Dorothy Roberts

In her piece "Racism and the Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood," Roberts offers insight into the intersecting roles of racism and patriarchy and their deep effects on motherhood for black women in society. Roberts opens the article, broadly discussing an explanation of how women differ in their gendered experiences based on their race, as the intersectional oppression that black women face varies than their white counterparts. She then delves into the impact of racism and the patriarchy, their complex relationship to each other, and argues that racism and patriarchy cannot be separated in their impact on the lives of black women, specifically in regards to how they feel about motherhood and how society perceives black mothers. She explains that there are shared experiences amongst all mothers, but that raising black children in a racist, patriarchal society poses its own pain and struggle. Roberts argues that the social construction of motherhood, which was made by those in power, leads to the stigmatization of mothers who do not fit this mold. Roberts article goes on to outline a brief history of black mothers experience dating back to slavery, through the 19th-century "Cult of Domesticity", and into modern-day discourse surrounding poverty. Roberts concludes with a call to understand the interplay of racism, sexism, patriarchy, and how ending racism is a necessary step in the feminist fight to end sexism.

Roberts gives a Ted X talk titled "The Problem with Race Based Medicine" which was posted online on February 2016. In this TedX talk Roberts addresses the practice of race based medicine and finds it hurtful to patients. Roberts uses her own observations and talks with medical professionals to conclude that race is used to prescribe, treat, and diagnose patients. The use of race in the medical field is used as a shortcut and as a result can become a distraction by relying on a social construction in order to make biological determinant. Roberts gives an example of a medical test, GFR (glomerular filtration rate), that takes race into account when testing patients. Another problem that Roberts brings up with race medicine is that it relies on bias and stereotypes that can negatively affect patients and cites the example of the stereotype that people of color can handle more pain. This negative stereotype that people of color can handle more pain can lead to patients not receiving the medication they need. Roberts says that race medicine can contribute to social inequality by continuing the racial discrimination.

At the beginning of the book, Roberts reviews the history of the invention of race. She argues that race is not just a social construct, it is also politically charged and has been disguised as a biological category to justify racial injustice. Roberts writes, “the problem with this interpretation of race as a social construction is that it ignores its political – and not biological – origin. The very step of creating race, dividing human beings into these categories is a political practice”. She wants to move beyond race just being a social construction and begins her analysis by explaining the political origins of race and how it was utilized for economic means. The purpose of recounting the history is to emphasize that racial categories are not natural, but that they were created.

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

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 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 is 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. She holds appointments there in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. Her books include 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 six co-edited works on constitutional law and gender. She has also published over 80 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.

Her article, "Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy" (Harvard Law Review, 1991), has been widely cited. Fatal Invention (The New Press, 2011) argues that America is once again on the brink of classifying population by race.

Dorothy E. Roberts (born March 8, 1956 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her concerns include changing thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare and bioethics.