The awful dishonesty and deliberate falsehoods employed by academics to further the cause of ‘anti-racism’

Those who devise and disseminate the idea of anti-racism are seldom open and truthful about what they are doing

Any theory or doctrine which is true and founded upon evidence should not need to be defended with falsehoods and deceit, any more than it should depend upon logical fallacies. If we found that those who work in the field of quantum mechanics were only able to explain their ideas by misleading people about history or hurling abuse at those who held a different view of the behaviour of sub-atomic particles and so on, then we might be a little suspicious about this. Why, we would perhaps ask ourselves, are these people telling lies and being rude, if their belief system is a rational one based upon scientific enquiry? This is the question which some ask today, about the champions of the anti-racist movement.

The best way of examining what is now happening in the field of anti-racism is to look closely at a specific example of what one of the more articulate and well-known academics writing about the subject has to say. Let us begin by taking a book published by that most respectable of houses, the Oxford University Press. It is in their series of ‘A very short introduction’ books, in which leading experts write short books which explain topics ranging from Accounting to Zionism for the ordinary, non-academic reader. Ali Rattansi, a Professor of Sociology, is the author of Racism: A Very Short Introduction. This was published originally in 2007 and then comprehensively updated and revised in 2020 in he wake of the death of George Floyd in the United States. It is from the 2020 edition that quotations are taken.

      The very first sentence of the book at which we are looking, is deliberately untrue. It reads,

     The term racism was coined in the 1930s, primarily as a response to the

      Nazi project of making Germany judenrein or ‘free of Jews’.

     (Rattansi, 2020)

It is probably fair to assume that an authority in the field of racism like Professor Rattansi knows perfectly well that he has begun the book with a falsehood and that he knows that the term ‘racism’ was first set down in print in 1903, 30 years before the Nazis came to power in Germany. It was an American who is first recorded using the word, in a speech denouncing racial prejudice against American Indians. In 1902, General Richard Pratt said,

     Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people

      kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very

      slow. Association of races and classes is necessary in order to destroy

      racism and classism.

     (Barrows, 1903)

It is unlikely that Pratt coined the term, but this is the first verifiable time that it appeared in print. After all, the other expression he uses, classism, had been circulating for 60 years or more by 1902. The natural question we have to ask ourselves is why on earth does the author of Racism: A Very Short Introduction try to deceive his readers in this way? The answer is not hard to find.

     When once the full horror of Auschwitz and other details of the Holocaust became known to the world, after the end of the Second World War, it dealt an apparently mortal blow to the whole idea of scientific racism, as well as making both racism and eugenics  taboo subjects to this very day. By associating the word ‘racism’ with the Holocaust and claiming it as an invention of the Nazis, Ali Rattansi makes sure that we associate the two things in our minds; the neutral word and the ghastly historical event of the Holocaust. It may interest readers to know that the claim is often made on right-wing internet groups that it was the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky who first came up with the word. Pretending that it is something devised by communists helps, or so they suppose, to discredit anti-racists today. Still on Page 1 of the book, we find this,

     The idea that the Jews were a distinct race was given currency by Nazi

     racial science.

     (Rattansi, 2020)

This is of course also untrue and another attempt to bring the Nazis into the picture.  On this page, the first in the chapter entitled ‘Race’ and racism: some conundrums, the word ‘Nazi’ occurs no fewer than four times, just in case we were to miss the connection between the Holocaust and the subject at hand. The Jews were regarded as a race at least a century before the Holocaust. The first mention in print of a Jewish ‘race’ was made by the British politician, and later Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who was of course himself a Jew,

     The Jews, for example, independently of the capital qualities for

     citizenship which they possess in their industry, temperance, and energy

      and vivacity of mind, are a race essentially monarchical, deeply

      religious...

     (Disraeli, 1844)

     Most readers will, it is assumed, be familiar with the idea of Godwin’s Law. This was formulated 30 years ago by an American called Mike Godwinson and states, ‘As a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a comparison of a person's being compared to Hitler, or another Nazi reference, increases.’ The generally accepted interpretation of this is that accusing a debating opponent of comparing some person or practice to Hitler and the Nazis is intellectually lazy, a way of scoring points which tells us little about the actual merits of an argument. In the case of Ali Rattansi, he appears to be so eager to violate Godwin’s Law and invoke the spectre of the Nazis, that he cannot even wait for a debate to begin. For some readers, scattering references to the Third Reich around in this way like confetti raises the suspicion that the person using such a tactic must be short on persuasive and logical debating points.

