What I'm Reading: Dorothy Roberts, "Fatal Invention"

This book is great. It’s about the concept of race and how it’s used in medicine, pharmacology, and surveillance. It reminded me a lot of Falguni Sheth’s Toward A Political Philosophy of Race, which is a favourite of mine, but whereas that book stuck to a fairly abstract viewpoint this one puts specific medical research studies and legal cases under the microscope. Lovely to get that detail.

Particularly fascinating to me was the section on genetics: Roberts examines how modern understandings of population genetics expose race as a political grouping whilst also documenting the worrying trend of genetic studies, reports, and industries replicating the erroneous idea that it’s biological. Also interesting were the historical accounts of how racial categories over the years have shifted, changed, and even been invented wholesale: further evidence of its being social rather than biological. She also makes a convincing argument that the myth of biological or genetic race prompts misunderstandings of racial inequalities: if we assume, wrongly, (or better yet design a flawed study that appears to show) that children of colour are genetically more prone to asthma then that opens up a whole market for medical companies to sell to, rather than recognising and taking steps to tackle environmental racism that channels airborne irritants into neighbourhoods with high proportions of POC residents. I’m a real geek for people examining flaws in study methodologies, and Roberts definitely delivers on that front.

Some of the bits in Section II on pharmacology go a little fast for my liking; the book is at its best when it’s being specific and towards the end of that section it flits over a number of issues quite broadly. It’s consistently eye-opening though: I had no idea the degree to which the UK and US governments were harvesting DNA from arrested citizens into databases - note, not from citizens charged with, suspected of, or convicted of crimes, but just arrested, which not only means innocent citizens are subjected to power relations that they shouldn’t be but also, of course, disproportionately affects POC. I also hadn’t appreciated before the ways in which DNA evidence can be fudged - I had assumed that it was always watertight, but Roberts shows otherwise.

My Mum does a lot of work with clinical studies so I’m going to get her this book as a birthday present. I got it by way of a fan of the show, Vespere Sebastien Oaks, who got it from my Amazon wishlist - thank you! If you’d like to check it out you can get it here - I highly recommend it!