Before getting into quite why Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance—a book which argues, among other things, that Jews possess a genetic “adaptation to capitalism”—is racist, it may be worth thinking back to the summer of 2012. Viewers of the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics on August 10 would have been surprised, between heats in the 200 metres, by a short video explaining how the slave trade made black people into better athletes:

For those of you unable to watch, the argument (as cheerily introduced by John “you’re never going to be, you know, a looker” Inverdale) goes like this:

The slaves of the Caribbean and American plantations predominantly came from a select group of west African ethnic groups

Only the fittest slaves survived the horrors of transportation to, and working on, plantations

Their descendants overwhelmingly make up the best professional sprinters in the world

African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people are genetically predisposed, through evolution, through survival of the fittest, to be sprinters

Spot the problem? Congratulations—you’re better at this than Nicholas Wade, former deputy editor of Nature, writer for the New York Times and Washington Post, pop-sci author and pusher of the hypothesis that: a) there is a biological basis for race, and b) racial differences explain cultural and societal differences.

In this, he is partly correct—at least, in the way he defines “race”—but in oh-so-very-many other ways he is not. Frankly, it may well be that A Troublesome Inheritance is most useful as an illustration of the gap between the popular understanding of racism and the reality of how it operates. Wade very clearly does not consider himself, or his conclusions, to be racist, writing that "no one has the right or reason to assert superiority over a person of a different race." Yet this book is ultimately racist, because it does exactly that.

This is most obvious during the (numerous) sections of the book where Wade uses language that can best be described as “unfortunate.” We are told that, as a consequence of genetic analysis, “an individual can be assigned with high confidence to the appropriate continent of origin.” Furthermore, it is “perfectly reasonable” to classify all humans into one of five “continental based races,” while “classification into the three main races of African, East Asian and European is supported by the physical anthropology of human skull types and dentition.”