Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy E. Roberts (born March 8, 1956) is an American sociologist, law professor, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her focuses include reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She has published over 80 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review.

Background
Roberts was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a white father and Jamaican-born mother, who raised her in a politically active household in Hyde Park. Her father was an anthropologist, and her mother was his research assistant. Roberts' parents met at the University of Chicago, where her father was her mother's professor in her PhD program. (She left without finishing her degree to care for their children).

Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Yale University and her Juris Doctor 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 has received awards from the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Roberts met her husband, Coltrane Chimurenga (born Randolph Simms) when they were both students at Harvard. Chimurenga was active in the Pan-Africa movement and in socialist causes. They had two sons, Amilcar and Camillo Chimurenga. Coltrane Chimurenga passed away in 2009.

Author
Roberts has published more than 50 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 Books, 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 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.

Roberts has received much praise for her work from notable sources such Publishers Weekly and Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union.

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.

In 2019, Roberts gave the Betsy Wood Knapp '64 Lecture at Wellesley College. Her topic for this lecture was "The Problem with Race-Based Medicine." In the lecture, Roberts asserts that race, in medicine, is used as a proxy for the more complex aspects of health and disease that should require further investigation. Roberts notes that this topic is especially relevant in the age of genomic science where the desire is to reduce all aspects of disease and infection to a genetic origin. According to Roberts, this is an inaccurate assumption and can powerfully impact the medical treatment of women, children, and African-Americans.

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

Roberts has asserted that women should be able to choose if they bear a child and how they raise it. However, she notes that these decisions are often dependent on the social conditions in which women live, any discrimination they face, and whether they value the idea of childbearing. Roberts also concludes that this choice, along with the choice to have a relationship with the child, must be respected by the state and by society, which does not happen to Black women who are often subject to government interference during their parenthood. In her views on reproductive justice, Roberts includes issues of social justice as well in order to ensure that women and men are able to make independent, informed reproductive decisions when it comes to whether or not to have children and their relationships with their children.

Roberts has been a vocal critic of Israel. Following Oct. 7, 2023, Roberts signed on to a letter consisting of sociologists who accused Israel of attempting to commit "genocide and ethnic cleansing" against the people of Gaza and called Israel an "apartheid regime."

Works
Roberts has explored topics such as race, reproduction, and motherhood in her scholarship, specifically focusing on the experiences of Black women.

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century
Roberts explores the dangers of the continued research of race in the science and medical fields in her book Fatal Invention. She asserts that genomic science and biotechnology is reinforcing the concept of race as a biological category. She cautions that the continued research of race at a molecular level is used to hide racism in the United States and continues a racial division by justifying racial differences.

Sex Power & Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond
Roberts, with Rhoda Reddock, Sandra Reid, and Dianna Douglass, study the outbreak of HIV in the Caribbean in Sex, Power, And Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond. The authors research how gender, norms, race, and power affect HIV treatment, polices, and stigma. The authors argue that to effectively end the HIV epidemic, it must be viewed through an intersectional lens.

Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
Roberts outlines the American foster care system's persecution of low-wealth Black families. Roberts details how thousands of children annually are removed from their parents' homes, often due to the endemic effects of poverty that impact women and children more than any other group in the United States. Roberts not only describes the racial differences in foster care, but she also highlights the discrimination that comes with high concentration of state intervention in predominantly Black neighborhoods, the struggle of low-wealth families in meeting state standards for regaining custody of their children, and the relationship between state supervision and systemic racial inequality.

Killing the Black Body
Roberts wrote Killing the Black Body on history of punitive policies directed towards African American women, from slavery to modern day, concluding that white supremacy views Black women's reproductive capabilities as a threat. Dorothy says,” I want this book to convince readers that reproduction is an important topic and that it is especially important to Black people.”

Awards and honors

 * 1998 recipient of the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America
 * 2015 recipient of the Solomon Carter Fuller Award
 * Northwestern University School of Law's Kirkland & Ellis Professor
 * Faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research
 * Fellow at Harvard University's Program in Ethics
 * Fellow at Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
 * Chair of the board of directors of the Black Women's Health Imperative
 * Member of the board of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
 * 2022 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences