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

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, by Dorothy Roberts (New York: New Press, 2012. 400 pp. Paper, $19.95.) Reviewed by Barbara Tomlinson

n Fatal Invention, Dorothy Roberts reveals how emerging developments in contemporary genomic science and biotechnology serve to perpetuate some very old and destructive lies about race as a biological reality rather than a social construction. Scientific researchers revive long-discredited notions of race by searching for racial markers transmitted genetically. Pharmaceutical companies produce and market drugs that presume to address infirmities attributable to racial difference at the genetic level. Colorblind discourses in law and scholarship silence exposure of the political and economic causes of racial stratification, leaving scientifically untenable but socially appealing genetic explanations as the default explanations and justifications for race-bound inequalities.

In the book's first two chapters, "The Invention of Race" and "Separating Racial Science from Racism," Roberts establishes a framework for understanding race as a political rather than biological classification. She argues: "Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one" (4). Race is politically grounded in conquest, colonialism, and exploitation; its function shifts over time and space to meet sociopolitical imperatives. One of those imperatives was to justify slavery. Establishing race as biological made it appear inherent in individuals. This served a sociopolitical purpose that profited white men who raped their African slaves: an early Virginia law classified the resulting children as slaves also- property to be used and sold for white advantage. Roberts emphatically clarifies the connection between race and racism: "Race is the product of racism; racism is not the product of race" (25).

Tracing the history of racial and eugenic science, Roberts notes that in recent years, the Human Genome Project has demonstrated that race is neither genetic nor scientifically verifiable. According to the Project, 99.9 percent of human genes are identical; 98.7 percent of human genes are identical to those of chimpanzees, and 90 percent to those of mice. Roberts argues that the .1 percent difference in humans is undoubtedly significant, but not in ways that align with popular conceptions of racial difference. According to Roberts:

[Persons] from the Congo . . . South...