Dorothy Roberts

ABOUT NEW BOOK, TORN APART

Most of us who have never encountered the child welfare system assume it does what the name implies: protects children. But after twenty-five years of research, service, and advocacy, Professor Dorothy Roberts exposes the reality of the system’s destructive regulation of Black families—and sets us on a new path, away from surveillance, punishment, and coercion, toward a reimagined meaning of safety that centers the needs of children and their families.

In TORN APART: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World we meet Black mothers like Vanessa, a 25-year-old nursing student whose family trip to the local park led to a brutal assault by police officers in her home, followed by months of state intrusion that left her children traumatized and her career at risk. Or Angeline, whose desperate call to a domestic violence hotline triggered a multi- year legal battle to be reunited with her son, after he was forced into foster care. Roberts shows that these are not isolated incidents, but the system working as designed: to control Black communities and criminalize Black children. As the nation grapples with police violence and mass incarceration, TORN APART explains why a focus on what she calls “family policing” must be part of the growing abolitionist movement.

If we really want to protect children, Roberts argues, we should replace the current system, steeped in foundational racism, with a radical new vision that actually meets their needs. We can start by diverting the billions of taxpayer dollars currently spent on investigating, regulating, and separating families toward providing concrete resources directly to family caregivers, building voluntary community-based supports for families, and engaging in transformative justice practices. Roberts points to grass-roots campaigns that are pushing for legislation that guarantees parents Miranda rights and legal representation, ends mandatory and anonymous reporting, and repeals the federal timeline for termination of parental rights.

Written with the passion of an activist at the forefront of an emerging movement, backed by the research of a top scholar in her field, TORN APART will forever change the way we think about “child welfare” in this country.

AVAILABLE TALKS

Ending the Legacy of Racism in Medicine

False biological concepts of race, structural racism, and conscious or unconscious racial bias all contribute to racial inequities in health. The medical profession has long defined disease and treated patients according to race. But race-based medicine can be traced back to false assumptions about innate biological differences and to excuses for slavery and medical exploitation. Today, race-based medicine diverts attention and resources from the social determinants that cause appalling racial gaps in health. By understanding how racism has helped to structure medical knowledge, practice, and policies, we can end this backward legacy and collectively build a more equitable and heathier society.

Torn Apart: Ending the Legacy of Racism in Child Welfare

Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Dorothy Roberts uncovers in her talk Torn Apart, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment. The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.

Killing the Black Body

Dorothy Roberts’ seminal book Killing the Black Body made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race when it was written in 1997 amid a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies—and remains a leading text in today’s reproductive justice movement. Killing the Black Body exposes America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas.