This post is not about the rocks in the box — it is what happens when they are allowed unfettered access to power. Biological essentialism is the way we determine which humans don’t count as people. It separates “us” into “them” and sets us on the road to dehumanization. Reject it utterly, and speak out against the genocides it is used to justify.
Ceasefire. Now.
Step one of genocide is a line, chalky and pale, drawn around the humans who count as people and the humans that you can treat as animals. The line neatly separates humanity into “us” and “them”. It is a lie.
It is a familiar lie. It is a lie told every single day, told so often that empires are built upon it, whole societies are armed to the teeth for it, entire nations staring compulsively at that line to make sure that “they” do not get to “us”. The lie, the line, is drawn over and over by humans so gorged on their own personhood that there is no scrap of humanity left for those on the other side.
In fact, being on the right side of that line is sometimes the only way they know they are people. They do not know how to be human without it.
The tragedy, of course, is that in drawing that line, by being willing to exclude humans from humanity and say this person, not that one, deserves water, deserves peace, deserves life, you sacrifice your own capacity for humanity. The line, like every other lie, erodes the very thing it is supposed to protect. It does not preserve your humanity, but limits it.
Water. Now.
The lie that humanity is limited to certain types of humans echoes through more than the modern eugenics revival, the accelerationist TESCREAL movement, and the never-ending search of biological determinists for a neat and tidy human hierarchy they can organize the world around. Much of our world is built on this lie. David Friedman, Milton Friedman’s son and one of Marc Andreessen’s Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism describes the way it props up our world like this:
“If you confidently reject [human biodiversity], by sex and race, you have a strong argument that Silicon Valley is racist and sexist since the distribution of race and gender in jobs is wildly different from that in the population. Once you accept that HBD is real, you need actual evidence, and it’s easier to find evidence that Silicon Valley and academic employment is sexist against males than against females.“
This is the crux of the matter — we need ‘race science’ so we can stop thinking about inequality as something that should be challenged. Biological essentialism transforms inequality into a natural phenomenon, and insists that what is, is what ought to be. It keeps us from questioning the status quo. And, it ensures that there is always someone at the bottom of the hierarchy.
The lie of a universal human hierarchy, one ordained and immutable, is the modern day equivalent of divine right. Power turns to the idea of the natural order whenever it is time to rein in a society that is getting a little too keen on the idea of equality. Atomizing our humanity is a way for power to maintain control over people, promising unity and freedom to “us” if we are willing write “them” off.
Aid. Now.
When you declare others inhuman, you grant yourself license to become inhumane. The line, the demarcation on that universal human hierarchy where humans cease to be people, is permission to ignore injustice — and often permission to perpetrate it.
There is always a genocidal sycophant eager to twist kings into tyrants, a Wormtongue excited to share the lie of biological essentialism with someone who can craft it into policy and thereby enforce it. Steven Pinker continuously plays this role, ensuring that “race science” finds open doors wherever it goes.
Pinker played this role in the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq by the United States. He read, in 2003, an essay by movie critic Steve Sailer, that declared the Iraqi people too inbred to govern themselves and decided this message was the one that needed to be added to a media narrative marketing the lie-fueled US invasion of a Iraq as a legitimate war. To do so, Pinker introduces Sailer (who at that point was issuing report-cards on Pinker’s progress towards becoming a race scientist) to NYT reporter John Tierney. Sailer begins a relationship with Tierney, introducing him to “experts” like Linda Gottfredson, and Tierney launders Sailers ideas to the nation.
It took less than a week after the initial attack on Israeli citizens by Hamas for this playbook to be opened once again in 2023, this time by those legitimizing the collective punishment the state of Israel has and continues to rain down upon the Palestinian people. As Israel shut off the electricity, turned off the water, demanded two million people, half of them children, evacuate in 24 hours amidst endless bombing campaigns with the explicit intention of putting civilian safety second to the destruction of Hamas, papers surfaced claiming that Palestinians, with an IQ of only 75, were incapable of governing themselves. Incapable, really, of being human.
The role of race science is to identify those humans that do not have to be classified as people. It is as simple as that. And dehumanization, stripping a group of their capacity to be human, their humanity, is the literal foundation of genocide.
On Tutsi — “Exterminate the cockroaches” Rwanda, 1994.
On Native Americans: “Wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the earth” — United States, 1891
On Armenians: “the Government will view the feeding of such children or any effort to prolong their lives as an act completely opposite to its purpose, since it regards the survival of these children as detrimental.” — Turkey, 1916.
On Tigray “They should be erased and disappear from historical records” — Ethiopia, 2021.
Twenty years prior to effecting the Holocaust, Hitler said of Germany that the “final aim, however, must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether.” And today, in 2023, Israel repeats the same tired story, declaring that they “are fighting human animals” as they rain down thousands of bombs upon an area the size of Rhode Island, destroying hospitals and bakeries and churches in an offensive that declares with every day that passes “the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian”
Ceasefire. Now.
Genocide is what happens when biological essentialism is allowed unfettered access to power.
There have been so many genocides. Bosnia. The Uyghurs. East Timor. Cambodia. Ukraine. It is the same story every time. Those willing to cut themselves off from their humanity draw a line and declare that those humans, the ones over there, they are not people, they do not bleed like us, dream like us. Their children are not innocent, not like ours. They are animals, dangerous down to their bones, their blood, their very DNA. We, the people, the humans, the “us,” must murder every last one of “them” to keep ourselves safe.
Watching this genocide unfold in real time, using the same lies we were told twenty years ago to justify the invasion of Iraq after a massive intelligence failure resulted in a horrific loss of human life is atrocious in ways it is difficult for me to put into words. To see sentences that could have been spoken by Hitler used by the Israeli state to justify the slaughter of Palestinians over the protests of their own people is an unbearable desecration of the memories of those lost in the Holocaust. To know that my country is facilitating this genocide, providing weapons and funding and training and political cover has made me keenly aware of the distance between myself and my nation, the person I am and the political structure that claims to represent me.
Yes, petition the United States government to support a ceasefire immediately. They have the power to do it, just as they forced the Israeli government to open the Rafah gate so aid (too little, too late, but aid) can reach the rubble of the Gaza strip. Yes, call your representatives and march and join forces with the people across the world demanding that the water be turned back on, electricity restored, medical facilities made safe. Raise your voice and be heard — call this moment what it is, genocide, and reject it.
But above all else, remember that we, the people, are not the same as the nation we are born to or the political organizations that speak above us and for us and draw, again and again, the line that tries to separate us from other members of humanity. Remember that the Palestinan people are people — read their words amidst the bombing, see their city as they saw it, recognize their anger, their grief, their love, their desire to be free and to simply live. Remember that the Jewish people are people, that they suffer loss, that they see this moment for what it is, they fight against a government that weaponizes their grief and makes them more unsafe with every day of continued cruelty. Do not let the Jewish people be tokenized. Recognize their anger, their love, their desire to be free and simply live.
Remember that you are a person. Remember your own humanity, now more than ever. Be unwilling to draw that line, to separate “us” into “them”. Do not let your fear and pain be used to isolate you. If we have the courage to hold on to one another, we may be able to hold on to the world.
Voices I have been listening to include Chandra Prescod-Weinstein, Timnit Gebru, Rasha Abdulhadi, Noor Hindi, Lauren Wolfe. Thank you to Michael Eisen and others holding on to their humanity simply by recognizing that the people on the other side of the line are human. I know many things about our career discourage this, but if you are a scientist, please, use your voice to speak out and connect with those who will speaking out with you. These are the people you will change the world with.
