Overview

In this article first published in 2004, feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling reconstructs the historical trajectory of the idea of race in Western science and its persistence in new forms, in contemporary life and health sciences. Drawing on the case of the United States, the author shows the complex relationship between the biological and the social and how inequalities and exclusions based on the naturalization and essentialization of differences produce forms of discrimination in access to health. During times of convergence of a pandemic, of an economic crisis and of the outburst of the revolt against racial oppression and the persistence of colonial forms of domination, the re-reading of this article contributes to the indispensable and urgent reflection on the current crisis and on the relationship between science and politics.