Dorothy Roberts > Quotes

“Blaming Black mothers, then, is a way of subjugating the Black race as a whole. At the same time, devaluing motherhood is particularly damaging to Black women.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother,”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“The theme of willful self-creation is especially strong in the writings of Black women.80 The fiction of authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker revolves around Black female characters who learn to invent themselves after breaking out of the confines of racist and sexist expectations. Black women’s autobiographical accounts also describe the process of self-creation, exemplified by Patricia Williams’s statement, “I am brown by my own invention.… One day I will give birth to myself, lonely but possessed.”81”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Although these attitudes are not universally held, they influence the way many Americans think about reproduction. Myths are more than made-up stories. They are also firmly held beliefs that represent and attempt to explain what we perceive to be the truth. They can become more credible than reality, holding fast even in the face of airtight statistics and rational argument to the contrary.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Reviewing the history of official racial classifications reminds us that these categories are not natural—and neither are the institutional inequities that race undergirds.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“In the 1950s, Dr. Dorothy Brown, the first Black female general surgeon in the United States and a Tennessee state representative, became the first state legislator to introduce a bill to legalize abortion.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Race persists because it continues to be politically useful.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“What if I were born in Brazil? Brazilian society recognizes an even wider range of identities for people who are neither white (branco) nor black (preto). In the 1950s, anthropologist Harry Hutchinson found eight in-between categories in the community of Reconcavo, located in northeastern Brazil, ranging from Cabo verde (“lighter than the preto but still quite dark, but with straight hair, thin lips, and narrow, straight nose”) to Moreno (“light skin with straight hair, but not viewed as white”).54 I probably would have been classified as pardo, designating mulattoes who are the children of the union of pretos and brancos. Of course, my genetic makeup remains the same no matter where I was born. But my race, along with all the privileges and disadvantages that go with it, differs depending on which country I am born in or travel to, because race is a political category that is defined according to invented rules.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Three central themes, then, run through the chapters of this book. The first is that regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions had been a central aspect of racial oppression in America.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“charts in vivid detail precisely how the shape of her life and the choices she makes are defined by her reduction to a sexual object, an object to be raped, bred, or abused.”2”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“He agreed that BiDil should be approved without regard to race, noting that American cardiologists “jumped on the statin drugs” once the Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study showed they were effective. “Would you restrict the results of the Scandinavian trial to Scandinavian people?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”17 Dr. Curry’s colleague Charles Rotimi, from Howard University’s National Human Genome Center, echoed this position. Rotimi warned that upholding an unproven biological explanation for health disparities would steer biomedical research in a dangerous direction. “It would be tragic not to approve [BiDil],” Rotimi said, “and it would be even more tragic just to approve it for African Americans.” 18”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“A 2003 study published in Genetics in Medicine shows that this skepticism about race-specific drugs is not fictional; it is widespread in the black community.77 Participants in an anonymous survey and two focus groups that oversampled for minority groups reported that they would be highly suspicious of race-labeled drugs. Nearly half said they would be very suspicious of their safety, and 40 percent said they would be very suspicious of their efficacy. In fact, 13 percent of African Americans said they would choose a drug labeled for whites over one designated for blacks. At a conference on BiDil, an elderly black woman in the audience stood up and said, “If I were sick and somebody told me that they had a drug just for black people to help me, I’d say to them: give me what the white people are taking.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Even after Emancipation, political and economic conditions forced many Black mothers to earn a living outside the home.31 At the turn of the century nearly all Black women worked long days as sharecroppers, laundresses, or domestic servants in white people’s homes.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“The state has the authority to take citizens’ private property—in this case, their genetic information—without due process. Those are the features of a totalitarian state, not a liberal democracy. Jim”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“This construct of the licentious temptress served to justify white men’s sexual abuse of Black women. The stereotype of Black women as sexually promiscuous also defined them as bad mothers. The”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Second, the control of Black women’s reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered “prime stock” to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“that reproductive liberty is essential to women’s political and social citizenship.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“scientists are using advanced genomic theories and technologies to create a new racial science that claims to divide the human species into natural groups without the taint of racism.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“The story of control of Black reproduction begins with the experiences of slave women like Rose Williams. Black procreation helped to sustain slavery, giving slave masters an economic incentive to govern Black women’s reproductive lives.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Neglect is usually better classified as child maltreatment defined by poverty rather than maltreatment caused by poverty. The main reason child protection services deal primarily with poor families is because of the way child maltreatment is defined. The child welfare system is designed to detect and punish neglect on the part of poor parents and to ignore most middle-class and wealthy parents’ failings. Although the meaning of child maltreatment shifted from a social to a medical model, it retained its focus on poor families. The system continues to concentrate on the effects of childhood poverty, but it treats the damage as a symptom of parental rather than societal deficits.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color Of Child Welfare

