How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality
Adam Rutherford
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When you have only ever experienced privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
“Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. Neither race nor racism has foundations in science. It is our duty to contest the warping of scientific research, especially if it is being used to justify prejudice. If you are a racist, then you are asking for a fight. But science is my ally, not yours, and your fight is not just with me, but with reality.”
“When all you’ve ever known is privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
“Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every white supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, Native American, aboriginal Australian ancestors, as well as everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy. For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.”
“demonstrates quite clearly Swift’s maxim that you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.”
“Scientific racism’ or ‘race science’ are both misnomers. These are pseudoscientific domains.”
“Race is a social construct. This does not mean that it is invalid or unimportant.”
“It behoves us all to confront racism wherever we find it, especially when it is covert or normalised in stereotypes and myth, and science is a weapon in that contest. The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that ‘in a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”
“As Jonathan Swift said in 1721: ‘Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.”
“The nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker said that the moral arc of the world tends towards justice,”
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Book Keywords:
race, education, equality, white-privilege, genes, racism, antiracist, pseudoscience, oppression, british, racsim, science, genetics
