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

by Dorothy Roberts

To chip away at an overwhelming budget deficit, Miami’s public hospital system stopped paying for kidney dialysis for the indigent this week, officials said, leaving some patients to rely on emergency rooms for their life-sustaining treatments. —Kevin Sack, “Hospital Cuts Dialysis Care for the Poor in Miami,” New York Times, January 8, 2010.

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!” —Nina Bernstein, “Officials Obscured Truth of Migrant Deaths in Jail,” New York Times, January 10, 2010.

Race applied to human beings is a political division: it is a system of governing people that classifies them into a social hierarchy based on invented biological demarcations.

Instead of hammering the last nail in the coffin of an obsolete system, the science that emerged from sequencing the human genome was shaped by a resurgence of interest in race-based genetic variation.

Some scientists are claiming that clusters of genetic similarity detected with novel genomic theories and computer technologies correspond to antiquated racial classifications and prove that human racial differences are real and significant. Others are searching for genetic differences among races that can explain staggering inequalities in health and disease as well as variations in drug response.

The new science and technology of racial genetics threatens to steer America on a course of social inhumanity that already has begun to dominate politics in this century. Government policies that have drastically slashed social services have been accompanied by particularly brutal forms of regulation of racial minorities: mass imprisonment at rates far exceeding any other place on Earth or any time in the history of the free world; roundup and deportation of undocumented immigrants, often tearing families apart; abuse of children held in juvenile detention centers or locked up in adult prisons, some for the rest of their lives; official and unofficial infliction of torture in police stations and prison cells; and rampant medical neglect that kills.

Genomic science is reinforcing the concept of race as a biological category even as Americans ignore the devastating effects of racial inequality on our society. I argue that this paradox reflects the primary impact of the new biopolitics of race: the seemingly color-blind regime of coercive surveillance imposed on poor communities of color will seem more acceptable to a majority of Americans as their belief in intrinsic racial differences is validated by genomic science and technologies. The new racial biopolitics obscures this modern form of state brutality at a time when the United States claims to have moved beyond violent enforcement of racial hierarchies. As biological theories of race have always accomplished, the redefinition of race as a genetic category and the technologies it is generating make racial inequality, as well as the punitive apparatus that maintains it, seem perfectly natural.

Despite claims that genomic scientists are reconfiguring race in a more precise and accurate way, I have found rampant confusion about this new racial science among friends and colleagues trying to understand where it fits in their conceptions of humanity and social equality. What is the value and impact of modernizing racial classifications with new genomic technology? Will this new understanding of race provide the answers we need to solve the problem of persistent racial inequality in our society?

I found not one shred of evidence to counter my belief in the political nature of race. In fact, my journey only strengthened my understanding of our common humanity and the dehumanizing consequences of believing in innate racial differences. The answer to the problem of race will not be found in our genes. Yes, human beings are remarkably similar at the genetic level. But what should link us together is not our genetic unity; we should be bound by a common struggle for the equal dignity of all of humankind.

Citizenship is a political category, not a biological one. Citizenship doesn’t describe a person’s intrinsic characteristics; it defines her relationship to a nation’s government, to the other people who are citizens, and to noncitizens. Whether someone qualifies as a citizen isn’t inscribed in her body; citizenship is determined by the requirements set forth in the country’s constitution. Even if the constitution stated that only people of a certain height qualified for citizenship, we would still understand it as a political category, a relationship among people that has to do with governing them.

Race is not only interpreted according to invented rules, but, more important, race itself is an invented political grouping. Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.

The very first step of creating race, dividing human beings into these categories, is a political practice.

Race is very real as a political grouping of human beings and has actual consequences for people’s health, wealth, social status, reputation, and opportunities in life. The fact that dividing people into races has biological effects does not change the fact that this division is a political exercise.

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

The use of the term race to describe distinct categories of people is surprisingly recent. In 1508, William Dunbar, a Scottish member of King James IV’s court, wrote a poem called “The Dance of Sevin Deidly Sins.” One of the verses listed among those guilty of Envy, “bakbyttaris of sindry racis”—backbiters of sundry races. Some scholars believe this is the earliest use of the word “race” in the English language.3 Dunbar employed race to mean family lineage—kinship groups descended from the male line. He probably borrowed racis from the Spanish word raza, which the Spanish applied to breeds of horses and dogs.

The political origins of race are similarly an artifact of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Europeans increasingly tried to impose order on the movement of peoples between Christian and Islamic territories and the “Old” and “New” worlds.

The Roman Catholic Church, in particular, found a need to distinguish between believers and infidels; the latter were deemed fit fo...

In 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal directive authorizing the Portuguese to “attack, subject, and reduce to perpetual slavery” all “enemies of Christ” along the west coast of Africa. The authorization included the condition that the...

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

Unlike race, these observed differences did not create a set of discrete categories that every single person in the world must fit into from the day he or she is born.

“What Englishmen did not at first fully realize was that Negroes were potentially subjects for a special kind of obedience and subordination which was to arise as adventurous Englishmen sought to possess for themselves and their children one of the most bountiful dominions of the earth” (my emphasis).8

The word “slave” comes from Slavs, who were held in bondage from as early as the ninth century. The ancestors of people now considered white, who think of themselves as the slaveholding race, were once held as slaves themselves.

After Bacon’s Rebellion and similar revolts, it was imperative for European landowners to prevent future interracial solidarity by driving an impenetrable wedge between African and European laborers.

As officials split white indenture from black enslavement and established “white,” “Negro,” and “Indian” as distinct legal categories, race was literally manufactured by law.

