Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 8: The Invention of Race

In Chapter 8 of the series, Chisom turns to the secular machinery that took over the work, science, and the lie it was used to build, the invention of race. The claim is that power took the authority of science and manufactured race, to give an ancient hierarchy the one disguise almost impossible to argue with, the look of objective fact. And the proof that the crime was in the wielding and not the method is that science is also what destroyed the lie, the genome showing there was never anything there. It traces the invention from Linnaeus and Blumenbach to Morton’s skulls and Sarah Baartman, the apparatus from Galton’s eugenics and Buck v. Bell to the Scandinavian sterilisations, Sims, Tuskegee, and Henrietta Lacks. It holds it against the series definition of white terrorism as terror laundered into truth, and weighs the counterweight that keeps it honest, as well as the UNESCO statement and the Human Genome Project that took the lie apart. It names the reckoning still owed, the race correction stripped from kidney medicine only in 2021 and the maternal mortality gap across the United States and the United Kingdom, and closes by turning the Three Clarities on the people the science was built to rank lowest, the African placed at the very bottom, and what is now theirs to refuse.

Transcript

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Ask a Black person almost anywhere in the world outside the African continent and they will know the feeling before you finish the question. For a man racialized as Black, the bag pulled a little closer on the train or the bus. The question that is never quite a compliment. Where are you really from? Or your English is so good. The hair touched without asking as though it were public property. The competence that must be proven over and over again. the warmth that gets read as aggression. The voice that goes unheard in meetings until a paler one repeats it. None of it alone leaves a mark. all of it together across a lifetime is a weather that Black people And many of the global majority have learned to walk through in Oslo and in London, in Paris and in Sao Paulo, And in New York and well beyond. And it does not stay in the realm of the personal. The same forces show up in the systems themselves, in who gets the interview and who gets the job, in who is believed in the hospital, and who is followed in the shop and stopped on the street, in whose child is marked as gifted and whose as a problem. when a Black woman names it, the second thing happens, and it's often worse than the first. She's told it did not happen. She's gaslit. She's tone policed. She's told that she's imagining it and she's too sensitive. And that it was not really about race, that the world is past all that now, and that she is the one keeping it alive by speaking it. The injury is doubled first the cut and then the insistence that there was no knife. This is not only a matter of feeling and it is not only social. The same denial that meets her in the streets, meets her in the hospital, and there it kills. Even in wealthy countries, a Black woman is more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman in the next bed with the same income and the same educational degree. More likely to have her pain waved away. She's more likely to be sent home still bleeding because someone decided she was exaggerating. In the United States, it is the indigenous woman who now carries the highest maternal mortality rate of all. And Black women carry the highest rates of infant death and of babies born too soon. The hierarchy is not abstract. It is written in who survives being born and who survives giving birth. The voice that says it's not about race is the same voice that says she's not really in that much pain. What joins the small slight on the train to the knee on the neck, to the death in the delivery room, is the single idea, and the idea is a lie that was built to look like the truth. Race was not discovered, it was invented by men in laboratories. and lecture halls who set out to confirm a hierarchy they already believed in, and who gave it the one thing that would make it almost impossible to argue with. They gave it the authority of science. That is why racism can be everywhere and deniable at once. It was designed to wear the face of fact. This is an episode about the people who built that lie and called it knowledge. I'm Chisomudeze, and this is Overnight's Wisdom. This is episode eight, and this episode is part of a series On a system I call white terrorism rather than white supremacy. And like the others, it stands on its own. So if you're new here, hello. I'm really happy to have you here. The chapter before this one looked at the church, which basically is the sacred machinery that turned conquest into. salvation. you know the discourse that often talks about the separation of church and state within the context of this series. I think of the previous episode about the church and this one about science. So this one is the twin, basically the secular machine that took over the work essentially through science, and the lie it was used to build basically the invention of race. I wanna say from the outset what this episode is not about. This episode is not a attack on science and it is not an argument that you should distrust your doctor