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

by Dorothy Roberts

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We are witnessing the emergence of a new form of racial politics in America, in which the state’s power to control the life and death of populations relies on classifying them by race.

racial typologies

They place people into a small number of discrete categories, or races, based on a few readily observable traits, such as skin colour, hair texture, facial features, and body build.

These dehumanizing policies of surveillance and control are made invisible to most Americans by the emerging genetic understanding of race that focuses attention on molecular differences while obscuring the impact of racism in our society.

The Human Genome Project, which mapped the entire human genetic code, proved that race could not be identified in our genes.

On June 26, 2000, when President Bill Clinton unveiled the draft genomic sequence, he famously declared that “human beings, regardless of race, are 99.9 percent the same.”

Some law enforcement agencies are using these same forensic tools to identify the race of suspects. And federal and state agents are starting to collect DNA from everyone they arrest, even those never charged with or convicted of a crime, filling ever-expanding government gene banks with compelled samples mostly from black and brown men.

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; o...

How can the perception of increasing racial fairness coexist with the reality of increasing racialized brutality?

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.

The fact that dividing people into races has biological effects does not change the fact that this division is a political exercise.

We know race is a political grouping because it has political roots in slavery and colonialism, it has served a political function over the four hundred years since its inception, and its boundary lines—how many races there are and who belongs to each one—have shifted over time and across nations to suit those political purposes.

These racial reclassifications did not occur in response to scientific advances in human biology, but in response to sociopolitical imperatives.

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

The Spanish and the Portuguese had experienced close contact with North Africa as well as domination by highly cultured Arab invaders for centuries. The Moors conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711, bringing with them several hundred years of cultural influence and ethnic intermixing. Spanish and Portuguese traders did not automatically classify the people from the west coast of Africa as an innately inferior group.

Then came Bacon’s Rebellion. In 1676, European and African servants in colonial Virginia joined forces to demand that the royal governor, William Berkeley, move more aggressively against Indian tribes to settle lands on the frontier.

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.12

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

As W.J. Cash explained in The Mind of the South in 1941, whites passed these laws to protect “the right of their sons in the legitimate line, through all the generations to come, to be born to the great heritage of the white race.”14

In addition to destroying political unity between white and black servants, white landowners had to make absolutely certain that free blacks would never become socially equal to whites or encourage slaves to revolt in order to join their ranks.

“Like slaves, free Negroes were generally without political rights, were unable to move freely, were prohibited from testifying against whites, and were often punished with the lash,” writes historian Ira Berlin in his classic Slaves Without Masters.

a result of the new racial regime, “Negro” and “slave” were becoming synonymous as free and enslaved blacks were grouped together at the bottom rung of society.

Combining Africans into a single race eventually obliterated the physical, linguistic, and cultural distinctions that had existed among thousands of ethnic groups on the African continent.

The New World Europeans also began to perceive themselves as a different kind of master. English, Scottish, German, French, and Dutch settlers were uniting under the general label “white.” W.E.B. Du Bois observed that “the discovery of person...

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.

In addition to the grotesque lynchings that terrorized blacks throughout the South, an especially brutal form of reenslavement was the false imprisonment of thousands of black men who were then leased to white farmers, entrepreneurs, and corporations as a source of cheap labor.

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

One of the most sensational trials in New York in 1925 involved the annulment sought by wealthy socialite Leonard Kip Rhinelander of his marriage to Alice Beatrice Jones.

In her defense, Alice surprised Leonard and his attorneys by choosing not to prove she was white. She admitted that she had some “colored blood” but insisted that Leonard—who prior to the wedding had met her family, spent many nights with her at the Hotel Marie Antoinette, and even bathed her naked body—was well aware of her true identity. The climax of the trial occurred when Alice was compelled to provide the key evidence in her defense. The judge, lawyers, jurors, and Leonard waited in the jury room while Alice stripped to her underwear, covered by a coat, in an adjoining lavatory. At her lawyer’s direction, a weeping Alice let down the coat before the white male jurors so they could see for themselves how easy it was to tell that she was black.

Trials to determine an individual’s racial identity were commonplace in courts throughout the country from the late eighteenth century until well into the twentieth century.

And sometimes husbands sought to avoid the obligations of marriage by claiming they had been tricked into an interracial union.”

adjudicated

In her book What Blood Won’t Tell, Gross emphasizes that racial identity trials did not always hinge on documentary evidence, physical markers of race, or scientific fact.

