Fatal INTERPRETATION Part IV

Fatal Interpretation Part IV: The New Biopolitics of Race and Conclusion

We have come so far in the book Fatal Invention by Dorothy Roberts that we are getting to the end—I promise. We are now at Chapter 11, “Genetic Surveillance.” Did you know the government is going to want your genetic fingerprints or does that sound a bit paranoid? Ask Dorothy Roberts who goes from violent felons to sex offenders to getting a traffic ticket. Yes, some of that is worrisome, but DNA can also be helpful. It certainly is in paternity tests on Jerry Springer’s show. Again, we are talking about policy issues, not whether race is a social construct. Unfortunately, we can’t have it both ways; use our DNA freely and totally protect our DNA.

Uh oh. Roberts says DNA is not infallible. She states, “The genetic material in government databanks has to be retrieved, transferred, transported, identified, labeled, analyzed, and stored by human hands, and there is opportunity at every stage.” I think of DNA as closely related to fingerprints and nothing horrible has happened with those. I’m not sure yet what point Roberts is trying to make. Are DNA samples better than race or what? She attacks law enforcement for being racially biased, but that’s because racism exists. Once again, another old problem with no answers or even suggestions from the author, and once again I see it as policy issues.

The last chapter is “Biological Race in a ‘Postracial’ America.” I think—finally—Roberts and I agree that the United States is not postracial at all. With arguments she makes from conservative color blindness to liberal views, she gets bogged down in her own perspective by writing things like “When racial justice advocates refer to the political meaning of race, however, it is interpreted as an expression of racism orally equivalent to forms of overt white supremacy.” Really? Or maybe we just hang out with different advocates. It takes an entire chapter to say racism is alive and thriving and to think otherwise is just ignorant, but we can’t make race go away no matter what we call it.

Roberts tries to show us ignorant people that government is evil, privatization isn’t the answer, and then she goes into a rant about the prison system, all really to no avail. She does not suggest any ways to make the system different. Anyone can complain; few do anything about it.

FINALLY, the last part of this book on page 309 is “Conclusion: The Crossroads.” Wow. Now I get it completely! Roberts contends she has proven that race is not a biological construct, and it’s not a social construct, it’s a political construct and she lights up the world with this thought. First, it’s nothing new, and has been suggested by many over the years. Second, she hasn’t proven anything. The book is disjointed and is mostly just quotes from other academics (the endnotes of quotation sources is over 50 pages long) with the author trying to tie things together while pandering to her own personal political agenda. The things she decrees…well…you just have to read them for yourselves.

My intuition and over 20 years of advocacy lead me to believe that I don’t know if there is any biological basis for race. Just when I think we really are all the same, something comes up like these:

·        Bone marrow matching is closest with someone of the same race, ethnicity, or whatever you want to call it. So, how can biology not matter?

·        The incidence of high blood pressure is higher in blacks than in any other race. So, how can biology not matter?

·        Deaths from breast cancer are highest in black women. So, how can biology not matter?

·        Asian lung cancer patients have different medical responses to tyrosine kinase inhibitors than white patients. So, how can biology not matter?

·        Diabetes is less prevalent in whites than blacks. So, how can biology not matter?

·        If you are African-American, your eGFR on lab work must be calculated differently because of a difference in muscle mass. So, how can biology not matter?

·        Asthma and bronchodilator drugs response has been shown to vary widely among racial and ethnic groups. So, how can biology not matter?

Roberts doesn’t even mention these things in her book because they don’t fit into her agenda. The danger is that some people believe what Roberts has implied, for example that there is no reason for racially/genetically bone marrow donors for multiracial people. She has not said that, but is guilty by implication and omission and has caused more people than she knows to state that “Dorothy Roberts has found that multiracial people do not have to enlarge the bone marrow donor pool.” It’s just not true. Please read this book carefully and do your own research into what other top medical specialists, think. Look at the clinical studies and research.

The truth is closer to this: we do not know with absolute certainty if race has any biological basis. It really doesn’t matter what kind of construct race is or what we call it, it’s still here, it’s still a problem, and no one knows how to fix it. Roberts rehashing of old problems is not going to help. She is a civil rights professor, and she could really be useful in helping with answers to things like why we’ve been told that multiracial people have no legal standing because they are not a protected group under the law. She would know what to tell the multiracial engineer who was hired as black and fired as white.

