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

Featured on The Tavis Smiley Show and named one of the ten best black nonfiction books of 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention is “a provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics by leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts. It examines how the archaic belief system underlying the concept of race—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science—undermines a just society and promotes continuing inequality.

“Alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Fatal Invention exposes the falseness of the biological concept of race—used in the past to divide humans and justify prejudice and used today to enable everything from the race-targeted therapies developed in the pharmaceutical industry and stop-and-frisks that disproportionately target African Americans to a proliferation of for-profit ancestry-testing services.

Called “vitally important” and “a massive achievement” by Race and the Law, “Fatal Invention devastatingly counters any argument that can be made for a racial view of genetics” (The Brooklyn Rail).

This groundbreaking book by the acclaimed Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of biological concept of race—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and “provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics by one of the nations leading legal scholars and social critics.

Dorothy Roberts is the Kirkland and Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She is the author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds and is the co-editor of six books on gender and constitutional law. She serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Womens Health Imperative and lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Preface

Part I: Believing in Race in the Genomic Age

1. The Invention of Race

2. Separating Racial Science from Racism

Part II: The New Racial Science

3. Redefining Race in Genetic Terms7

4. Medical Stereotyping

5. The Allure of Race in Biomedical Research

6. Embodying Race

Part III: The New Racial Technology

7. Pharmacoethnicity

8. Color-Coded Pills

9. Race and the New Biocitizen

10. Tracing Racial Roots

Part IV: The New Biopolitics of Race

11. Genetic Surveillance

12. Biological Race in a “Postracial” America

Conclusion: The Crossroads

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index