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

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Discussion Questions

Part 4-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “The New Biopolitics of Race”

Part 4, Chapter 11 Summary: “Genetic Surveillance”

Chapter 11 focuses on the ways DNA is now used as a mode of surveillance.

In 2009 the United Kingdom began a program using DNA to determine the nationality of asylum seekers. Specifically, the technology was used in the case of those seeking asylum from a war zone in Somalia, with the goal to determine whether those requesting asylum were Somalian refugees or Kenyans posing as Somalian. Yet this use of DNA dangerously conflated nationality with geographical ancestry. There is also a technology called DNAWitness that uses the same techniques as ancestry testing to predict the ancestry of criminals. Rather than fingerprinting that matches a print with an individual, this technology “predicts the race of an unknown suspect” (261) through DNA recovered from a scene. DNAWitness provides an “eyewitness” that claims to be more “scientific” than visual witnessing.

The assumption is that someone’s geographic ancestry assures a certain phenotype. Ancestry informative markers are used to provide phenotypic information (what a suspect looks like) that then enables racial profiling in the name of gathering DNA evidence; people who supposedly look like the phenotype that is associated with the ancestral profile of the suspect are often forced to provide DNA samples to police. The scientific nature of DNA provides a sense of legitimacy and authority to something that is actually very old fashioned: racial profiling enabled by the biologization of race. Thus, the legal system and law enforcement categorize by way of biological race in order to engage in racial profiling and the problematic identification of suspects.

Some states now mandate that anyone suspected (not convicted) of a felony surrender their DNA. Their DNA is then stored in a database, forever available to be scanned and compared with other suspects’ DNA. Many innocent people are now permanent suspects due to their inclusion in this database. When new DNA is secured, it is run through the database, with the hope that a “cold hit,” or match with DNA already in the system, will be achieved. If an impartial cold hit is achieved, as in the case of family relations, then whole extended families will often be asked to submit their DNA. While they are not required to surrender their DNA, assumptions of guilt often follow a refusal to do so. In short, these DNA databases exist for the sole purpose of future incrimination, thus “undermining the principle of presumptive innocence” (267).

While most associate DNA with the exoneration of wrongfully convicted people, DNA is not infallible, and it often helps not to exonerate, but to wrongfully convict people. DNA is not an objectively, immediately legible package. It is subject to contamination at the stages of retrieval, transportation, and analysis. It can be mislabeled. It can be analyzed incorrectly. It can also be planted very easily. There false positives, as the genetic profiles that most crime labs create are generally based on only 13 markers and are therefore not necessarily unique. There is also a silencing effect as a result of cold-hit searches in which DNA matches. Namely, many defendants do not want to reveal to juries that their DNA was already in the system due to a prior arrest, as the introduction of this information is generally damaging to a case.

Solidifying all the problems associated with DNA as evidence, the Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that there is no constitutional right to post-conviction DNA sampling as a means to double check the accuracy of previous sampling. DNA sampling, even when it has knowingly been tampered with or incorrectly handled or analyzed, then, often leads to the unjust conviction of the innocent.

There is no evidence that large DNA banks have made life safer, and collecting and forever having DNA available for incrimination is an invasion of privacy and of bodily autonomy. Law enforcement has historically abused its power, with most of these abuses falling on the poor and Black people in particular. Yet DNA places even more authority with law enforcement, by way of scientific authority. In the United States, mass incarceration is disproportionately Black, which means that DNA databanks are disproportionately Black as well.

Despite this, however, civil rights groups are reluctant to criticize this curation of DNA. DNA plays a role in post-conviction exonerations too, and the feel-good stories of these exonerations are ones the public is familiar with. As a result, the collection of DNA upon arrest has received almost universal approval even among Democrats and liberals and was explicitly lauded by Barack Obama when he was president.

Part 4, Chapter 12 Summary: “Biological Race in a ‘Postracial’ America”

Chapter 12 examines the widespread support for racial science and technology from both the most conservative and most liberal politicians.

Roberts presents conservatives as “color-blind”: They no longer believe that racism exists and thus do not think that government needs policies or programs that address the legacies of the political category of race. Now that science has created distinctions between biological and social race, conservatives can talk about race biologically while avoiding any of its social dimensions. Thus, the biologization of race allows for policies that “depoliticize race” (292).

In comparison, liberals generally uncritically accept the authority of science, so they, too, have generally accepted race as a biological category. Critiques of racial research are generally met by liberals with mockery. By way of this rejection of any questioning of what science is supposedly built on, liberals defend the subjectivity of science (and the grand narrative of race as biology) as objective.

While liberals may continue to espouse the harms that have been done through the political category of race, their acceptance of the biological category of race nonetheless diverts attention away from more systemic social changes that are needed.

Conclusion Summary: “The Crossroads”

Race, biology, and politics are a “toxic conversion” in the United States. Race has functioned as an American form of governance for the last 400 years, with racialized biopolitics becoming particularly violent during the eugenics period of the early 20th century. These eugenics programs were quashed by way of the public’s refusal of Nazi eugenics and the civil rights movement.

