If you’re looking for the ultimate anti-racism guide, this is it. How To Argue With A Racist is an important, accessible and incredibly thought-provoking read which powerfully confronts and quashes racist stereotypes, views and arguments with science and history. We caught up with author, geneticist and broadcaster Dr Adam Rutherford to discuss systemic racism, calling out racist behaviour and his advice on sharing anti-racist content on social media.
Get your copy! How To Argue With A Racist is available at UO now. 100% of the profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.
We Talk Racism With Adam Rutherford, Author of How To Argue With A Racist
Is ‘how to argue with a racist’ a question you get asked often, and if so, why do you think people are unsure how to recognise and confront racist behaviour?
It’s really hard. It takes some real hotspa to actually confront someone when you see somebody being openly racist in an aggressive way. It is hard to confront that but we have to do that. But also it’s more about low levels of racism that are more to do with stereotypes than open hatred. The thing is although I talk about white supremacists and neo-nazis in the book, it’s more considered to be aimed at people like us who aren’t racist and don’t consider themselves to be racist, but hold views that are stereotypes about certain cultures and races. When I wrote this book, I had people saying to me they wished they had this at Christmas for someone they know or family members. When I sit down with my family, or there’s big sports events, my dad will say something and I can intuitively tell this is a racist thing to say. It is sometimes called positive attitude racism, as everyone wants to be healthier, fitter, more muscular etc, but they still hold these racist views. The book is to equip normal people, like us, with scientific and historical tools so we can say, “What you just said is not correct, it’s also derogatory and a racist thing to say.”
The curriculum teaches children more about the wars that divide us than the origin of humankind which unites us. Why is this still the case when we know so much about our shared DNA, genetics and ancestry?
The racial categories we all know and use today are 400 years old. They cover the tiniest bit of history let alone prehistory. One of the key things about the book and the history of colonialism is that these racist catergories that feel normal to us were invented in the 17th/18th centuries by european men who hadn’t travelled anywhere in the world. Using secondhand reports and enslaved people and making these vast generalisations about land masses such as Africa, which today has 54 countries and 1.3 billion people, and yet we just call them black people or African American. 42 million African Americans descended from Africa over the enslaved period of transalantic slavery, and the story of human evolution, migration and our history is so much richer than the very limited focus that particularly in this country. We tend to focus a lot on British history, and that history ignores the facts that contemporary Britain is built on a racist system of colonisation. That's not to be down on it, it's just that if we ignore it, we don't know the basis of it and where our racist catagories come from. It’s not to disparage empires, which I think was a complex thing rather than a good or bad thing. Our conversations seem to be about what is good or bad. ‘Was this war good or bad?’ (for example). Human existence is super-complicated, and until we understand and appreciate that, we won't be able to get over our base instincts to say; ‘these people are X / Y, these people are our enemies, these people are our friends’ etc. Bigotry is permanent, but this form of racism we live amongst today is very temporal.
We all share the same ancestry and the success of humankind is down to the fact we have always moved / never been bound by country of birth. This fact is incontestable, so why do you believe politicians still go unchecked and are able to verbalise, use and implement systemic racist policies in 2020?
The answer to that is ignorance combined with willful deceit - which isn’t a very positive message to talk about our politicians. But the truth is bigotry is permanent, people will always be bigoted about something. But one of the key points of my book and studying British history, colonialism, the British Empire and slavery, and all of these things which our society is dependent, is just understanding that history releases you from the bigotry that is purely racial, as it shows it’s superficial and invented. It’s incumbent upon us all to wield the power that we have to make sure people are educated about the real story of our country. We have some fracture lines within it which are easier to fuel and hard to mend. We need to put the effort in to understand the experience of black people or BAME people in this country, and listen to the lived experiences of young black kids on the street who are stopped and searched at a disproportionately high amount. It’s very easy to say we’re not a racist country or say that we’re less racist than America - which is probably true. But the least racist country is still a country, and if we don't confront that then those fracture lines are much more easily split and widened.
