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

by Dorothy Roberts

But the only way we know which racial designation to assign each person is by referring to the invented rules we have been taught since we were infants. And the only reason we engage in this exercise is the enormous social consequences of classifying people in this way. So we force the mélange of physical features and social clues into a code that tells us how to categorize each person—so as to know where each person fits in our society.

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

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.

It is in this acute distinction between the political status of whites and blacks, this way of governing the power relationship between them, that we find the origins of race. Colonial landowners inherited slavery as an ancient practice, but they invented race as a modern system of power.

“It may be true that a blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity,” wrote the Court, “but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.”

Seeing scientific racism as restricted to extreme cases like Nazi genocide mirrors the view of racism in general as an extremist position that falls outside enlightened Western thinking. But as I have shown in the previous chapter, race and racism emerged as integral aspects of the American republic, not at all in opposition to it.

Both UNESCO statements disclaimed the practice of ranking races. But neither document abandoned the concept of biological race altogether. Instead, both statements took issue with race as an ideological doctrine of inferiority that was responsible for deadly social conflicts. They distinguished the Nazis’ ideological use of race for repressive purposes from the scientific use of race for legitimate research.

Their conclusion was unanimous: the Human Genome Project revealed that the human species cannot be divided into biological races. President Clinton famously announced, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”

The people who migrated from Africa and dispersed throughout the globe carried in their genomes only a portion of variants found in the ancestral inhabitants. “From a genetic perspective,” writes anthropologist Deborah Bolnick, “non-Africans are essentially a subset of Africans.”76 In fact, the entire range of human variation for some genetic traits can be found on the African continent.

Published reports of biomedical and genetic studies rarely describe how race was determined or the rationale for analyzing the data on the basis of race. “The lack of disciplinary clarity or consensus with respect to a central term of analysis . . . was not a barrier to publication of thousands of articles evaluating racial differences in a host of medical conditions,” reported a survey on the use of race variables in genetic studies.57

But we should challenge genomic scientists who take it for granted that human beings are naturally organized into definable, genetically cohesive populations. If we pause for a moment to examine the political, cultural, and even arbitrary borders that delimit populations and consider how mutable, porous, and continually changing these boundaries are, the scaffolding of population genomics that seems to be supporting race begins to look very wobbly.

Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health. Understanding race as a political category does not erase its impact on biology; instead, it redirects attention from genetic explanations to social ones.

Discovering a genetic risk opens a fresh avenue for profit. Dealing with the environmental risks we already know exist and are killing people costs money.

Yet after a decade of intense and expensive digging for genetic drug targets, scientists have come up virtually empty-handed. It turns out they were banking on a flawed hypothesis about the relationship between genes and disease.

The problem with this picture is that prescribing medication on the “race is a proxy for genetic difference” theory takes the statistical correlation too far. It is one thing to show that gene variants that affect drug response differ in frequency across racial groups. It is quite another to use these racial differences to predict which drug an individual should use.

Race-based medicine gives people a morally acceptable reason to hold on to their belief in intrinsic racial difference. They can now talk openly about natural distinctions between races—even their biological inferiority and superiority, at least when it comes to disease—without appearing racist. This would be a case of public enlightenment—“pulling back the covers”—if the science supporting racial therapies were sound. But to the contrary, the purported benefits of racial medicine provide an excuse to overlook the scientific flaws in research claiming to show race-based genetic difference. These technologies are not just products of racial science. They are driving racial science.

Companies like 23andMe market their services as tools not only for gathering personal information, but also for creating social connections. In September 2008, the front page of the New York Times “Styles” section featured a colorful story about a celebrity “spit party,” hosted by media moguls Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, and Harvey Weinstein, where the glitterati spit into test tubes so their DNA could be analyzed by 23andMe.

Contrary to the illusion of biocitizens liberated by a personalized genomics that transcends racial divisions, the reality includes racially segregated markets for eggs and sperm, gender selection to weed out girls, renting wombs of impoverished surrogates, lawsuits branding dark-skinned children as genetic “mistakes,” and a growing obligation to use high-tech testing and interventions to ensure the genetic fitness of children.

Educating blacks, as well as other Americans, about the history, politics, and cultures of Africa is an important antidote to the widespread ignorance that exists about the continent. But there is no reason why instilling a greater appreciation for Africa should hinge on genetic kinship.

Both conservatives who espouse a color-blind ideology and liberals who believe in a postracial America have embraced both the science validating racial difference at the genetic level and biotechnological solutions for inequality at the social level. Even some activists who oppose racism have adopted the view that race-based genetics and technology can be used as a tool for alleviating health inequities, building solidarity, and fixing the criminal justice system. Examining the grounds for this bipartisan endorsement of racial science shows the flaws in its logic and the urgent need for a political understanding of race that does not rely on biology.

With the new distinction between biological and social race, conservatives now have a way to speak about racial difference while maintaining a color-blind approach to social policy. They find it acceptable to refer to race explicitly as long as it has a biological meaning because that use of race is purportedly scientific and unbiased. It is no longer necessary to use code_word proxies for race, such as “welfare” and “illegal immigration.” Instead, race can be used outright as a proxy for genetic difference.

The liberal position, then, is to see the concept of biological race as a neutral scientific fact that can be put to good or bad use and to advocate for safeguards against its misuse by racists. Many liberals call for rules mitigating the damage caused when the findings of racial science fall in the wrong hands but see any criticism of the research itself as an impermissible interference in science.