Superior
The Return of Race Science
The subtitle of Angela Saini’s Superior refers to the return of race science—but reading it, it’s abundantly clear that race science never went away. Instead, it went to ground, where it continued to grow and mold and erupt into the world at irregular, now increasing, intervals. Saini carefully but insistently explores the shape of those eruptions, the various modes in which the biological determination of race and intelligence emerges, noting the ways in which people who claim the mantle of superiority will look endlessly, and fruitlessly, for its justification. But perhaps that is itself a kind of instruction: race science is a symptom of an ideology of supremacy, the cloak it wears to justify its existence. Like all the emperor’s clothes, there’s not much to it; but while the emperor lives, it will always be with us.