There’s a sentence I wrote in the book which i borrowed off a feminist writer called Helen Lewis, which I think is the most important sentence I’ve ever written. ‘If all you’ve ever known is privilege, then equality feels like oppression.’ It’s important as it’s so hard to recognise one's own privilege... and hard to say if you’re having a tough day, you’re poor or struggling with mental health issues it’s really hard to say I still have privilege above other people. It’s true as we all have different levels of privilege. The privilege we inherit comes from the luck, the chance and happenstance of where we were born. The fact that me and you are sitting the UK in London - middle class - tonnes of privilege, I have extra privilege being born a man - that notion to recognise we have power and i think it’s our duty if you have power to distribute it to others. That;s what systemic racism is - the maintenance of power by the powerful by no other reason other than they have it and the perpetual inconvenience of not being in that power/powered group. That’s what we have to confront. We have to be not non-racist but anti-racist. Which means not pulling the ladder up from beneath us, making an effort to ensure there is diversity in our conversations and representation. You do confront those whom you work with when they say things which are casually racist or positively racist or overtly racist. That to my mind is the duty as the powerful.
There’s been pivotal points throughout history which at the time must have felt like the battle to end racism was near. To what extent do you believe the events of this year, in particular the BLM movement, will see the death of systemic racism at its root?
I think this is a movement that is making waves more than anything. How permanent it is, we don’t know, but at least it is exposed and you can't avoid that conversation anymore. The fact that books like mine and others - mine is more focused on the science and historical basis - but loads of other books about race during the lockdown period and during BLM protests, became best sellers. This shows there is an appetite; when issues of race become a part of public discourse, people want to improve themselves and they want to listen to diverse voices so that they are better educated and better equipped for confronting racists and being anti-racist. Ask me again in ten years time and we’ll see if we’ve made progress. Positive discrimination and affirmative action does actually work. In 1964 when the civil rights movement was successful in changing the law in the states, that is effectively civil rights. The law impsong rules that you could not segregate between the races. The same with legislation against homophobia or discrimination about homosexual behavour in this country in the last 50 years. Again it’s positive discrimination - it said you can’t not employ someone for being gay. At the time, if you look at the historical records, loads of people said this is terrible, it’s positive discrimination, we just want to employ people based on how good they are, rather than their sex or gender, which is a standard issue we come across today. If you make those positive incremental moves when they have to happen in the future, in five or ten years time, they stop being an issue and you start to normalise it. So when I go onto a panel and I'm one of five white blokes in our 40s talking about an issue - the thing to do there is - don’t do it. I’m not going to do this panel as there is not representation of gender, sex or ethnicity. Most people are receptive to that, and respond by saying ‘that's awkward, it’s hard to do it’, well, do it, put the work in, because in a few years time it won't be an issue anymore, and we’ll have forgotten that there was a time when it was easy to sit on stage as a white man. Baby steps, we chip away and I believe, as Obama said ‘The ark of history is towards progress’. It takes effort and bravery to say this is not representative of the people of Britain. We know that diversity makes the conversation better.
Social media and the sharing of misinformation is rife and loaded when it comes to race, there are conflicting ideas from all angles. What advice would you give people who want to share anti-racist content and be actively anti-racist on these platforms?
Social media is so fast, and the ability to share and spread misinformation very quickly is overwhelming. Get smart at it, learn the tools, learn what the responses are, get the toolkit to point out exactly the things that are wrong with people’s arguments you see online. This is the difference to being non racist and anti-racist. You have to grat and put the effort in to find out what the arguments are. What the data says, what the history is and what the lived experience of people is, and then when you come back, you've got better weapons. The whole point is, I’m not going to fix racism with this book, but what I am saying is, you can’t have my tools to make your bigoted arguments, and my tools are really powerful. I want to share them and I want you to have access to history science and contemporary science to say racist views are not supported by the most powerful knowledge we have, which is science.
What’s the one thing above all you hope readers will take away from this book?
There is far more that brings us together than divides us. The differences that we see in people, the main way we categorise people today are extremely superficial and literally skin deep. They're invented - we can see that people are different, and we celebrate people who are different skin tones, hair textures and come from different places on earth, but those characteristics are so superficial that they’re close to meaningless. Races do exist because we did invent them, they are social categorisations and that's really important. The way we interact with other humans is the core part of the human condition - we are social beings. Time is a social construct and money is a social construct, but you don't get people saying ‘I’m not going to pay you because money isn’t real’. Race itself is a social construct, and it's incredibly important. It is not rooted in biology, the differences we see between us are physically superficial and culturally invented. Which means they are important, but they are changeable.
What further resources or content would you recommend to check out on the following platforms:
Book: Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge - an important classic which talks to the lived experience, so compliments the science of my book.
Documentary: David Olusoga’s Black and British on BBC iPlayer celebrates the diversity of the country.
TV: I May Destroy You on BBC - important and integrates black culture into mainstream TV.
