The Biggest Lie About Race? That It’s Real |
The Biggest Lie About Race? That It’s Real
The Root
2011-07-26
Jenée Desmond-Harris, Contributing Editor
Dorothy Roberts says race is a social and political construct, and she won’t rest until we know it.
There’s a reason we’ll never come to a consensus on the most accurate racial classifications for Barack Obama or Tiger Woods. There’s a reason questions about ethnicity on the census and college applications feel impossible to an increasing number of Americans. There’s a reason you can be black in the United States, colored in South Africa and something else entirely in Brazil.
According to Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, it’s because, despite centuries of efforts to treat race as if it’s a biological category, it is no more than social construction—created to oppress people—that changes with place, time and perspective.
The Root talked to Roberts about the profit that’s behind the re-emergence of myths about race, the impact for African Americans and health, and how we can continue to talk about it, minus the long-standing lies.
The Root: Fatal Invention is an attempt to correct major misunderstandings and myths about race. Explain what race is and what it isn’t.
Dorothy Roberts: I can say very definitively that race is an invented political system; it is not a natural biological condition of human beings. The human species is a single race. It is not biologically divided up into distinguishable races…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Dorothy Roberts, Jenée Desmond-Harris, The Root