Dorothy E Roberts
Biographic Data
| ID | 101252 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dorothy E Roberts |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dorothy E |
| FAMILY NAME | Roberts |
| SIGNATURE | ROBERTS D E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 225 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Relationship Between Intimate Partner Violence Policing and Family Surveillance in Large U.S. Counties
Why abolition
Calls to abolish the child welfare system have provoked questions about the feasibility of dismantling the current system and worries that abolition will put vulnerable children at greater risk of maltreatment. Despite the clear evidence of harm inflicted by the family policing system, some child welfare experts argue that abandoning the system is dangerous because it is needed to protect children from harm. This essay makes a concise case for ab…
Rationing, racism and justice: Advancing the debate around ‘colourblind’ Covid-19 ventilator allocation
Withholding or withdrawing life-saving ventilators can become necessary when resources are insufficient. In the USA, such rationing has unique social justice dimensions. Structural elements of dominant allocation frameworks simultaneously advantage white communities, and disadvantage Black communities—who already experience a disproportionate burden of COVID-19-related job losses, hospitalisations and mortality. Using the example of New Jersey’s …
Sequential organ failure assessment, ventilator rationing and evolving triage guidance: New evidence underlines the need to recognise and revise, unjust allocation frameworks
We respond to recent comments on our proposal to improve justice in ventilator triage, in which we used as an example New Jersey’s (NJ) publicly available and legally binding Directive Number 2020-03. We agree with Bernard Lo and Doug White that equity implications of triage frameworks should be continually reassessed, which is why we offered six concrete options for improvement, and called for monitoring the consequences of adopted triage models…
Family Policing as Counterinsurgency and the Gathering Abolitionist Force
I spent the first year of the pandemic writing a book about abolishing the so-called child welfare system—what I call the family policing system. When I heard Dylan Rodríguez’s remarkable presidential address, I was already proofing the galleys of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.1 Every word Rodríguez spoke resonated with my thinking and activism around the need to dismant…
Reflections on Re-Creating Biological Race and the Entrapment of Black People
The US white supremacist regime is a machine of death and destruction and that’s intensified under the current administration. The maternal mortality rate, that’s the rate of deaths from the pregnancy-related causes, is actually going up in the United States, which is unlike any other so-called advanced developed nation in the world. For more than half a century, most scientists and scholars have taken it as common knowledge that race is a social…
Keynote: How I Became a Family Policing Abolitionist
This piece is a written version of Professor Dorothy Roberts' keynote speech at the Columbia Journal of Race and Law's 11th annual symposium, titled Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being
The Biology of Racism
It Is Likely a White Gene”: Racial Voyeurism and Consumption of Black Mothers and “White” Babies in Online News Media
Focusing on media reports of black women who give birth to “white” children, this study asks: What can we learn about popular understandings of race from the fascination with births of “white” babies born to black mothers? What racial discourses guide how such stories are produced and consumed online? We conducted a critical discourse analysis of media coverage and online comments about two contemporary cases. We found that three race-based assum…
Why Sociology Matters to Race and Biosocial Science
Recent developments in genetics and neuroscience have led to increasing interest in biosocial approaches to social life. While today's biosocial paradigms seek to examine more fully the inextricable relationships between the biological and the social, they have also renewed concerns about the scientific study of race. Our review describes the innovative ways sociologists have designed biosocial models to capture embodied impacts of racism, but al…
Learning about Race: The Lived Experiences of Interracially Married U.S.-born White and European Immigrant Women in the 1930s
How did intermarriage between African Americans and European immigrants influence how European immigrants learned about race in the United States? In this study, the authors compare the lived experiences of European-born and U.S.-born white women married to U.S.-born black men in Chicago in the late 1930s. The authors find that both groups of women characterized their lives as marked by material, social, and institutional costs, and they experien…
Sleep disparity, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic position
Taking race out of human genetics
Engaging a century-long debate about the role of race in science
Can Research on the Genetics of Intelligence Be “Socially Neutral”