Listen: 90s hip hop…that’s really the answer.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? As a writer, the best piece of advice came from Alex Garland - write the book that you want to read. It’s really hard to write for diverse audiences - you don’t know what they want, so write the thing that pleases you and find the audience. I think that applies for everything - if you produce something you like, then other people will like it. Social media and the internet has enabled us to find each other and find people who have shared interests and problems. Without sounding too hippie-ish it’s about finding things that unite us rather than divide us.
It’s really hard. It takes some real hotspa to actually confront someone when you see somebody being openly racist in an aggressive way. It is hard to confront that but we have to do that. But also it’s more about low levels of racism that are more to do with stereotypes than open hatred. The thing is although I talk about white supremacists and neo-nazis in the book, it’s more considered to be aimed at people like us who aren’t racist and don’t consider themselves to be racist, but hold views that are stereotypes about certain cultures and races. When I wrote this book, I had people saying to me they wished they had this at Christmas for someone they know or family members. When I sit down with my family, or there’s big sports events, my dad will say something and I can intuitively tell this is a racist thing to say. It is sometimes called positive attitude racism, as everyone wants to be healthier, fitter, more muscular etc, but they still hold these racist views. The book is to equip normal people, like us, with scientific and historical tools so we can say, “What you just said is not correct, it’s also derogatory and a racist thing to say.”
The curriculum teaches children more about the wars that divide us than the origin of humankind which unites us. Why is this still the case when we know so much about our shared DNA, genetics and ancestry?
The racial categories we all know and use today are 400 years old. They cover the tiniest bit of history let alone prehistory. One of the key things about the book and the history of colonialism is that these racist catergories that feel normal to us were invented in the 17th/18th centuries by european men who hadn’t travelled anywhere in the world. Using secondhand reports and enslaved people and making these vast generalisations about land masses such as Africa, which today has 54 countries and 1.3 billion people, and yet we just call them black people or African American. 42 million African Americans descended from Africa over the enslaved period of transalantic slavery, and the story of human evolution, migration and our history is so much richer than the very limited focus that particularly in this country. We tend to focus a lot on British history, and that history ignores the facts that contemporary Britain is built on a racist system of colonisation. That's not to be down on it, it's just that if we ignore it, we don't know the basis of it and where our racist catagories come from. It’s not to disparage empires, which I think was a complex thing rather than a good or bad thing. Our conversations seem to be about what is good or bad. ‘Was this war good or bad?’ (for example). Human existence is super-complicated, and until we understand and appreciate that, we won't be able to get over our base instincts to say; ‘these people are X / Y, these people are our enemies, these people are our friends’ etc. Bigotry is permanent, but this form of racism we live amongst today is very temporal.
We all share the same ancestry and the success of humankind is down to the fact we have always moved / never been bound by country of birth. This fact is incontestable, so why do you believe politicians still go unchecked and are able to verbalise, use and implement systemic racist policies in 2020?
The answer to that is ignorance combined with willful deceit - which isn’t a very positive message to talk about our politicians. But the truth is bigotry is permanent, people will always be bigoted about something. But one of the key points of my book and studying British history, colonialism, the British Empire and slavery, and all of these things which our society is dependent, is just understanding that history releases you from the bigotry that is purely racial, as it shows it’s superficial and invented. It’s incumbent upon us all to wield the power that we have to make sure people are educated about the real story of our country. We have some fracture lines within it which are easier to fuel and hard to mend. We need to put the effort in to understand the experience of black people or BAME people in this country, and listen to the lived experiences of young black kids on the street who are stopped and searched at a disproportionately high amount. It’s very easy to say we’re not a racist country or say that we’re less racist than America - which is probably true. But the least racist country is still a country, and if we don't confront that then those fracture lines are much more easily split and widened.
There’s a sentence I wrote in the book which i borrowed off a feminist writer called Helen Lewis, which I think is the most important sentence I’ve ever written. ‘If all you’ve ever known is privilege, then equality feels like oppression.’ It’s important as it’s so hard to recognise one's own privilege... and hard to say if you’re having a tough day, you’re poor or struggling with mental health issues it’s really hard to say I still have privilege above other people. It’s true as we all have different levels of privilege. The privilege we inherit comes from the luck, the chance and happenstance of where we were born. The fact that me and you are sitting the UK in London - middle class - tonnes of privilege, I have extra privilege being born a man - that notion to recognise we have power and i think it’s our duty if you have power to distribute it to others. That;s what systemic racism is - the maintenance of power by the powerful by no other reason other than they have it and the perpetual inconvenience of not being in that power/powered group. That’s what we have to confront. We have to be not non-racist but anti-racist. Which means not pulling the ladder up from beneath us, making an effort to ensure there is diversity in our conversations and representation. You do confront those whom you work with when they say things which are casually racist or positively racist or overtly racist. That to my mind is the duty as the powerful.
