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

Fatal Invention is about the biologization of the constructed, political category of race. Roberts defines race and race-based slavery as two distinct historical and political categorizations. Human populations across the world have historically categorized one another and also enslaved one another. The political category of race and its entanglement with enslavement, however, is a specifically modern “invention.”

Roberts demonstrates that, across cultures and time, humans have tended to categorize their own in-group as different from, and often superior to, other human populations. Humans have also, across cultures and history, enslaved one another. Yet race-based taxonomies are different from other human taxonomies of difference in that they insist on intrinsic difference that is immutable and deny any interchange between groups. In turn, unlike older forms of slavery, the race-based slavery of the United States was distinct in the inability of individuals to free themselves, of their own accord, from enslavement (aside from becoming a fugitive and fleeing to a place where slavery was outlawed): Slavery was for life. In addition, slavery was codified as racially based and inherited through the mother. Women were not only enslaved for their entire lives but also condemned to pass this legal status to their children. The matrilineal dimension of slavery was codified in the 1600s along with the racial designation of enslaved individuals.

Thus, the definition of “Negro” in Virginia in the 1600s determined that all enslaved people would be “Black,” though not every Black person would be enslaved. Nonetheless, this political category was one that forever threatened Black people in its surveillances that both maintained the institution of slavery and placed a range of restrictions on “free” Black people. The category of slave, then, falls under the larger canopy of the category of “negro” or Black, and any Black person could “fall through” to become enslaved.

The relation between the political and biological categories of “Negro” and slave, codified in Virginia in the 1600s, was solidified by science via the biologization of race. In their taxonomies of human populations, scientists claimed “Blackness” was indicative of unique physical capacities: endurance for harder and longer labor, resistance to disease, and resistance to pain. These qualities were professed by some of the leading scientists of the 1700s and 1800s, casting Black people as “built for” slavery and thus “born” to be enslaved. Thus, the biologization of race is intimately entwined with the biologization of slavery. Geographical ancestry (West Africa) was tied to a political identity (“Negro”) that enabled a subsequent political identity (“slave”); this ruse was all maintained by the corroboration of political identities by biological identities (Blackness as biological race, and slavery as biological condition).

The biologization of enslavement as a way of being was “proven” in the 19th century by various supposedly cutting-edge experiments that espoused the cognitive defects of “the Black race.” By claiming that Black people were “meant” for slavery, their very bodies and minds designed for labor, enslavers and their proponents hid the constructed nature of the political category of “race” and “slave,” rendering the concepts impervious to critique. Thus, Roberts is deeply concerned with the ways that 21st-century science continues to map Blackness as a biological race. This approach misses the diversity of African genomics, which are more varied than any other continent’s. It thus misrepresents the true genetics at stake in population studies and instead perpetuates ways of thinking that support and enable systemic racism.