Congress moved more directly to stanch the “Mongolian invasion” with the Chinese Immigration Act of 1882, barring entry to Chinese workers for ten years, including the wives and families of immigrants already in the country. Subsequent laws passed in 1917, 1924, and 1934 extended the

Even certain European groups whose whiteness seems unquestionable today were not considered full members of the white race one hundred years ago. In the late 1800s, Irish immigrants were considered to be closer to Africans than to the English and were often portrayed as apelike in caricatures. Italian newcomers were called Guineas, an epithet originally reserved for African Americans and derived from their motherland along the west coast of Africa. Scholars in a number of fields have puzzled over the question, How did the Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Jews “become white”?

The wave of immigrants who arrived from southern and eastern Europe from the 1840s to the 1930s were included among the undesirables targeted by the exclusionary immigration laws passed by Congress in 1924. They threw off their native customs, accents, and names not only to become assimilated into American culture, but also to be granted entrance to the privileged rank of whiteness. Obviously, their ancestry did not change to make them whiter; their racial transformation occurred as a result of changing political qualifications for inclusion in the ruling class. There is no biological test for whiteness. White means belonging to the group of people who are entitled to claim white privilege.

Only politics and not nature (or genetic science) can explain why in some states “a single black great-grandparent was sufficient to establish a person as ‘black,’ while seven white great-grandparents were insufficient to establish one as ‘white,’” notes anthropologist Jonathan Marks.

Colonists first began establishing the distinction between whites, Negroes, and Indians when they passed statutes that specified the privileges and disabilities that accrued to each group. The effort to legislate the political status of whites and nonwhites necessitated legal specifications for these categories.

the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) explained the reason for differences in skin color and natural disposition that distinguished the four main races, which he identified as whites, Negroes, Hindustanic, and Kalmuck, the nomadic Mongols of Central Asia.11 Kant subscribed to monogenism, locating the origin of all humanity in a common ancestor, and defined race as “the hereditary differences of animals belonging to a single stock.” “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

French philosopher Voltaire, on the other hand, believed in polygenesis, the idea that the races of mankind descended from distinct origins. “Only the blind could doubt that the Whites, the Blacks, the Albinos, the Hottentots, the Laplanders, the Chinese, the Americans, are entirely different races,” he declared in a 1764 essay.13

Did the differences that naturalists were cataloging constitute racial variation within the human species (monogenism) or mark completely distinct species that descended from separate creations (polygenism)?

In the United States, two pioneering scientists were especially instrumental in promoting the view that human beings were split into separate species. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz lent intellectual firepower to the scientific theory of polygenism, while empiricist Samuel Morton developed the scientific technology to validate it.

Agassiz was haunted by his encounters with blacks when he arrived in the United States. His very first experience meeting black people as servants in a Philadelphia hotel in 1846 was so unsettling that he wrote at length about it in a letter to his mother. “I can scarcely express to you the painful impression that I received, especially since the feeling that they inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type and the unique origin of our species,” he wrote. Describing blacks as “a degraded and degenerate race,” Agassiz confessed, “it is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us.”16 Agassiz soon turned this repulsion toward blacks into a full-fledged theory that they had descended from a distinct ancestor. He argued that it was wrong to link all living things to “one common centre of origin”; rather, races were created as separate species that adapted to different zoological zones along with other animals and plants peculiar to each region.

four ardent letters written in 1863 to Lincoln’s Civil War commission, Agassiz warned that incorporating blacks as equals in the reunited nation would contaminate the white race both socially and biologically.

“How shall we eradicate the stigma of a lower race when its blood has once been allowed to flow freely into that of our children?”17

Physician and anatomy professor Samuel George Morton, born in Philadelphia in 1799, used this scientific method to study racial difference and validate the separate species theory. Morton was well known as president of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and a founder of invertebrate paleontology, having published an acclaimed book describing the fossils collected by the Lewis and Clark expedition.

18 Morton amassed more than one thousand human skulls, sent to him from colleagues around the globe, into the largest collection in the world, known as the American Golgotha.

In his 1839 magnum opus, Crania Americana, Morton presented his meticulous measurements of the cranial capacity of Caucasians, Mongolians, Malays, indigenous Americans, and Negroes.

Morton’s racial methodology proved deeply flawed. But at the time of his death in 1851, the New York Tribune wrote that “probably no scientific man in America enjoyed a higher reputation among scholars throughout the world than Dr. Morton.”