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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Believing in Race in the Genomic Age”

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Invention of Race”

Roberts begins Chapter 1 by defining race as a political category “disguised as a biological one” (4), immediately underscoring the main thesis of the book: The political category of race gathers weight from its supposedly biological foundation. This distinction is important because framing race as a biological category allows the attribution of political inequalities to biological differences. In other words, the myth of race as a biological category maintains the political category of race, which maintains inequalities.

There is a long history of humans dividing one another into groups; human classification systems have existed across cultures, as seen in ancient Egypt and Biblical texts. Though these systems often classify humans into groups of greater and lesser status, these systems are not racial: They do not insist on categories into which each human must fit. Our modern, current understanding of race gradually developed from the 1500s.

So, too, has slavery existed across cultures. The term “slave” originates with the term Slav, designating a group of European (Slavic) peoples, who were enslaved starting in the ninth century. Europeans, often considered the ancestors of enslavers, thus have a long history of being subjected to slavery themselves. Ancient people, too, enslaved people as payments for debt or punishment for crime, and desperately poor parents might sell their children into slavery in the Roman Empire. Slavery, then, is not specific to the rise of modern imperialism.

As a political category, race is also grounded in the 15th and 16th centuries, when it was initially used to distinguish between Christians and non-Christians. During this period, the Pope declared that non-Christian Africans could be enslaved and then freed once they converted to Christianity. This mandate of freedom after conversion was often ignored, however, enabling the beginnings of the modern trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved people.

Even in the American colonies, however, “slave” did not initially mean African. Before American slavery became entrenched in the 1700s, most of the unfree workers were European. White servants, captured Indigenous Americans, and Africans all occupied the same category. This diversity changed with Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-1677), when African and European servants banded together to protest the Virginia royal governor’s land policies. Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy landowner, led this group in burning down the then-capital, Jamestown. This rebellion went on for several months, until the governor captured and hung 23 rebels. Wealthy landowners, keen to ensure their own security in the wake of the rebellion, sought to undermine the threatening solidarity between African and European laborers. In addition, too few European servants were arriving in the colonies, and Indigenous Americans generally avoided capture; it was easiest to violently take more Africans to the colonies for enslaved labor.

Therefore, in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, the political categories of “white” and “Negro” were invented and legalized. This change set all Black and all white people—regardless of class—apart from one other hierarchically, creating the broad political category of race that supported racialized slavery. By the late 1600s, laws were in place to prevent sexual relations between “whites” and “Negroes.” These laws were not overturned in Virginia until the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia.

Not all Black people were enslaved, however, so additional laws were enacted to ensure that free Black people did not have the same privileges as free white people. The mobility of free Black people was restricted, their political rights were denied, and they were not able to testify against whites. Some states had statutes that allowed for free Black people to be placed in bondage for minor legal infractions, and many states banished free Black people altogether.

The invention of race as a biological category enabled the United States to justify slavery, even during the revolution against Britain. Once race became biological, the unequal conditions that this political category induces seem “natural” and thus become an “excuse for racial injustice” (24). Roberts concludes: “race is the product of racism; racism is not the product of race” (25). Racial categories are grounded in political violence and must be seen as such.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Separating Racial Science from Racism”

In the wake of the Human Genome Project, which was completed in 2000 and determined that humans are 99.9% genetically alike, scientists immediately started studying the 0.1% of difference, a difference that scientists increasingly link to race. With the Human Genome Project, “biological concepts of race” (26) that have been developing and shifting over the last 300 years are being “resuscitated” by science.

Science was a major contributor to the construction of race as a biological category; in short, science helped justify the injustices between racialized categories of humans. The scientific construction of race as biological category is not confined to “scientific racism,” a term that “implies an exceptional use of science to support racist ideas” (27). The term scientific racism identifies a “corrupt misuse of race,” such as Nazi experiments, rather than the fundamental problem of science’s “support of race itself” (27). Roberts also warns against discourse emphasizing earlier practices that are now recognized as “pseudoscience;” such discourse too easily dismisses previous ways of thinking as not “scientific.” What now looks like pseudoscience regarding race was often considered cutting-edge science, and science’s foundation in race has not changed. There is more continuation than disconnect between past and present scientific approaches to race.

The authority of science, too, must be understood critically. By 1700, there was a shift from “theological thinking” to scientific thinking, with science usurping religion as authorizer of truth. Biologists became obsessed with classifying living beings, often hierarchically, and specifically through the use of taxonomy. Naturalists thus made “race an object of study” (28). The obsession with locating and categorizing differences among humans remains, to this day, the foundation for the study of human biology. Science holds an authority that no other discipline does in its claims to “truth.”

Both scientists and philosophers in the 1700s and 1800s debated the origin of humans through two schools of thought: polygenism and monogenism. Polygenists argued that there were multiple species of humans developing geographically apart. Monogenists insisted on a shared origin for all humans, with different races. The debate as to whether there were different human species or whether there were different races within one species continued through the 19th century.

One of the main theories used to determine species remains that of George-Louis Leclerc, or Comte de Buffon, who theorized that shared species could be determined if the children of two animals could reproduce. While a donkey and a horse can reproduce, for example, their children are sterile. This “rule” meant that humans were of one species. Many scientists, however, insisted that “mixed-race” children were less fertile than children of “pure” race.

With the increase in immigration to the United States from southern and eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, scientists insisted that these immigrants, not considered “white,” were excessively fertile, and the eugenics movement gathered force with the help of racial science. Eugenics was mainstream in the early 20th century, with funding from major corporations. Eugenic science and Jim Crow segregation were mutually supporting, and many states passed laws criminalizing interracial sex and reproduction by way of outlawing interracial marriage. Virginia, for example, passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924. Racial science insisted that social programs were unable to make society more just, as race was biological and “the reason” for poverty and disease, and the eugenicists’ motto was “nature knows no equality” (42).

