Fatal Invention Quotes

“Reviewing the history of official racial classifications reminds us that these categories are not natural—and neither are the institutional inequities that race undergirds.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“A 2003 study published in Genetics in Medicine shows that this skepticism about race-specific drugs is not fictional; it is widespread in the black community.77 Participants in an anonymous survey and two focus groups that oversampled for minority groups reported that they would be highly suspicious of race-labeled drugs. Nearly half said they would be very suspicious of their safety, and 40 percent said they would be very suspicious of their efficacy. In fact, 13 percent of African Americans said they would choose a drug labeled for whites over one designated for blacks. At a conference on BiDil, an elderly black woman in the audience stood up and said, “If I were sick and somebody told me that they had a drug just for black people to help me, I’d say to them: give me what the white people are taking.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“He agreed that BiDil should be approved without regard to race, noting that American cardiologists “jumped on the statin drugs” once the Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study showed they were effective. “Would you restrict the results of the Scandinavian trial to Scandinavian people?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”17 Dr. Curry’s colleague Charles Rotimi, from Howard University’s National Human Genome Center, echoed this position. Rotimi warned that upholding an unproven biological explanation for health disparities would steer biomedical research in a dangerous direction. “It would be tragic not to approve [BiDil],” Rotimi said, “and it would be even more tragic just to approve it for African Americans.” 18”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“What if I were born in Brazil? Brazilian society recognizes an even wider range of identities for people who are neither white (branco) nor black (preto). In the 1950s, anthropologist Harry Hutchinson found eight in-between categories in the community of Reconcavo, located in northeastern Brazil, ranging from Cabo verde (“lighter than the preto but still quite dark, but with straight hair, thin lips, and narrow, straight nose”) to Moreno (“light skin with straight hair, but not viewed as white”).54 I probably would have been classified as pardo, designating mulattoes who are the children of the union of pretos and brancos. Of course, my genetic makeup remains the same no matter where I was born. But my race, along with all the privileges and disadvantages that go with it, differs depending on which country I am born in or travel to, because race is a political category that is defined according to invented rules.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“The state has the authority to take citizens’ private property—in this case, their genetic information—without due process. Those are the features of a totalitarian state, not a liberal democracy. Jim”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Race persists because it continues to be politically useful.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“scientists are using advanced genomic theories and technologies to create a new racial science that claims to divide the human species into natural groups without the taint of racism.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“So let me be clear: race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Because the children of two people from different races were fertile, Buffon’s rule meant that all human beings belonged to the same species.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“race was presumed to be an essential biological category. This is not a happy-ending tale of science overcoming racism.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“For my parents, Iris and Robert Roberts,
who taught me that there is only one human race.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Turning people into "gene carriers" concentrates responsibility on them to manage their own genetic predispositions, shifting the spotlight away from state responsibility for ensuring healthy living conditions.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“A series of Supreme Court decisions in the last two decades struck down race-conscious measures to desegregate schools and workplaces. In City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., decided in 1989, the Court ruled that the former capital of the Confederacy practiced reverse discrimination against whites by adopting a set-aside program to steer some of its construction dollars to minority-owned firms—“even when, without the program, less than one percent of construction contracts went to minorities in a city over 50 percent African American,” as legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez pointed out.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Consider a 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Devah Pager and Bruce Western finding that whites just released from prison fared better in the New York City job market than blacks with identical résumés but no criminal record.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Although whites use drugs in greater numbers than blacks, blacks are far more likely to be arrested for drug offenses—and therefore far more likely to end up in genetic databases. The latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released in February 2010, confirms that young blacks aged eighteen to twenty-five years old are less likely to use illegal drugs than the national average.69 Yet black men are twelve times more likely than white men to be sent to prison on drug charges.70 This staggering racial disparity results in part from the deliberate decision of police departments to target their drug enforcement efforts on inner-city neighborhoods where people of color live.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“By the logic used to approve BiDil, drugs tested on Americans should never be marketed overseas, or drugs tested only on whites should not be made available to anyone else. That logic had never resulted in a racial indication before. In the past, the FDA has generalized clinical trials involving white patients to approve drugs for everyone because it is assumed that white bodies function like all human bodies. By approving BiDil only for use in black patients, the FDA emphasized the supposedly distinctive—and, it is implied, substandard—quality of black bodies.30 The FDA treated white heart failure patients as the norm and blacks as a special case that had to be given a specialized therapy that Nissen compared to an orphan drug and that could not be assumed to work for other people. The message is: black people cannot represent all of humanity as well as white people can.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“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.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Equally as intriguing as the concept of personalized medicine is the proposal to develop the first drugs based on race. Think of the paradox: a classification system constructed centuries ago to enslave people became the portal for the most cutting-edge biomedical advance of the twenty-first century. Predicting drug response based on a patient’s race rather than on genetic traits, says Lawrence Lesco of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation Research, is “like telling time with a sundial instead of looking at a Rolex watch.