The history of research on the genetics of intelligence is fraught with social bias. During the eugenics era, the hereditary theory of intelligence justified policies that encouraged the proliferation of favored races and coercively stemmed procreation by disfavored ones. In the 1970s, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen argued that black students’ innate cognitive inferiority limited the efficacy of federal education programs. The 1994 controver…
Race, Care Work, and the Private Law of Inheritance
In Someday All This Will Be Yours , Hendrik Hartog (2012) examines how private inheritance law structured the strategies people used at the turn of the twentieth century to induce relatives to care for them as they aged. Reading it as a book about social inequality and the family reveals how wealth, gender, and race not only worked to deny claims of marginalized caregivers but also to hide the way these social hierarchies affect family life. Alth…
The Politics of Race and Science: Conservative Colorblindness and the Limits of Liberal Critique
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Structural Competency Meets Structural Racism: Race, Politics, and the Structure of Medical Knowledge
Physicians in the United States have long been trained to assess race and ethnicity in the context of clinical interactions.Medical students learn to identify how their patients' "demographic and cultural factors" influence their health behaviors [1].Interns and residents receive "cultural competency" training to help them communicate with persons of differing "ethnic" backgrounds [2].And clinicians are taught to observe the races of their patien…
Child protection as surveillance of African American families
The over-representation of black children in US out of home care results from racial bias in placement decisions and a political choice to address startling rates of child poverty by investigating parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. The impact of state disruption and supervision of African American families is intensified when it is concentrated in inner-city neighbourhoods – the system's ‘racial geography.’ A small case study o…
Complicating the triangle of race, class and state: The Insights of Black Feminists
This article complicates Wacquant's three-sided schema of race, class and state by adding a focus on gender, the experiences of black women, and a black feminist intersectional analysis. Welfare retrenchment in the USA relied on stereotypes of black women, especially the 'Welfare Queen', that were at once sexist and racist and implemented policies targeted specifically at them as the vilified beneficiaries of state largess. Attributing social ine…
Law, Race, and Biotechnology: Toward a Biopolitical and Transdisciplinary Paradigm
Law influences and is shaped by the emergence of race-based biotechnologies in the genomic age. This review examines how law and social science scholars have approached the role of legal regulation, theories, and norms in governing the definition and utility of race in gene-based technological innovation. I structure my discussion around four main themes: the institutional regulation of biotechnology research, commercial incentives for race-speci…
Movement Intersectionality: The Case of Race, Gender, Disability, and Genetic Technologies
Intersectional analysis need not focus solely on differences within or between identity-based groups. Using intersectionality for cross movement mobilization reveals that, contrary to criticism for being divisive, attention to intersecting identities has the potential to create solidarity and cohesion. In this article, we elaborate this argument with a case study of the intersection of race, gender, and disability in genetic technologies as well …
Race, Gender, and the Political Conflation of Biological and Social Issues
In March of 1969, a Black man from Detroit named Abdul-Rasheed Karim arrived at Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan, after spending two years locked up in prison and a psychiatric ward for a fight that started when he was assaulted by three White boys, then brutalized by the police who responded. Mr. Karim, who suffered two broken ribs, a cracked tooth, and a deep skull laceration, made the mistake of hitting one of …
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century
The Paradox of Silence and Display: Sexual Violation of Enslaved Women and Contemporary Contradictions in Black Female Sexuality
In this essay, I seek to understand the paradox of silence and display that characterizes contemporary black female sexuality by examining its relationship to the sexual violation of enslaved women and girls. I argue that slavery’s identification of black female sexuality with licentiousness and black female acceptability with asexuality led to silencing the subjective sexual experiences of black women even while the media are full of images of b…
Privatization and punishment in the new age of reprogenetics
