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

Chapter 3 is interested in how 21st-century genomics, or the study of genetics, “reproduces traditional ideas of race” (58). This reproduction of race is grounded in two methods: statistical probability and geographic distribution and ancestry. These two approaches generally “repackage race” rather than replace it as a biological category.

Roberts examines several studies in which political race is repackaged as genetic (and thus biological). In one study, researchers claimed that they had identified six human genetic clusters, with five of the six matching continents, so that these clusters were divided into Africa, Eurasia, East Asian, Oceania, and America. Yet it was the researchers themselves who determined that six, rather than the original 20 clusters that the computer program identified, were the relevant ones. When divided into only two groups, the humans most genetically distanced from one another were based in Africa and the Americas, which reflects patterns of migration out of Africa and undermines the biological definition of “white” and “Black” as opposed. Roberts underscores that the researchers’ cultural and political understanding of race as biological influenced their supposedly objective work.

An increasingly popular way of repackaging race is to define it as geographic ancestry, which has become the “new race.