The Language of Genes

"You began the conversation by asking me about racism: racism is something that’s done to others, it’s a confection, it’s a socially-engineered notion. Race, however, is supposedly something objective, scientific. Of course, after the Second World War , after the Holocaust , people looked at this problem of race and racism, and they saw how people could see difference and use it against people. So they said racism is bad, xenophobia is bad. But they didn’t really deal with the problem of race and the poppycock that has passed for science in that area for the past two hundred years. What attracted me to The Language of Genes was its clarity on this issue of what lies beneath the skin. What matters? What’s on the surface? Does my black skin determine who I am? When I was younger I was a great athlete and an excellent dancer. And of course people said, ‘You’re athletic, you know how to move because you have a black skin.’ That’s ridiculous. As it happens, my mother, who is Anglo-Irish, born in Hornsea in North London, is one of the best movers you could come across. That’s probably where those genes came from, not my visible skin colour. This sort of thinking always invites the question: What’s really going on? Jones got to the heart of this. In 2000 I made a film called The Faster Race for the BBC, around the time of the Sydney Olympics. I asked the old question, ‘Why do black men run faster?’ Well, ‘Do they run faster?’ is obviously the first question. The prejudice is that black men run faster, and the evidence is that in the Olympic finals all the way back to Jesse Owens, black men seemed to take first, second, and third in nearly every event. The thrust of the film was to delve into the science. Steve Jones was a very passionate advocate in that film for the view that science shows that race, as a scientific concept, offers us no clarity at all on why we are different, why we function differently. That’s race in the broadest sense: black, white, Asian. It doesn’t help us. It isn’t scientifically useful. “Race as a scientific concept offers us no clarity at all on why we are different.” This helps us recognise that the original racial ‘science’ was nonsensical. Let’s not blame those scientists, because they didn’t have the tools available now. Now we can understand better that what goes on underneath the skin really matters. In The Faster Race we realised that we were asking the wrong question: blackness is not the issue here at all. Population groups is the issue. Kenyans run fast for long distances because they have a capacity to absorb oxygen and use it efficiently because they’ve been raised at high altitude. That is the answer for them. It’s not the colour of their skin. West Africans and Caribbeans have fast twitch fibres, and therefore they can sprint faster, as a population group. But it’s not the colour of their skin, it’s what going on underneath that matters. So for me, Steve Jones’s book was a text of liberation in a strange sort of way: imaginative liberation, not political liberation. What Jones offers is that sense that we can liberate ourselves, because we can imagine things in a different way. That doesn’t mean that racism suddenly disappears. Our heads are traumatised with this notion of race. Steve Jones provides us with new memory to lay over the trauma that will help us to move on eventually. He’s applied modern science to an old problem."