17 October 2024
In a Guardian piece following a Guardian/ Hope Not Hate investigation into an international network of activists and academics seeking to normalise scientific racism, IRR Director Liz Fekete warns on the danger posed today by scientific racism. Here is the full statement upon which her comments are based.
Black health campaigners, committed researchers and civil liberties and race organisations, have been raising their voices about the return of race science for years, with little indication that those in powerful institutions, particularly health institutions, are listening.
Now, the Guardian/Hope Not Hate exposé has raised the stakes. It provides a timely wake-up call to health institutions of the threat posed to NHS users from minority backgrounds when race scientists, backed by a plutocratic libertarian billionaire donor class, gets access to their data. And let’s not forget that NHS England has already faced criticism for NHS data contracts with Palantir, a company founded by US tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who is named in this investigation, along with Turning Point USA.
But what really concerns IRR is the danger that today’s fringe ideas could be tomorrow’s mainstream. The path to this mainstreaming has already been laid, in culture wars that ridicule any attempt to tackle racism, even as structural, systemic and popular racism increase – particularly Powellite ideas against Muslims and migrants. Ideas based on cultural racism (a hierarchy of cultures, with western culture at the apex) have already passed into the mainstream, so why not scientific racism (a hierarchy of races, based on genetic differences, with the white race at the apex)?
When we have Kemi Badenoch saying that ‘not all cultures are equally valid’, the danger is that the parliamentary hard Right could, at some point, act as a bridge between cultural and scientific racism.
Read the full Guardian piece here.
For further comment get in touch via info or contact kaiisha@irr.org.uk