or refuse the medicine that will save your life. because that kind of misreading gets people killed and I will not participate in that. The claim I'm making here is very similar, if not a twin, of the one I made about the church. my argument here is that power took the authority of science and used it to manufacture race. It used it to give an ancient hierarchy, the one disguised that would make it almost impossible to argue with, the appearance of objective facts. And also the proof that the crime was in the wielding and not in the method is that science is also the thing that destroyed the lie. The same instruments that Built's race turned honestly on the question, took it apart and showed there was never anything there. The cassock and then the lap coats, the will of God and then the law of nature, the same work by a newer authority. I also want to say where I stand here. You know, the hierarchy that these men built around race did not place my people somewhere in the comfortable middle. It placed Africans and Black people at the very bottom by design. And that is not a historical curiosity to me. It is the water I have swum in my entire life. And it is also the most uncomfortable destination of this episode, which I will get to by the end. But first I want to talk about the invention. Race feels like one of the oldest facts in the world, like something humanity has always known. And that feeling is the thing this episode has to take from you because it's not true. The idea that humanity divides into a small number of biological races, ranked from highest to lowest, is not ancient. Older hatreds existed and older suspicions of the stranger, but the claim that the ranking was biology, fixed in the blood and the skull and passed down like a height, it's about 300 years old. it has an author, or rather a succession of them, and they worked. in the most respectable institutions of their day And they called what they were doing science. it began as taxonomy, the harmless looking work of sorting the natural world into categories. In 1735, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, the man who gave the system for naming species that we still use, placed human beings into his great catalogue of nature and divided us into four kinds. By continents and by colour. And he did not stop at describing our bodies. In the expanded 10th edition of 1758, he assigned each kind a character. European he called governed by laws. The African governed by caprice. And in that small move from describing a body to ranking a soul. The machinery was born. By the end of that century, the German anatomist Johann Blumenbach had refined the scheme into five races and given the one he placed at the top a name he coined for the purpose, Caucasian. After a mountain range whose people he considered the most beautiful, arranging the others as a descent away from that ideal. The hierarchy now had its shape: white at the summit. Everyone else ranged below. What he did not have yet was data, the appearance of hard measurements that turns an opinion into a fact. And in the nineteenth century, an American physician named Samuel Morton set out to supply it. He collected human skulls from across the world, more than a thousand of them, and filled them with seeds and then with lead shots to measure the space inside. And he announced that the races ranked exactly as the hierarchy had always said Europeans with the largest brains, Africans with the smallest, the rest arranged more or less in between. His was considered exemplary science in its day. Careful, quantitative, objective. It was also built backwards. We know from his own letters that he cheered the case for white supremacy before his skulls had finished telling him anything. And whatever the truth of his individual measurements, which scholars still argue over, the enterprise was never a search. It was a confirmation. He had the conclusion and he went looking for the bones to essentially carry the conclusion that he'd made. And the proving was done on the living, not only on the dead. In eighteen ten, a young Khoekhoe woman from the Eastern Cape, remembered now as Sarah Bartman, was taken to Europe and exhibited in London and then Paris as the Hottentot Venus, showed half naked to paying crowds as a specimen of a lower order of human. And when she died in eighteen fifteen, the celebrated French anatomist Georges Cuvier dissected her and used her body to argue the Africans placed near the bottom of his scale. Her preserved remains were kept on show in Paris Museum into the 1970s and were not returned to South Africa for burial until 2002, Which is a measure of how recently the science of ranking still treated a human being as an exhibit. This is how the lie was built, not by liars exactly, but by serious men in good standing who began from a hierarchy they had absorbed with the air of their century, and who used the most prestigious tool available the measuring and the sorting and the publishing. to dress that hierarchy into the language of facts. Race was not found in nature, it was built in the academy and then sent out into the world wearing the one uniform almost no one in the modern age knows how to argue with, the uniform of science. So now let's talk about the apparatus. Basically, an idea on its own harms no one. What makes the invention of race a chapter in this series about terrorism rather than