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Summary
Summary
A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when America claims to be post-racial.
Moving from an account of the evolution of race--proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science--Roberts delves deep into the current debates, interrogating the newest science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences obscured by the focus on genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a provocative call for us to affirm our common humanity.
Author Notes
Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is the author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds and is the co-editor of six books on gender and constitutional law. She serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women's Health Imperative.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Roberts, a lawyer and sociology professor, examines the development and contemporary consequences of "race as a political system," bringing science, law, commerce, and race ideologies, virtual thickets of controversy, under one canopy. After demonstrating how, historically, "race was literally manufactured by law," and offering an admirably intelligible account of genomic theory, she considers the extent to which the new approaches "tend to merely repackage race as a genetic category rather than replace it." DNA becomes a "marketable commodity," one consequence being that "race soon became the linchpin for turning the vision of tomorrow's personalized medicine into today's profit-making drugs." As she assesses the "new biopolitics of race," she argues that "Race-based medicine gives people a morally acceptable reason to hold onto their belief in intrinsic racial difference." While "pharmacogenomics," "epigenetic," and "allele" are not in most of our conversations, and while the specialized journals Roberts has made germane use of, for support or to controvert, are not most readers' regular stuff, Roberts is consistently lucid. Her book is alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Bull Connor might not recognize his heirs, but Roberts is ready to do the introductions. She finds Connor's legacy of racism among scientists proffering a genetic definition of race, biotech companies marketing new race-specific drugs, and law-enforcement officers using DNA tests to populate a swollen prison system with African American males. Affirming the fundamental unity of the human race, Roberts challenges both the pseudo-scientific methodology and the fallacious reasoning of twenty-first-century racists, who are proud of their modernity yet disturbingly vulnerable to crude typologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her challenge to cutting-edge racism, Roberts even punctures optimism about DNA science as a safeguard against legal injustice, for she exposes the racial bias of officials amassing genetic data banks that dramatically overrepresent ethnic minorities. Some readers, though, may puzzle over how Roberts reconciles her hostility to a science that reifies chromosomal racial boundaries and her advocacy of an affirmative-action politics premised upon politically defined racial identities. A tangle of science and politics sure to attract readers.--Christensen, Bryc. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
no one becomes "not racist," despite a tendency by Americans to identify themselves that way. We can only strive to be "antiracist" on a daily basis, to continually rededicate ourselves to the lifelong task of overcoming our country's racist heritage. We learn early the racist notion that white people have more because they are more; that people of color have less because they are less. 1 had internalized this worldview by my high school graduation, seeing myself and my race as less than other people and blaming other blacks for racial inequities. To build a nation of equal opportunity for everyone, we need to dismantle this spurious legacy of our common upbringing. One of the best ways to do this is by reading books. Not books that reinforce old ideas about who we think we are, what we think America is, what we think racism is. Instead, we need to read books that are difficult or unorthodox, that don't go down easily. Books that force us to confront our self-serving beliefs and make us aware that "I'm not racist" is a slogan of denial. The reading list below is composed of just such books - a combination of classics, relatively obscure works and a few of recent vintage. Think of it as a stepladder to antiracism, each step addressing a different stage of the journey toward destroying racism's insidious hold on all of us. Biology "FATAL INVENTION: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century," by Dorothy Roberts (New Press, 2011). No book destabilized my fraught notions of racial distinction and hierarchy - the belief that each race had different genes, diseases and natural abilities - more than this vigorous critique of the "biopolitics of race." Roberts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shows unequivocally that all people are indeed created equal, despite political and economic special interests that keep trying to persuade us otherwise. Ethnicity "WEST INDIAN IMMIGRANTS: A Black Success Story?" by Suzanne Model (Russell Sage Foundation, 2008). Some of the same forces have led Americans to believe that the recent success of black immigrants from the Caribbean proves either that racism does not exist or that the gap between African-Americans and other groups in income and wealth is their own fault. But Model's meticulous study, emphasizing the self-selecting nature of the West Indians who emigrate to the United States, argues otherwise, showing me, a native of racially diverse New York City, how such notions - the foundation of ethnic racism - are unsupported by the facts. Body "THE CONDEMNATION OF BLACKNESS: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America," by Khalil Gibran Muhammad (Harvard University, 2010). "Black" and "criminal" are as wedded in America as "star" and "spangled." Muhammad's book traces these ideas to the late 19th century, when racist policies led to the disproportionate arrest and incarceration of blacks, igniting urban whites' fears and bequeathing tenaciously racist stereotypes. Culture "THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD," by Zora Neale Hurston (1937). Of course, the black body exists within a wider black culture - one Hurston portrayed with grace and insight in this seminal novel. She defies racist Americans who would standardize the cultures of white people or sanitize, eroticize, erase or assimilate those of blacks. Behavior "THE NEGRO ARTIST AND THE RACIAL MOUNTAIN," by Langston Hughes (The Nation, June 23, 1926). "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," Hughes wrote nearly 100 years ago. "We know we are beautiful. And ugly too." We are all imperfectly human, and these imperfections are also markers of human equality. Color "THE BLUEST EYE," by Toni Morrison (1970); "THE BLACKER THE BERRY," by Wallace Thurman (1929). Beautiful