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

by Dorothy Roberts

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