It gives a history of racism in America and how we came to conflate biology with race. Get this from a library! This book tied it up with a bow on it. A very complex argument clearly exposed. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. Some of this stuff has a use but it is a prickly affair and I can see bad actors using it to bad ends especially racists, rightwingers, cops, and corporations the usual baddies on my list. It is bad enough but if used for profiling ethnicities it brings back some of the worst racist and eugenics practices from our past. Dorothy Roberts is a scholar, professor, author and social justice advocate, and currently the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her book is alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential,  impassioned but rational." Javascript is not enabled in your browser. I need more people to read her so we can talk about her work. Exploring a crucial topic seldom addressed in meditation instruction, this revered teacher takes to her pen to shine a compassionate, provocative, and practical light into a deeply neglected and world-changing domain profoundly relevant to all of us. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Fatal Invention : How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts (2012, Trade Paperback) at the best online prices at eBay! Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. It is a lesson on academic writing too — Robert's always presents all of the sides of the argument clearly explaining why she thinks the way she does. Einstein's cosmic constant projects such a field which easily explains everything. The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime. Nonetheless, the ideas are important and raise a lot of interesting and thorny questions. One of those times I wish GoodReads allowed half stars, as I teetered back and forth between 3 and 4 for a long time. So I recommend reading it, but to expect to want to skim it in places. Race has always been an ill-defined amalgam of medical and cultural bias, thinly overlaid with the trappings of contemporary scientific thought. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. "Racism is a heart disease," writes Ruth King, "and it's curable." This book slams the door shut on the idea of "biological race." You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser. Paperback. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. It squashes the belief that race is a biological concept. With barely concealed frustration, Roberts lays out the ways that our social construction of race combines with the cost-cutting and shortcut-taking to lead to a new enthusiasm for categorising humans into white, black, red and yellow, and pretending this is a biological, rather than a social, set of categories.