Part 2: Family Policing and the Journey to Reproductive Justice
EPISODE 6

Audio Nuggets is proud to announce that Professor Dorothy Roberts has joined us back in the cypher for Part 2: Family Policing and the Journey to Reproductive Justice. Professor Roberts is a legendary racial and family justice scholar and activist, and it is Audio Nugget’s distinct honor to share the microphone and space with her. In this conversation, MFG and Professor Roberts dive into the post-Roe era, and how the historical legacy of Black women and families have been the centrality of her work for the past 25 years. Killing the Black Body, her authored chapter, Race, in The 1619 Project, and her newest book Torn Apart illustrate for us that criminalizing pregnancy in Black women, the carceral system, and family policing are all interconnected, anti-Black ideologies. It is inherent in this ideology that Black women transfer depravity to their wombs, and with this ideology also comes the vilification of Black mothers in the family policing system.
Professor Roberts leaves us with even more nuggets to noodle on, and we are incredibly grateful to uplift her work, and stand committed to continue to join her in the movement for justice and liberation for Black families.
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. An internationally acclaimed scholar, activist, and social critic, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her major books include 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). Her newest book was released in April 2022, Torn Apart. (Basic Books, 2022). She is 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.
“The powerful Western image of childhood innocence does not seem to benefit Black children. Black children are born guilty.”
Instagram: dorothyeroberts
Twitter: @DorothyERoberts
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