Dorothy Roberts

Last updated
Dorothy Roberts
Roberts Dorothy 2012 2106.jpg
Born
Dorothy E. Roberts

(1956-03-08) March 8, 1956 (age 68)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Education Yale University (BA)
Harvard University (JD)
Employer University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy E. Roberts (born March 8, 1956) [1] is an American sociologist, law professor, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her focuses include reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. [2] She has published over 80 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review , Yale Law Journal , and Stanford Law Review . She is a 2024 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius Grant". [3]

Contents

Background

Roberts was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a white father and Jamaican-born mother, who raised her in a politically active household in Hyde Park. Her father was an anthropologist, and her mother was his research assistant. Roberts' parents met at the University of Chicago, where her father was her mother's professor in her PhD program. (She left without finishing her degree to care for their children). [4]

Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Yale University and her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. She has been a professor at Rutgers and Northwestern University, [5] a visiting professor at Stanford and Fordham, and a fellow at Harvard University's Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Program. She serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women's Health Imperative, on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and on the advisory boards of the Center for Genetics and Society and Family Defense Center. She also serves on a national panel that is overseeing foster care reform in Washington State and on the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (stem cell research). She has received awards from the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Roberts met her husband, Coltrane Chimurenga (born Randolph Simms) when they were both students at Harvard. Chimurenga was active in the Pan-Africa movement and in socialist causes. They had two sons, Amilcar and Camillo Chimurenga. Coltrane Chimurenga passed away in 2009. [6]

Author

Roberts has published more than 50 articles and essays in books, scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, [7] Social Text, and The New York Times . She has written Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Civitas Books, 2002) and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon Books, 1997), in which she purports to give "a powerful and authoritative account of the on-going assault—both figurative and literal—waged by the American government and our society on the reproductive rights of Black women." [8] and was the co-author of casebooks on constitutional law and women and the law. Killing the Black Body received a 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

Her article, "Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy" ( Harvard Law Review , 1991), has been widely cited. [9] Fatal Invention (The New Press, 2011) argues that America is once again on the brink of classifying population by race.

Roberts has received much praise for her work from notable sources such Publishers Weekly and Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union. [10]

Lecturer/professor

Roberts has delivered several endowed lectures, including the James Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School. She was elected twice by the Rutgers University School of Law graduating class to be faculty graduation speaker, and was voted outstanding first-year course professor by the Northwestern University School of Law class of 2000. She received the Radcliffe University Graduate Society Medal in June 1998. Her current projects concern race and child welfare policy.

Roberts has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.

In 2002–03, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, where she conducted research on family planning policy and on gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. She is currently conducting research on the significance of the spatial concentration of state supervision of children in African American communities and on the use of race in biomedical research and biotechnology.

Roberts is featured in the documentary film, Silent Choices, about abortion and reproductive rights from the perspective of African Americans. Roberts also served as an advisor to the film.

In 2019, Roberts gave the Betsy Wood Knapp '64 Lecture at Wellesley College. Her topic for this lecture was "The Problem with Race-Based Medicine." [11] In the lecture, Roberts asserts that race, in medicine, is used as a proxy for the more complex aspects of health and disease that should require further investigation. Roberts notes that this topic is especially relevant in the age of genomic science where the desire is to reduce all aspects of disease and infection to a genetic origin. According to Roberts, this is an inaccurate assumption and can powerfully impact the medical treatment of women, children, and African-Americans. [12]

Views

Roberts has drawn parallels between what she sees as current U.S. imperialism and white supremacy. She has asserted that U.S. torture of terrorist suspects is a tool to maintain supremacy just as violence has been used to maintain white supremacy, and has compared the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison to racist lynchings of blacks. [13]

