The Race Gallery - The Return of Racial Science

Marek Kohn examines the resurgent racialism in science in a timely expose. The ideas, which exploit anxieties about race and social breakdown and their defenders, are analysed in this book... This book's primary subject is a particular way of thinking and talking about race: the scientific way. But The Race Gallery's broader theme is that of how we think and talk about race in general. We do so at inordinate length, yet with extreme anxiety: we feel that the subject is covered by a taboo, but we don't know exactly what the rules of the taboo are. It seems important, if not obligatory, to discuss cultural differences, but dangerous even to mention physical differences. At the same time that we feel compelled to do it, we are profoundly uncertain about how to think about race...