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

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

University of Michigan
Hatcher Library Gallery, Room 100
913 S. University Avenue
Ann Arbor, Michigan
2013-04-04, 16:00-17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Professor Roberts will be discussing her latest project in connection with the “Understanding Race” theme semester. In “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century” she argues that America is experiencing a dangerous resurgence of classifying populations into biological races. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when many claim that the United States is “post-racial.” Moving from an account of the evolution of the concept of race—proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science—Roberts delves deeply into the current debates, interrogating cutting-edge genomic science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences of the focus on race-based genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a powerful call for us to affirm our common humanity by eliminating the social inequities preserved by the political system of race…

For more information, click here.

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