Dorothy Roberts
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“Dorothy Roberts was one of the best speakers we have ever worked with - warm, engaging, and provocative. We are thrilled to offer her presentation to our audience.”
Speech topics
The Urgency of Reproductive Justice After Dobbs
Since the 1980s, the longstanding devaluation of Black women’s childbearing has supported an expanded criminalization of pregnancy that encompasses fetal protection laws, abortion restrictions, and family policing. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health spotlights the entanglement of these forms of reproductive violence, which Roe v. Wade and the mainstream reproductive rights movement largely ignored. Especially telling is how the Dobbs Court’s recommendation of adoption as a remedy for abortion paints a false picture of both reproductive servitude’s history and the child welfare system’s current operation. Black feminists have developed a reproductive justice framework that includes the human right not to have a child, to have a child, and to raise children in safe, supportive, and sustainable communities—a framework made more urgent than ever by Dobbs.
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Is It Time To Stop Using Race In Medical Research?
Genetics researchers often discover certain snips and pieces of the human genome that are important for health and development, such as the genetic mutations that cause cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia. And scientists noticed that genetic variants are more common in some races, which makes it seem like race is important in genetics research.
Books by Dorothy Roberts
“The Mixed Marriage Project A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family” (2026)
The Mixed Marriage Project A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family
“Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World” (2023)
Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment. The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing, Torn Apart argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.
“Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century” (2012)
Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept―revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases―continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and “provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics that “is consistently lucid . . . alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
“Shattered Bonds: The Color Of Child Welfare” (2002)
The story of foster care in the United States is the story of the failure of the social safety net to aid poor, largely black, parents in their attempt to make a home for their children. Shattered Bonds tells this story as no other book has before -- from the perspective of a prominent black, female legal theoretician. The current state of the child-welfare system in America is a well-known tragedy. Thousands of children every year are removed from their parents' homes, often for little reason other than the endemic poverty that afflicts women and children more than any other group in the United States. Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed legal scholar and social critic, reveals the racial politics of child welfare in America through extensive legal research and original interviews with Chicago families in the foster care system. She describes the racial imbalance in foster care, the concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, the alarming percentages of children in substitute care, the difficulty that poor and black families have in meeting state's standards for regaining custody of children placed in foster care, and the relationship between state supervision of families and continuing racial inequality.
“Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty” (1998)
In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas.
At a glanceDorothy Roberts
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