Who benefits from race-based science

Story from The Tavis Smiley Show. Use audio player above to listen to full story.

A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race — with evidence that showed no consistent patterns of genes exist to distinguish one race from another — the emerging fields of personalized medicine, genetic genealogy and DNA databanks are moving to resuscitate race as a biological category written into our genes.

Professor and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again on the path to classifying population by race. Roberts explores the effects of race-based science in her new book, “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century.” It’s the first text of its kind to document the development of racial science and biotechnology based on genetics, and to map its implications for equality in America.

Race is an invention, Roberts said in a recent interview on The Tavis Smiley Show. “It’s a political system that has served for centuries to divide people into superior and more powerful groups and those who are subordinated. And it pretends to have a biological essence, but both scientific, political, historical evidence shows that it’s always been a political category. So I wanted to emphasize how race was invented — and not discovered — in human bodies. And I also wanted to emphasize how it is reinvented — how today, with new genomic science and technologies, it’s claimed that race is a biological category once again.

Roberts believes that big business and commercial interests, in combination with politics and science, are the drivers of the movement to defining race as biological. This is a concern, she says, because it obscurs racism in our society and legitimizes state brutality against communities of color at a time when America claims to be post-racial.

More about “Fatal Science” on Amazon.com.

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