a footnote in the history of bad science is what was done with it. Because once the hierarchy wore the authority of fact, it licensed everything. and the bodies it was practiced. On were real. so let's start with breeding. If the races were biological ranks, the logic ran, then. The human stock could be improved by encouraging the right people to reproduce and stopping the wrong ones. And in eighteen eighty three, Charles Darwin's half cousin, Francis Galton, gave the idea a name, eugenics. It was not a fringe enthusiasm. It became respectable science and respectable policy across the Western world. And nowhere more than in the United States where he moved from the laboratory into law. beginning in Indiana in 1907, more than 30 American states passed laws permitting the forced sterilization of people judged unfit, the feeble-minded, the criminal, the poor, the inconvenient. And in 1927, the Supreme Court of the United States blessed the practice. In Buck vs. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the sterilization of a young woman named Carrie Buck, whose only proven offense was to have borne a child. With the sentence that became the policy of a nation, three generations of imbeciles are enough. More than 60,000 Africans were sterilized under those laws, against their will, in the name of science. And the world was watching. when the Nazi regime built its own sterilization and racial hygiene programs, it took the American law as a model. And at Nuremberg, where the architects of the Holocaust were tried, the defense cited Buck vs. Bell. The line from the lecture hall to the death camp is not a metaphor, it is a citation. it was not only the Germans that borrowed from the United States. The Nordic democracies, the very states the world now holds up as a gentle exception, ran sterilization programs of their own deep into the twentieth century. Sweden founded the world's first state institute for racial biology at Uppsala in 1922 and between 1937 and 1976 sterilized some 60,000 people, the majority of them women, many with no real say in it for being poor or judged as feeble-minded or of the wrong blood. with the Romani and the travelers among its chosen targets, while its race scientists measured and catalogued the Sami. The point is not that one country was uniquely guilty, it is that the hierarchy wore a lab coat across the whole of the West, including the corners that now believed themselves constitutionally incapable of it. And then there is the body as labs. If a people were a lower order of human, their bodies could be used. And they were. In the 1840s, an American physician named James Marion Sims, Remembered for a century as the father of modern gynecology, developed his surgical technique by operating on enslaved Black women, at least ten of them, whose names survived in only three cases Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. He operated without anesthesia and on one of these women more than 30 times on the working assumption common in his profession that Black people did not feel pain as white people did. when he later treated white women in New York, he used the anesthesia the others had been denied. century after him, the same logic ran through the Tuskegee study, in which the United States Public Health Service tracked 600 poor Black men from 1932 to 1972, and they left about four hundred of them who had syphilis untreated and withheld the penicillin that could have cured them once it became available In order to observe the course of the disease. And in 1951, a Black woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins with cervical cancer. And her cells were taken without her knowledge or consent and turned into the most widely used human cell line in the history of medicine. The foundation of a thousand discoveries and a fortune in value, none of which her family was told off for decades, and for which they were paid nothing until a single biotech company settled with them confidentially in 2023, seven decades on. These were not facts of a few cruel men working in secret. These were mainstream medicine conducted openly, published in the journals, taught to students, honored with statutes and presidencies of medical societies. The hierarchy that the lab had invented had become the permission slip And on the strength of it, the bodies of the people ranked lowest were available for breeding control. for experiment and for use without consent. So now let's talk white terrorism. The definition I continue to repeat across most of the episodes in this series is basically looking at what white terrorism is, the systematic use of violence to control a population through fear. The apparatus that I just discussed basically qualifies much of that argument. The forced sterilization with violence. The experiments were violent, the withholding of a known cure was violence. All of it was systematic, sanctioned by states and courts and the leading institutions of medicine, and all of it fell by design on the population the hierarchy had chosen. And as with the church, the distinctive work of this machinery is not the violence it added, it is the particular kind of cover that it provided. And it is worth seeing it clearly for what it is, because it is the most murdered form and the most durable form the cover has ever taken. Religion justified the conquest by calling it holy, and that worked for as long as the world took holiness as the final word. Science justified it by calling it true, and that works still because the modern world has agreed to treat science as this thing that is not up for debate. To say a thing is the will of God is to make a claim that a non believer can refuse. To say a thing is a biological fact is to make a claim that sounds as though it stands outside all belief, above politics, above arguments, simply the way the world is arranged. That is also the most powerful alibi a system of domination has ever been handed. It does not ask you to have faith, it asks you to be reasonable, and it lets the people who run the hierarchy experience that cruelty, not as cruelty at all, but as the brave facing of hard facts. this is why the racism in this episode can be lived with and denied in the same breath. When the hierarchy wears the face of fact, then the person who points at it is not naming a crime. They are denying reality, being emotional, refusing the data. The denial is built into the design. Race was made to look like nature precisely so that the suffering it caused could always be explained as nature's doing and never our responsibility. Now let's look at what science did in other hands. And here, as I did in the previous episode, I also want to note that this is where the argument turns. Because if science were just about the servants of the hierarchy, this would be an episode that is full of despair, and it is not. The same instrument that built race is the instrument that disproved it. And this again is not a footnote. is the whole reason the honesty wall holds. The unbuilding took the better part of a century anthropologist Franz Boas and the students he trained set out to test the racial hierarchy by its own methods and found it empty. No fixed types, no stable rankings. The supposed racial traits shifting within a single generation of migration. In nineteen fifty, in the wreckage of where the hierarchy had led, a body of the world scientists assembled by UNESCO issued a formal statement declaring that race was not a biological fact but a social myth, and that the differences between human groups were trivial besides the vast inheritance they shared. And then at the turn of this century, the question was settled in one language the modern world cannot easily dismiss, the language of the gene. When the Human Genome Project finished reading the human script in 2003, it found that all human beings are more than 99.9% identical at the level of DNA. That there is no genetic marker that sorts us into races, and that there is more variation inside any so-called race than between one another. so basically the hierarchy that Morton built from skulls and Linnaeus from temperament had no foundation in the body at all. The thing had been measured to the bottom and there was nothing there. I want to name though, we must notice who did much of the unbuilding it was not only the heirs of the men who built the lie. It was the people Delai had ranked lowest, the Black physicians, the scientists who insisted on the humanity, the textbooks denied them, the scholars from the colonized world who turned the tools of the academy back on the academy's own myth. the method never belonged to the hierarchy. It only seemed to for as long as the hierarchy held the institution, handed to honest people, including the people it had been built against, the same science that manufactured race became the thing that could prove beyond the reach of denial that race was never real. This is essentially the difference between a method and what that method was used for. And it is why this chapter is not a counsel of despair and not whatever a careless or hostile listener wants it to be. It is not an argument against science. so as usual, I want to talk about critiques and complicity. the attacks on this episode are more technical than say on the previous episode. So let me just jump in uh based on what I anticipate will come back at me. The first is that there clearly are genetic differences between population groups. So things like sickle cell exist. And some medicines work differently in different bodies. So race must be a biological reality, after all. I just want to name that this confuses two things that have to be kept apart. There is a real genetic variation across human populations, clustered by ancestry and geography, and it matters in medicine, But that variation does not map onto the handful of color-coded races the hierarchy invented. Sickle cell traces the history range of malaria, which is why it is found among Greeks and Arabs and Indians as well as West Africans, and is rare among Black populations of Southern Africa where malaria was rare. Ancestry is real and continuous and fantastically complex. Race is the crude five box grid that was laid over it to rank it and it is not factual. It is a fiction. the second argument is that race based medicine saves lives, that doctors must consider race to treat patients well. Sometimes race stands in for something real, an environment, an exposure, an ancestry, but it is a crude and dangerous proxy. And when it is built into the machinery, it kills. for years, a heart failure drug called BiDil was marketed specifically to Black Americans approved by the United States regulator in two thousand and five on thin evidence that it works differently by race. and for years, the standard