1,191 words
Many people believe in innate racial equality, yet I have never seen an argument made for it. All I have seen are attempts to keep people away from the opposite view, whether by calling it racist pseudo-science, saying that racial differences should not be studied, denying that there is anything to study by saying that there are no such things as races, or condemning a belief in racial differences on the grounds that it entails judgements of superiority and inferiority. To see what line it took, I watched a video produced in 2014 at University College London (UCL) about Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911).[1]
After a debate, which wasn’t shown, a student asked the Provost why UCL continued to celebrate a racist like Francis Galton, after whom a laboratory and a lecture hall were named, whereas no black academic was similarly honored. Everyone applauded, including the Provost, who instead of explaining the lack of monuments to black academics by saying that none had equaled Galton’s achievements was apologetic, saying that his only defense of Galton’s name being seen at UCL was that he had inherited him.
Three women were interviewed: the curator of the Galton collection, who showed an instrument used by Galton to measure people’s heads; a senior lecturer in science and technology studies, who showed a display of hair from people of many races that was made for the statistician and anthropologist Sir Ronald Fisher (1890-1962); and one from UCL’s Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, who showed Sir Flinders Petrie’s collection of model heads that had been made by the ancient Greeks to illustrate the different human types (Petrie 1854-1942).
None of the women mentioned anything the scientists had said about the races, instead suggesting that it was indecent of them to have thought that they differed or to have taken an interest in the differences. Their main reason for taking this view seemed to be that the idea of racial differences brought with it notions of superiority and inferiority. But comparing any two things of a given type does that, at least descriptively, and an evaluative sense is added if the feature with respect to which they are being compared is valued. Thus, to say that the riper of two apples is the superior in ripeness is a tautology, and if one wants a ripe apple, it is the preferable one. To forbid judgements of superiority and inferiority is to forbid comparisons.[2]

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But white people, who have been conditioned to react with horror to the thought of one race being said to be superior to another, think that comparisons between the races should be forbidden, and therefore such a simple statement as that black people are on average faster runners than whites, as seen in a race over any distance, or that whites are more inventive than are blacks as seen throughout history, make them feel uncomfortable. Merely to observe that white people had built great cathedrals before black people had ever put up a stone building would be reprehensible according to this conditioning because of the implication that whites are superior to blacks as builders.
The participants in the video could therefore make a case against Galton simply by referring to his belief that whites exceeded blacks in many ways; they didn’t need to say that he was wrong, or in what respects he found whites to be superior. Thus the student, Mahmoud Arif, who was interviewed later, said that Galton believed that the other races were inferior to Anglo-Saxons, which for him by itself dealt Galton a knockout blow. The lecturer mentioned superiority and inferiority no fewer than four times, each reference presumably being intended as a criticism.
The experts showed their distaste for Galton and his like in other ways. The curator called him racist and referred to measuring people as if it were disgusting. She repeated the statement: Galton had gone round measuring people. But doctors and nurses measure people all the time, and what else would she have expected of a scientist studying racial differences? The lecturer said that Fisher had “used instruments to scientifically measure race.” Think of that! Measuring it scientifically, using instruments! The Egyptologist, who had revealed the model heads as though they made a case against Petrie or the ancient Greeks, said that they represented “so-called racial types” and had made her realize how influenced Petrie had been by “so-called racial theory” and “so-called racial science.” She didn’t say why Petrie shouldn’t have been influenced by these things, or why they were only so-called.
But the student did mention something Galton had said. In a letter to the Times, he had suggested encouraging the Chinese to colonize East Africa. Mahmoud Arif partially quoted him: “The gain would be immense to the whole civilized world if we [through the Chinese] were to out-breed and finally displace the N-word as completely as the latter has displaced the aborigines of the West Indies” — where the “N-word” Galton used, as I found out when looking up his letter, was “Negro.” It seems a strange idea, but Galton made a reasonable case for it, saying that although there were some highly intelligent Negroes, the average member of the race lacked the intellect, self-reliance, and self-control needed to sustain any respectable form of civilization, whereas the industrious and order-loving Chinese, who were prolific breeders and would thrive in the East African climate, were endowed with a remarkable aptitude for it. No such empirical claim made it into the video lest it be put into the minds of viewers and the experts were to find themselves having to contest it.
Thus, the video illustrated every strategy commonly used to fend off the idea of innate racial differences. Between them the experts attached the word “racist” to Galton and his like, implied that they were not scientists, suggested that there were no such things as races, and condemned objective observations, which could invite value judgements. They did not say that the scientists’ unmentioned opinions were wrong — or rather, while not saying that they were wrong empirically, they suggested that they were wrong morally, not seeming to realize that their moralism was only the product of a historically unprecedented squeamishness about natural facts.