My scholarship on reproduction has made me acutely aware of the stratification of childbearing in the United States. In particular, the social value placed on a woman’s reproduction depends on her standing within the hierarchies of race, class, and other inequitable divisions. My research highlights the harsh dichotomy where policies punish poor black women for bearing children but advanced technologies assist mainly affluent white women not only…
Movement Intersectionality: The Case of Race, Gender, Disability, and Genetic Technologies
Intersectional analysis need not focus solely on differences within or between identity-based groups. Using intersectionality for cross movement mobilization reveals that, contrary to criticism for being divisive, attention to intersecting identities has the potential to create solidarity and cohesion. In this article, we elaborate this argument with a case study of the intersection of race, gender, and disability in genetic technologies as well …
Child protection as surveillance of African American families
The over-representation of black children in US out of home care results from racial bias in placement decisions and a political choice to address startling rates of child poverty by investigating parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. The impact of state disruption and supervision of African American families is intensified when it is concentrated in inner-city neighbourhoods – the system's ‘racial geography.’ A small case study o…
Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia
In the 1980s, Margaret Atwood, Gena Corea, and other feminists envisioned dystopias in which wealthy white women's reproduction was valued and privileged and women of color's reproduction was devalued and exploited. In subsequent decades, feminist scholars continued to criticize the stratification of reproduction by contrasting policies that penalize poor nonwhite women's childbearing, on the one hand, with the high‐tech fertility industry that p…
Complicating the triangle of race, class and state: The Insights of Black Feminists
This article complicates Wacquant's three-sided schema of race, class and state by adding a focus on gender, the experiences of black women, and a black feminist intersectional analysis. Welfare retrenchment in the USA relied on stereotypes of black women, especially the 'Welfare Queen', that were at once sexist and racist and implemented policies targeted specifically at them as the vilified beneficiaries of state largess. Attributing social ine…
Why Sociology Matters to Race and Biosocial Science
Recent developments in genetics and neuroscience have led to increasing interest in biosocial approaches to social life. While today's biosocial paradigms seek to examine more fully the inextricable relationships between the biological and the social, they have also renewed concerns about the scientific study of race. Our review describes the innovative ways sociologists have designed biosocial models to capture embodied impacts of racism, but al…
Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
The Biology of Racism
Race, Gender, and the Value of Mothers' Work
The Politics of Race and Science: Conservative Colorblindness and the Limits of Liberal Critique
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Race, Gender, and the Political Conflation of Biological and Social Issues
In March of 1969, a Black man from Detroit named Abdul-Rasheed Karim arrived at Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan, after spending two years locked up in prison and a psychiatric ward for a fight that started when he was assaulted by three White boys, then brutalized by the police who responded. Mr. Karim, who suffered two broken ribs, a cracked tooth, and a deep skull laceration, made the mistake of hitting one of …
Motherhood and Crime
Women's criminal conduct is of growing interest to both criminologists and legal scholars, while the subject of motherhood has recently been embraced by feminist legal theorists. There are important insights into the social construction of women's identities where these two topics meet. To find evidence of a special relationship between motherhood and crime, students need only open their first-year criminal law casebook to the omission liability …
Family Policing as Counterinsurgency and the Gathering Abolitionist Force
I spent the first year of the pandemic writing a book about abolishing the so-called child welfare system—what I call the family policing system. When I heard Dylan Rodríguez’s remarkable presidential address, I was already proofing the galleys of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.1 Every word Rodríguez spoke resonated with my thinking and activism around the need to dismant…
Learning about Race: The Lived Experiences of Interracially Married U.S.-born White and European Immigrant Women in the 1930s
How did intermarriage between African Americans and European immigrants influence how European immigrants learned about race in the United States? In this study, the authors compare the lived experiences of European-born and U.S.-born white women married to U.S.-born black men in Chicago in the late 1930s. The authors find that both groups of women characterized their lives as marked by material, social, and institutional costs, and they experien…
Law, Race, and Biotechnology: Toward a Biopolitical and Transdisciplinary Paradigm
