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

21 " For the years 1995 to 2004, a search of research awards in the National Institutes of Health database using the term genetics identified 21,956 new grants (including 181 cross-indexed by the term race), while only 44 new grants were indexed by the terms racism or racial discrimination .56 When the NIH launched a new center to study population health, it was originally named the Center for Genomics and Health Disparities—the environmental component was completely missing from the title. "

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

22 " A black man in San Diego who developed hypertension because of exposure to toxic chemicals lost half of his disability award after a doctor reported that blacks are genetically prone to hypertension. "

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

23 " White women in Chicago are slightly more likely than black women to get breast cancer, but black women are twice as likely to die from it. That is a startling statistic by itself. But what is equally as shocking is that in 1980 Chicago’s black and white breast cancer mortality rates were identical: black and white women died at the same rate. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, the astounding gap emerged.1 Consider this additional aspect: the disparity in breast cancer mortality in New York City is only 15 percent. In Chicago, the racial gap is ten times greater than in New York. It is unlikely that genes explain these numbers. "

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

24 " What blocks black women from getting the cancer care available to white women? One barrier is that black women do not have the same access to mammography. Black neighborhoods have fewer facilities that provide breast cancer screening. The sole mammogram machine in Englewood, a predominantly black area on Chicago’s South Side, was broken for months. Women were sent ten miles away to get screened. Even the state-of-the-art John H. Stroger Hospital, which replaced Chicago’s aging Cook County Hospital in 2002 and serves many of the city’s poor African Americans, ran up a backlog of more than ten thousand women seeking mammograms.5 Mammograms cost about $150, which can be prohibitive for a woman struggling to feed her children. Medicaid paid only about half of the cost, so many hospitals in Chicago didn’t offer mammograms to women on Medicaid. “What does it mean if you have to take three buses to get to a place that gives mammograms, and then when you get there, you say, ‘Here is my Medicaid card,’ and they say, ‘Sorry, we don’t take that’?” Whitman asks. "

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

25 " Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference. "

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

26 " Krieger took the first scientific step by partnering with physician Stephen Sidney to specifically measure research participants’ exposure to racial discrimination and test its association with high blood pressure. Instead of treating race as a biological risk factor, as was typical in epidemiological research, Krieger zoomed in on racism as a cause of disease and developed a fledgling methodology to measure its health impact directly. Her findings, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1996, were the first to show that experiencing racial discrimination raises the risk of high blood pressure. "

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

27 " The greater the percentage of blacks living in a neighborhood, the higher the neighborhood death rate, regardless of neighborhood income level.52 It is the neighborhood that makes people unhealthy, not the susceptibility of black people living there. The rate of death is higher for all residents, including whites, who live in predominantly black neighborhoods. "

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

28 " They discovered that commonly used ethnic labels did not match the genetic clusters and were not reliable at predicting variation in the DME genes. One glaring lack of correspondence was the fact that 62 percent of Ethiopians, who would socially be labeled as black and grouped with the Bantu and Afro-Caribbeans, fell in the same genetic cluster as Ashkenazi Jews, Norwegians, and Armenians. A gene variant involved in metabolizing codeine and antidepressants “is found in 9%, 17%, and 34% of the Ethiopian, Tanzanian, and Zimbabwean populations, respectively.”41 The prevalence of an allele that predicts severe reactions to the HIV-drug abacavir is 13.6 percent among the Masai in Kenya, but only 3.3 percent among the Kenyan Luhya, and 0 percent among the Yoruba in Nigeria.42 Grouping all these people together on the basis of race for purposes of drug tailoring would be disastrous. "

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

29 " Equally as intriguing as the concept of personalized medicine is the proposal to develop the first drugs based on race. Think of the paradox: a classification system constructed centuries ago to enslave people became the portal for the most cutting-edge biomedical advance of the twenty-first century. Predicting drug response based on a patient’s race rather than on genetic traits, says Lawrence Lesco of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation Research, is “like telling time with a sundial instead of looking at a Rolex watch. "

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

30 " Race-based medicine gives people a morally acceptable reason to hold on to their belief in intrinsic racial difference. They can now talk openly about natural distinctions between races—even their biological inferiority and superiority, at least when it comes to disease—without appearing racist. This would be a case of public enlightenment—“pulling back the covers”—if the science supporting racial therapies were sound. But to the contrary, the purported benefits of racial medicine provide an excuse to overlook the scientific flaws in research claiming to show race-based genetic difference. These technologies are not just products of racial science. They are driving racial science. "

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

31 " He agreed that BiDil should be approved without regard to race, noting that American cardiologists “jumped on the statin drugs” once the Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study showed they were effective. “Would you restrict the results of the Scandinavian trial to Scandinavian people?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”17 Dr. Curry’s colleague Charles Rotimi, from Howard University’s National Human Genome Center, echoed this position. Rotimi warned that upholding an unproven biological explanation for health disparities would steer biomedical research in a dangerous direction. “It would be tragic not to approve [BiDil],” Rotimi said, “and it would be even more tragic just to approve it for African Americans.” 18 "

