She does so accessibly and cogently, tracing the trajectory from that history to knotty topics such as research on the emergence of Homo sapiens, or the production of pharmaceuticals targeting people of colour. The book, Saini tells us, reflects her childhood dream to understand and speak about the history and social context of the race concept. In Superior, one cannot help but see similarities between the twentieth-century movement of race-making ideologies from laboratories to political stages, and the current rise of xenophobic politics around the world. The US Immigration Act of 1924 was consciously designed to discourage southern and Eastern Europeans from entering the United States, and barred Asian immigrants outright. A century later, early-twentieth-century eugenic pseudoscience came to influence US policy. Sara Baartman (her birth name is unknown) was insultingly dubbed “the Hottentot Venus” owing to a fascination with her genitalia. Saini reminds us that in early-nineteenth-century Europe, the dehumanization of people of colour allowed for the caging and public exhibition of a South African Khoikhoi woman. The consequences of that reliance have ranged from justifications for school and housing segregation, to support for the Atlantic slave trade of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, genocidal policies against Indigenous communities around the world, and the Holocaust. Yet, despite its lack of scientific rigour or reproducibility, this reliance on race as a biological concept persists in fields from genetics to medicine. But we cannot consistently divide humans into discrete groups. Visible traits tell us something about population histories and gene–environment interactions. The characteristics that have come to define our popular understanding of race - hair texture, skin colour, facial features - represent only a few of the thousands of traits that define us as a species. Across the world, humans share 99.9% of their DNA. Research has repeatedly shown that race is not a scientifically valid concept. Pivoting deftly from personal reflection to technical exposition, she now explores a similarly persistent taint: the search by some scientists for measurable biological differences between ‘races’, despite decades of studies yielding no supporting evidence. Saini’s celebrated 2017 Inferior investigated the troubling relationship between sexism and scientific research. That story spans the survival of German doctor Johann Blumenbach’s eighteenth-century regionally based characterization of five human ‘races’ (Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans and Malays), and modern discussions about presumed correlations between race and intelligence. This overture to imperialism sets the stage for an eminently readable history lesson on the origins, rise, disavowal and resurgence of race research in Western science. In a reflection on power and conquest, Superior opens in the halls of London’s British Museum, among collections from Lower Nubia and ancient Egypt. In her latest book, Superior, Angela Saini investigates how the history and preservation of dubious science has justified and normalized the idea of hierarchies between ‘racial’ groups. Superior: The Return of Race Science Angela Saini Beacon (2019) Glass eyes of a type used in the twentieth century for ‘racial’ classification.

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