A spotlight on racism in 6 prizes
This is the talk I did for Nottingham University Hospital’s Black History Month Celebration Event in November 2024. Only slightly edited to make sense for written word.
1. Introduction
Today I’m going to talk about the systematic racism, through the lens of some prizes you will know well.
What prizes could I pick? Arguably I could pick any western institution
I could have picked the Oscars.. Over the awards 96 years, there have been 54 black Oscar wins against 1,000 to 2,300 possible category wins¹. There’s a lot of history here too as, of those 54 black wins since the ceremony’s inception, 39 of them have been won in the last 23 years; 28 of these have been won since 2010.
I could have dived into the Birthday Honours… According to Gov.UK, in the King’s Birthday Honours List 2024, 90% of honours recipients were white (out of those whose ethnicity was known). 5% of honours recipients were Asian, 3% were black, 2% had mixed ethnicity, and less than 0.5% were from the ‘other’ ethnic group. White people received 95% of higher honours, including damehoods and knighthoods².
Or I could have explored the Balon D’Or… the Ballon d’Or started in 1956 and was based exclusively on voting by football journalists up until 2006. Originally, it was awarded only to players from Europe and was widely known as the European Footballer of the Year award. In 1995, the Ballon d’Or was expanded to include all players of any origin that have been active at European clubs. The award became a global prize in 2007 with all professional footballers from around the world being eligible.
But today, the prize I’m going to focus on the Nobel prize.
2. The Nobel Prize
So what is the Nobel prize? Alfred Nobel was a Chemist, engineer and industrialist whose most famous invention, dynamite, was an explosive using nitroglycerin that was patented in 1867. He further invented gelignite in 1875 and ballistite in 1887. Basically three explosivey-type things.
There is a great story about the origin of the Nobel Prize, although historians have been unable to verify it and some dismiss the story as a myth. In 1888, the death of his brother Ludvig supposedly caused several newspapers to publish obituaries of Alfred in error. The obituary stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort (“The merchant of death is dead”), and went on to say, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” The legend/myth is that Nobel read the obituary and was appalled at the idea that he would be remembered in this way. His decision to donate the majority of his wealth to found the Nobel Prize has been credited to him wanting to leave behind a better legacy. However, it has been questioned whether or not the obituary in question actually existed³.
Whether that story is true or not, Nobel created a will in 1895, the year before he died and left the equivalent of about $200 million in his will (94% of this total assets), for 5 annual awards that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind in the proceeding year.
Prizes were first awarded in 1901 by the Nobel Foundation. Nobel’s will indicated that the awards should be granted in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. A sixth prize for Economic Sciences, endowed by Sweden’s central bank, was added in 1969.
3. Physics
How many black people do you think have won the prize?
ZERO
The thing that got me on the route of my career in technology was electronics. Electronics is a branch of physics, and I spent hours and hours and all my pocket money as a teenager, messing about designing circuits, giving myself accidental electric shocks and learning as much as I could about this topic. As I was going through the list of previous winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics, I came across the name William Shockley. I knew this name as one of the creators of the transistor in 1951– the core elemental structure that the technological revolution in silicon valley was built on. When I was messing about in the 1980s, I was building basic circuits that used individual transistors and small “integrated circuits” using about 25 transistors packed into something about 5mm x 5mm.
Transistors have continued to get smaller and smaller and more and more packed into things known as silicon chips. The transistor count for certain Intel Core i9 processors is estimated to be around 10 billion transistors⁴.
Because of this invention of the transistor, Shockley was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956. Being an areas of interest for me, I read more about Shockley who I found out is widely discredited and termed a Eugenicist. What is Eugenics ? Historically, eugenicists have altered various human gene frequencies by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups they considered inferior, or promoting that of those considered superior⁵.
Shockley devoted the latter part of his life to promoting racist views, arguing that higher IQs among Blacks were correlated with higher extents of Caucasian ancestry, and advocating for voluntary sterilization of Black women⁶.
Do we dismiss this as a relic of the past, of a bygone era? Sadly not, only this Saturday, the Guardian were reporting of a group called The Human Diversity Foundation⁷, who have views of the genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups. You can guess that which groups… They claim that inequality is due to genetics rather than discrimination.
4. Chemistry
Ok, so moving onto Chemistry.
How many black people do you think have won the prize?
ZERO
Having not studied Chemistry beyond a few introductory classes, there were no names that jumped out for me in the list apart from Marie Curie. Probably worth a short diversion here in that women were also in short supply in the Nobel Prize list, but Curie was the first woman to win a prize and the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice. In 1903, Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics for her research of radiation phenomena (not without the prompting of her husband and co-scientist that she should be jointly awarded it with him). She was also the first woman in France to attain a PhD in Physics, and the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of polonium and radium.
But what I did look at was at representation across academics in the UK. You’ll not be surprised to hear that according to the BBC, in 2022⁸ there was only one black chemistry professor in the UK.
Robert Mokaya is the UK’s only black chemistry professor. His applications for research grants to the country’s main funding body have all been turned down. Until summer 2024 he was Professor of Materials Chemistry and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement at the University of Nottingham, but is now in a senior position at the University of Sheffield.
5. Physiology or Medicine
Ok, so moving onto Physiology or Medicine.
How many clinicians are in the room?
How many black people do you think have won the prize?
ZERO
As I looked through the list, one name jumped out, mainly because I’d read about this person in “How to Argue with A Racist” ⁹.
Who knows why the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962?
It was for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. They didn’t discover DNA, that was back in the 1860s, but they played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule that has led onto many exciting discoveries such as genetic screening tests for cancer, genetic fingerprinting of criminals and the still-controversial creation of genetically engineered organisms.
However, Crick to some extent, and Watson unapologetically had views on Eugenics.
Many leading British politicians also subscribed to the theories of eugenics. Winston Churchill supported the British Eugenics Society and was an honorary vice president for the organisation. Churchill believed that eugenics could solve “race deterioration” and reduce crime and poverty¹⁰.
Watson has asserted that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their [blacks] intelligence is the same as ours [whites] — whereas all the testing says not really … people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” ¹¹
Watson has repeatedly asserted that differences in average measured IQ between blacks and whites are due to genetics. In early October 2007, he was interviewed by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). He discussed his view that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners.
So what does the science say? There is something called the Flynn effect, political scientist James Flynn observed that IQ was rising in test scores by 3 points per decade from 1930 onwards¹². Several factors account for this — improved health, nutrition, standards of learning and education, but importantly changes in genes have been ruled out.
The interesting things about the advances in DNA is that it is actually helping to challenge the views of Watson. Through analysis we see that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than in the rest of the world. For example two San people from different tribes in Africa will be more different in their genes than a Briton, A Sri Lankan and a Maori ¹³. I do find it somewhat satisfying that the development of DNA which Watson was so instrumental in, led to his views on Eugenics being discredited though the use of DNA analysis. Ha!
6. Economics
Ok, so moving onto Economics — the newest prize.
How many black people do you think have won the prize?
One! Yes in 1979.
Who has heard of Sir Arthur Lewis? I certainly hadn’t.
He was born into a family of modest means on the island of St Lucia, the fourth of five children, and his father died when he was 7. He was clearly a gifted student as he was accelerated a couple of years up in his studies. So he left school at 14, having completed the curriculum, and went to work as a clerk in the civil service. In 1932, he became the first black individual to gain a scholarship to the London School of Economics¹⁴.
He became the first black person to be appointed as lecturer at the LSE, reportedly telling his colleagues: “I’m the kind of person you guys like the least; I’m an educated native”¹⁵. He later became the first black instructor to gain a full professorship at Princeton University.
It was during this time at Princeton that Lewis received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979, sharing it with Theodore Schultz, “for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries”.
The dominance of skin colour as a racial classifier is based on historical pseudo science practically invented during the years of empire building and colonial expansion¹⁶. This years winners in Economy Acemoglu and Robinson, made strides in understanding this in their 2012 book “Why Nations Fail”¹⁷ which talks about the institutions of colonial expansion, and it all depending on if the white Europeans wanted to settle there or just intended to extract the maximum wealth. They showed that countries where the colonialists died e.g. in parts of Africa where white Europeans were not resistant to malaria, the institutions are very different than areas such as America and Canada where they didn’t die.
Isn’t it interesting that the biggest impact of economics is on non-whites? In 2022, Joseph Rowntree Foundation published some results¹⁸, showing (sadly unsurprisingly) the impact of poverty in the UK more deeply affects (their words) minority ethnic groups.
7. Literature
Ok, so moving onto Literature.
Who has ever read a book?
How many black people do you think have won the prize?
FOUR!
- 1986: Wole Soyinka. Nigeria. First black man to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
- 1992: Derek Walcott. Saint Lucia
- 1993: Toni Morrison. United States. First black woman to win any Nobel Prize. That is 92 years of running the prizes before the Nobel Committee determined that out of the 85% of the global majority¹⁹, of whom 50% are women they are worthy of a prize. Could that really be the case?
- 2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah. United Kingdom. Gurnah moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee following the Zanzibar Revolution
I read a lot. I read about 50 books a year and am working my way through various notable lists, such as the Booker Prize list and stuff like the BBC Big Read²⁰, and have run a book club since 2010. Since my teenage years, I’ve consistently read a lot, and so the dates of these prizes are from my prime reading era, yet to my shame, I’d not heard of a single one of those authors.
So on the topic of books, I got this book recently — “100 Great Black Britons”²¹. Now, those of you who have spent some time with me before, have heard that I had an awakening to racism in 2020 and have been seeking to educate myself about race, or as Fleming says How to be less Stupid about Race²². So I thought I’d be in a good position to know more about the people in the list. By way of comparison, I also took the BBC list of Great Britons²³ from back in 2002 (I couldn’t find an update anywhere).
What I did for each person in the Black Briton and Great Briton lists was assess how much I knew about them, using the following non-scientific scoring:
- 1 — not at all aware: I had never heard of them
- 2 — Slightly aware: Heard the name, but no idea what they did or why they were famous
- 3 — Somewhat aware: Know the name and a vague idea of what they did or why they were famous
- 4 — Moderately aware: Had a good awareness of what they did and some detail behind that
- 5 — Extremely aware: Very good knowledge of them, not quite Mastermind specialist subject
I was shocked by my results: 6 of the 100 Great Black Britons who I was Moderately or Extremely Aware, compared to 57 of the Great Britons. So if I was in any misapprehension about the conditioning of my life and how far I’ve still got to go to reset my understanding, then this data was a sharp awakening.
But should I be surprised? Robin De Angleo has a bit in White Fragility²⁴ where she summarises the influencers of media — movies, books and music and shows that the majority of decision makers are white, so it is no wonder that stories of black people doesn’t make it into my consciousness unless I take a specific effort — hence these two books being on my reading list — 100 Great Black Britons and Black History for Every Day of the Year²⁵.
8. Peace
Ok, so moving onto the final category — Peace
How many black people do you think have won the prize?
TWELVE!
We now come to a series of firsts.
The first black person to win a Nobel prize of any category was Ralph Bunche in 1950. Bunche was an American political scientist, diplomat, and leading actor in the mid-20th-century decolonization process and US civil rights movement, who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Israel. He was involved in the formation and early administration of the United Nations (UN), and played a major role in both the decolonization process and numerous UN peacekeeping operations.
The first black African to win a Nobel Prize in 1960 was Albert John Luthuli from South Africa. Inspired by his Christian faith and the nonviolent methods used by Gandhi, Luthuli was praised for his dedication to nonviolent resistance against apartheid as well as his vision of a non-racial South African society. In 1961, Luthuli was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in leading the nonviolent anti-apartheid movement.
The youngest African American to win a Nobel was Martin Luther King Jr who won it in 1964 aged 35. King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance.
And the first Black African to be the Archbishop of Cape Town was Desmond Tutu who won the prize in 1984.
The first president of South Africa was Nelson Mandela. Mandela was an anti-apartheid activist and politician who served as the first president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 and won his prize in 1993. He was the country’s first black head of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election.
The first person elected from UN staff to the secretary general of the UN was Kofi Annan. Annan was the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations and awarded his prize in 2001.