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

32 " By the logic used to approve BiDil, drugs tested on Americans should never be marketed overseas, or drugs tested only on whites should not be made available to anyone else. That logic had never resulted in a racial indication before. In the past, the FDA has generalized clinical trials involving white patients to approve drugs for everyone because it is assumed that white bodies function like all human bodies. By approving BiDil only for use in black patients, the FDA emphasized the supposedly distinctive—and, it is implied, substandard—quality of black bodies.30 The FDA treated white heart failure patients as the norm and blacks as a special case that had to be given a specialized therapy that Nissen compared to an orphan drug and that could not be assumed to work for other people. The message is: black people cannot represent all of humanity as well as white people can. "

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

33 " A 2003 study published in Genetics in Medicine shows that this skepticism about race-specific drugs is not fictional; it is widespread in the black community.77 Participants in an anonymous survey and two focus groups that oversampled for minority groups reported that they would be highly suspicious of race-labeled drugs. Nearly half said they would be very suspicious of their safety, and 40 percent said they would be very suspicious of their efficacy. In fact, 13 percent of African Americans said they would choose a drug labeled for whites over one designated for blacks. At a conference on BiDil, an elderly black woman in the audience stood up and said, “If I were sick and somebody told me that they had a drug just for black people to help me, I’d say to them: give me what the white people are taking. "

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

34 " Although whites use drugs in greater numbers than blacks, blacks are far more likely to be arrested for drug offenses—and therefore far more likely to end up in genetic databases. The latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released in February 2010, confirms that young blacks aged eighteen to twenty-five years old are less likely to use illegal drugs than the national average.69 Yet black men are twelve times more likely than white men to be sent to prison on drug charges.70 This staggering racial disparity results in part from the deliberate decision of police departments to target their drug enforcement efforts on inner-city neighborhoods where people of color live. "

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

35 " Consider a 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Devah Pager and Bruce Western finding that whites just released from prison fared better in the New York City job market than blacks with identical résumés but no criminal record. "

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

36 " A series of Supreme Court decisions in the last two decades struck down race-conscious measures to desegregate schools and workplaces. In City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., decided in 1989, the Court ruled that the former capital of the Confederacy practiced reverse discrimination against whites by adopting a set-aside program to steer some of its construction dollars to minority-owned firms—“even when, without the program, less than one percent of construction contracts went to minorities in a city over 50 percent African American,” as legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez pointed out. "

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

37 " Linnaeus divided the genus Homo into two species, Homo sapiens (man) and Homo troglodytes (ape), and divided Homo sapiens into four natural varieties—H. sapiens americanus, H. sapiens europaeus, H. sapiens asiaticus, and H. sapiens afer—linked to the four known regions of the world, America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He color-coded the subspecies red, white, yellow, and black and assigned each a set of physical, personality, cultural, and social traits. Linnaeus was influenced by the classical concept of the Great Chain of Being described by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which placed everything in the universe—from stones to angels—in a grand hierarchy established by God. At the pinnacle of beauty and intelligence Linnaeus placed H. sapiens europaeus: “Vigorous, muscular. Flowing blond hair. Blue eyes. Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.” H. sapiens americanus, according to Linnaeus, was “Ill-tempered, impassive. Thick straight black hair; wide nostrils; harsh face; beardless. Stubborn, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. Ruled by custom.” Linnaeus described H. sapiens asiaticus as “Melancholy, stern. Black hair; dark eyes. Strict, haughty, greedy. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion.” And at the bottom, he placed H. sapiens afer: “Sluggish, lazy. Black kinky hair; silky skin; flat nose; thick lips; females with genital flap and elongated breasts. Crafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice.” Here lies the origin of the color scheme for mankind American children still sing about in Sunday school: red, yellow, black, and white. "

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

38 " the Human Genome Project revealed that the human species cannot be divided into biological races. President Clinton famously announced, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”75 Collins ended his remarks by saying, “I’m happy that today the only race that we are talking about is the human race.” Venter reported that Celera Genomics had sequenced the genomes of three women and two men who identified as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian, and African American and found that “there’s no way to tell one ethnicity from another.” He bluntly declared, “Race has no genetic or scientific basis. "

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

39 " There is less genetic variation in the entire human race than in a typical wild population of chimpanzees. "

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

40 " In fact, the entire range of human variation for some genetic traits can be found on the African continent.77 A person from the Congo, a person from South Africa, and a person from Ethiopia are more genetically different from each other than from a person from France.78 This seems astonishing because we are so used to focusing on a tiny set of physical features, especially skin color, to assign people to racial categories. It turns out that the genes contributing to these phenotypic differences represent a minute and relatively insignificant fraction of our genotypes and do not reflect the total picture of genetic variation among groups.79 What’s more, these phenotypic differences do not even fall neatly into the categories known as races. Rather, the physical features are “discordant” among groups—they are assorted randomly and do not come assembled in racial packages. “Sub-Saharan Africa is home to both the tallest (Maasai) and the shortest (pygmies) people, and dark skin is found in all equatorial populations, not just in the ‘Black race’ as defined in the United States,” writes Richard S. Cooper, a physician epidemiologist at Loyola University.80 And most genetic variation is found within any human population.81 "

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