Fatal Invention

By Dorothy Roberts,

Book cover of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Fatal Invention as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Fatal Invention is a masterfully researched book on the faulty science of biological race. Roberts shows how race continues to be re-invented as somehow in the skin, bones and genes. Using extensive and wide ranging sources from history and genomics to medicine and business, Roberts shows how the notion of biological race is continually reinvented to support existing hierarchies. Roberts explains clearly the fundamental flaws of race science and what is at stake in believing that race is somehow genetically a real think. A must read to understand how racism, rather than race, gets into our bodies and souls.  

From Alan's list on what race is (and is not).

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