Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Paying attention to race as a political system—which is what it really is—is essential to fighting racism.”

If the reality of the political nature of racial categorizations is lost, then the constructed nature of these categories, in service of injustice, is also lost. The fact that humans created racial categories must be recognized so that humans can, in turn, address and change this political system and thus address racism.

“Believing in the uniqueness and superiority of one’s own group may be universal, but it is not equivalent to race.”

While populations across space and time have often considered their own in-group to be superior to other out-groups, these subjective, hierarchical groupings are not tantamount to race. The categorization of race requires that everyone fit into one constructed category and assumes that everyone within this category is fundamentally different from everyone outside this category and that there is only one category for each person. 

“The expansion of the slave trade in the 1700s, which necessitated a racial system of governance, coincided with the shift among European intellectuals from theological to biological thinking, giving the institution of science ultimate authority over truth and knowledge.”

Roberts situates the political invention of race as supporting the expansion of race-based slavery in the American colonies. The shift from religious authority to the secular authority of science that occurred during this same period gave legitimacy to both race and race-based slavery: The Dangerous Authority of Science originates here. By asserting that race is grounded in biology, science validates race-based slavery as the “natural” state of the world.

“The insistence on finding difference among people so they can be categorized governs the study of human biology to this day.”

Human biology as a science is grounded in its organization around difference in people rather than sameness or similarity. This focus on difference often rejects holistic thinking or considerations of broader, environmental conditions in the study of human lives. Rather than thinking broadly, science tends to think narrowly.

“So where does the notion of ‘opposite race’ come from? It is part of an ideology about race that pits Blacks against whites as the moral and social antithesis of each other.”

The political category of race creates a “fictional opposition” that also assumes “enmity.” This paradigm of enmity carries over to the ways in which scientists approach genotypes. Namely, scientists often assume that “white” and “Black” genetics must also be opposed to one another and thus forever racially distinct from one another.

“When social scientists or legal scholars point out these flaws, we are often accused of meddling where we have no place.”

Both the public and scientists themselves assert that science is inherently objective, and thus unassailable. Yet scientific research often incorrectly assumes race as biological, and when this flaw is illuminated by scholars who have knowledge about the historical and political construction of race, this essential knowledge is dismissed and rendered inappropriate.

“This close-minded faith that racial science must be true helps to shield scientists’ failed methods from public scrutiny.”

Roberts uses religious language to underscore how science truly has taken the place of religious authority in its maintenance of its own power via the public’s “faith” in its supposed truth-telling. The authority vested in science after its replacement of religious authority in the Renaissance cushions the discipline from critique. In this sense, the academic discipline has a unique, and therefore dangerous, authority that other academic disciplines lack.

“Science has been responsible for giving racial folklore its superficial plausibility by updating its definitions, measurements, and rationales without changing what the tale is about: once upon a time, human beings all over the world were divided into large biological groups called races.”

There is a cultural grand narrative, akin to the genre of religious creation story, of different, pure, and pre-historic biological races developing around the world. Science has lent authority to this fictional story by asserting that race is biological. By comparing this narrative, at varying points, to folklore and witchcraft, Roberts gives readers a framework by which to understand how science—despite its alleged objectivity—is just as subjective as the average human.

“The narrow view of bias as a prejudiced attitude on the part of individual doctors misses the more powerful intertwining of racial stereotypes with their understanding of disease.”

Doctors are often trained to become aware of their implicit bias toward Black people and other marginalized groups. Yet the larger issue with which Roberts is concerned, and medical training is not concerned, is the racialization of disease itself. This concern is an important part of the theme of “Racial Science” as a Refutation and Continuation of “Scientific Racism.” Medical students assume that the consequences of the political category of race—and the diseases that follow—reflect biologically based disease, which stems from the biological nature of race. These incorrect assumptions of biological race and disease impair medicine.

“Paying attention to racial disparities in health is crucial to eliminating them, but attention to race in biomedical research can also make these disparities seem to be grounded in biological difference rather than social inequality.”

Racial health disparities, which are caused by the unjust political category of race, must be recognized and addressed by medicine. Yet research must not confuse or collapse these social disparities with biological differences: it is critical to acknowledge Race As Embodied Rather Than Biological. In research, approaching race as biological elides the real social inequalities that create health disparities, wrongly locating difference in biology rather than politics.

“Population genomics trades the fallacy that races are naturally bounded by biology with the fallacy that populations that map onto races are natural formations that became biologically cohesive.”

Scientific thinking of the past theorized that races were created out of a biological essence. Today, population genomics applies a racialized population map to genomic studies of geographic ancestry. In other words, it assumes that population genomics should “match” traditional racial population maps.

“How does racial inequality get under the skin? How is racism embodied?”

Roberts argues that instead of viewing racial categories, such as “Black” and “white,” as biological, we should consider how the political category of racism affects the biology of the body. In this quotation, she is prompting the reader to consider how environmental factors, especially ones emerging due to systemic racism, can come to manifest physically. While race is not biological, racism does negatively affect the body, becoming embodied.