There’s been pivotal points throughout history which at the time must have felt like the battle to end racism was near. To what extent do you believe the events of this year, in particular the BLM movement, will see the death of systemic racism at its root?
I think this is a movement that is making waves more than anything. How permanent it is, we don’t know, but at least it is exposed and you can't avoid that conversation anymore. The fact that books like mine and others - mine is more focused on the science and historical basis - but loads of other books about race during the lockdown period and during BLM protests, became best sellers. This shows there is an appetite; when issues of race become a part of public discourse, people want to improve themselves and they want to listen to diverse voices so that they are better educated and better equipped for confronting racists and being anti-racist. Ask me again in ten years time and we’ll see if we’ve made progress. Positive discrimination and affirmative action does actually work. In 1964 when the civil rights movement was successful in changing the law in the states, that is effectively civil rights. The law impsong rules that you could not segregate between the races. The same with legislation against homophobia or discrimination about homosexual behavour in this country in the last 50 years. Again it’s positive discrimination - it said you can’t not employ someone for being gay. At the time, if you look at the historical records, loads of people said this is terrible, it’s positive discrimination, we just want to employ people based on how good they are, rather than their sex or gender, which is a standard issue we come across today. If you make those positive incremental moves when they have to happen in the future, in five or ten years time, they stop being an issue and you start to normalise it. So when I go onto a panel and I'm one of five white blokes in our 40s talking about an issue - the thing to do there is - don’t do it. I’m not going to do this panel as there is not representation of gender, sex or ethnicity. Most people are receptive to that, and respond by saying ‘that's awkward, it’s hard to do it’, well, do it, put the work in, because in a few years time it won't be an issue anymore, and we’ll have forgotten that there was a time when it was easy to sit on stage as a white man. Baby steps, we chip away and I believe, as Obama said ‘The ark of history is towards progress’. It takes effort and bravery to say this is not representative of the people of Britain. We know that diversity makes the conversation better.
Social media and the sharing of misinformation is rife and loaded when it comes to race, there are conflicting ideas from all angles. What advice would you give people who want to share anti-racist content and be actively anti-racist on these platforms?
Social media is so fast, and the ability to share and spread misinformation very quickly is overwhelming. Get smart at it, learn the tools, learn what the responses are, get the toolkit to point out exactly the things that are wrong with people’s arguments you see online. This is the difference to being non racist and anti-racist. You have to grat and put the effort in to find out what the arguments are. What the data says, what the history is and what the lived experience of people is, and then when you come back, you've got better weapons. The whole point is, I’m not going to fix racism with this book, but what I am saying is, you can’t have my tools to make your bigoted arguments, and my tools are really powerful. I want to share them and I want you to have access to history science and contemporary science to say racist views are not supported by the most powerful knowledge we have, which is science.
What’s the one thing above all you hope readers will take away from this book?
There is far more that brings us together than divides us. The differences that we see in people, the main way we categorise people today are extremely superficial and literally skin deep. They're invented - we can see that people are different, and we celebrate people who are different skin tones, hair textures and come from different places on earth, but those characteristics are so superficial that they’re close to meaningless. Races do exist because we did invent them, they are social categorisations and that's really important. The way we interact with other humans is the core part of the human condition - we are social beings. Time is a social construct and money is a social construct, but you don't get people saying ‘I’m not going to pay you because money isn’t real’. Race itself is a social construct, and it's incredibly important. It is not rooted in biology, the differences we see between us are physically superficial and culturally invented. Which means they are important, but they are changeable.
What further resources or content would you recommend to check out on the following platforms:
Book: Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge - an important classic which talks to the lived experience, so compliments the science of my book.
Documentary: David Olusoga’s Black and British on BBC iPlayer celebrates the diversity of the country.
TV: I May Destroy You on BBC - important and integrates black culture into mainstream TV.
Listen: 90s hip hop…that’s really the answer.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? As a writer, the best piece of advice came from Alex Garland - write the book that you want to read. It’s really hard to write for diverse audiences - you don’t know what they want, so write the thing that pleases you and find the audience. I think that applies for everything - if you produce something you like, then other people will like it. Social media and the internet has enabled us to find each other and find people who have shared interests and problems. Without sounding too hippie-ish it’s about finding things that unite us rather than divide us.