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

by Dorothy Roberts

The notion of “racial diseases”—that people of different races suffer from peculiar diseases and experience common diseases differently—is centuries old. It is tied to the original use of biology in inventing the political category of race.

Every perceived physical difference conveniently supported Africans’ slave status. Defining disease in racial terms played an essential part in this biological strategy that was enshrined in biomedical research and practice. It was precisely “by locating disease in physiologic difference—be it susceptibility or resistance—that medicine served to mark blacks as deserving of their inferior social status in society,” writes Lundy Braun.10 Medicine has historically promoted a racial construction of disease that in turn perpetuates a biological construction of race.

Jefferson opined, for example, that blacks sweat more than whites because of “a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat.” He also observed that black people were disposed to sleep too much because their minds were empty: “An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course,” he wrote.11

“This unfortunate difference in colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

Benjamin Banneker, the free black astronomer and mathematician born in 1731, confronted Jefferson, then secretary of state, about the statesman’s contradictory position on slavery.

“Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.” Banneker presented to Jefferson a copy of his Almanac for 1792, based on his own careful astronomical calculations, to substantiate his equal intelligence.

Jefferson’s reply, dated August 30, 1791, is fascinating for its ambivalence on the scientific question of whether blacks’ status stemmed from biological or social disadvantage. “Nobody wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”

After Banneker died, Jefferson disparaged his talents, suggesting that his almanacs were crafted with the aid of a white mentor. “I have a long letter from Banneker, which shows him to have had a m...

whites argued that the best way to improve the condition of emancipated blacks was through either benign neglect or coercive medical intervention.

The Syphilis Study is so frightening because it shows the inhumanity that can result from a belief in intrinsic racial difference.

Race has been and continues to be a major cause of blind spots in biomedical research.

“Syphilis and the American Negro.” He explains that the greater intensity of syphilis in blacks stemmed from the “terrible changes fifty years have wrought”—the physical and moral degeneration of blacks between 1859 and 1909 as a result of their emancipation from slavery. Whereas “by a forced system of hygiene the negro’s body, as a piece of property, was not allowed to deteriorate,” freedom left blacks unprepared to take care of themselves.20

Doctors described Jewish immigrants as too sickly, weak, and neurotic to cope with urban life in America.

In The Protest Psychosis, Jonathan Metzl, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, traces how schizophrenia became a black disease in the 1960s in much the same way that drapetomania became a black disease in the 1860s. Like Dr. Cartwright’s use of mental illness to explain black resistance to enslavement, psychiatrists in the civil rights era began to explain black urban unrest as a symptom of mental instability.

Medical students are taught to take race into account when they treat patients. In fact, race is the second thing about a patient they are trained to see, after age and before sex.

“When I prescribe Prozac to a patient who is African-American, I start at a lower dose, 5 or 10 milligrams instead of the usual 10-to-20 milligram dose. I do this in part because clinical experience and pharmacological research show that blacks metabolize antidepressants more slowly than Caucasians and Asians.”

an anesthesiologist in a Baltimore-area hospital, who takes race into account when placing a breathing tube down a patient’s windpipe. The anesthesiologist gives his black patients a drying agent in advance because, he says, “black patients tend to salivate heavily, which can cause airway complications.” He also always starts Asian patients undergoing surgery on a lower dose of narcotics because he believes they have a higher sensitivity to the drugs.43

One of the most enduring and disturbing medical beliefs about blacks is that they are impervious to pain. This myth has excused surgical experimentation without anesthesia on blacks, as well as providing blacks wit...

Racial profiling by doctors can also lead to overmedication. A 2009 federally funded study found that doctors are four times as likely to prescribe powerful antipsychotic drugs to children covered by Medicaid as they are to children whose parents have private insurance.51 Prescriptions to Medicaid youth have jumped dramatically over the last several years, far outpacing the modest rise in prescriptions to other children.

The story of Henrietta Lacks reflects the horrible history of medical exploitation and neglect of African Americans that has been reinforced by the view that their bodies are intrinsically inferior. But her story also defies the belief in inherent racial differences. Her cells, although they came from a black woman, helped to improve the health of human beings the world over and testify to our common humanity.

Although the slavery hypothesis has been thoroughly debunked, it still holds sway in the popular imagination and even in professional circles.

Genetic explanations for health disparities are basically implausible. Remember, the issue is not whether genes affect health—of course they do—but whether genetic difference explains racial disparities in health.

it would seem strange for a large group of people as genetically diverse as African Americans to have such a concentrated genetic susceptibility to so many common complex diseases.

Blacks who appear to be as poor as poor whites when income alone is measured are at greater risk of being unable to pay the rent, having their utilities shut off, and being evicted. Black poor people experience a more intense poverty than white poor people.45 Even when black individuals reach the middle class, chances are they have close relatives who are poor, so they bring family financial needs with them into a higher bracket.

Throughout your lifetime, your parents’ income and education, the neighborhoods you live in, the schools you attend, the jobs you hold, your experience of discrimination and privilege, and the resources you and your community have ultimately govern how the genetic hand you were dealt is translated into well-being. The way society is organized drives group disparities in health.

It has been firmly established that the best predictor of health is an individual’s position in the social hierarchy.

Genomic research is conducted with a constant eye toward market applications.

