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

by Dorothy Roberts

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.