Mixed Race Studies

Author takes on modern myths about race

Skokie Review
Chicago, Illinois
2013-04-05

Mike Isaacs

he 8-year-old girl who had difficulty breathing had been misdiagnosed for a long time, but then a technician looked at her X-ray and asked incredulously why she had not been treated for cystic fibrosis.

The reason was because she was black, and cystic fibrosis was thought to be a white people’s disease. The technician had never met the girl when he asked his question.

“It’s bad medicine to look at someone’s race and say you should get this test or that test, because you may be completely wrong,” said distinguished author and educator Dorothy Roberts.

To Roberts, who penned “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-Create Race in the 21st Century,” this is just one example of a distorted view of science and race playing out today.

“There’s no such thing as a white disease or a black disease or an Asian disease,” Roberts said during a provocative talk Sunday at Skokie’s Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago. “That doesn’t make sense, because there’s no gene that belongs to a particular race that doesn’t belong to other races.”

She argues that the tie between biology and race is a myth that has been resurrected again, this time with the help of a false reliance on modern-day science…

…Some of the same theories from the era of eugenics, she said, are being resuscitated in 21st century science.

Roberts isn’t saying, though that we’re all identical – one reason she isn’t keen on President Clinton’s famous declaration about the Human Genome Project that all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99 percent the same.

“It makes it sound like we’re all alike, and you can see that everyone isn’t alike,” she said. “There’s lots of genetic variation in the human species, but it’s not grouped into races.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Theories in Context (Second Edition)

Cognella
2013
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60927-056-8

Edited by:

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

This book presents a critical framework for understanding how and why race matters — past, present, and future. The readings trace the historical emergence of modern racial thinking in Western society by examining religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writing; legal statutes and legislation; political debates and public policy; and popular culture. Readers will follow the shifting ideological bases upon which modern racial theories have rested, from religion to science to culture, and the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality, and between notions of race and the nation-state.

The authors of Racial Theories in Context discuss the relationship of racial theories to material contexts of racial oppression and to democratic struggles for freedom and equality:

• First and foremost in this discussion is the vast system of racial slavery instituted throughout the Atlantic world and the international movement that sought its abolition.
• Continuing campaigns to redress racial divisions in health, wealth, housing, employment, and education are also examined.
• There is a focus on the specificity of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism.
• The book also looks comparatively at other regions of racial inequality and the construction of a global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE.

Contents

• Introduction / Jared Sexton
• A Long History of Affirmative Action—For Whites / Larry Adelman
• The Cost of Slavery / Dalton Conley
• Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex / INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance
• Introduction To Racism: A Short History / George M. Fredrickson
• Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West / Darlene Clark Hine
• Understanding the Problematic of Race Through the Problem of Race-Mixture / Thomas C. Holt
• The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics / Martha Hodes
• The Original Housing Crisis / Derek S. Hoff
• The American Dream, or a Nightmare for Black America? / Joshua Holland
• The Hidden Cost of Being African American / Michael Hout
• Slavery and Proto-Racism in Greco-Roman Antiquity / Benjamin Isaac
• Colorblind Racism / Sally Lehrman
• The Wealth Gap Gets Wider / Meizhu Lui
• Sub-Prime as a Black Catastrophe / Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
• Unshackling Black Motherhood / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Is Race -Based Medicine Good for Us? / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Understanding Reproductive Justice / Loretta J. Ross
• The History of the Idea of Race / Audrey Smedley
• The Liberal Retreat From Race / Stephen Steinberg
• “Race Relations” / Stephen Steinberg

“Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century,” talk by Dorothy Roberts

University of Michigan
Hatcher Library Gallery, Room 100
913 S. University Avenue
Ann Arbor, Michigan
2013-04-04, 16:00-17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Professor Roberts will be discussing her latest project in connection with the “Understanding Race” theme semester. In “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century” she argues that America is experiencing a dangerous resurgence of classifying populations into biological races. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when many claim that the United States is “post-racial.” Moving from an account of the evolution of the concept of race—proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science—Roberts delves deeply into the current debates, interrogating cutting-edge genomic science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences of the focus on race-based genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a powerful call for us to affirm our common humanity by eliminating the social inequities preserved by the political system of race…

For more information, click here.

..this was a book that really, completely, changed and challenged everything that I knew and I thought I knew about race. And I thank you for that, because it’s just one of those books that really, really kind of changes your life in a way because it sort of opens things up and makes you think about the world in a completely different way. It’s a really powerful book. [Host Michelle McCrary commenting on Dorothy Roberts’ book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century.]

Michelle McCrary, “Talking Race w/ Social Critic/Legal Scholar Dorothy Roberts,” Blogtalk Radio: Is That Your Child?, October 11, 2011 (00:03:40 – 00:04:06).

The End of Race History? Not Yet

Center for Genetics and Society
2012-12-14

Osagie K. Obasogie, Associate Professor of Law
University of California, Hastings

Have we gone beyond race? Many argue society has now overcome centuries of strife to become “post-racial”—a moment that law professor Sumi Cho of DePaul University in Chicago refers to as “the end of race history”.

