Harry Shukman is a journalist and an activist with the anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate. About a year ago, under the name Chris, he set out to infiltrate a group of far-right street activists. Following a lead he picked up at a far-right event in Estonia, his investigation led him down a different path. Instead of street thugs, he found himself in meetings with a network of people who considered themselves intellectuals, people dabbling in what they called “human biodiversity” and what is more commonly known as scientific racism.
Shukman tells Michael Safi how he remained undercover for months gathering information on the network and finding new leads to how it was funded that led all the way to Silicon Valley.
For those in the network, the kind of inquiries they were undertaking in matters of perceived racial differences, particularly around intelligence, was a kind of forbidden science, with conclusions too controversial to be acknowledged by timid academics. But that is simply nonsense, says Adam Rutherford, a geneticist working at University College London who has a decades-long background of research in human biology and has written books refuting the claims of “race science”.
Composite: Alex Mellon for the Guardian : Alamy/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Support The Guardian
The Guardian is editorially independent.
And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all.
But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work.