How To Argue With A Racist review: Adam Rutherford’s new book is ‘enthralling and illuminating’

Adam Rutherford’s enthralling and illuminating new book, How To Argue With A Racist, proves that ‘racial purity’ is a total myth

How To Argue With A Racist

Adam Rutherford                                                                                       W&N £12.99 

Rating:

Who can forget the joyful astonishment of Danny Dyer when he learned on Who Do You Think You Are? that he was a direct descendant of both William the Conqueror and Edward III? ‘It’s crazy,’ he gasped.

To the geneticist Adam Rutherford it doesn’t seem crazy at all. By his calculations, anyone with broadly British ancestral heritage is almost certain to be descended from Edward III and William I – as well as innumerable serfs and peasants.

Since the number of your direct ancestors doubles with each generation, over 500 years you accumulate more than a million. Go back another 500 years and you have a trillion. Go back further and you eventually reach ‘the global isopoint’: everyone from 1400 BC who has descendants alive now is the ancestor of everyone living today.

Adam Rutherford's new book makes a mockery of concepts of racial purity: all Nazis have Jewish blood for example. Above: Adolf Hitler meeting young fans in Hamburg in 1936

Adam Rutherford’s new book makes a mockery of concepts of racial purity: all Nazis have Jewish blood for example. Above: Adolf Hitler meeting young fans in Hamburg in 1936

This, Rutherford argues, makes a mockery of concepts of racial purity. All Nazis have Jewish blood; white supremacists are descended from Africans, Chinese and Indians. One of his chapter titles puts it succinctly: ‘Your Ancestors Are My Ancestors.’ Humanity isn’t black and white – literally so, as he shows in a chapter on skin colour.

The mapping of the human genome has transformed our understanding of ethnic identity, even if DNA-testing companies don’t always seem to get the point, as in an advertisement during the 2018 World Cup. ‘Root for your roots,’ it exhorted. ‘Be the ultimate football fan by supporting the countries that reflect your unique DNA.’ What, all of them?

IT’S A FACT

On Facebook there’s a support group for people whose genealogy DNA tests have led to unexpected results. 

The only thing wrong with this enthralling, illuminating book is its title. Rutherford doesn’t have much appetite for arguing with racists – ‘a fairly fruitless endeavour, and exhausting’. He quotes Jonathan Swift: you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.

But it isn’t only overt racists who perpetuate racial myths. There are plenty of well-intentioned people who assume that East Asian students are innately better at maths, or that black people have ‘natural rhythm’, or perhaps even that Jews are predisposed to crack jokes and win Nobel Prizes. 

See how many successful long-distance runners come from Kenya and Ethiopia: it must be DNA, mustn’t it? As Rutherford points out, however, in the first half of the 20th century most medal-winning distance runners came from Finland. The dominance of the flying Finns ended not because of a sudden change in their genomes: the country’s ‘culture of running’ simply faded.

Closer to home, the best table-tennis players produced by the UK came from one street in Reading. Something magical in the local gene pool? No, says Rutherford, but there was a very good table-tennis club.