Yet racial biopolitics is again a seemingly unstoppable force with cutting-edge genomic technology. While technologically novel, this scientific apparatus nonetheless operates within the old framework of biological race, which has been proven false. This combination of new technology and old narrative framework is particularly dangerous because it appeals to both conservatives and liberals, who both assume that solutions reside in technological innovation rather than in social revolution. Leaders are thus lionizing new technologies without criticizing old frameworks and creating new ones.

A social belief in biological race organically leads to individualized solutions to social problems. Under such solutions, those with the most resources can supposedly take control of their genetic “blueprint,” thus approaching the world individualistically and molecularly rather than socially and holistically. These genomic technologies broadly individualize problems and solutions, sidestepping the social dimensions of problems and solutions and ignoring those whose individuality has already been discounted.

This racialized approach to genomics is a “false view of humanity” (310). Rather than approaching our species through a false sense of difference, science should be approaching the species through true commonalities. A focus on race in science should therefore shift from the false landscape of biologically racialized genomics to the real landscape of politically racialized injustices: Scientists should be studying how the political category of race damages people and, in turn, changes their biology—not the other way around. This social approach to the political category of race spurns the false notion that technology can solve social problems and is also efficacious: While genes cannot be changed, society can. Racism is real in its damage to individuals and groups. Recognizing the false narrative of the biological category of race frees science to conduct research that might actually liberate, rather than harm, people.

Part 4-Conclusion Analysis

The new technology of DNA assists those in power with controlling populations and, via surveillance, upholds structural racism. The technology serves this role despite the claims of science more broadly to objective truth. In other words, the control exerted by the technology is only possible as a result of the false narrative surrounding DNA “evidence.”

Traditional eyewitness testimony has been proven unreliable in the judicial system: Even when people are certain that they have identified a person in detail, their recollections are often not accurate. This lack of reliability stems not only from the physical limitations of human vision but also from the implicit biases that exist in all humans’ subjective frameworks, including specific biases that may vary from witness to witness. In this context, authorities have presented DNA “eyewitness” evidence to the public as the scientific “solution.” Relying on The Dangerous Authority of Science, these actors present this new technology as devoid of implicit bias.

More specifically, DNA has been presented to the public as an individualized narrative that organically reveals its unique “blueprint,” one that does not require interpretation and is thus immune to misinterpretation, always perfectly legible. Yet the DNA “blueprint” that law enforcement relies on is not a complete DNA sequencing and thus is not a full record. These DNA sequences could match to multiple individuals. The notion of impartial DNA sequencing always resulting in a full, unique “blueprint” is false. Worse still, beyond that notion lies the larger narrative within which it is packaged—a narrative associated, ironically, with racial justice. After all, the public generally hears about DNA evidence in the context of exonerations of the unjustly incarcerated. In reality, DNA evidence is an imprecise tool that is vulnerable to manipulation and misinterpretation, and it often helps to unjustly force people into prison. In the public’s mind, DNA evidence is an unequivocally precise tool that overcomes injustice: Along with science more broadly, it enables racial justice and liberation.

Even more dangerous, however, is how DNA is weaponized in its racializations, with DNA sequencing approached through the biological category of race when used by law enforcement and the judicial system. In its impartial sequencings, it provides a general, rather than individualized, narrative of a suspects’ physical characteristics. This narrative then allows for a range of racial profilings that endanger whole communities.

The assumption of the infallibility of DNA evidence is dangerous for everyone, regardless of race. Yet the theme of “Racial Science” as a Refutation and Continuation of “Scientific Racism” is evident in the most dramatic manifestations of this issue. The biologization of race and the concomitant political category of race are mutually supporting within law enforcement and the judicial system: Black people are more likely to be suspects and thus their DNA is collected more often than white people’s DNA. The outcome is that Black people are more likely to be forever considered a suspect due to their inclusion in the DNA databanks that are used for cross referencing.

In general, then, Roberts argues that the liberties of Black people are violated so that liberty might exist for whites, whose rights are generally not violated. How could this protection be equally enjoyed, then? Should all submit their DNA so that it is no longer racialized in its curation? Would everyone then be more cognizant of its abuses and feel themselves suspects? Roberts argues that the answer is not for all to be considered suspects, but instead, for the biological category of race to be deconstructed. In turn, the political category of race, along with its dangers and intrinsic violence, could be illuminated, witnessed, and resisted.

This resistance to science’s claims to objectivity and progress—despite its insistent biologization of race—is grounded in African America itself. African America is viscerally aware of the ways that science is biased, subjective, and often violent, and Black Americans thus are an intellectual and moral resource for necessary resistance to unwarranted scientific claims of progress. Within the theme of Race As Embodied Rather Than Biological, Roberts emphasizes not only the biological damage inflicted by systemic racism but also the potential of resistance as a mechanism to alleviate that harm. African America has long worked within the political category of race to resist the biological category of race in which science continues, incorrectly and unethically, to ground its narratives and research. In speaking to the ways that the political category of race creates an unjust lived reality, too, African America has provided the means by which scientific blindness to its own racism has been both documented and resisted. Everyone can learn from these resistances.