Roberts has asserted that women should be able to choose if they bear a child and how they raise it. However, she notes that these decisions are often dependent on the social conditions in which women live, any discrimination they face, and whether they value the idea of childbearing. [14] Roberts also concludes that this choice, along with the choice to have a relationship with the child, must be respected by the state and by society, which does not happen to Black women who are often subject to government interference during their parenthood. In her views on reproductive justice, Roberts includes issues of social justice as well in order to ensure that women and men are able to make independent, informed reproductive decisions when it comes to whether or not to have children and their relationships with their children. [14]

Roberts has been a vocal critic of Israel. Following Oct. 7, 2023, Roberts signed on to a letter consisting of sociologists who accused Israel of attempting to commit "genocide and ethnic cleansing" against the people of Gaza and called Israel an "apartheid regime." [15]

Works

Roberts has explored topics such as race, reproduction, and motherhood in her scholarship, specifically focusing on the experiences of Black women. [16] [17] [18]

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

Roberts explores the dangers of the continued research of race in the science and medical fields in her book Fatal Invention. She asserts that genomic science and biotechnology is reinforcing the concept of race as a biological category. She cautions that the continued research of race at a molecular level is used to hide racism in the United States and continues a racial division by justifying racial differences. [19]

Sex Power & Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond

Roberts, with Rhoda Reddock, Sandra Reid, and Dianna Douglass, study the outbreak of HIV in the Caribbean in Sex, Power, And Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond. The authors research how gender, norms, race, and power affect HIV treatment, polices, and stigma. The authors argue that to effectively end the HIV epidemic, it must be viewed through an intersectional lens. [20]

Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare

Roberts outlines the American foster care system's persecution of low-wealth Black families. Roberts details how thousands of children annually are removed from their parents' homes, often due to the endemic effects of poverty that impact women and children more than any other group in the United States. [21] Roberts not only describes the racial differences in foster care, but she also highlights the discrimination that comes with high concentration of state intervention in predominantly Black neighborhoods, the struggle of low-wealth families in meeting state standards for regaining custody of their children, and the relationship between state supervision and systemic racial inequality. [21]

Killing the Black Body

Roberts wrote Killing the Black Body on history of punitive policies directed towards African American women, from slavery to modern day, concluding that white supremacy views Black women's reproductive capabilities as a threat. [22] Dorothy says,” I want this book to convince readers that reproduction is an important topic and that it is especially important to Black people.”   [23]

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Blaffer Hrdy</span> American anthropologist and primatologist

Sarah Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She is considered "a highly recognized pioneer in modernizing our understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates". In 2013, Hrdy received a Lifetime Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

Reproductive rights are legal rights and freedoms relating to reproduction and reproductive health that vary amongst countries around the world. The World Health Organization defines reproductive rights as follows:

Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.

Reva B. Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Siegel's writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality, and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution. She is currently writing on the role of social movement conflict in guiding constitutional change, addressing this question in recent articles on reproductive rights, originalism and the Second Amendment, the "de facto ERA," and the enforcement of Brown. Her publications include Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking ; The Constitution in 2020 ; and Directions in Sexual Harassment Law. Professor Siegel received her B.A., M.Phil, and J.D. from Yale University, clerked for Judge Spottswood William Robinson III on the D.C. Circuit, and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is active in the American Society for Legal History, the Association of American Law Schools, the American Constitution Society, in the national organization and as faculty advisor of Yale's chapter. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.

Dame Ann Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA is a British anthropologist, who has worked largely with the Mount Hagen people of Papua New Guinea and dealt with issues in the UK of reproductive technologies. She was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge from 1993 to 2008, and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge from 1998 to 2009.

Feminist sexology is an offshoot of traditional studies of sexology that focuses on the intersectionality of sex and gender in relation to the sexual lives of women. Sexology has a basis in psychoanalysis, specifically Freudian theory, which played a big role in early sexology. This reactionary field of feminist sexology seeks to be inclusive of experiences of sexuality and break down the problematic ideas that have been expressed by sexology in the past. Feminist sexology shares many principles with the overarching field of sexology; in particular, it does not try to prescribe a certain path or "normality" for women's sexuality, but only observe and note the different and varied ways in which women express their sexuality. It is a young field, but one that is growing rapidly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reproductive justice</span> Social justice movement

Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework that was invented as a response to United States reproductive politics. The three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. The framework moves women's reproductive rights past a legal and political debate to incorporate the economic, social, and health factors that impact women's reproductive choices and decision-making ability.

Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anita L. Allen</span> American lawyer (born 1953)

Anita LaFrance Allen is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was formerly Vice Provost for Faculty from 2013 to 2020.

Marybeth Gasman is Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education and a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University. She was appointed as Associate Dean for Research in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education in the fall of 2021 and was elected Chair of the Rutgers University-New Brunswick Faculty Council in 2021. In addition to these roles, Gasman is the Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice as well as the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

Joan Callahan was a Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, an institution where she taught for more than twenty years and served in a variety of roles, including as director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Callahan's research has focused on feminist theory, critical race theory, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and on the junctions of these topics.

Sofia Gruskin is a scholar and advocate in the field of health and human rights whose contributions range from global policy to the grassroots level. For more than 25 years her work has been instrumental in developing the conceptual, methodological, and empirical links between health and human rights, with a focus on sexual and reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, child and adolescent health, gender-based violence, non-communicable disease, and health systems. Currently, Gruskin is a professor at the Keck School of Medicine and Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California. Gruskin also directs the USC Institute for Global Health as well as its Program on Global Health & Human Rights and leads the USC Law & Global Health Collaboration with fellow professors.

Rayna Rapp is a professor and associate chair of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health; the politics of reproduction; science, technology, and genetics; and disability in the United States and Europe. She has contributed over 80 published works to the field of anthropology, independently, as a co-author, editor, and foreword-writing, including Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent's Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge. Her 1999 book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, received multiple awards upon release and has been praised for providing "invaluable insights into the first generation of women who had to decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancies on the basis of amniocentesis result". She co-authored many articles with Faye Ginsburg, including Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship, a topic the pair has continued to research.

Michelle Murphy is a Canadian academic. She is a professor of history and women and gender studies at the University of Toronto and director of the Technoscience Research Unit.

Floretta Avril Boonzaier is a South African psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town. She is noted for her work in feminist, critical and postcolonial psychologies, subjectivity in relation to race, gender and sexuality, and gender-based violence, and qualitative psychologies, especially narrative, discursive and participatory methods. She heads the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa with Shose Kessi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Briggs</span> Feminist scholar and historian

Laura Briggs is a feminist critic and historian of reproductive politics and US empire. She works on transnational and transracial adoption and the relationship between race, sex, gender, and US imperialism. Her 2012 book Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption won the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for best book on the history of US race relations and has been featured on numerous college syllabi in the US and Canada. Briggs serves as professor and chair of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amy Wax</span> American professor of law

Amy Laura Wax is an American legal scholar and neurologist. She is a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her work addresses issues in social welfare law and policy, as well as the relationship of the family, the workplace, and labor markets. She has often made remarks about non-white people that have been described by some of her contemporaries and colleagues as white supremacist and racist. In 2024, she was suspended from teaching for one year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Romero</span> American sociologist

Mary Romero is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, with affiliations in African and African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. Before her arrival at ASU in 1995, she taught at University of Oregon, San Francisco State University, and University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Professor Romero holds a bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in Spanish from Regis College in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado. In 2019, she served as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association.

Susan GolombokFBA is Professor of Family Research and Director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, and Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her research on new family forms has contributed to theoretical understanding of family influences on child development and has addressed social and ethical issues that are of relevance to family life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nadia Dowshen</span> American pediatrician

Nadia Lauren Dowshen is an American pediatrician and adolescent medicine physician. She specializes in the care of youth living with HIV infection and medical care to transgender and gender-diverse youth. Dowshen researches health inequality, access to care, and promoting resilience in LGBT youth. As an associate professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, she is also the medical director and co-founder of the Gender and Sexuality Development Clinic.

