(2022) - Not So Black and White - Dorothy Roberts

In her interview "Not So Black and White", legal scholar Dorothy Roberts challenges the deeply rooted assumption that race is a natural category. Drawing on the work of Barbara and Karen Fields, she argues that we focus too much on “race” as if it were a real, stable trait, rather than recognizing it as the product of racism—a system that first imposes unequal treatment, then invents race to justify it. This inversion is unsettling: race doesn’t cause racism, racism produces race.

Roberts outlines this argument in her book Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, showing how racial categories have been repackaged over time—from pseudoscientific claims about biological difference to modern appeals to genetics, ancestry testing, the one-drop rule, and racial classification on medical forms. These frameworks change over time, but they all serve to obscure the material conditions that actually produce racial inequality. Her work calls for a shift in how we think and act. What would it mean to look for racism, not race, in our public conversations, data collection, and policy? If we foreground racism as the cause, how would our frameworks for justice have to change? And what do we risk reinforcing when we continue to speak as if race itself explains inequality instead of being a consequence of it?

For more of her work, see here.