Ever since the fall of the Nazis, the world has tried to keep the biology of racial disparity under wraps. It has been acceptable to link racial differences to social and cultural factors. One race might underperform another because of upbringing or poverty. But suggesting biology as the cause for those differences—like “The Bell Curve” did a decade ago when it looked at academic achievement—was strictly taboo. Now, a new and unexpected force—medicine—is pulling back the covers. By taking a close look at minute differences in people’s genetic codes, researchers and drug companies are beginning to create racially based drugs and treatments.64

“I have done African American Lives 1, African American Lives 2, Finding Oprah’s Roots, and Faces of America, and you, Stephen, are the whitest man I have ever tested.” Gates made it clear that he regards so-called biogeographical ancestry as the equivalent of a test for race.

Changes in the gene pool of African ethnic groups also mean that the genetic profiles of present-day Africans contained in company databases are not identical to the profiles of these groups during the time of the slave trade. It has never made sense to define these groups as discrete genetic entities at any point in history. Ethnic groups like the Yoruba and Mende are not natural groupings of genetically related people; they were created by geopolitical forces that arose out of European colonialism.

The implications of genetic genealogy are far graver than the elation or disappointment a customer might feel after learning about her tribal lineage or racial origins. It is even more significant than consumer fraud. I believe that the explosion in genetic ancestry testing is perpetuating a false understanding of individual and collective racial identities that can have widespread repercussions for our society. Genetic genealogy has tremendous power to influence the way we define race, determine who belongs to various racial groupings, and understand racial connections. Test results are being used not only as a means to explore personal identity, but also as a basis for claiming membership in racial groups in order to qualify for government benefits and entitlements. Although genetic ancestry testing companies are fond of calling their service “recreational genomics,” their impact on relationships of power can be quite serious.

In September 2009, the United Kingdom Border Agency began a pilot program that uses DNA to check the nationality of asylum seekers. The Human Provenance Pilot Program verifies the nationality of people who said they had fled war-torn Somalia by asking them to submit to genetic screening. Immigration officials want to make sure the asylum seekers are not actually from another country, such as Kenya. Human rights advocates and scientists protested the program, pointing out that it conflated ancestry and nationality and ignored the possibility that people with origins in one country might have moved to another. British geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys, who pioneered human DNA profiling, is one of the program’s chief critics, charging the Border Agency with “making huge and unwarranted assumptions about population structure in Africa.”

If the British use of ancestry testing to determine nationality is alarming, consider how some law enforcement agencies in the United States are using these same tests to predict the race of criminal suspects.

The Florida-based company DNAPrint Genomics developed a technology called DNA Witness for use by law enforcement officers to determine “genetic heritage” from DNA samples left at a crime scene.2 DNA is typically used by the police to match a crime scene specimen to the genetic profile of a known suspect. But instead of confirming the identity of a perpetrator the way a fingerprint would, the new DNA phenotyping predicts the race of an unknown suspect. Using the same techniques as for ancestry testing, DNA Witness reports the percentage of genetic makeup among four population groups—sub-Saharan African, Native American, East Asian, and European.

There is no scientific test to discern what a person who is part African, part European, part Native American, and/or part East Asian will look like or what racial category he or she will fit into.

But DNA is not infallible. The genetic material in government databanks has to be retrieved, transferred, transported, identified, labeled, analyzed, and stored by human hands, and there is opportunity for error at every stage.27 In 2003, the Houston police department’s crime lab was shut down and hundreds of convictions were called into question when an independent audit uncovered widespread problems in the way DNA evidence was handled, including “poor calibration and maintenance of equipment, improper record keeping and a lack of safeguards against contamination of samples.”

The public will never know how many innocent people are sitting in prison because they were convicted with faulty DNA evidence. Despite recent DNA exonerations, most of the power to use genetic technology lies in the hands of law enforcement.

Color blindness and race consciousness compete as major schemes for determining the proper treatment of race in social policy.2 In the political arena, advocacy for color-blind policies is based on the assertion that racism has ceased to be the cause of social inequities, while race-conscious policies are promoted as a necessary means for remedying persistent institutional racism. Color blindness emerged as a conservative strategy after the civil rights movement succeeded in toppling the Southern Jim Crow system and forms of de jure segregation in the North.

Pretending that the civil rights movement attained perfect equality ignores the lingering effects and systemic incorporation of three centuries of official white supremacy as well as newly minted forms of racial discrimination. Civil rights advocates explicitly argued that eliminating the structural roots of racial inequality required paying attention to race.

Mass imprisonment of blacks and Latinos is a way for the state to exert direct control over poorly educated, unskilled, and jobless people who have no place in the market economy because of racism, while preserving a racial caste system that was supposed to be abolished by civil rights reforms.

Naomi Klein’s chilling exposé of violent state strategies employed to introduce radical free-market reforms abroad, The Shock Doctrine, reveals the horrific potential of state corporatism: Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security.

Take a look at what is going on in the nation’s public schools, prisons, detention centers, and hospitals serving poor people of color. You will see not only stark inequalities but also a dehumanizing brutality committed by state agents, a brutality that hinges on bodily neglect, abuse, confinement, and even torture of black and brown people.

This nation is at a crossroads. One path is the one I have just described: adopting the view that human beings are naturally divided into races at the molecular level and looking to genomic science and technology to bridge the enduring chasm between racial groups.

The other road means affirming our shared humanity by working to end the social inequities preserved by the political system of race. Which path we choose to follow is not only a question of scientific evidence. It is a question of moral commitment. There is no neutral scientific position on this question. We have long had scientific confirmation that race is a political and not a biological category. The re-creation of biological race in genomic science today, like its invention by scientists in past centuries, results from an ideological commitment to a false view of humanity.