Health institutions and policy makers must “wake up” to the danger posed by scientific racism and attempts to normalize an ideology that poses a real threat to minority communities, think tanks have warned.
The Institute of Race Relations, the Race Equality Foundation and Race on the Agenda say they have raised their voices over the return of “race science” beliefs as a topic of public debate over the past few years, with little response from national institutions.
Scientific racism is the belief that inequality stems from biological rather than social causes. It seeks to use research to legitimize the idea that there is such a thing as genetic superiority and is often deployed to push back against efforts to improve diversity and dismantle structural racism. More recently, it has been used by right-wing politicians to argue for hard borders or the mass expulsion of migrants from Western countries.
An investigated by the Guardianworking with the anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate, discovered that an international network of activists and academics trying to normalize scientific racism was operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire American tech entrepreneur, who claimed to obtained data from the British Biobank. The facility stores genetic information from 500,000 volunteers.
The think tanks and campaign groups say the latest investigations have significantly raised the stakes around the issue, saying that “today’s fringe ideas could be tomorrow’s mainstream”. They called for immediate action to hold those responsible to account and to challenge the ideas they are spreading.
Liz Fekete, the director of the Institute of Race Relations, said: “Black health campaigners, dedicated researchers and civil liberties and racial organizations have been raising their voices for years about the return of race science, with little indication that those in powerful institutions, especially health institutions, are listening.
“Now the Guardian/Hope Not Hate expose has raised the stakes. It provides a timely wake-up call to health institutions about the threat posed by NHS users from minority backgrounds.”
She added that her organization fears “today’s fringe ideas could be tomorrow’s mainstream. The road to this mainstream has already been paved in culture wars that mock any attempt to tackle racism, even as structural, systemic and popular racism increases – especially [Enoch] Powell-ite ideas against Muslims and migrants. Ideas based on cultural racism, a hierarchy of cultures, with Western culture at the top, have already gone mainstream, so why not scientific racism?”
Jabeer Butt, the CEO of the Race Equality Foundation, said: “Race may not have a biological basis, but racism has profound biological impacts, with poorer health being a key consequence.”
Kulvinder Nagre, a research and policy coordinator at Race on the Agenda, said it was appalling that those who support scientific racism theories may have gained access to sensitive data submitted for health and genetics research.
“Race science and eugenics have been increasingly discussed by certain fringe and online communities over the past decade or so, in line with the growing trend in ‘anti-woke’ theories and right-wing, populist discourse.”
The penetration of such ideas into more mainstream culture, he said, could be demonstrated by the controversy surrounding secret eugenics conferences held at UCL and exposed in 2018as well as the “growth in influence of ideas around the ‘great displacement theory’ in Western politics”.
Nagre added: “Although eugenics will never again be a respected scientific discipline, we must remain hypervigilant about the dangers of destructive racism, hidden behind a thin veneer of scientific legitimacy. Scientific racism has been the ultimate justification, and often the motivation , behind almost every genocide and attempted genocide that has occurred since the 15th century.”