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“They discovered that commonly used ethnic labels did not match the genetic clusters and were not reliable at predicting variation in the DME genes. One glaring lack of correspondence was the fact that 62 percent of Ethiopians, who would socially be labeled as black and grouped with the Bantu and Afro-Caribbeans, fell in the same genetic cluster as Ashkenazi Jews, Norwegians, and Armenians. A gene variant involved in metabolizing codeine and antidepressants “is found in 9%, 17%, and 34% of the Ethiopian, Tanzanian, and Zimbabwean populations, respectively.”41 The prevalence of an allele that predicts severe reactions to the HIV-drug abacavir is 13.6 percent among the Masai in Kenya, but only 3.3 percent among the Kenyan Luhya, and 0 percent among the Yoruba in Nigeria.42 Grouping all these people together on the basis of race for purposes of drug tailoring would be disastrous.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“The greater the percentage of blacks living in a neighborhood, the higher the neighborhood death rate, regardless of neighborhood income level.52 It is the neighborhood that makes people unhealthy, not the susceptibility of black people living there. The rate of death is higher for all residents, including whites, who live in predominantly black neighborhoods.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Krieger took the first scientific step by partnering with physician Stephen Sidney to specifically measure research participants’ exposure to racial discrimination and test its association with high blood pressure. Instead of treating race as a biological risk factor, as was typical in epidemiological research, Krieger zoomed in on racism as a cause of disease and developed a fledgling methodology to measure its health impact directly. Her findings, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1996, were the first to show that experiencing racial discrimination raises the risk of high blood pressure.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“What blocks black women from getting the cancer care available to white women? One barrier is that black women do not have the same access to mammography. Black neighborhoods have fewer facilities that provide breast cancer screening. The sole mammogram machine in Englewood, a predominantly black area on Chicago’s South Side, was broken for months. Women were sent ten miles away to get screened. Even the state-of-the-art John H. Stroger Hospital, which replaced Chicago’s aging Cook County Hospital in 2002 and serves many of the city’s poor African Americans, ran up a backlog of more than ten thousand women seeking mammograms.5 Mammograms cost about $150, which can be prohibitive for a woman struggling to feed her children. Medicaid paid only about half of the cost, so many hospitals in Chicago didn’t offer mammograms to women on Medicaid. “What does it mean if you have to take three buses to get to a place that gives mammograms, and then when you get there, you say, ‘Here is my Medicaid card,’ and they say, ‘Sorry, we don’t take that’?” Whitman asks.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“White women in Chicago are slightly more likely than black women to get breast cancer, but black women are twice as likely to die from it. That is a startling statistic by itself. But what is equally as shocking is that in 1980 Chicago’s black and white breast cancer mortality rates were identical: black and white women died at the same rate. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, the astounding gap emerged.1 Consider this additional aspect: the disparity in breast cancer mortality in New York City is only 15 percent. In Chicago, the racial gap is ten times greater than in New York. It is unlikely that genes explain these numbers.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“A black man in San Diego who developed hypertension because of exposure to toxic chemicals lost half of his disability award after a doctor reported that blacks are genetically prone to hypertension.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“For the years 1995 to 2004, a search of research awards in the National Institutes of Health database using the term genetics identified 21,956 new grants (including 181 cross-indexed by the term race), while only 44 new grants were indexed by the terms racism or racial discrimination .56 When the NIH launched a new center to study population health, it was originally named the Center for Genomics and Health Disparities—the environmental component was completely missing from the title.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Perhaps it is unfair to expect such a high degree of scientific precision. But studies that conclude health disparities are caused by genetic difference do not even come close. These studies typically control for the socio-economic status (SES) of the research subjects in an attempt to compare subjects of different races who have the same SES. If there remains a difference in the prevalence or outcome of a disease, the researchers typically attribute the unexplained variation to genetic distinctions between racial groups. But this conclusion suffers from a basic methodological error. The researchers failed to account for many other unmeasured factors, such as the experience of racial discrimination or differences in wealth, not just income, that are related to health outcomes and differ by race. Any one of these unmeasured factors—and not genes—might explain why health outcomes vary by race.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“In this study and others like it, guesswork about a peculiar black predisposition toward unhealthy births imports an old notion about sickle cell disease “afflicting the black race.”25 Whenever I give a talk on this topic, there is inevitably someone in the audience who invokes the mantra that sickle cell anemia is a black genetic disease and therefore proves that race is a genetic category. This misconception was first popularized in the early twentieth century by hematology experts who believed the capacity to develop sickled cells was uniquely inherent in “Negro blood.”26 Stereotypes about black resistance to malaria and susceptibility to sickle cell justified sending black workers to malaria-infested regions in the first part of the century and later led to discriminatory government, employer, and insurance-testing programs in the 1970s.27 The error is easily exposed by looking at two world maps, one highlighting the regions around the globe where malaria is prevalent, the other highlighting areas where sickle cell disease is present. The maps mirror each other perfectly. By comparing them, it is plain to see that malaria and sickle cell aren’t restricted to Africa and that much of Africa is unaffected. High frequencies of the trait also occur in parts of Europe, Oceania, India, and the Middle East, all places where there is malaria. In fact, people in the town of Orchomenos in central Greece have double the rate of sickle cell disease reported among African Americans.28 If frequency of the sickle cell gene determined racial boundaries, it certainly would not prove there is a black race. Instead, as Jared Diamond pointed out in the November 1994 issue of Discover , if we grouped together people by the presence or absence of the sickle cell gene, “we’d place Yemenites, Greeks, New Guineans, Thai, and Dinkas in one ‘race,’ Norwegians and several black African peoples in another.”29 It would be more accurate to call the groups with the sickle cell gene the “antimosquito race.” Of course, that would be a silly way of grouping people, except for studying the sickle cell gene. But “black race” is an equally silly way of grouping people for identifying genetic contributions to disease.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“The article ended by downplaying “disparate access to medical care or other environmental factors,” arguing that “our data suggest that the proposed genetic component to preterm birth may be a greater etiological contributor than previously recognized”—despite presenting no genetic data whatsoever!22”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century