In 2020, when statues of white people were being pulled down, in some cases to be replaced by statues of black people, and when streets and buildings named after whites were being renamed after non-whites, UCL renamed its Galton Lecture Theatre. But in the absence of a sufficiently eminent black scientist to name it after, it was rechristened “Lecture Theatre 115.”[3]
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Notes
[1] Times Higher Education, October 9, 2014, “Eugenics at UCL: We inherited Galton.”
[2] The other way of getting rid of unwanted value judgements is by giving up one’s values. Thus, if one race is superior to another in art, this won’t matter as long as we don’t value art. Otherwise one can choose one’s values to match the things a favored race is good at.
[3] Evening Standard, June 19, 2020, “University College London renames lecture theatres after criticism over eugenicist links.”
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8 comments
The Galton bashing has seeped into pop culture. In season 2 of Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne’s Shebrew character makes a crack about epigenetics disproving Galton and eugenics.
Depressing that a distinguished individual has been erased. Not sure what is worse, your name being replaced by a no mark black academic to shoe horn in DEI to tick a nonsensical box or to be forgotten and replaced by a place holder number. We are in the cross hairs of this and it is given a platform to dominate. We seem to have a knife at a gun fight at the moment. They have it both ways. The dictate policy, academia, media whilst crying ‘victim’.
If it was just race, then you could react accordingly but it’s not. Its many things, too long to list here. Disingenuous individuals and groups claim the moral high ground using heuristic thought that is made up to define anything they wish to perpetuate this nonsense. They have many institutions on side or cowed. I looked at the membership booklet of the recently resurrected SDP in the UK. Part of the hand book states that you cannot be a member or chair (may be both) if you ever had membership of the BNP, PA and so on. The SDP claim not to be ‘woke’ and are campaigning for a moratorium on immigration for at least a generation yet we can only deviate away from the dictated Overton window only so much, lest there are consequences.
No.
Got any other easy questions?
There is a simple chart in existence and will be in existence for many years since it is in Fortune Magazine, one of the top financial magazines in the world. The chart is in the February/March 2022 issue, last page, entitled “Global Growth Gathers Speed — Global GDP Projections”.
The two top competitors on the Chart soar to the top, intertwined, until 2030, when China surpasses the United States.
Below that mind-bending reality of where we stand, all the other ‘producing’ countries of the world, show up in mostly steady upward momentum on the chart — Germany, Japan, UK, France, etc.
So — which ‘country’ is last — almost dead flat from 2006 to 2030? Well, it’s not a country at all, but rather an entire Continent — Africa — the second-largest continent on Earth.
You cannot say that Fortune Magazine has a horse in this race, so to speak — they deal in purely charting the statistics as they occur.
Look up this chart in any library and know the truth in black and white. Once seen, no one can ever utter a word about ‘equality’ of races.
There are moral arguments for racial equality, although they would require each race to have their own territories in order to be realized.
“The gain would be immense to the whole civilized world if we [through the Chinese] were to out-breed and finally displace the N-word as completely as the latter has displaced the aborigines of the West Indies”
Now the Chinese are out-breeding and finally displacing the Whites in Europe, Americas, Siberia and Australia, and how would it be seen for them could be shown on the examples of Uyghurs and Qazaqs of the Eastern Tuerkestan and of Tibetans. In Africa the Chinese exploit the mineral ressources of African countries and bribe African politicians, but they do not want to settle there in big masses, prefering Europe, Siberia and Australia, by the way, corrupting the politicians there in much bigger scale, than in Africa.
The equality of races is irrelevant, what matters is that they are different, and thankfully most people are steadily acknowledging that they are. What nobody seems to be able to do is separate difference from value. A deer is different from a tortoise, this is plain to everyone, but nobody argues about which one is superior or inferior, or that they should be made equals. No one would propose cutting the deer’s legs off to make it as slow as the tortoise, or removing the tortoise’s shell to make it as supple as the deer. They’re different beings that are different for a reason, and that’s alright. Races are different too, in many ways that are plain to see, and this is alright as well. It’s called diversity, or biodiversity, the thing these cretins claim to appreciate and pursue so much but appear hell-bent on destroying forever.
There have been proponents of race denialism and Lamarckianism. This includes Franz Boas, Trofim Lysenko, and Stephen Jay Gould. The problem is that they faked their research. Then there are the fast-talkers like Richard Lewontin who use phony rhetoric to serve their agendas.
As for the pearl-clutching you noted, this much is not a scientific viewpoint; it’s basically a substitute religion, and Galton was a “heretic”. It goes further than that. Many of these types will say that being male or female is a state of mind.
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