Dorothy Roberts: MacArthur Fellow on Child Welfare and Racial Inequality PDF

Two Harvard alumnae are among the 2024 MacArthur Fellows announced today. Dorothy Roberts, J.D. '80, is a legal scholar and public policy researcher who studies racial inequality in health and social service systems. A faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania since 2012, she holds named prof...

Two Harvard alumnae are among the 2024 MacArthur Fellows announced today. Dorothy Roberts, J.D. '80, is a legal scholar and public policy researcher who studies racial inequality in health and social service systems. A faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania since 2012, she holds named professorships in the law school and the department of sociology, with a joint appointment in Africana studies. Roberts's work has focused in particular on reproductive freedom and black women's reproductive rights, and on the child welfare system's treatment of families of color. In *Killing the* *Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty* (1997), she analyzed the long struggle over control of black women's childbearing, from forced procreation during slavery to forced sterilization to contemporary welfare reform. Later, in *Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare* (2001), and her most recent book, *Torn Apart:* *How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families---and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World* (2022), Roberts examined how race and class disproportionately lead to state intervention in child welfare cases. She also described the historical, cultural, and political forces driving this imbalance, creating stereotypes and stigmas about black families and blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems with long roots in history. She calls for dismantling the current child welfare system, which she sees as irredeemable, and building a new one from the ground up.