and hardworking black people come in all shades. If dark people have less it is not because they are less, a moral eloquently conveyed in these two classic novels, stirring explorations of colorism. Whiteness "THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X," by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965); "DYING OF WHITENESS: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland," by Jonathan M. Metzl (Basic Books, 2019). Malcolm X began by adoring whiteness, grew to hate white people and, ultimately, despised the false concept of white superiority - a killer of people of color. And not only them: low- and middle-income white people too, as Metzl's timely book shows, with its look at Trump-era policies that have unraveled the Affordable Care Act and contributed to rising gun suicide rates and lowered life expectancies. Blackness "LOCKING UP OUR OWN: Crime and Punishment in Black America," by James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017). Just as Metzl explains how seemingly pro-white policies are killing whites, Forman explains how blacks themselves abetted the mass incarceration of other blacks, beginning in the 1970s. Amid rising crime rates, black mayors, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs embraced toughon-crime policies that they promoted as pro-black with tragic consequences for black America. Class "BLACK MARXISM: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition," by Cedric J. Robinson (Zed Press, 1983). Black America has been economically devastated by what Robinson calls racial capitalism. He chastises white Marxists (and black capitalists) for failing to acknowledge capitalism's racial character, and for embracing as sufficient an interpretation of history founded on a European vision of class struggle. Spaces "WAITING 'TIL THE MIDNIGHT HOUR: A Narrative History of Black Power in America," by Peniel E. Joseph (Holt, 2006). As racial capitalism deprives black communities of resources, assimilationists ignore or gentrify these same spaces in the name of "development" and "integration." To be antiracist is not only to promote equity among racial groups, but also among their spaces, something the black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s understood well, as Joseph's chronicle makes clear. Gender "HOW WE GET FREE: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective," edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Haymarket, 2017); "WELL-READ BLACK GIRL: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves," edited by Glory Edim (Ballantine, 2018). I began my career studying, and too often admiring, activists who demanded black (male) power over black communities, including over black women, whom they placed on pedestals and under their feet. Black feminist literature, including these anthologies, helps us recognize black women "as human, levelly human," as the Combahee River Collective demanded to be seen in 1977. Sexuality "REDEFINING REALNESS: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More," by Janet Mock (Atria, 2014); "SISTER OUTSIDER: Essays and Speeches," by Audre Lorde (Crossing Press, 1984). 1 grew up in a Christian household thinking there was something abnormal and immoral about queer blacks. My racialized transphobia made Mock's memoir an agonizing read - just as my racialized homophobia made Lorde's essays and speeches a challenge. But pain often precedes healing. By not running from the books that pain us, we can allow them to transform us. 1 ran from antiracist books most of my life. But now 1 can't stop running after them - scrutinizing myself and my society, and in the process changing both.
Choice Review
The term "race" has many connotations and has often been applied not only to categorize humans, but also to discriminate among different groups of individuals. Noted lawyer and sociologist Roberts (Northwestern Univ.) offers a remarkable compendium of historical and current details accounting for the etymological origin of the term and then painstakingly tracing its evolution over the ages. Politically and legally, through time, the word has been used to isolate, enslave, and limit the rights of people of color. Biologically, scientists have distinguished different races on the basis of skin pigment or site of origin. The white race was situated at the apex of this multihued pyramid. Controversies have raged over the cerebral competencies of the various groups. Now with genomic studies revealing the similarities of all Homo sapiens, no genetic factors can be identified to distinguish the so-called disparate races. While different behaviors, health problems, and socioeconomic statuses have been studied, the definition and perception of race becomes revised to fit the dominant worldview of the period. This thought provoking, well-researched, insightful account shows how the devious racism bug is currently employed to influence thought and promote business. Summing Up: Recommended. General, academic, and professional readership, all levels. R. A. Hoots emeritus, Sacramento City College
Library Journal Review
While answering many questions, the completion of the Human Genome Project has also presented science and society with a host of new issues, including different ways to define human identity. Roberts (law, Northwestern Univ.) examines how race has historically been used as a method of social and political categorization. Recent studies have shown that there is no genetic basis for the organization of people into races, and the difficulties in clearly defining racial difference are abundant. Yet many researchers continue to advocate for genetic solutions to health issues that can be more prevalent in one racial group than another. Despite laudable goals, these studies fail to admit that these disparities are more likely related to continuing inequities in social and political resources than to differences in our genetic makeup. Verdict With media attention focused on the advent of medicine "personalized" to patients' genes and DNA's use in law enforcement, this fascinating book is a must-read for those looking for an enlightened discussion of race in the 21st century.-Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida St. Petersburg Lib. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Part I Believing in Race in the Genomic Age | p. 1 |
| 1 The Invention of Race | p. 3 |
| 2 Separating Racial Science from Racism | p. 26 |
| Part II The New Racial Science | p. 55 |
| 3 Redefining Race in Genetic Terms | p. 57 |
| 4 Medical Stereotyping | p. 81 |
| 5 The Allure of Race in Biomedical Research | p. 104 |
| 6 Embodying Race | p. 123 |
| Part III The New Racial Technology | p. 147 |
| 7 Pharmacoethnicity | p. 149 |
| 8 Color-Coded Pills | p. 168 |
| 9 Race and the New Biocitizen | p. 202 |
| 10 Tracing Racial Roots | p. 226 |
| Part IV The New Biopolitics of Race | p. 259 |
| 11 Genetic Surveillance | p. 261 |
| 12 Biological Race in a ôPostracialö America | p. 287 |
| Conclusion: The Crossroads | p. 309 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 313 |
| Notes | p. 317 |
| Index | p. 372 |