<i>Killing the Black Body</i> 1997 book by Dorothy Roberts

In Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts analyzes the reproductive rights of black women in the United States throughout history. Published in 1997 by Pantheon Books, this book details a history of reproductive oppression that spans from the commodification of enslaved women's fertility to forced sterilizations of African American and Latina women in the 20th century. Through these accounts, Roberts makes the case that reproductive justice is a necessary part of the greater struggle for racial equality.

References

  1. ↑ "Dorothy Roberts — Lawyer Profile". martindale.com. Retrieved March 31, 2013.
  2. ↑ "The American Philosophical Society Welcomes New Members for 2023".
  3. ↑ Fiorillo, Victor (2024-10-03). "Philly Today: Penn Prof Wins $800,000 "Genius" Grant". Philadelphia Magazine. Retrieved 2024-11-25.
  4. ↑ "Dorothy Roberts Tried to Warn Us". 6 September 2022.
  5. ↑ "IPR People: Dorothy Roberts". Archived from the original on April 19, 2007.
  6. ↑ "Field Marshall Coltrane Chimurenga, ¡Presente!". 25 June 2019.
  7. ↑ "Howard Law Journal" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-11-12. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
  8. ↑ Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts – Books – Random House
  9. ↑ "Cites of Punishing drug addicts who have babies: Women of color, equality, and the right of privacy". scholar.google.ca.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "Dorothy Roberts". Dorothy Roberts. Retrieved 2021-04-18.
  11. ↑ "The Betsy Wood Knapp '64 Lecture: The Problem with Race-Based Medicine". Wellesley College. Retrieved 2021-04-18.
  12. ↑ "YouTube". www.youtube.com. Retrieved 2021-04-18.
  13. ↑ "The Cowl". The Cowl. Archived from the original on 2013-02-03.
  14. 1 2 Street, The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School3501 Sansom; Philadelphia; Pennsylvania, PA 19104 map 215 898 7483 University of. "Celebrating Dorothy Roberts". www.law.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2021-04-18.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  15. ↑ "Sociologists in Solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian People". Google Docs. Retrieved 2024-03-20.
  16. ↑ Callahan, Joan C.; Roberts, Dorothy E. (1996). "A Feminist Social Justice Approach to Reproduction-Assisting Technologies: A Case Study on the Limits of Liberal Theory". University of Pennsylvania Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. 84 (4): 1197–234. PMID   15228041.
  17. ↑ Roberts, Dorothy E. (1993). "Racism and the Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood". American Journal of Gender & the Law. 1 (1).
  18. ↑ Roberts, Dorothy E. (1996). "Race and the New Reproduction". University of Pennsylvania Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository.
  19. ↑ Roberts, Dorothy (2011). Fatal Invention . New York: The New Press. ISBN   9781595584953.
  20. ↑ Roberts, Dorothy; Reddock, Rhoda; Douglas, Dianne; Reid, Sandra (2009). Sex Power & Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond. Ian Randle Publishers. ISBN   9789766373498.
  21. 1 2 "Talking Biopolitics with Dorothy Roberts and Jonathan Marks | Center for Genetics and Society". www.geneticsandsociety.org. Retrieved 2021-04-18.
  22. ↑ "Revisiting 'Killing the Black Body,' 20 years later". Penn Today. 11 May 2017. Retrieved 2021-04-18.
  23. ↑ "Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Dorothy Roberts". Isis. 90 (1): 101–102. March 1999. doi:10.1086/384248. ISSN   0021-1753.
  24. ↑ "Roberts and Sambanis Named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences | School of Arts and Sciences - University of Pennsylvania". www.sas.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2022-04-29.
  25. ↑ "MacArthur Fellows". macfound.org. MacArthur Foundation . Retrieved 2 October 2024.
  26. ↑ Aguiar, Annie (1 October 2024). "MacArthur Foundation Announces 2024 'Genius' Grant Winners". nytimes.com. The New York Times . Retrieved 2 October 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.