Literature Review #2, Fatal Invention

 

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

Author

Dorothy Roberts is a well-established author and lawyer, having written well over 50 articles and essays in various forms and publications, from books to magazines, such as the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, The New York Times, and more. Her several books revolve around race and racial issues of African America, such as Fatal Invention. Dorothy Roberts has also professored and lectured on the topics of law, race, and gender studies at institutions such as Yale Law School, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University, having also been voted the outstanding first-year course professor by the Northwestern University School of Law class of 2000. It should also be noted that she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies of the University of the West Indies, Trinidad, and Tobago. Her extensive research and dedication across multiple fields makes her an excellent scholarly choice.

Summary and Value

Fatal Invention talks about the invention of race and its consequences. This goes back to the founding of the United States, primarily to justify slavery and the abuse of African peoples, as well as those who would later be recognized as non-white. This view is important because it is, in many ways, the basis of race relations even to this day. The book goes on to describe race laws, how they were built, and they were maintained, and how they were changed, including the very definition of race, races, and ethnicities themselves. It goes on to explore the impacts of these rules in the class, race, and economic hierarchy of the United States, such as the constructed stratification between those who are white, non-white, and black. This extends from political movements and ideologies to pseudoscience, weaving all of these points into an overarching view of the systems of race in America. This text gives a fundamental and necessary background to contemporary racial relations, and as such, is extremely important to understanding the lives of African Americans and how their experiences of higher education are shaped.

Key Terms

Race: groups of humans which are divided based on the appearance of physical traits, or phenotype, seen as common amongst people of similar or shared ancestry.

Phenotype: the set of observable physical characteristics of an individual, usually expressing and resulting from the interaction between their genotype and their environment.

Social Construct: a subjective concept or idea created and accepted by the people of a society as an intrinsic and inherent truth.

Quotes

“There is no biological test for whiteness. White meaning belonging to the group of people who are entitled to claim white privilege.” (Roberts, Page 18)

“Perhaps the most compelling evidence that race is a political category is its instability. Since its invention to manage the expansion of European enslavement and the colonization of other peoples, the definitions, criteria, and boundary lines that determine racial categories have constantly shifted over the course of U.S. history.” (Roberts, Page 20)

“Of course, my genetic makeup remains the same no matter where I was born. But my race, along with all the privileges and disadvantages that go with it, differs depending on which country I am born in or travel to, because race is a political category that is defined according to invented rules… Making race revolve around biology constructed it as an innate, permanent and inescapable status. No matter how someone changes her appearance or mannerisms, she remains deep down a member of the race to which she was born.” (Roberts, Page 23)

“When the lunatic is met with the ideas incompatible with his delusion he distorts facts by rationalization to preserve the inner consistency of his delusions.” (Frazier, Page 24)

“For me, ‘race’ refers primarily to an impersonal, discursive arrangement, the brutal result of the raciological ordering of the world, not its cause. In less academic terms: race is the product of racism; racism is not the product of race” (Gilroy, Page 25)

Citation

Roberts, Dorothy. 2011. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New Press (pp. 3-25)