Law influences and is shaped by the emergence of race-based biotechnologies in the genomic age. This review examines how law and social science scholars have approached the role of legal regulation, theories, and norms in governing the definition and utility of race in gene-based technological innovation. I structure my discussion around four main themes: the institutional regulation of biotechnology research, commercial incentives for race-speci…
The Relationship Between Intimate Partner Violence Policing and Family Surveillance in Large U.S. Counties
It Is Likely a White Gene”: Racial Voyeurism and Consumption of Black Mothers and “White” Babies in Online News Media
Focusing on media reports of black women who give birth to “white” children, this study asks: What can we learn about popular understandings of race from the fascination with births of “white” babies born to black mothers? What racial discourses guide how such stories are produced and consumed online? We conducted a critical discourse analysis of media coverage and online comments about two contemporary cases. We found that three race-based assum…
Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy
Race, Gender, and the Value of Mothers' Work
Social Justice, Procreative Liberty, and the Limits of Liberal Theory: "Robertson's "Children of Choice
Liberal theory is under fire from a number of fronts. Communitarians have rejected liberalism's focus on atomistic individuals and its bracketing of moral reasoning in favor of collective responsibility and deliberation about the common good.' Dominance and relational feminists have argued that liberalism reflects a masculine perspective that privileges patriarchal interests and exalts separateness over connection.2 Critical race scholars have cr…
Social Justice, Procreative Liberty, and the Limits of Liberal and the Limits of Liberal Theory: Robertson's Children of Choice
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Pitied but not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare
Motherhood and Crime
Women's criminal conduct is of growing interest to both criminologists and legal scholars, while the subject of motherhood has recently been embraced by feminist legal theorists. There are important insights into the social construction of women's identities where these two topics meet. To find evidence of a special relationship between motherhood and crime, students need only open their first-year criminal law casebook to the omission liability …
Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship
Racial politics has so dominated welfare reform efforts that it is commonplace to observe that "welfare" has become a code word for race.When Americans discuss welfare, many have in mind the mythical Black "welfare queen" or profligate teenager who becomes pregnant at taxpayers' expense to fatten her welfare check.'Although most welfare recipients are not Black, Black single mothers do rely on a disproportionate share of Aid to Families with Depe…
Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia
In the 1980s, Margaret Atwood, Gena Corea, and other feminists envisioned dystopias in which wealthy white women's reproduction was valued and privileged and women of color's reproduction was devalued and exploited. In subsequent decades, feminist scholars continued to criticize the stratification of reproduction by contrasting policies that penalize poor nonwhite women's childbearing, on the one hand, with the high‐tech fertility industry that p…
The Paradox of Silence and Display: Sexual Violation of Enslaved Women and Contemporary Contradictions in Black Female Sexuality
In this essay, I seek to understand the paradox of silence and display that characterizes contemporary black female sexuality by examining its relationship to the sexual violation of enslaved women and girls. I argue that slavery’s identification of black female sexuality with licentiousness and black female acceptability with asexuality led to silencing the subjective sexual experiences of black women even while the media are full of images of b…
Privatization and punishment in the new age of reprogenetics
My scholarship on reproduction has made me acutely aware of the stratification of childbearing in the United States. In particular, the social value placed on a woman’s reproduction depends on her standing within the hierarchies of race, class, and other inequitable divisions. My research highlights the harsh dichotomy where policies punish poor black women for bearing children but advanced technologies assist mainly affluent white women not only…
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century
Race, Gender, and the Political Conflation of Biological and Social Issues
In March of 1969, a Black man from Detroit named Abdul-Rasheed Karim arrived at Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan, after spending two years locked up in prison and a psychiatric ward for a fight that started when he was assaulted by three White boys, then brutalized by the police who responded. Mr. Karim, who suffered two broken ribs, a cracked tooth, and a deep skull laceration, made the mistake of hitting one of …
Law, Race, and Biotechnology: Toward a Biopolitical and Transdisciplinary Paradigm
