Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ the part of her family that had been hidden from her, and she has devoted herself to absorbing their culture ever since. She shows me her blankets and pictures, adorned with the prints for which Aboriginal Australian artists have lately become famous. She has tried to learn an indigenous language, but it has been a struggle. She lives like most white Australians, in a nice house in a nice suburb, her knowledge of her great-grandmother’s way of life, as it would have been, fragmentary.

      ‘We are constantly in mourning, and people don’t understand that,’ she tells me. ‘The young children that were lost, that doesn’t just affect the nuclear family, that affects the community.’ And this is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, that the way of life she might have had, the knowledge and language she could have been raised with, the relationship to the local environment, all of this was trodden beneath the boot of what considered itself to be a superior race. After the arrival of the Europeans, even the creation of art sharply declined. It took until 1976 for Aboriginal people even to be able to gain legal rights over their land. Throughout, the victims had no choice. ‘They weren’t allowed to practise their culture, they weren’t allowed to mix and they weren’t allowed to speak their language.’ Having been told they were inferior, that theirs was a life to be ashamed of, they adopted different ways of living – ways they were told were better.

      ‘It was a real shameful thing.’

      *

      I don’t cry easily. But in the car afterwards, I cry for Gail Beck. There is no scale of justice weighty enough to account for what happened. Not just for the abuse and the trauma, the children torn from their parents, the killings, but also for the lives that women and men like her didn’t have the chance to live.

      In recent decades, as scholars have tried to piece together the past and make sense of what happened, as they share with ordinary Australians in the long process of assessing the damage and its impact, we can see an overarching story about the definition of human difference. It shows us how people have drawn boundaries around other groups of people, and how far inside us and how far back in time the disparities are thought to stretch. These are the parameters of what we now call race.

      That same day I meet with Martin Porr, a German-born archaeologist who works at the University of Western Australia, his work focusing on human origins. He feels, as do many archaeologists nowadays, that his is a profession weighed down by the baggage of colonialism. When the first European encounters with Australians happened, when the rules were drawn for how they should be treated, science and archaeology began to be woven in. And they have remained interwoven ever since. For Porr, this tale begins with the Enlightenment, at the birth of Western science. The Enlightenment reinforced the idea of human unity, of an essential biological quality that elevated humans above all other creatures. We live with that concept to this day, seeing it as positive and inclusive, a fact to be celebrated. There was a caveat, however. As Porr cautions, this modern universal way of framing human origins was constructed at a time when the world was a very different place, with far less understanding of other cultures. When European thinkers set the standard for what they considered a modern human, many built it around their own experiences and what they happened to value at that time.

      A number of Enlightenment thinkers, including influential German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, defined humanity without really having much of an idea how most of humanity lived or what it looked like. Those who lived in other lands, including the indigenous people of the New World and Australia, were often a mystery to them. ‘A universal understanding of human origins was actually created at the time by white men in Europe who only had indirect access to information about other people in the world through the lens of colonialism,’ explains Porr. So when they went out into the real world and encountered people who didn’t look like them, who lived in ways they didn’t choose to live, the first question they were forced to ask themselves was: Are they the same as us?

      ‘If you define humanity in some universal sense, then it’s very restrictive. And in the eighteenth century, that was totally Eurocentric. And of course, when you define it in that sense, then of course, so to speak, other people do not meet these standards,’ Porr continues. Because of the narrow way Europeans had set their parameters of what constituted a human being, placing themselves as the paradigm, people of other cultures were almost guaranteed not to fit. They didn’t necessarily share the same aesthetics, political systems or moral values, let alone food or habits. In universalising humanity, Enlightenment thinkers had inadvertently laid the foundations for dividing it.

      And here lay the fatal error at the birth of modern science, one that would persist for centuries, and arguably persists to this day. It is a science of human origins, as British anthropologist Tim Ingold observes, that ‘has written the essence of humanity in its own image, and that measures other people by how far they have come in living up to it’.

      ‘When you look at these giants of the eighteenth century, Kant and Hegel, they were terribly racist. They were unbelievably racist!’ says Porr. Kant stated in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1764, ‘The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.’ When he met a quick-witted carpenter, the man was quickly dismissed with the observation that ‘this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.’ While a few Enlightenment thinkers did resist the idea of a racial hierarchy, many, including French philosopher Voltaire and Scottish philosopher David Hume, saw no contradiction between the values of liberty and fraternity and their belief that non-whites were innately inferior to whites.

      By the nineteenth century, those who didn’t live like Europeans were thought to have not yet fully realised their potential as human beings. Even now, notes Porr, when scientists discuss human origins, he still catches them describing Homo sapiens in what sound like nineteenth-century European economic terms, as being ‘better’ and ‘faster’ than other human species. There’s an implicit assumption that higher productivity and more mastery over nature, the presence of settlements and cities, are the marks of human progress, even of evolution. The more we are superior to nature, the more we are superior as humans. It is a way of thinking that forces a ranking of people from closer to nature to more distant, from less developed to more, from worse to better. And history shows us that it’s only a small leap from believing in cultural superiority to believing in biological superiority, that a group’s achievements are due to their innate capacities.

      What Europeans saw as shortcomings in other populations in the early nineteenth century quickly became conflated with how they looked. Cultural scholars Kay Anderson and Colin Perrin explain how, in that century, race came to be everything. One writer at the time noted that the natives of Australia differ ‘from any other race of men in features, complexion, habits and language’. Their darker skin and different facial features became markers of their separateness, a sign of their permanent difference. Their perceived failure to cultivate the land, to domesticate animals and live in houses was taken as part and parcel of their appearance. And this had wider implications. Race, rather than history, could then be framed as the explanation for not only the Aboriginals’ failure, but the failure of all non-white races to live up to the European ideal that Europeans had themselves defined. An Aboriginal Australian – just by having darker skin – could now be lumped together with a West African, for instance, despite being continents apart, with entirely different cultures and histories. Both were black, and this was all that mattered.

      Whiteness became the visible measure of human modernity. It was an ideal that went so far as to become enshrined in Australian law. ‘When Australia federated in 1901, when the states came together as a nation, one of the first pieces of legislation to pass through Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act, which formed the basis of the White Australia policy. It sought to fuse the new nation together with whiteness by excluding non-European migration and attempting to assimilate and, ultimately, to eliminate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity,’ explains Billy Griffiths. What happened to Gail Beck’s family was СКАЧАТЬ