Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. Neither race nor racism has foundations in science. It is our duty to contest the warping of scientific research, especially if it is being used to justify prejudice. If you are a racist, then you are asking for a fight. But science is my ally, not yours, and your fight is not just with me, but with reality.

Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it’s a dumb, simplistic question.

When all you’ve ever known is privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Anti-Semitism is one of the only forms of racial bigotry that punches upwards to perceived power.

It behoves us all to confront racism wherever we find it, especially when it is covert or normalised in stereotypes and myth, and science is a weapon in that contest. The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that ’in a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every white supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, Native American, aboriginal Australian ancestors, as well as everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy. For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.

As Jonathan Swift said in 1721: ‘Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.

Except if you’re of European descent. Your lactase continues to work throughout your life. This unusual phenomenon is called lactase persistence, and although a splash of milk in tea is the English way, and even a mug of hot chocolate might seem very normal to us, we are the weird ones.

As a species, all the things we do are unique, and are also seen all over the natural world.

Evolution, blind and slow, has not inched along over billions of years with any intention that it should be decipherable to one or any of its billions of children.