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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Part 1

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Part 3

Part 4-Conclusion

Key Figures

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Themes

The Dangerous Authority of Science

Roberts focuses on how the discipline of science carries an intrinsic weight that no other academic discipline does. She traces this authority back to the Renaissance, or early modern period, and the usurpation of religious authority by scientific authority. With the secularization that occurred in the early modern period, an increasingly humanistic approach to life emerged. This approach privileged human perspective (in the arts), the democratization of human intellectual knowledge (with the printing press), and the human penetrability and classification of the natural world (with science): there was a redirection toward human, rather than divine, powers.

As opposed to other humanistic disciplines, such as the literary or fine arts, which assert their specifically subjective perspectives, science claims a perspective that often attempts to transcend the human in its supposed objectivity. Roberts is focused specifically on what she calls the new “racial science.” More broadly, though, she is interested in the discipline of science as a whole and the dangerous claims of objectivity that imbue the discipline with its authority.

In an increasingly secular world, science carries an increasing amount of authority to reveal and state truth via this claim to objectivity. This authority, grounded in objectivity and quantifiable results, is understood by the public as the “truth” of science. Even the description of disciplines within the humanities points toward the varying authorities they carry, with the “hard” sciences (biology, chemistry, physics) generally held apart from the “soft” sciences (politics, sociology). The hard sciences are determined by their methods: They theoretically engage in controlled experiments that have quantifiable results that rely on mathematical models, thus claiming an objectivity that the “softer” sciences do not attempt to claim. The hard sciences have subsequently been seen as more rigorous, offering an objective truth valued more highly than the subjective truth of the arts.

Roberts draws attention to the objective fact that scientists are nonetheless subjective. Like everyone else, scientists are human beings who are influenced through and thinking within the intellectual and cultural climate in which they exist. Because science carries such authority, however, its “rigor” is not only contrasted to but also eschews that of the softer sciences, such as sociology. Yet sociology, for example, is a field that offers crucial understandings of the mutually supportive relation between political and biological race. Its insights could facilitate an understanding of how racial science has developed. A sociological approach to racial science is particularly relevant within the life sciences, especially regarding how genomics is linked to geographic ancestry. Roberts insists that, because our understanding of humanity is so bound up with race, the life sciences must open themselves to other disciplines. Citing sociology in particular, she argues that these disciplines are key to creating more objective and equitable research; through these disciplines, we could gain an understanding of the subjective world and the ways we have constructed categories of humanity.

Race As Embodied Rather Than Biological

While Roberts argues against the biologization of race, which only edifies the political definitions of race that maintain systemic racism, she insists that these political categories of race do become embodied, affecting the way the body works. This theory of race as embodied reverses the conventional notion of race as biological, which assumes a programmed, genetic grounding in biological race out of which all human lives develop. Race as embodied, in comparison, begins with the politicization of racial categories, with race biologically experienced as a result of its political reality, which affects human lives. Systemic racism, for example, surveils Black people at much higher levels than it surveils white people, and this surveillance has negative impacts. At the same time, due to systemic racism, there is much less surveillance and oversight over the toxins released into Black communities. These toxins range from the environmental (pesticides, emissions, industrial pollution) to the cultural (a lack of public resources, including medical services). They include as well the broader culture of racism that is “in the air” as much as these pollutants and disadvantages in these Black neighborhoods are.

As a result of these environmental conditions emerging due to the category of race, race becomes embodied, experienced somatically and psychologically. More specifically, environmental conditions change how DNA responds and expresses itself in the body. The field of epigenetics, which studies these changes in DNA’s expression, however, has not received the same amount of funding or interest as the field of genomics, which studies the structure of DNA.

The tension between these two fields, epigenetics and genomics, speaks to the larger thesis of Roberts’s book: that the soft sciences need to be not only considered but also emphasized. She founds this thesis on the further assumption that the political climate of racism is just as—if not more—important than ancestral genetics when determining both individual and public health. Moreover, while the structure of our DNA cannot change, the environmental factors that are the leading cause of disease in the United States can be changed. Changing these factors would have much greater efficacy in creating higher levels of well-being and health in the United States than the continued insistence on biological categories of race as relevant, for example, to the study of disease.

Rather than the conventionally dangerous conception of race as a biological category that manifests in an exterior political category, Roberts argues that the political category of race works its way into the body from the outside, changing how DNA works. Race is not grounded in biology. Rather, racism becomes biological. Because these epigenetic changes can be inherited, the trauma of racism is passed down. Yet these epigenetic changes can also be reversed, so it makes much more sense—scientifically and sociologically—to focus on improving the outside world that affects epigenetics rather than on manipulating an internal world of immutable structural genetics.

“Racial Science” as a Refutation and Continuation of “Scientific Racism”

The biologization of race has occurred within and through the sciences and is generally located within the field of scientific racism, which was prominent from the late 18th to early 20th centuries. Scientific racism was invested in measuring, calibrating, and classifying supposed racial differences that were built into the body through racially distinct biology. It theorized through the framework of political race, with its experiments designed to uphold the political categories of race (such as white and Black). Thus, it maintained these categories that assumed hierarchical differences and leant the authority of science to white supremacy. Today, scientific racism appears obviously and extremely biased (and thus not scientific) in both its assumptions of racial hierarchies and the subsequent experiments designed around these hierarchies. However, Roberts maintains that what she calls the new “racial science,” which is widely practiced, fails to refute scientific racism entirely—in some ways, it is even an extension of it.

Racial science is different from scientific racism in its rejection of racial hierarchies. Scientific racism upheld the biologization of race by way of phrenology (measurements of the skull that were argued to reflect racialized intellectual hierarchies) and craniometry (measurements of the internal capacity of the skull that were linked to measurements of the brain, which were argued to also reflect intellectual capacity). Racial science, in contrast, directly and explicitly rejects the use of any such measurements to prove racial hierarchies; these measurements were, in the first place, designed specifically to accomplish that goal. In this sense, racial science is consciously opposed to scientific racism.

At the same time, however, racial science continues a racialized way of thinking through its upholding of biological categories of race. Though it distances itself from the overtly racist dimensions of scientific racism, it continues to maintain one of the key tenets of scientific racism: that the political categories of race are biologically grounded. Few people still maintain the theory that “Black brains” are intellectually inferior to “white brains,” let alone seek to conduct experiments to test this hypothesis. Nonetheless, racial science maintains racial categories as biologically grounded: Brains could be approached as racially distinct. This maintenance of political categories as grounded in biology upholds the status quo of systemic racism by asserting racial difference as intrinsic rather than constructed. Thus, racial science averts attention from the reality of race as a political invention that must be overturned.

Roberts argues that science is still invested in the racial status quo, even though the field believes itself to be anti-racist. It is the insidious nature of race’s biologisms that science must begin to address critically. Both the old scientific racism and the new racial science maintain the political category of race through their shared understanding of race as biological.