Health institutions and policymakers need to “wake up” to the danger posed by scientific racism and attempts to normalise an ideology that poses a significant threat to minority communities, thinktanks have warned.
The Institute of Race Relations, the Race Equality Foundation and Race on the Agenda say they have been raising their voices about the return of “race science” beliefs as a subject of open public debate over the past few years, with little response from national institutions.
Scientific racism is the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes. It seeks to use research to legitimise the idea that there is such a thing as genetic superiority and is often deployed to push back against efforts to improve diversity and dismantle structural racism. More recently, it has been used by rightwing politicians to argue for hard borders or the mass expulsion of migrants from western countries.
An investigation by the Guardian, working alongside the anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate, has discovered that an international network of activists and academics seeking to normalise scientific racism had been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur, claiming to have obtained data from UK Biobank. The facility stores genetic information from 500,000 volunteers.
The thinktanks and campaign groups have called for immediate action to be taken to hold those responsible to account and to challenge the ideas they are disseminating.
Jabeer Butt, the CEO of the Race Equality Foundation, said: “Race may not have a biological basis, but racism has profound biological impacts, with poorer health being a key consequence.”
Kulvinder Nagre, a research and policy coordinator at Race on the Agenda, said it was appalling that those who support scientific racism theories may have gained access to sensitive data submitted for health and genetics research.