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

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty-First Century was written by Dorothy Roberts and published by the New Press in 2011. In addition to Fatal Invention, Roberts is the author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002) and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997). Fatal Invention was named one of the 10 best Black nonfiction books of 2011 by AFRO.com. Roberts is also co-editor of six books focusing on legal issues, including constitutional law and women in law. At the University of Pennsylvania, Roberts holds joint appointments with the School of Law and the department of Africana Studies & Sociology. She is also the university’s founding director of the Race, Science, & Society program, held within the Center for Africana Studies. Roberts received her bachelor of arts from Yale in 1977 and her juris doctor from Harvard in 1980. Recent awards for her work include the 2019 Rutgers University-Newark Honorary Doctor of Laws degree, election to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017, the 2016 Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2016 delivery of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and the 2015 American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.

This study guide refers to the 2011 paperback edition of Fatal Invention published by New Press.

Content Warning: Fatal Invention discusses systemic racism, slavery, eugenics, police surveillance, mass incarceration, and a wide range of abuses within the sciences. The source text also uses the terms “slave” and “Negro,” which is reflected in this guide in quotes.

Summary

Roberts argues in Fatal Invention that the wide-held belief that race is biologically based is inaccurate. Racial categories are, instead, politically constructed ones that do not reflect biological groupings. Roberts traces the construction of the political category of race and how the “fatal invention” of the biological category of race has served to uphold structural racism; the political category of race appears natural when bolstered by the supposedly scientific and biological category of race.

Fatal Invention is divided into four parts. Part 1, “Believing in Race in the Genomic Age,” explores, first, the invention of the political category of race that occurred with imperialism and, second, the invention of the biological category of race that occurred with the scientific revolution. Imperialism and science were mutually supportive in the construction of systemic racism. Scientific assertion of imperialism’s political categories of race (such as white, Black, Asian) as biologically based has helped to convince the general population that these politicized racial categories are not constructed but intrinsic.

Part 2, “The New Racial Science,” moves away from the 400-year history of the invention of race and into the 21st-century study of genetics. Roberts points out how genetic science today remains grounded in very traditional, political ideas of race; those ideas, in turn, dangerously influence the way contemporary research is designed, conducted, and applied. The public tends to assume that the new technology of genetics is divorced from politics, with DNA “speaking for itself” within an objective, scientific context. Roberts demonstrates that, in fact, genetic research is deeply entrenched in and undermined by subjective notions of race.

Part 3, “The New Racial Technology,” continues to examine the subjective nature of supposedly objective scientific research. Namely, in applying the political notion of race, genetic research by default rejects the boundedness of geographic ancestral populations, insisting on outlining those populations instead with traditional, racialized lines. Part 3 goes into detail in its consideration of how scientists are mired not only in dangerous political notions of race but also in the grueling effort of trying to market their research. Scientists must work with market analysts to determine how to secure funding, acquire patents, and gain FDA approval. Science, thus, thinks not only in terms of the political category of race but also in terms of the market. Genetic technology also changes how patients themselves think, prompting the privatization of medical approaches, decisions, and choices based on genetic information. The narrative of the internal world of genetics has rendered the outer world, both social and environmental, of less consequence. Roberts argues that this imbalance is dangerous to the practice of medicine and prevents necessary changes that would help to create a more racially just medical infrastructure—and world.

Part 4, “The New Biopolitics of Race,” considers how the private, personal narrative of DNA does apply this private information to the external world, albeit to detrimental effect—that is, by lending support to surveillance technology. There is a belief that DNA is infallible, an immediately legible narrative (versus one subject to interpretation). This belief has allowed the use of DNA, often uncritically, as a method of surveillance invested with unwarranted authority, again by way of science. With enormous databanks holding the DNA of anyone suspected (but not necessarily found guilty) of a crime, this supposedly infallible genetic technology perpetuates racial profiling in both the attainment and application of DNA. Genetic surveillance is affected by the political categorization of race. In other words, Black people’s DNA is more likely to be stored, used for surveillance, and weaponized against them.