“In 1958, Representative David H. Glass introduced a bill in the Mississippi Legislature entitled “An Act to Discourage Immorality of Unmarried Females by Providing for Sterilization of the Unwed Mother under Conditions of this Act,” which provided for the chancery court to order the sterilization of single mothers, most of whom were Black. The bill passed the House by a vote of 72 to 37, but was ddropped in the Senate after national protest, which included a pamplet entitled Genocide in Mississippi circulated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“...Louisiana state representative and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke proposed paying women on welfare $100 a year to use [Norplant]. Duke's bill was an attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to enact "concrete proposals to reduce the illegitimate birthrate and break the cycle of poverty that truly enslaves and harms the black race.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Men convicted of attempted rape or whom hospital authorities considered unruly were castrated to make them “easier to handle.” Because they were not considered intelligent enough, none of the patients was asked for consent.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“Dr. Knox Todd began documenting how patients’ race affects the treatment of pain when he was a doctor in the UCLA Emergency Center in the 1990s.46 He and colleagues examined the way doctors treated 139 white and Latino patients coming to the emergency room over a two-year period with a single injury—fractures of a long bone in either the arm or leg. Because this type of fracture is extremely painful, there is no medical reason to distinguish between the two groups of patients. Yet the researchers discovered that Latinos were twice as likely as whites to receive no pain medication while in the emergency room.47 Although it’s possible that the Latino patients complained less of pain, the doctors should have been aware of the high degree of pain they suffered, given the nature of their injuries. When Todd moved to Emory University School of Medicine, he led an Atlanta-based study that confirmed his finding in Los Angeles. This time his research team analyzed medical charts of 217 patients who were treated for long-bone fractures at an inner-city emergency room that served both black and white patients. In a 2000 article in Annals of Emergency Medicine, Todd reported that 43 percent of blacks, but only 26 percent of whites, received no pain medication. In this study, Todd took the additional step of documenting whether or not the patients expressed pain to their doctors. By carefully looking at notations in the medical files, he found that black patients were about as likely as whites to complain of pain. Black patients thus received pain medication half as often as whites because doctors did not order it for them, not because blacks do not feel pain or do not want pain relief.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“The Genetics of Asthma lab is one of countless research projects at universities and biotech firms around the country hunting for the genes that are responsible for health disparities in America. They are supplementing a large body of published studies that claim to show that racial gaps in disease prevalence or mortality are caused by genetic differences. In addition to asthma, disparities in infant mortality, diabetes, cancer, and hypertension have all been attributed in the scientific literature to genetic vulnerability that varies according to race. Most of these studies never even examined the genotypes of research subjects, as Burchard’s lab does; they just infer a genetic source of racial differences when they fail to find another explanation. As interest in health disparities converges with the genomic science of race, a new brand of racial stereotyping is gaining hold in biomedical research.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“The very first U.S. census began on August 2, 1790, a year after the inauguration of President George Washington. Census takers in 1790 counted the number of persons in each household according to the following categories: free white males sixteen years and older, free white males under sixteen years, free white females, all other free persons, and slaves. Since then, every U.S. census has sorted people by race—but the racial groupings have changed twenty-four times over the last two hundred years. In the second census, taken in 1800, Indians were specified as a separate category of free persons. Chinese were added to the 1870 census. In 1920, race had become even more complicated. That census included ten racial categories: white, black, mulatto, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, Korean, and other. By the end of the twentieth century, the racial groupings were consolidated into five main choices: American Indian or Alaska native, Asian, black or African American, native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

“For three centuries, Black mothers have been thought to pass down to their offspring the traits that marked them as inferior to any white person. Along with this biological impairment, it is believed that Black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to their children that dooms each succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair. A persistent objective of American social policy has been to monitor and restrain this corrupting tendency of Black motherhood. Regulating”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty