Race, Family Policing, & Medicine with Dorothy Roberts

On today’s episode, Dorothy Roberts joins me and UVA Law 3Ls Darius Adel and Julia D'Rozario to discuss her work on race-based medicine and the child welfare system. Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. Professor Roberts’ work focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics. Her major books include Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is also the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Harvard Program on Ethics & the Professions, and Stanford Center for the Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. Recent recognitions of her scholarship and public service include 2019 Rutgers University- Newark Honorary Doctor of Laws degree, 2017 election to the National Academy of Medicine, 2016 Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award, 2016 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and the 2015 American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.

Show notes:

Dorothy Roberts Full Bio, University of Pennsylvania https://www.law.upenn.edu/faculty/roberts1

Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022)

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011)

Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002)

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997).