kidney tests, the estimated glomerular filtration rate, silently rated Black patients' kidneys as healthier than they were on the basis of race alone, delaying their diagnosis and their place on the transplant list until in 2021 the race adjustment was finally stripped out. Race in medicine is most often not the signal, it is the noise the hierarchy left behind, mistaken for a finding. The third is that this position or this episode is anti science and the resentment of people who do not like what the data says. it is the reverse. Everything in the counterweight, the genome, the disproof of the hierarchy is science correcting science, which is the thing science is built to do and the thing the old authority would not. To insist that race is not biological is not to reject the evidence. It is to follow the evidence. The fourth, that this is all safely in the past, the skull measuring and the sterilization long behind us, it is not. Between 1996 and 2000, the government of Alberto Fujimori sterilized more than 270,000 women, overwhelmingly poor and indigenous and quechua speaking, many by coercion. Or deception in a campaign that a human rights court was still ruling in 2026. Nearly one hundred and fifty women were sterilized without proper consent in California's prisons between 2006 and 2010 ten. The false belief that Black people feel less pain was documented in white American medical students and residents in a study led by Kelly Hoffman at the University of Virginia and published in 2016 in which forty percent of first and second year students endorsed the notion that Black skin is thicker and the belief predicted how they choose to treat Black patients pain. And the newest machines have learned the oldest lies. The diagnostic algorithms and the language models now entering medicine reproducing the same racial assumptions they were trained on. The hierarchy is not a monument to walk past. It is still running through the wires. It is still organizing the present. Now I want to talk about the hierarchy of the fiction of race. Now this part is also mine because the hierarchy did not rank Black people somewhere in the middle. From Linnaeus's Caprice to Morton's smallest skulls to the intelligence theories that followed, the African was placed again and again at the bottom of the ladder of man, The furthest points from the European ideal and in the vilest version the nearest to the animal. That was not ancient cruelty of the system. For a long time it was the system's central purpose because the African at the bottom was the figure the whole hierarchy had been built to justify enslaving and then colonizing. I could spend this part of the episode refuting that ranking, but it has been refuted by the genome and by every honest measure since. And I'm not interested in asking the old courts to acquit us. What I want to do is to name a more subtle and harder reality. The deepest damage a hierarchy does is not the contempt it pours on you from the outside. It is the moment its ranking gets inside, and you begin without noticing to measure yourself and your own people by it. It shows up as the colorism that prices the lighter skin. It is in the reflex that trusts the foreign experts over the local one, the imported solution over the homegrown. The credential from the old Metropole over the knowledge of the elders, Still waiting to be certified as fully capable by the civilization that invented the fiction of African and Black inferiority to excuse the robbery and theft of our bodies and our labor. I want to be clear what I'm not saying here. I'm not telling anyone not to take pride in their heritage or that every preference is a wound. I am pointing to something worth examining honestly as history and as self-knowledge, not as accusation, because a people that never asks how the ranking got inside will keep carrying it essentially for free. So, as usual, I will turn to the three questions that this series is built on using my own three clarities framework of identity, context, and power. I wanna turn that on to everyone this ladder was built to rank. The first is identity. You are not your place on their ladder. the ranking was never a discovery about you. And the science that built it has since been demolished by better science. Whatever you have been taught to feel about where you stand, it was manufactured. And you are entitled to set it down. The second is context. See the ladder for what it is and see how far inside it you have reached. Because the version that still does damage is rarely the one shouted from the outside anymore. It is the one we have been carrying for them, unpaid, the standard we still quietly hold ourselves to. You cannot refuse a measure you have not noticed you are using. And the third is power. authority to decide your worth was never theirs or anyone else's, really. And taking it back is not waiting for them to rank you higher. It is refusing the ladder itself. and the whole apparatus of ranking human beings and then building in your own institutions and your own mirrors a way of seeing yourself that owes your hierarchy nothing, a way that celebrates you for the magnificent being that you are. So as I consider this episode a twin of the previous one to deal with the church, I also want to talk about what a reckoning would require. I think the reckoning here is different in shape from the church's because