Law influences and is shaped by the emergence of race-based biotechnologies in the genomic age. This review examines how law and social science scholars have approached the role of legal regulation, theories, and norms in governing the definition and utility of race in gene-based technological innovation. I structure my discussion around four main themes: the institutional regulation of biotechnology research, commercial incentives for race-speci…
Movement Intersectionality: The Case of Race, Gender, Disability, and Genetic Technologies
Intersectional analysis need not focus solely on differences within or between identity-based groups. Using intersectionality for cross movement mobilization reveals that, contrary to criticism for being divisive, attention to intersecting identities has the potential to create solidarity and cohesion. In this article, we elaborate this argument with a case study of the intersection of race, gender, and disability in genetic technologies as well …
Structural Competency Meets Structural Racism: Race, Politics, and the Structure of Medical Knowledge
Physicians in the United States have long been trained to assess race and ethnicity in the context of clinical interactions.Medical students learn to identify how their patients' "demographic and cultural factors" influence their health behaviors [1].Interns and residents receive "cultural competency" training to help them communicate with persons of differing "ethnic" backgrounds [2].And clinicians are taught to observe the races of their patien…
Child protection as surveillance of African American families
The over-representation of black children in US out of home care results from racial bias in placement decisions and a political choice to address startling rates of child poverty by investigating parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. The impact of state disruption and supervision of African American families is intensified when it is concentrated in inner-city neighbourhoods – the system's ‘racial geography.’ A small case study o…
Complicating the triangle of race, class and state: The Insights of Black Feminists
This article complicates Wacquant's three-sided schema of race, class and state by adding a focus on gender, the experiences of black women, and a black feminist intersectional analysis. Welfare retrenchment in the USA relied on stereotypes of black women, especially the 'Welfare Queen', that were at once sexist and racist and implemented policies targeted specifically at them as the vilified beneficiaries of state largess. Attributing social ine…
Can Research on the Genetics of Intelligence Be “Socially Neutral”
The history of research on the genetics of intelligence is fraught with social bias. During the eugenics era, the hereditary theory of intelligence justified policies that encouraged the proliferation of favored races and coercively stemmed procreation by disfavored ones. In the 1970s, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen argued that black students’ innate cognitive inferiority limited the efficacy of federal education programs. The 1994 controver…
Race, Care Work, and the Private Law of Inheritance
In Someday All This Will Be Yours , Hendrik Hartog (2012) examines how private inheritance law structured the strategies people used at the turn of the twentieth century to induce relatives to care for them as they aged. Reading it as a book about social inequality and the family reveals how wealth, gender, and race not only worked to deny claims of marginalized caregivers but also to hide the way these social hierarchies affect family life. Alth…
The Politics of Race and Science: Conservative Colorblindness and the Limits of Liberal Critique
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Sleep disparity, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic position
Taking race out of human genetics
Engaging a century-long debate about the role of race in science
Learning about Race: The Lived Experiences of Interracially Married U.S.-born White and European Immigrant Women in the 1930s
How did intermarriage between African Americans and European immigrants influence how European immigrants learned about race in the United States? In this study, the authors compare the lived experiences of European-born and U.S.-born white women married to U.S.-born black men in Chicago in the late 1930s. The authors find that both groups of women characterized their lives as marked by material, social, and institutional costs, and they experien…
It Is Likely a White Gene”: Racial Voyeurism and Consumption of Black Mothers and “White” Babies in Online News Media
Focusing on media reports of black women who give birth to “white” children, this study asks: What can we learn about popular understandings of race from the fascination with births of “white” babies born to black mothers? What racial discourses guide how such stories are produced and consumed online? We conducted a critical discourse analysis of media coverage and online comments about two contemporary cases. We found that three race-based assum…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Race, Genetics, and Society (10 works) · Criminology (8 works)