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

Roberts focuses on how the discipline of science carries an intrinsic weight that no other academic discipline does. She traces this authority back to the Renaissance, or early modern period, and the usurpation of religious authority by scientific authority. With the secularization that occurred in the early modern period, an increasingly humanistic approach to life emerged. This approach privileged human perspective (in the arts), the democratization of human intellectual knowledge (with the printing press), and the human penetrability and classification of the natural world (with science): there was a redirection toward human, rather than divine, powers.

As opposed to other humanistic disciplines, such as the literary or fine arts, which assert their specifically subjective perspectives, science claims a perspective that often attempts to transcend the human in its supposed objectivity. Roberts is focused specifically on what she calls the new “racial science.” More broadly, though, she is interested in the discipline of science as a whole and the dangerous claims of objectivity that imbue the discipline with its authority.

In an increasingly secular world, science carries an increasing amount of authority to reveal and state truth via this

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