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

by Dorothy Roberts

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