for the data’ (74) is
especially compelling.
In chapter 4, ‘Race and Biomedical Science’, Marks introduces what he calls the taxonomic
fallacy, which has plagued biomedical science. He argues that in the same way scientists have
mistakenly taken the ability to classify humans into races (an exercise that we now know is bio-
political) to signify that human races are real zoological units—take the eugenics movement; so
too has our ancestry (again, something bio-political) been reified as objectively real taxonomic
structure. In chapter 5, ‘What We Know, and Why It Matters’, the last chapter, Marks sum-
marises the main points of the book in 10 succinct points.
Despite the strengths of Marks’s book, I would like to raise three worries. Marks begins the
book by framing the question ‘Is Science Racist?’ around the paradox that although both are
‘outmoded ideologies’, if as a scientist you support or promote creationist ideas, you are
immediately shunned by other scientists; whereas, if you support or promote racist ideas,
‘you can coexist in science alongside’ other scientists (3). Creationism and racism (as Marks
has defined it) are similar in that they are both antithetical to the ideals of science, so it is para-
doxical that scientists would shun the one but not the other.
Although I understand the similarities between creationism and racism, I find the paradox
that Marks sketches here to be too superficial. Science, we could say, is about observing the
world and following the scientific method, whereas creationism, a religious belief, is about
something else entirely—something that cannot be scientifically observed. The fundamental
difference is that racism is not an outmoded ideology in science or in fact, in any area.
Science has been co-opted for racist ends by scientists, governments, and for private interests
because of the authority of science. Racism has an appeal in science that creationism lacks. As
Marks himself has shown, politics, economics, science, and racism have historically been bed-
fellows. But that is because, historically, racism has also been about political, social, and econ-
omic powers. Were power and control not one of the ends of the 1920s eugenics movement
and the forced sterilisation the 1970s? So that racism is tolerated in science, as opposed to crea-
tionism, or indeed as opposed to anything, is to be expected.
The second issue is Marks’s ‘deceptively simple’ answer to the question in the title of his
book, namely ‘Science is racist to the extent that its practitioners may be narrowly trained
and particularly shielded from the knowledge about race that differs from their folk knowledge
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 321

or common sense’ (106). What I find problematic here is the passivity and basic ignorance of
race and racism that it implies for scientific practitioners. First, any serious science prac-
titioners engaged in research about human biological variation should know many of the
facts about human variation, scientific racism, and the partiality of science that Marks dis-
cusses (even if they have to research this themselves). Second, even if science practitioners
were provided with all the knowledge on race and racism, it is questionable that this would
ameliorate racism in science. That science is racist in the way that Marks put it here cannot
be the full story.
The two issues I have just mentioned are a symptom of my last concern with the book—
namely that Marks could have spent more time directly answering (especially the ‘why?’
part of) the question, Is Science Racist?. As I have indicated, one way in which he tried to
answer the question was by focusing on the nature of race. He quickly dismissed attempts
at biologically defining race through genetic clusters when he could have given a stronger argu-
ment. More importantly, the answer he gave to the central question could have been more
expansive, had he widened his definition of racism in science—by more deeply considering
issues of power and control, for example.

Reference
Hunt-Grubbe, Charlotte. 2007. “The Elementary DNA of Dr. Watson.” Sunday Times (London), 14 October.

Zinhle Mncube
Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg
zinhlem@uj.ac.za
© 2018 Zinhle Mncube
https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2018.1463695

The Meaning of the Wave Function: In Search of the Ontology of Quantum

Mechanics, by Shan Gao, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, x + 189 pp.,
ISBN 9781107124356, £89.99, US$140.00 (hardback)

What is the revolution that comes with quantum mechanics? While there is no universally
accepted answer, the understanding that has grown in recent years is that the revolution, what-
ever it is, is to be found in the wave function or quantum state. Understanding the meaning of
the wave function has thus emerged as one of the most important topics in the philosophy of
science.
Shan Gao has now written a book that will serve as a valuable resource for everybody inter-
ested in the subject and advance the debate by new and bold ideas. That he manages to do this
in a mere 170 pages is due not least to the fact that he avoids the temptation to play the classics.
He does not try to entertain (or bore) us with yet another discussion of the double-slit exper-
iment but dives right into recent developments in quantum foundations. This makes the book
less accessible to readers without solid background knowledge, though more relevant to the
contemporary discourse.
Chapter 1 introduces protective measurements, a relatively new form of quantum exper-
iment that does not collapse the state of the measured system, allowing even for a complete,

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