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

(Paperback)

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A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, scientists are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category. In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in society and legitimising state brutality against communities at a time when America claims to be post-racial.

Reviews

Fatal Invention is a triumph!
Harriet A. Washington, author of Medical Apartheid and Deadly Monopolies

This is the best book of the year If you read one work of nonfiction a year, make this the one.
The New York Journal of Books

[Roberts] dismantles the reasons for using race to determine healthy policy and exposes how embedded social assumptions can shape medicines research agenda and distort science.
Ms. Magazine

Masterful.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism Without Racists

Devastatingly counters any argument that can be made for a racial view of genetics.
The Brooklyn Rail

Alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational.
Publishers Weekly, starred review

Thought-provoking, well-researched, [and] insightful.
Choice

A must-read for those looking for an enlightened discussion of race in the 21st century.
Library Journal

Author Bio

Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. 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 Healthy Imperative and lives in Evanston, Illinois.