“It seems, then, that genes can remember the environmental impacts of prior generations.”

Roberts discusses epigenetics, or the ways that the broader environment, including toxins and various stresses, can change how genes work. Epigenetic changes affect the way that genes express themselves rather than the actual structure of DNA. These epigenetic changes can be inherited, yet unlike the inheritance of structural DNA, negative epigenetic changes can be reversed. Roberts’s larger point is that racism affects how genes express themselves.

“Race soon became the linchpin for turning the vision of tomorrow’s personalized medicine into today’s profit-making drugs.”

Personalized medicine, which requires genomic sequencing, promises individualized counseling and medical care. It’s a vision for the future. However, the personalization aspect of personalized medicine is rooted in racial group affiliation, which depends on scientific racial profiling. This kind of profiling accepts the false biological category of race in the development and marketing of drugs. Racially personalized medicine, though presented as grounded in biology, is not.

“NitroMed did not make money from a drug that was designed to treat heart failure in Black patients. It made money by converting a drug for heart failure into a drug for African Americans based on unsubstantiated claims about racial difference.”

Roberts refers here to BiDil and the marketing maneuvers that enabled the drug to be presented to the FDA for approval to be marketed only to African Americans. This approval was secured, despite the lack of any evidence of biological racial difference that would mandate this exclusive marketing.

“The message is: Black people cannot represent all of humanity as well as white people can.”

Roberts refers to the FDA’s approval of BiDil (for heart disease) marketing exclusive to the African American community. Because the clinical trials regarding the efficacy of BiDil that were referenced in the case were limited to African Americans, the FDA only approved the drug for this group; the FDA thus disregarded a history of clinical trials being conducted primarily on white men that yielded authorization for marketing to all humans. For the FDA, white people are able to “represent” the species, whereas Black people are not. This indicates that the FDA’s thinking, as Roberts concludes here, is uncritically grounded in both the political and biological categories of race.

“It is the complex regulatory system in our cells, not genes themselves, that determines the final transcript of instructions.”

Gene sequences are not mere blueprints that direct the body and determine human health. Genes never act in isolation. Nonetheless, genomic research tends to downplay the fluid expressions of genes, largely influenced by the outside environment, thus refusing to approach the broader environment as foundational to wellness.

“Turning people into ‘gene carriers’ concentrates responsibility on them to manage their own genetic predispositions, shifting the spotlight away from state responsibility for ensuring healthy living conditions.”

The scientific discourse of “gene carrier” places responsibility with the patient, who is presented as in possession of a toxin or genetic ticking bomb. This sense of individual possession easily bleeds into a sense of individual responsibility to manage one’s genetic liabilities. Roberts reiterates her concern that an increasingly internalized and personalized approach to medicine is one that elides the broader social and physical environmental changes that need to change to enable healthy living.

“Genealogy is being used by some African Americans, as well as by people from other groups, as the basis for a collective identity that lacks the shared political values and goals needed to fight racial oppression.”

Direct-to-consumer genetic sequencing allows people to conduct individual and family genealogy. Roberts is concerned with how such services may direct African Americans to identify with African populations out of a sense of biological identity. Instead, she points to the need for an African American community of resistance formed out of a sense of political identity, which could help generate political change.

“DNA phenotyping gives scientific cover to racial profiling in the form of DNA dragnets.”

DNA is now used to determine the geographical ancestry of suspects, so that this genetic information “predicts” a phenotype that can then be employed to racially profile anyone who might match that phenotype. The result is that many African American communities, by way of genealogical profiling of suspects, are being racially profiled in very familiar and old ways, which are only exacerbated by new technologies.

“But this innocent person has become a permanent suspect: his or her genetic information remains in the government databases for future screening for criminal involvement.”

The United States holds a DNA database, with many states mandating that suspected criminals (not yet proven guilty) release their DNA to be included in this data bank. Once DNA becomes part of the bank, that person is technically forever a suspect, just waiting for their DNA to be matched through a “cold hit.” Invasions of privacy occur not only in the mandated collection of the DNA but also in the possession of the DNA that is forever available to be “matched,” a science that has many flaws and often results in unjust convictions.

“Why would we expect DNA to eliminate the corruption in law enforcement that led to the framing of these innocent people? To the contrary, it gives dirty lab analysts, police officers, and prosecutors a simpler and more effective tool to use in building a false case against someone they want to see behind bars.”

The technology of DNA sequencing is fairly new. However, it is folded into already existing structures of the political category of race. As a result, this new technology serves very old purposes of surveilling and incarcerating Black people.

“Liberal Americans have bought into the new racial science in part because it is science. Many believe in the inherent progress of science and have faith that scientists conducting research on race and genetics must be advancing knowledge in an objective, rational, and ultimately beneficial way.”

Both conservative and liberal Americans alike trust science because it claims to be objective and offers quantitative, mathematically based “evidence” of its truths. People place “faith” in science to engage in research that aims to improve lives. However, because scientists generally do not think critically about how these new technologies often operate within already existing racist structures, this work may not necessarily be progressive at all, instead maintaining the status quo.