Adam Rutherford writes:

“Civilisation is going to pieces … if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” Sentiments like this will be familiar to those who lurk in the less wholesome corners of the internet, where racism and other bigotries flourish. As a geneticist who specialises in racism and eugenics, I lurk so that you don’t have to.

However, this particular phantom threat comes from Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s brutish husband, barking these unsolicited words at supper in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald paints a picture of upper-class ghouls that is fundamentally accurate: eugenics, race and the menace of immigrants were defining campaigning issues in Jazz-era America, as they were in Edwardian Britain.

One would have hoped the fall of empire and the defeat of nazism marked their demise. But as shown in a new investigation by the Guardian and partners, based on undercover filming by the charity Hope Not Hate, these views are creeping back into the mainstream, fuelled by the concerted efforts of international networks of activists – and American tech money. What we are witnessing is a coordinated renaissance in eugenics and race science. One of these new race scientists, Emil Kirkegaard, leads a group that claims to have access to the sensitive health information of half a million British volunteers. Kirkegaard wrote on his blog in July that “Africans are prone to violence everywhere”.

Eugenics was formalised as a scientific discipline in the 19th century by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton, who dedicated his life to promoting the idea that certain populations could and should be improved via selective breeding of humans. So entrenched were his convictions that he believed it should be pursued as a “jehad”, a holy war against customs and prejudices that “impair the physical and moral qualities of our race”.

With Galton as inspiration, and with the support of scientists, philosophers and politicians – as well as funding from philanthropic tycoons – eugenics came to be an idea supported on the political left and right. Beatrice and Sydney Webb were advocates, as was Winston Churchill, who drafted compulsory sterilisation legislation that thankfully never made it through parliament. New progressive movements such as the Suffragists and advocates for birth control such as Marie Stopes were also keen eugenicists. Their views on the innate superiority of white people, though abhorrent to us now, were typical of the time. [Continue reading…]