medicine, unlike the church, cannot disown his foundations without disowning the good it also does, and the good is real. The cures and the surgeries and the life saved every single day. So the task is not to tear medicine down, it is to get the hierarchy out of it. And that turns out to be slow and technical, unglamorous work, And it is also exactly why it must be done. Some of it has already begun. The race adjustments came out of the kidney test in 2021. Medical schools have started to teach the history in this chapter rather than bury it. The statute of Sims was taken down from Central Park in 2018 and moved to his grave. These are real and they are the easy part. The renaming and the removing and the regretting. The harder part is still mostly undone. And it has a measure, the one I talked about in the beginning. As long as a Black woman is more likely to die giving birth than the white woman beside her with the same income and the same, you know, profession and the same degree across the United States and across the United Kingdom and across the wealthy world. The reckoning is not finished because that gap is the hierarchy still doing its work. And it does that work in form of pain not believed, the symptom not taken seriously, the woman sent home still bleeding, The reckoning will be complete, not when the apologies are made and the statues are taken down, although that is very important work, but when that number and that gap closes. and there's also a guardrail on this reckoning, and I I want to state it plainly because the cost of being misunderstood because the internet likes to hear what it wants to hear is too high. The answer to a medicine that has harmed Black people is not for Black people to abandon medicine. First, I want to say that it is understandable that Black people distrust the medical system because it doesn't often take care of them. Now, that conclusion, however earned the distrust behind it, because it is earned, it often ends in untreated illnesses and preventable deaths in the unvaccinated child and the cancer found too late. And it hands the hierarchy, one more set. of bodies. Listen, the distrust is real and it is a rational response to an irrational situation and system. And the task it demands is not flight, but repair. A medicine that earns back the trust it's spent. The trust it's misused. By stripping out the race it never should have built in in the first place. By listening to the patient it was trained to doubt, and by closing the gap that proves. The work is not yet done. The reckoning is not to leave the hospital. It is to make the hospital safe for the people it was built to disbelieve. so in closing, I want to reiterate that race is not real. It is a fiction. And it has never been more important to say this so clearly, because basically everything I talk about in this episode depends on two facts at once that the world keeps trying to pull apart. Race has no foundation in biology. The genome closed that question. And yet, race is one of the most powerful forces to shape a human life. Because a fiction believed and enforced for 300 years built real prisons and real hospitals and real graves. The lie is not real. The damage, though, is very real. What made the lie so durable was the uniform it wore. The church taught the conquered that their place was the will of God. And when that authority faded, the lab taught them it was the law of nature. And that lie that was cultivated by science is still holding because we have been schooled to argue with priests. and to fall silent before scientists. But the lab coat was only ever a costume on an old hatred. The same ranking of human beings the cassock war before it dressed for a skeptical age. Strip the costume and the thing underneath it is not a finding. It is a decision made by people who profited from them to treat some lives as worthless and then to call that arithmetic the truth. The good news and one of the few things in this episode worth calling good is that the same instrument that built the lie took it apart. And it is available to anyone, including the people it was built to rank, to take it apart again and again wherever it is still standing. The hierarchy was measured all the way to the bottom and there was nothing there. There was never anything there because race is a fiction. There was only us, the one species, more alike than any of us were ever told, being sorted by people who already knew what they wanted the answer to be. This is where I leave this one. sit with it, reflect on it, argue with it. This is what it's for. am also learning a lot from the people who engage and comment and share their perspectives. If this is the kind of thinking you want more of, I write a newsletter called the Weekly Clarity, where I take an idea and essentially turn it on systems that we live inside. when I talk a lot about clarity, you know, for me clarity is not really about feeling comfortable, it's all about accountability and that radical sense of responsibility. you can subscribe at chisomudeze uh.com and also the show notes. If this episode gave you something, send it to one person who needs to hear it and share it broadly with people who you think might benefit from having a listen. And of course, follow overnight's wisdom wherever you get your podcast. So the next episode finds you. I am Chisom Udeze and thank you so much for being here.