{"id":58614,"date":"2019-07-30T16:28:53","date_gmt":"2019-07-30T16:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58614"},"modified":"2019-07-30T16:59:42","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T16:59:42","slug":"the-internet-is-a-cesspool-of-racist-pseudoscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58614","title":{"rendered":"The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/voices\/the-internet-is-a-cesspool-of-racist-pseudoscience\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em><strong>The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Scientific American<\/a><br \/>\n2019-07-29<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.angelasaini.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Angela Saini<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/voices\/the-internet-is-a-cesspool-of-racist-pseudoscience\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.scientificamerican.com\/blogs\/cache\/file\/F823CD05-83C2-4DAD-A0C72E470BA8173B_source.jpg?w=590&amp;h=800&amp;59DAA6B5-7CEA-4312-B619F3FE1F9EA3DD\" alt=\"The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience\" width=\"550\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<small>Credit: Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n<p>The author of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58120\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Superior: The Return of Race Science<\/em><\/a> knows this from firsthand experience<\/p>\n<p>Last month, I temporarily deactivated my Twitter account following a colossal dump of racist abuse into my feed, including a man in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Texas\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Texas<\/a> whipping up his followers to phone into an NPR radio show on which I was a guest to ask about \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/White_genocide_conspiracy_theory\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">white genocide<\/a>.\u201d Others played a guessing game around my skin color in the belief this would help them gauge my <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Intelligence_quotient\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">IQ<\/a>. On YouTube, one of the editors of <em>Mankind Quarterly<\/em>, a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pseudoscience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pseudoscientific<\/a> journal founded after the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/World_War_II\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Second World War<\/a> to argue against desegregation and racial mixing, imitated me by dressing up in an \u201cIndian shirt\u201d (I am British; my parents were born in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/India\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">India<\/a>). The comments underneath said I should I go back to where I came from.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s just another day online.<\/p>\n<p>The abuse I\u2019ve seen isn\u2019t unusual. Others receive worse, especially if they are in the public eye. My particular crime was to have written a well-reviewed popular science book about why racial categories are not as biologically meaningful as we think and how, in fact, they have been used to justify slavery and the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Holocaust\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Holocaust<\/a>. These are ideas so widely accepted in mainstream academia that it should be blandly uncontroversial to repeat them. Yet to read some of the comments I\u2019ve received, one might imagine I was hopelessly deluded&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/voices\/the-internet-is-a-cesspool-of-racist-pseudoscience\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The author of &#8220;Superior: The Return of Race Science&#8221; knows this from firsthand experience<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,2039,8],"tags":[29802,12622],"class_list":["post-58614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","tag-angela-saini","tag-scientific-american"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58614"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58623,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58614\/revisions\/58623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}