The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience

Angela Saini, Scientific American, July 29, 2019

In Superior: The Return of Race Science, I interview researchers at the cutting edge of research into human difference to journalistically expose the dangerous history of scientific racism.

{snip}

If anything, the public debate around race and science has sunk into the mud. To state even the undeniable fact that we are one human species today means falling afoul of a cabal of conspiracy theorists. The “race realists,” as they call themselves online, join the growing ranks of climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers in insisting that science is under the yoke of some grand master plan designed to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. In their case, a left-wing plot to promote racial equality when, as far as they’re concerned, racial equality is impossible for biological reasons.

{snip} How did society manage to create so much room for those who genuinely believe that entire nations have innately higher or lower cognitive capacities, who think that mixed-heritage children are genetically impaired, who assume that someone’s skin color can tell you something about their IQ, and who are actively working to resurrect eugenics?

{snip} The internet has opened the door to racists and sexists, and they have happily walked in.{snip}

The blame can be spread widely. Social media corporations, such as Twitter and Facebook, have allowed racist networks to proliferate. Recent research from Western Sydney University, looking at a decade of cyber-racism, has shown that race-hate groups are sophisticated and creative in disseminating racist propaganda to their followers online. The Gab social network and the journal Psych seem to have been set up expressly to give these elements their own unfiltered space. Online magazines such as Breitbart, and the companies that advertise through them, are complicit in presenting a glossy front to bigotry...........To Read More...