Two seemingly disparate developments have been used to lend support to this claim. In politics, Barack Obama’s 2008 election as the first racial minority-member to become US president has been lauded as a racially transcendent moment. In science, the completion of the Human Genome Project’s first draft in June 2000 offered seemingly definitive evidence that race is not real. As geneticist Craig Venter noted at the HGP announcement, “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis”…

…Two recent books by legal scholars address these issues. Jonathan Kahn’s Race in a Bottle provides a stunning case study of BiDil, the first drug to receive approval by the US Food and Drug Administration as a race-specific therapy. It was designed to treat African-Americans suffering from heart failure—based mainly on a mistaken belief that there are meaningful disparities in heart failure outcomes between blacks and whites caused by biological differences. Although BiDil was initially created as a race-neutral drug, Kahn offers a compelling account of the many influences that turned what is in essence a combination therapy of two widely available generic treatments into a pill “for black people only”…

…Dorothy Roberts’s Fatal Invention, now out in paperback, extends this insight to examine how the re-emergence of biological race is having a broader impact—not only on innovations such as genetic ancestry-testing and racialised aspects of DNA forensics, but also on how we think about basic notions of racial difference. Advocates of biological race argue that today’s use of race in biomedicine is different from past usages within science that supported racism, eugenics and questionable research practices…

Read the entire article here.

Biology, race and politics explored in upcoming Chancellor’s Lecture

Vanderbilt News
Vanderbilt University
2012-10-10

Kara Furlong

Is race a biological category written in our genes? Or are genomic scientists and biomedical researchers mistakenly using race to explain away health disparities among different population groups?
 
Dorothy Roberts, the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, will explore this issue in an upcoming Chancellor’s Lecture at Vanderbilt University. Her talk, titled “Fatal Invention: The New Biopolitics of Race,” is scheduled from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 30, in Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Cinema…

…Roberts is the author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. A book signing and reception will precede her lecture from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the Sarratt Cinema Lobby.
 
An acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, Roberts pored over scores of scientific studies and interviewed dozens of geneticists whose work claims that race is visible in our genes. As a result, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are tailoring medications and other patented products to treat illnesses seemingly prevalent among certain populations.
 
Roberts argues that race is and always has been a political system, that health disparities exist because of social inequalities, and to further the myth that race is a biological category does irreparable damage to social progress in the United States…

…In July 2012, Roberts became the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania with joint appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. From 1998 to 2012, she was a professor of law, African American studies and sociology at Northwestern University…

Read the entire article here.

Dorothy E. Roberts: Fatal Invention: The New Biopolitics of Race [Vanderbilt University Lecture]

Vanderbilt News
Vanderbilt University
2012-10-30

Watch video of Dorothy E. Roberts—recently named Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania—presenting “Fatal Invention: The New Biopolitics of Race” based on her latest book Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century.
 
An acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law, Roberts examines contemporary issues in health, bioethics, and social justice with a particular focus on how they affect the lives of women, children, and African-Americans. Synthesizing a range of disciplines, she sheds light on some of humanity’s most challenging issues to bring hope and awareness to underserved members our society.

Race Under the Microscope: Biological Misunderstandings of Race

Center for Genetics and Society
2012-05-24

Despite the fact that advances in genetics undermine the notion that discrete and distinct racial groups exist at the biological level, the science of genetics is inadvertently reinforcing the myth that race is a biological, rather than a social, category. In this video, produced by the Center for Genetics and Society, a group of experts discusses the history and consequences of the misuse of racial categories in medicine and science. The video is a great resource for students and educators.

Race Under the Microscope features commentary on the misuse of race from esteemed professors Jonathan Kahn (Professor of Law, Hamline University), Dorothy Roberts (Professor of Law, Northwestern University), Osagie K. Obasogie (Professor of Law, University of California Hastings Law School), and Joseph Graves (Associate Dean for Research, Joint School for Nanosciences & Nanoengineering, Greensboro, NC). The excerpts used in the video were filmed during the 2011 Tarrytown Meeting.

…race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health.

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: The New Press, 2011), 129.

Review of Fatal Invention, by Professor Dorothy Roberts

Race and the Law: A Critical Examination of Science, Law and the Construction of Race
2011-12-07

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

Professor Dorothy Roberts has recently released a vitally important book on issues of race and genetics, entitled Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Professor Roberts thoughtfully engages the modern legal and scientific preoccupation with genetic theories of race. Examining the “new racial science” in a variety of contexts, including pharmacology, biomedical research, immigration screening, criminal justice, ancestry testing, and genetic surveillance, Professor Roberts deconstructs the myth of intrinsic racial difference through a lively use of historical and scientific sources. While the entire book is a massive achievement in the burgeoning field of genetics and race, a few insights stand out as particularly compelling. First, Professor Roberts makes a convincing argument that it is problematic to label the racial science of yore “pseudoscience.” It is quite tempting to ridicule both the old and new forms of racial science as ignorant and biased attempts to valorize racial hierarchy. Professor Roberts notes, however, that doing so allows modern scientists to distinguish their “objective” study of biological racial difference from the ridiculous “pseudoscience” of the past. Professor Roberts observes that “what we call racial pseudoscience today was considered the vanguard of scientific progress at the time it was practiced.” (27-28). In other words, we must be careful to briskly dismiss the “racial science” of the 19^th Century as pseudoscience, lest we fall into the trap (comforting to some) of believing that current genetic examinations of racial difference are somehow distinctly free from unsound empirical assumptions and implicit bias. As Professor Roberts argues, “[t]he burning scientific questions of each period have been framed and answered in terms of race not because rational scientific inquiry compelled it, but because race was presumed to be an essential biological category.” (28)…

Read the entire review here.