Following World War II and the Nazis’ rhetoric of eugenics, much effort in the sciences went toward divorcing the study of supposed intrinsic racial difference from racism itself. Racial science maintained the biological category of race, framing it as wholly separate from the political category of race. The study of race as biology moved from the study of outward appearances (phenotype) to the study of the internal and microscopic with genetic biotechnology.

Roberts returns to the Human Genome Project and the 0.1% that humans do not share. She rejects the usual “soundbite” that disregards this 0.1% as meaningless and thus proof that biological race does not exist. Instead, she insists that this 0.1% is meaningful. After all, humans and other mammals are much more alike than they are different, with humans sharing 98.7% of their genes with chimpanzees and over 90% with mice. Simultaneously, however, though this seemingly small difference is meaningful, it does not reflect a biological racial difference. Since humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa, the greatest amount of genetic diversity is present in the human populations that remain in Africa. Populations of Africans are more genetically different from one another than they are from European populations.

Nonetheless, the Human Genome Project did not put an end to race as biology. Rather, it catalyzed the use of genomic theories and technologies to create the continuation of the myth of race as biology and as a categorization of humans that is divorced from racism.

Part 1 Analysis

Part 1, “Believing in Race in the Genomic Age,” considers two factors in the construction of race: imperialism and science. Imperialism creates the political category of race, which develops out of racism. Science creates the biological category of race, which also develops out of racism. Science, however, edifies the political category of race by naturalizing race: Science claims that race is intrinsic and thus “natural.” Race was thus “invented” with the “historical coincidence” of the age of imperialism overlapping with the scientific revolution. From the beginning of the book, Roberts approaches science as a discipline that has created the dangerous and authoritative myth that race, a purely political category, is biological. The theme of The Dangerous Authority of Science is at the heart of this exploration, as science has accomplished this feat in large part through its unique authority as allegedly objective.

The first chapter is concerned with imperialism, with Roberts taking care to distinguish today’s conceptualization of race from other forms of human division and hierarchy in the past. Specifically, Roberts examines the shift from the various categorizations of different peoples that have occurred across human cultures and histories to the specifically modern racial categorizations. Roberts focuses on how these racial categories developed in the 1600s in the American colonies after Africans and Europeans joined together in opposition to the policies of the governor of Virginia during Bacon’s Rebellion.

Roberts’s emphasis on Bacon’s Rebellion as a major historical tipping point, as opposed to a minor event or mere contributing factor, reflects her effort to shift traditional perspectives that uphold the status quo. Namely, the author highlights how Bacon’s Rebellion directly prompted the white ruling class to legally codify the categories of “white” and “Negro” as ones of hierarchical difference. In the American colonies, through Roberts’s interpretation, the political response to Bacon’s Rebellion is thus the dramatic beginning of the political categorization of race, which quickly mapped on to the political category of slave.

In reframing history, Roberts also takes capitalistic motivations to undermine alliances into account, naming the actors who perpetuated this “invention” and their motivations; in doing so, Roberts implicitly calls for and notes the power of solidarity. The political categorization of race was born out of a class desire to ensure the security of wealthy landowners. In other words, race was created by the wealthy upper class in an effort to maintain their wealth and power. Key to that effort was the destruction of alliances between poor Africans and poor Europeans. The categories of “Negro” and “slave” were understood as political, not biological. Over time, though, the same did not hold true for the two political categories of “white” and “Negro,” which egregiously oversimplified the range of distinctions within both African and European populations. The latter categories paved the road for today’s categories of white and Black, which homogenize those within each group to establish contrast.

While the first chapter in Part 1 is concerned with imperialism, the second chapter focuses on the role of science, insisting that politics (Chapter 1) and science (Chapter 2) are “intertwined.” Roberts starts Chapter 2 with a discussion of the mapping of the human genome and scientists’ focus on the 0.1% of the genome that humans do not share—a difference that scientists then immediately linked to “race.” Roberts is adamant that we remain critical of science’s insistent biologism of race, which secures the political category of race, born out of racism, as “natural.” She insists that race is not biological. This chapter thus lays the foundation for the theme of Race As Embodied Rather Than Biological, opening the opportunity for Roberts to later explain the inverted manifestation of this relationship.

Chapter 2 argues that science itself is dedicated to the biological category of race and is part of the larger fabric of racism. Roberts goes to great lengths to clarify that she is not only talking about “scientific racism” or science that is now widely recognized as overtly racist. Rather, she terms her target “racial science.” The title of the chapter, “Separating Racial Science from Racism,” reflects not only the thesis of the chapter but also the direction of Roberts’s intellectual and moral energies throughout the book: she wants to separate current “racial science” from the overt racism of the Nazis and 19th-century “scientific racism.” She is not interested in validating current scientific efforts that theorize race as biology. Rather, she is aiming to introduce and build her theme of “Racial Science” as a Refutation and Continuation of “Scientific Racism.” She wants to show how scientific racism (so obviously racist to most people) still lives and operates within current racial science (so obviously “scientific” to most people). Both, she argues, persist in the mistake of biologizing race.

To uphold race as biological, Roberts insists, is a manifestation of racism, no matter how “scientific” or innocuous this biologism may seem. Yet today’s racial science, despite no longer upholding the biological category of race as an indicator of superiority or inferiority, and despite actively distancing itself from overtly racist discourse, nonetheless maintains this ideology. Scientists are subjective beings, trained within a political landscape of race. This training conditions them to approach the study of human populations in terms of biological race, thus maintaining the harmful political category of race.