     It would be easy, but perhaps wearisome, for any reader to go through this book listing the errors and misleading claims which are to be found on every page. Instead, we shall limit ourselves to a few egregious examples. Just to remind ourselves, the object of the exercise is to show that even in an apparently neutral account of racism written by an academic for the average person, the aim is less to shed light on the subject than to ensure that those reading it will be indoctrinated in the ‘correct’ view of the matter. It is hard to think of any other reason for including within a short book of fewer than 200 pages so many untruthful statements.

     One of the enterprises which has been launched in recent years by those who are enthusiastic about the equalitarian doctrine is the rewriting of history in order to demonstrate that people with dark skin played a far greater role in the past than has previously been acknowledged. In the United States this is done by suggesting that black people, the descendants of slaves of African heritage, have been responsible for many innovations and inventions, such as the electric lightbulb. This is quite a cottage industry in America, the attribution of everything from peanut butter to the internet as originating with black inventors. It ties in with a British project, which is designed to prove that there never was an exclusively white culture or civilisation in the country. The idea behind the enterprise of rewriting history is to demonstrate that the achievements in Britain and America of supposedly white people are really a product of a multicultural society. Rattansi plays to this idea on Page 39 of his book when he talks of the DNA testing carried out on a 10,000 year-old English skeleton known as Cheddar Man. Several rather crafty tricks are played on the reader. The first is to set up a straw man and then claim that it has been knocked down. We are told that,

     In February 2018 scientists unveiled a sculpture of the first modern

     Britons.  They had lived about 10,000 years ago and the DNA analysis of

     the skeleton, which had in fact been unearthed more than a hundred

     years ago in Gough Cave, in the Cheddar Gorge area of Somerset, revealed

     that these Britons were far from the light-skinned, straight- and fair-haired

     humans that they had been supposed to be.

     (Rattansi, 2020)

Supposed by whom, one might reasonably enquire? Most artists’ impressions of early men in Britain, going back to Victorian times, show swarthy-looking men with shaggy black hair and beards. This is of course how the first ‘cavemen’ in Britain have been depicted in books ranging from encyclopaedias to history books aimed at children for many decades. Offhand, I do not believe that I have ever in my life seen an image of the earliest men which shows them as pale and blond! Rattansi goes on to claim that the skin of Cheddar Man was ‘dark to black’ and says that this was based on the DNA testing.

     Here is another little bit of deception, because he fails to mention that this is not at all what the researcher who studied the DNA claimed. It is true that London’s Natural History Museum commissioned a bust of Cheddar Man showing him with black skin and that this received a good deal of publicity in newspapers and other media. It was said that this must be a shock to racists everywhere, to find that their earliest ancestors were not white at all, but black. Even the British magazine New Scientist joined in this. On 7 February 2018 New Scientist confidently reported that, ‘The first modern Briton, who lived around 300 generations ago, had “dark to black” skin.’ (New Scientist, 2018). Two weeks later, New Scientist conceded that perhaps there was some uncertainty about the story, because the geneticists who had actually carried out the work said publicly that the Natural History Museum’s reconstruction was purely speculative and other experts asserted that there was no way at all of deciding skin colour on the basis of ancient DNA. A week later, an editorial in New Scientist admitted that the television company which had been involved in the affair might have exaggerated the results for their own reasons, saying,

     The whole episode smacks of a publicity stunt to hype up the show. There   

     is some truth in that, but dismissing it outright does a disservice to the

     scientists.  According to the state of knowledge at the time, the genetic

     analysis did  suggest that Cheddar Man’s skin was dark. But science

     progresses, and since the analysis was done last year, many more genes

     affecting skin colour have been discovered. Understandably, the new

     science did not make it into the documentary.

     (New Scientist, 2018)

Not a word of this is mentioned by Professor Rattansi, despite the fact that he must surely have kept up to date with the developments, since he was writing two years after the scandal emerged. He includes in the book a photograph of the discredited reconstruction, with no comment about its dubious nature.

    It is hard to avoid the conclusion when we see this sort of thing that academics like Ali Rattansi are ferociously determined to attack the idea of scientific racism, while valiantly defending the concept of anti-racism, at all costs. In doing so, they will cheerfully deceive people by both omission and commission. I can think of no other area of human thought where such tactics are so widespread and tolerated so readily by people who would otherwise challenge such deliberate deceptions when encountered in a supposedly academic setting.

Barrows, Isabel C. Editor (1903) Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian 1902 (Published by Lake Mohonk Conference, 1903).

Disraeli, Benjamin (1844) Coningsby, London: Henry Colby.

New Scientist (2018) Early Briton from 10,000 years ago had dark skin and blue eyes, 7/2/2018.

New Scientist (2018) Does Cheddar Man show there is such a thing as bad publicity?, 28/2/2018.

Rattansi, Ali (2020) Racism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.