I think Dorothy Roberts set out to write an academic tome attacking the pharmaceutical industry, specifically BiDil. However, she never does reveal the other side of the story, and she succeeded best in that. The bigger problem is that certain people began misinterpreting the book, raving that this book solves all the racial problems and must be read because the author proves—finally!—that race does not exist or if it does, it’s not biological at all. The problem is bigger because if we drop “race” out of things like clinical trials and medical testing, people could be hurt and possibly even die.

Race has bred racism; I think we can all agree on that. Rather than spending time on what word(s) to change “race” to, such as “political construct,” can’t we work on educating policy makers? It’s going to take academics like Roberts and advocates like me and the members of Project RACE to make certain that those who make the policies know and understand what’s at stake and how people are similar and different. Isn’t that what diversity is about? We have tackled important issues with policymakers like the need for self-identification, for multiracial people to have a choice, and that no one should be invisible in the healthcare system of this country.

That 0.1 percent difference is actually huge. I think race-based medicine is definitely a dilemma and certainly one I can’t solve, neither can Roberts. Truly personalized medicine could happen with the help of The Human Genome and DNA; wouldn’t it be a tragedy if we never get there because we stop potential medical progress because we are afraid of what we might find out along the way? It could indeed be a fatal invention.

Fatal Interpretation Part II

Fatal Interpretation Part II: The New Racial Science

In Chapter 3, of Fatal Invention “Redefining Race in Genetic Terms,” author Dorothy Roberts begins with a contentious, secret meeting in Maryland regarding the Human Genome. She almost makes the case for “some” researchers seeing race as a statistical grouping based on genetic similarity, which is basically what the census bureau has done. Then she heads toward ancestry. She agrees that people are born with ancestry that comes from their parents but are assigned a race. I agree with that too; however, she seems to do an about-face and writes, “If there are no pure races, we should not conceive of people with mixed ancestry as being a combination of two or more pure races.”

Wait one minute. Now she is delving into the “pure” and “mixed” revelation that some of us warned about 20 years ago. I think Roberts gives much too much credence to racial purity. She is really all over the place. Is race a construct of some kind? Does race exist? Is purity the way to judge multiracial people? Whatever she is trying to get across, she certainly takes many detours along the way.  

Roberts gives credence to her ilk by stating “It appears to be a common belief that genomic and biomedical researchers should be left alone to investigate race objectively at the molecular level, while sociologists and their ilk should stick to understanding how race functions in society.” I don’t think this is a common belief at all, and I understand what she’s saying, but considering she is not a biomedical researcher, what’s her basis for this book?

Then she’s back to geography, writing that “geographic ancestry does not solve the problem of race.”  So, what solves it? Your guess is as good as mine at this point. In one paragraph she states, “Race must be a political category.” Really? More back and forth. This author is starting to bug me. We should believe this just because she says it?

I don’t blame multiracial people—or monoracial people—for wanting to believe no biological differences exist between races. I want to believe it! But it’s still just a premise, a possibility. I have no idea if it’s true or not, but for Roberts to get the multiracial community to buy into such a premise, seems like something we want her to confirm instead of something we truly think about, research on our own, and don’t blindly believe people promoting this or any one book. Please, people, think for yourselves, do your own research and stay open about this issue.

Chapter 4 is titled “Medical Stereotyping.” This is where Dorothy Roberts and I part company. She goes all the way back to Tuskegee, which was a totally unfortunate tragedy. Roberts then jumps to Jewish people and Tay-Sachs disease, then Chinese and Mexican immigrants. She calls some diseases “concocted.”

On the way to I’m not sure where, Roberts places blame on doctors and medical schools for even suggesting that there may be the tiniest difference in diagnosing anything if you take race into account. I have talked to hundreds of physicians and they aren’t sure what to think, but they know that something makes patients react differently to things like prescription drugs and anesthesia.

Aha, there it is on page 98! She barely introduces us to Cardiologist Jay Cohn, who invented BiDil, touted as the first race-based drug. Then just as quick, Roberts stops that story and oddly goes into cystic fibrosis and how ONE black child had the disease that overwhelmingly afflicts white people and therefore there is no cause for race-based medicine. Not so fast Ms. Roberts.

Chapter 5 is titled “The Allure of Race in Biomedical Research” and deals mostly with clinical research. She goes into OMB Directive 15 for federal reporting of race and ethnicity, which everyone in this field should certainly know about by now. It feels like filler material to me.