It wasn’t until 2004 that the first Black Woman First environmentalist and first black woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 was Wangari Maathai from Kenya.
And then more recently
- 2009: Barack Obama. United States
- 2011: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf & Leymah Gbowee. Liberia
- 2018: Denis Mukwege. Democratic Republic of the Congo
- 2019. Abiy Ahmed. Ethiopia
This is an impressive list, but still missing some key people. One of the most obvious absences in Gandhi. He was nominated 5 times, but was never a winner. Why? Have the people on this list manage to stay on the right slide of white acceptability, but Gandhi strayed over?
Was the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee too narrow? Were the committee members unable to appreciate the struggle for freedom among non-European peoples? Or were the Norwegian committee members perhaps afraid to make a prize award which might be detrimental to the relationship between their own country and Great Britain?
It does seem there was some wresting. Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948, two days before the closing date for that year’s Nobel Peace Prize nominations. Nobody had ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. But according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation in force at that time, the Nobel Prizes could, under certain circumstances, be awarded posthumously. Thus it was possible to give Gandhi the prize, however after some consideration the committee decided that posthumous awards, they thought, should not take place unless the laureate died after the Committee’s decision had been made. Perhaps as a compromise on November 18, 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award that year on the grounds that “there was no suitable living candidate”²⁶.
9. Conclusions
So as I come to the end, let’s summarise the data, which you’ll have gathered along. Of the 954 winners since 1901, 17 are black.
1.7%.
This can also be illustrated in the following two maps. The first²⁷ shows the distribution of the prizes over its history. Get that general shape in your mind.
Now if I show you where countries are predominately white you’ll see a strong correlation²⁸. Yet although skin colour is an obvious way to view humans, it is a superficial route to the understanding of human variation, but it it continues to influence our institutions, our society and our influences.
Fleming²⁹ states that “ours is a society that has socialised white folks to live in the midst of racial oppression but go on with their lives as normal”. So the sad thing is that in preparing this talk, I could have picked just about any institution with a reasonable history and plotted a similar route.
What is striking is that in many of the examples I’ve summarised, the black person winning the prize had be the first numerous times; first black person to win a scholorship, first to be admitted to an institution, first to be promoted from within their organisation, and so on. They needed to have broken so many barriers that racism puts up before they are able to contribute to the fields that led to their Nobel prizes. The data does not lie nor does the science. Black people are as talented, intelligent and worthy of the prizes as any other ethnicity.
So it is tempting to get the end of this talk and offer a 10 point action plan and all will be well. But is isn’t. This is going to take concerted individual effort, pushing against a society that has normalised white supremacy. So instead I’ll ask a plea.
Educate yourself.
In a few hours, I researched something that supposedly was designed to recognise the greatest benefit to humankind, yet could very quickly see discrimination in action. It is beholden on each of us educate ourselves and to be hyper-sensitive to where society acts to push us to normalise oppression. If you haven’t already, I urge you to start now.
References
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel
⁴ https://www.censtry.com/blog/how-many-transistor-in-a-cpu.html
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
⁶ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36395223/
⁸ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60708712
⁹ https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Argue-Racist-History-Science/dp/1474611249
¹⁰ https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour-extras/churchill-and-eugenics-1/
¹¹ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46856779
¹³ https://www.simplypsychology.org/flynn-effect.html
¹⁴ https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Argue-Racist-History-Science/dp/1474611249
¹⁴ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1979/lewis/biographical/
¹⁵ https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/17/archives/william-arthur-lewis-men-in-the-news.html
¹⁶ https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Argue-Racist-History-Science/dp/1474611249 (page 177)
¹⁷ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp/1846684307
¹⁹ https://britthawthorne.com/blog/people-global-majority/
²⁰ https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
²¹ https://www.100greatblackbritons.co.uk/
²³ https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/aug/22/britishidentityandsociety.television
²⁴ https://www.amazon.co.uk/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/dp/0807047414
²⁶ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/themes/mahatma-gandhi-the-missing-laureate/
²⁷ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nobel_prizes_world_map.svg
²⁸ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:European_Ancestry_Large.svg