By giving poor white laborers legal dominion over all blacks, enslaved or free, wealthy landowners secured their racial loyalty. Poor whites would cherish their privileged status over blacks—what Du Bois called their “psychological wage”—rather than joining with blacks to fight for a more equitable society.

Colonial landowners inherited slavery as an ancient practice, but they invented race as a modern system of power.

There is no biological test for whiteness. White means belonging to the group of people who are entitled to claim white privilege.

In less academic terms: race is the product of racism; racism is not the product of race.

No sooner had the Human Genome Project determined that human beings are 99.9 percent genetically alike than many scientists shifted their focus from human genetic commonality to the 0.1 percent of human genetic difference. This difference is increasingly seen as encompassing race.

Science is the most effective tool for giving claims about human difference the stamp of legitimacy.

And once scientists were committed to understanding human beings as divided into races, they believed that human biology could not be studied without attention to race.

There is a similar problem with calling the racial science of prior eras pseudoscience. In hindsight, we see the flaws in bizarre means of measuring racial difference, such as craniometry, which anatomists used a century ago to determine intelligence by calculating skull volume, and brand these methods a ridiculous pretense at the scientific method.

what we call racial pseudoscience today was considered the vanguard of scientific progress at the time it was practiced, and those who practiced it were admired by the scientific community and the public as pioneering geniuses. Could it be that our grandchildren will brand as pseudoscience today’s racial classifications generated by computerized genome scans?

The belief that race is natural has always been validated by mainstream—not aberrational—scientific theories and methods, and the most advanced science of human nature has always been shaped by current political contests over racial equality. The burning scientific questions of each period have been framed and answered in terms of race not because rational scientific inquiry compelled it, but because race was presumed to be an essential biological category. This is not a happy-ending tale of science overcoming racism.

Enlightenment biologists were preoccupied with classifying all earthly creations, whether plants, insects, or animals, into a natural hierarchy. Their chief scientific method was taxonomy: observing, naming, and ordering the world by partitioning living things into biologically different types. Applying this method to human bodies, naturalists made race an object of scientific study and made European conquest and enslavement of foreign peoples seem in line with nature.4 The insistence on finding differences among people so they can be categorized governs the study of human biology to this day.

Race was first used as a category for scientifically classifying human beings by the French physician François Bernier, who penned a 1684 essay titled “A New Division of the Earth, According to the Different Species or Races of Men Who Inhabit It.” Bernier organized human beings into five types based on their physical characteristics, grouping the people of Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and India together, but separating sub-Saharan Africans and “the blacks of the Cape of Good Hope” into two distinct species. Asians comprised the fourth large grouping. To these, Bernier added the Lapps of Norway, described as “little stunted creatures” and “wretched animals.”5

“Negroes and Whites are not different species of humans (for they belong presumably to one stock),” he wrote, “but they are different races, for each perpetuates itself in every area, and they generate between them children that are necessarily hybrid, or blendings (mulattoes).”12 The

A major problem with the separate-origin theory was that it breached the main criterion for identifying species. In a 1753 essay on the ass, French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, offered an influential definition of species as “a constant succession of similar individuals that can reproduce together.”

most scientists adapted Darwin’s theories to preexisting views of racial types.

Social Darwinists filled scientific journals with studies claiming to prove that these inherently primitive peoples were falling victim to a degenerative evolutionary process. “Will the Negro race be eliminated, and his place taken by the white man as a survival of the fittest?” became a key question for scientists to answer.27 A popular theory held that the defective bodies and minds of “savage races” would gradually generate their own extinction.

Eugenicists claimed that the IQ test could quantify innate intellectual ability in a single measurement, despite the objections of its creator, Alfred Binet.

By the 1940s, eugenics had been discredited both as bad science and as an excuse for racial hatred. American eugenicists who had initially supported the German sterilization law were shamed by its connection to the Nazi Holocaust.60 After World War II, a central project of racial scientists became to explain why their investigations of intrinsic racial difference had nothing to do with racism.

On July 18, 1950, the New York Times ran a front-page story, “No Scientific Basis for Race Bias Found by World Panel of Experts.”61 That day, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a landmark “Statement on Race,” drafted by an international committee of experts, declaring that race “is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.” The committee emphasized that human populations share most of their traits, meaning that “the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences.” Rejecting the Nazi idea that some races are superior to others, the UNESCO statement concluded that biological science demonstrated “the unity of mankind.”

scientists are using advanced genomic theories and technologies to create a new racial science that claims to divide the human species into natural groups without the taint of racism.

Genomic scientists have not discovered race in our genomes. They are taking already accepted racial categories and telling us a new way, based on computer-generated genetic differences, to verify them scientifically.

The idea that blacks and whites represent opposite races is patently unscientific.

Race started as a crude device for parceling people into servant and master classes, whose historical roots and scientific rationales we now reject. Yet race has outlasted its original historical context because it developed into a deeply held belief about the nature of human beings, a belief that continues to be useful in ordering our contemporary society.

Believing in race can be compared to believing in astrology. People who have faith in astrology find constant confirmation that horoscope predictions are reliable and that astrological signs determine personality types.

Race persists because it continues to be politically useful. It is therefore imperative to evaluate the political function of race at the present time and wage a political assault against it.

Imagine if every single day a jumbo jet loaded with 230 African American passengers took off into the sky, reached a cruising altitude, then crashed to the ground, killing all aboard. According to former surgeon general David Satcher, this is exactly the impact caused by racial health disparities in the United States.