In a World of White people, The Science of Racism uses clear scientific research to expose what we know about racism, exactly how we know it, and what we can do about it. Since 2000s, recruiters have suffered from unusual occupational hazard. Having received numerous applications for jobs they have advertised, they have consistently been hiring people who do not exist. Ghost applications with identical CVs, the only difference between the two is that one applicant is Black while the other is white. They fall victims of their own prejudices, as well as to what is by now, a well established scientific tradition. There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and social psychology experiments. West a social psychologist who was until recently a professor at the University of London, uses the study to show how hiring practices in white majority nations are demonstrably racist and also a way to help his readers improve their scientific literacy. Experiments from hiring practices to  how we school our children- have shown, we consistently lie to ourselves about how racist we are. “ A perpetually vexing aspect of the study of racism, is the apparent lack of any actual racists” says West.

Racism is a fatal social flaw, the response form the sceptical is often to ask, “ Can it be proved? The answer, as West explains with a quite assuredness and a level of patience none of us deserve, is that yes, most assuredly, it can.

One chapter catalogue of miseries, from who is more likely to get hired or excluded from school to who is more likely to get shot.  Reading the section on racism enacted by non-white groups on other non-white groups felt like watching the animatronic figures from Disneyland’s “It’s a small world” ride slip their moorings and bludgeon each other to death.

While the Enlightenment ideal of universalism posited that all human life was equally valuable, early advances in the study of human difference mistook the political realities of chattel slavery and colonialism for biological reality. They mistook white supremacy for something natural and inevitable.

People who hold on to bad ideas do so out of their own rationale, and science is unlikely to convince them otherwise. US president Donald Trump, who issued executive orders at the beginning of his second term are a set designed to dismantle DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – initiatives in both the government and private sector. Some people view systemic change as a threat to existing racist power structures.

The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know But Probably Don’t – Yet by Keon West, Picador £20/ Abrams $28, 352 pages.