Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy Roberts
Born	Dorothy E. Roberts (1956-03-08) March 8, 1956 Chicago, Illinois

Dorothy E. Roberts (born March 8, 1956 in Chicago, Illinois) is an internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare and bioethics.

Background

Professor Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology.

Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning books ''Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty'' (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) where she describes the use of Norplant and other contraceptives in population control and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Civitas, 2002), as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has also published more than eighty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review. Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, was published by the New Press in July 2011.

Professor Roberts has been a professor at Rutgers and Northwestern University, 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 panel of five national experts 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 recently received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the 2010 Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship.

Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and her Doctor of Jurisprudence from Harvard Law School.

From Norplant to the Contraceptive Vaccine, The New Frontier of Population Control

In Chapter 3 of Roberts' book Killing the Black Body Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty she describes how racial politics creates a challenge to reproductive rights and does not create reproductive freedom for everyone. Using the example of Norplant, Roberts shows the racial controversy linked to early experimentation of Norplant on women of non-white ethnicities. Norplant is made up of six silicone capsules that are filled with levonrgestral, a synthetic hormone. This gets implanted under the skin of a woman’s upper arm. Although the procedure takes ten to fifteen minutes, the longevity of the effects last up to five years in which low doses of hormones are released into the bloodstream to suppress ovulation and thickening the cervical mucus to prevent the sperm from contact with the egg. Norplant was considered the most convenient and successful form of contraceptive because it didn’t require cooperation from a woman’s partner, didn’t interrupt the frequency in which women had sex, and women didn’t have to remember to take it daily.

Norplant is now distributed in the United States through Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories and legislation is now using it as a means of population control. Poor Black women are targeted and persuaded with welfare financial incentives to Norplant because they are deemed as incapable of supporting their children. It was made to be available to women through Medicaid although the cost was $365 for the capsules and $150-$500 for the implantation. The government mandated women to be notified about the accessibility of Norplant. Many states and legislatures used this new contraceptive to propose curbing the birthrate of poor black women. Some created measures to try and implant poor women or women on welfare with Norplant. Others even considered making it mandatory for women on welfare to reduce the number of poor children being supported by the government. "Maryland governor William Schaefer suggested that the state should consider making Norplant mandatory for women on welfare. Similarly, bills introduced in Mississippi and South Carolina would require women who already have children to get Norplant inserted as a condition for receiving future benefits."

The proponents to Norplant also saw it as a solution to teenage pregnancy. Using Norplant to prevent pregnancy and young teenage mothers, it would allow these girls to pursue careers and decrease the number of children dependent on government aid. Teenage pregnancy is deemed as a Black cultural trait even though the rate of births out of wedlock for whites has nearly doubled since 1980 compared to the birth rate of Blacks who has risen only 7 percent. Although the use of Norplant is best suitable for teenagers and decreases the likelihood of pregnancies, Roberts raises the question of does Norplant solve the social issue of teenage pregnancy? Norplant does not prevent teenage girls from sexual assault or STD prevention. Roberts argues that, “distributing long-acting contraceptives to young girls unfairly shifts the spotlight away from the adult men who are largely responsible for the problem.” Also, teenage girls who are grew up in poor environments are not given enough of an incentive to avoid teenage pregnancy.

Although Norplant helped reduce teen pregnancy within a period of 5 years, by being marketed to poor black communities, Norplant created a racial segregation. Norplant is mostly distributed in inner-cities where the population is dominated by Blacks.Robert’s says that "proposals designed to reduce the number of children born to poor parents are an attempt to fend off this threat to white people's welfare, a threat that is specifically Black."(112) This shows the privilege and inequality between race and class ranking in the society. This refers to the hierarchy of gender. Dorothy Roberts points out that welfare reform is a racial issue that targets Black people especially single Black mothers because they are blamed for raising children who become delinquents and dependent on welfare. The point she makes is that “many whites hold deeply embedded beliefs about the dangers of Black reproduction that infect any scheme to solve social problems through birth control; therefore, race and class politics work together to propel coercive birth control policies.” Roberts argues that, “because class distinctions are racialized, race and class are inextricably linked in the development of welfare policy.” Therefore, because most Blacks are poor and are disproportionately reliant on welfare, the idea of welfare becomes associated with Black people and poor Black women are labeled as the “welfare queen”. The prevailing myth that describes poor Black mothers as devious in having more children in order to receive a heftier monthly paycheck from the government supports America’s persistent belief that these mothers will pass on their lazy mindset to their children. As a result, Black children will grow up to be criminals, lazy, and dependent on welfare as well. These are all examples of how Norplant was used as a solution to a monocausal problem instead of seeing race, gender inequalities, and teenage mothers as multi-causal issues.

Author/Lawyer

Roberts has published more than fifty articles and essays in books, scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, 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, 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." 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 influential article, "Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy" (Harvard Law Review, 1991), has been widely cited and is included in a number of anthologies. Her most recent book is Fatal Invention (The New Press, 2011), which argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race, proving that race has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science.

She was also a blogger at blackprof.com.

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.

Political views

Professor Roberts has drawn parallels between what she sees as current U.S. "imperialism" and white supremacy, asserting U.S. torture of terrorist suspects is a tool to maintain supremacy just as violence has been used to maintain white supremacy, and comparing the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison to racist lynchings of blacks.

Resources

• National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
• Dorothy Roberts: profile
• IPR People: Dorothy Roberts
• Dorothy Roberts: Race, Class, and Care
• Northwestern News: Child Welfare Discourse Fails to Factor in Racial Bias