Roberts tries to debunk high allergic asthma prevalence in Puerto Rican and African American children, sickle cell disease in blacks, and other health disparities. Then she makes the statement that “Black poor people experience a more intense poverty than white poor people.” Does that mean race exists on some level? Does she not see the intense poverty that people of all races suffer?

Chapter 6, “Embodying Race,” is pretty unimpressive until a one-liner stopped me, “Racism doesn’t affect just those who experience it—it also affects their children while still in the womb.”  Wow, minority women have stress in childbearing that results in stress on their unborn children. I can tell you as a white woman, we all have stress in childbearing!  Then she jumps on Directive 15 again. Nothing is really accomplished there, so we jump into policy. Now Roberts and I are getting a bit closer, but Roberts gives it a short two and a half pages and it’s done.

Has Roberts really shown us the new racial science in this section? No, but just wait for part III!

Fatal Multiracial? The Multiracial Advocacy

Fatal Interpretation Part I: Believing in Race in the Genomic Age

I heard about a book called Fatal Invention by Dorothy Roberts and didn’t think much about it. I knew the book was about the age old debate on whether race is a biological or social construct, and that there are hundreds, if not thousands of articles taking either side. Ho Hum. I did not plan to read it.

Then people started talking and typing about how this book changed their lives. How Roberts totally debunks and proves race is now a political construct. Proof?! This I had to read.

I am not a medical doctor, social scientist, politician, or anthropologist, and to be fair, neither is Dorothy Roberts. She is an academic. What really tipped me over the edge was an incident in which a very intelligent person—in my judgment—told me she wished she had never become a bone marrow donor thinking she was potentially helping critically ill multiracial people, and then learned from this book that was incorrect. I was stunned. I bought the book.

I began to read the book and decided to review it with an open mind. If Roberts does in fact make racial classifications, or whatever she chooses to call them, go away, then I might be able to jump on her bandwagon. That would be a good thing.  We could all just be humans and races would be non-existent. I have stated from the very beginning of Project RACE that multiracial people should be able to have the option of designating themselves as multiracial as long as there are racial classifications. I have also said I don’t believe that will happen in my lifetime or in my children’s lifetimes, I would be thrilled to be wrong.

I have also decided to interpret Roberts without falling into academic, scientific, mathematic, or anthropologic speak that she uses. I’ll try my best to break it down into things most of us understand and not use footnotes. This is my review, not my book.

The best way to review this book in sections, following the structure of the book, because I doubt many of the people who bought it actually made it past Part I, maybe Part II. I was eager to read everything Dorothy Roberts had to say.

Roberts writes a lot about race being a “political system.” When everyday people think about politics, it usually is thought of as the way we choose government officials and often stretches to decisions about policy. There are many other various definitions. Roberts never really tells the reader what her definition of “political” is, but I can give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is not writing about the upcoming elections, but rather anything government does on behalf of the general public.

The overall first portion of the book tries to answer such questions as “Where does Race Come From?” Roberts is pretty much all over the place, from definitions to subjugation to slavery to a one-liner on interracial marriage. Suddenly, it pops up that there is no biological test for whiteness and she writes, “White means belonging to the group of people who are entitled to claim white privilege.” I couldn’t find that definition in any dictionary, but I did learn that white is also a word for the drug cocaine.

Then Roberts gets to the census and how different changes have been made in racial categories from 1790 to 2010. That’s when I started to wonder about the “facts” in this book. She makes her case in three pages that the census is responsible for misleading us all into believing in race, and everything they do is bad. I’m no fan of the US Census Bureau, but they did not create what we know as race, they just put them into categories. She also lets readers know that her birth certificate states “Mother—Negro; Father—white.” She apparently blames society for the reason she was as she says in her own words, “born a Negro,” even though her birth certificate did not state a race for her.

But enough about the author. Next we get into Chapter 2, Separating Racial Science from Racism. Enter the Human Genome Project, which determined that human beings are genetically 99.9 per cent the same with 0.1 percent of human genetic difference. Now Roberts goes into how scientists created a racial order.

Again, Roberts quotes academics quoting academics, but mostly ones that agree with her. For the most part of this section, the arguments are old, but Roberts does a good job with the history of race. If you want a good read about DNA, this part could be for you. So now we have Roberts defending that the 0.1 percent human genetic differences are meaningful, but that does not mean race should be organized by the difference. Point taken, but then she drops the ball by throwing around other possibilities. That’s where it ends. Stay tuned for Part II.