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

Black people and white people are opposing categories of humans in the political construction of race. Linnaeus and a range of taxonomists, philosophers, and other scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries have argued that humans originating from Europe are, of all human populations, the closest to God, highest on the taxonomical hierarchy. In opposition to white humans are Black humans, who are almost considered “sub” human. These taxonomies of political race also assume that any animal species other than human are inherently deficient and “beneath” all humans.

The opposed categories of Black and white are entrenched in American society. Many understand these categories to be politically constructed in service of systemic racism. However, many nonetheless also assume these categories to be based in biological racial categories; the corresponding assumption, in this case, is that sub-Saharan Black people are one large group that is genetically similar while European, or white, people are another large continental population that is also genetically similar. Yet genetic differences are much more prominent within these groups than without them, as Ashley Montagu argued. Moreover, these categories of Black and white erase any cultural and political differences. Bantu people, for example, are assumed to be genetically the same as Yoruba people, as there seems to be no “real” difference between the French and the Germans. Thus, diversity within these political groups is erased, and genetic contrast between these groups is invented.

While the political nature of these groupings is deeply relevant and real, as political categories help to determine how livable life is, these categories have no biological grounding.

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (known as the Tuskegee Study) was a scientific study conducted by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from 1932 to 1972. Researchers enrolled approximately 600 poor African men from Macon County, Alabama, in coordination with Tuskegee University, to participate in the study. The men were promised medical care if they participated. This promise was a lie. The men were never informed of their syphilis diagnoses and were never treated for the disease, despite the fact that by 1947 penicillin was the standard for treatment and readily available. Researchers preferred that the men die, as they wanted to autopsy their bodies for scientific information. These scientists lied to the men about their medical condition as they also assured them that they were receiving a “special treatment.”

The study, supposed to last six months, ended up lasting 40 years, ending in 1972 as a result of a leak to the media. By the final year of the study, 28 men had died directly of syphilis, and 100 men had died of complications related to syphilis. As the men had never been informed that they had the disease, they had also unknowingly infected their partners, 40 of whom developed syphilis. Many of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

Roberts refers to this well-known study not only to emphasize its violence and consequences but also to underscore that the biological definition of race was the “reason” for the experiment: The PHS and CDC were experimenting on these men because they believed that syphilis affected Black men differently than white men. Their hope was to confirm that Black men experienced syphilis differently than white men, mainly through the cardiovascular system rather than the neurological system. Such findings would have supported scientists’ claims that African American men’s brains were not as “developed” as white men’s.

Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) was a British American anthropologist. He earned his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University and studied under Franz Boas. He is known for presenting his intellectually rigorous work in an accessible way and with a sense of humor. Montagu wrote over 60 books, including The Elephant Man (1971) and The Natural Superiority of Women (1953), the latter of which argued that women are biologically superior to men. His most famous book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, published in 1942, rejects the biological category of race, arguing that there is more genetic diversity within political racial groups than between political racial groups. Genetic research has since shown this claim to be true.

Montagu made scientific arguments that pushed back against the biological category of race. Moreover, he analyzed the cultural narratives through which race remains a potent force even as genuine efforts strive to dismantle systemic racism and the political category of race. Roberts cites Montagu’s framing of the political category of race as a form of “witchcraft” that remains potent in the spell it casts due to its ability to transform itself. Its flexibility, Montagu argues, enables the fundamental structure of the category of race to endure, sometimes without this maintenance being visible.

Among the European naturalists and taxonomists relevant to Roberts’s work is Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who was a Swedish botanist and physician. Linnaeus published 12 editions of System Naturae, his classification of living things, over the span of over 40 years, from 1735 until his death in 1778. His classification system was the first to include humans alongside other animals and plants. In the 10th edition of System Naturae, Linnaeus classified the genus Homo into two species: Homo sapiens and Homo troglodytes. He then divided Homo sapiens into four varieties, determined by place of origin: Homo sapiens americanus, Homo sapiens europaeus, Homo sapiens asiaticus, and Homo sapiens afer, with respective color-codings for each of red, white, yellow, and Black. Linnaeus was influenced by the Great Chain of Being, and his classification system assumed a hierarchy of beings, with Homo sapiens europaeus as the closest creature to God. Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French anatomist who then built on Linnaeus’s system to create one in which all beings were organized in divisions. Cuvier divided humans into Caucasians, Mongolians, and Ethiopians. Cuvier argued that humans were determined by the regions from which they originated, with different abilities based on those regions. The continental grounding for race (or, as polygenists argued, species) was widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Bob Cohn is the cardiologist and researcher who was the lead developer of the drug BiDil. Though this drug to treat heart disease could have been effective with all populations, the FDA approved it to be marketed only to African Americans. Cohn received the American College of Cardiology’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021.

BiDil was approved for this racialized marketing due to one of the final clinical trials of the drug including only African Americans and thus not providing specific data for other (political) racial groups. Cohn planned this setup. On facing denial of FDA approval for all races, Cohn sought to gain approval through an alternate route. On receiving FDA approval, while the drug could only be marketed to Black people, it could be prescribed to anyone. Many Black medical organizations were enthusiastically supportive of BiDil and the fact that the drug was being marketed directly and only to African Americans, feeling that this effort represented the population finally receiving exclusive attention.

Roberts is interested in how this case shows the FDA’s failure to think of African Americans as representative of all humans. With Black research subjects, the FDA seemed to think that conclusions could not be extrapolated as relevant to all humans, as has traditionally been done in experiments involving white men.