Dorothy E. Roberts

A powerful, thought-provoking indictment of America's continuing assault on the reproductive rights of black women ranges from the era of slavery to the welfare reform acts of the 1990s that penalize women on welfare for having babies. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Killing the Black Body

Explores the ways science, politics, and large corporations affect race in the twenty-first century, discussing the efforts and results of the Human Genome Project, and describing how technology-driven science researchers are developing a genetic definition of race.

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

Fatal Invention

An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change 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.

How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

Torn Apart

Killing the Black Body remains a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women. It is as crucial as ever, even two decades after its original publication. “Monumental. . . . An important contribution to the literature of civil rights, reproductive issues, racism and feminism.” —San Francisco Chronicle 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. “Compelling. . . . Deftly shows how distorted and racist constructions of black motherhood have affected politics, law, and policy in the United States.” —Ms.

Shattered Bonds is a stirring account of a worsening American social crisis--the disproportionate representation of black children in the U.S. foster care system and its effects on black communities and the country as a whole. Tying the origins and impact of this disparity to racial injustice, Dorothy Roberts contends that child-welfare policy reflects a political choice to address startling rates of black child poverty by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. Using conversations with mothers battling the Chicago child-welfare system for custody of their children, along with national data, Roberts levels a powerful indictment of racial disparities in foster care and tells a moving story of the women and children who earn our respect in their fight to keep their families intact.

The Color Of Child Welfare

Shattered Bonds

An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change 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.

How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

In the Caribbean sexuality has never been a topic for public discussion. Previously relegated to theatrical innuendo, musical lyrics and other popular forms of cultural expression, the HIV and AIDS pandemic have now thrown this taboo subject centrestage. The discourse on gender and sexuality is however, still being shaped and this book sets the platform for that discussion. Proceeding from a premise that gender influences sexuality and sexual behaviour, Sex, Power and Taboo provides an interdisciplinary approach to the exploration of how gender affects HIV risk and prevention. The paradigm of HIV and AIDS research is shifted by illuminating the influence of gender ideologies, norms and power relationships on sexuality, and the impact of gender to HIV risk and prevention within and outside of the Caribbean. The contributors are Caribbean and international, and discuss gender and sexuality for the academic, for those in the public health service as well as social policymakers. Sex, Power and Taboo contributes to the research-based interventions to aid the prevention of HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases and will assist in the design, implementation and evaluation of programmes addressing the AIDS epidemic.

Dorothy E. Roberts

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