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

by Dorothy Roberts

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.