Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy E. Roberts 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. She is a 2024 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius Grant".

Background

Roberts was born in 1956 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..
Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Yale University in 1977, where she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She then attended Harvard Law School, receiving her Juris Doctor in 1980. Roberts met her former husband, Coltrane Chimurenga when they were both students at Harvard. They had two sons, Amilcar and Camillo, before Chimurenga dying in 2009. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Constance Baker Motley in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Professional career

Lecturer and professor

From 1998 to 1994, Roberts was an associate professor of law at Rutgers University School of Law-Newark, and from 1994 to 1998, she was a professor of law and was elected twice to serve as the faculty graduation speaker in both 1992 and 1996.
She was also a visiting associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1994, and a fellow at the Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions from 1994 to 1995, as well as a visiting professor at the Northwestern University School of Law in 1997.
In 1998, she joined the faculty of Northwestern University School of Law with a joint appointment as a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She was voted outstanding first-year course professor by the class of 2000 then being named the Kirkland & Ellis Professor in 2002.
While faculty at Northwestern, Roberts was visiting professor at Stanford Law School in 1998 as a Fulbright Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies where she travel to Trinidad & Tobago from 2002 to 2003 to conduct research.
She also was appointed the Bacon-Kilkenny Distinguished Visiting professor at the Fordham University School of Law in 2006.
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.
Roberts later joined as faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where she remains a professor at the law school and sociology department and is the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society. Her scholarship focuses on race, gender, bioethics, and the intersection of law and social justice, particularly concerning reproductive rights, child welfare, and systemic inequalities in health care.

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 explored topics such as race, reproduction, and motherhood in her scholarship, specifically focusing on the experiences of Black women.
Her article, "Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy", has been widely cited. Invention 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 as Publishers Weekly and Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union.

Leadership roles

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. She has received awards from the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Views

State violence, white supremacy, and imperialism

Roberts has drawn parallels between what she sees as current U.S. imperialism and white supremacy. She has drawn parallels between U.S. imperialism and white supremacy, arguing that state violence—whether through mass incarceration, family separation, or reproductive control—has historically been used to uphold racial hierarchies. 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. She has also compared the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison to racist lynchings of Black Americans, emphasizing the ways in which state-sanctioned violence perpetuates systemic oppression.

Criminalization of black families and communities

Roberts has asserted that women should be able to choose if they bear a child and how they raise it, advocating for reproductive justice. 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, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, 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 contends that the same racial ideologies that justify punitive welfare policies and the over-policing of Black communities also shape disparities in healthcare and family regulation. She critiques policies that criminalize Black mothers, from welfare reform to child protection services, arguing that these systems disproportionately surveil and penalize Black families rather than offering support. She frames the foster care and criminal justice systems as interconnected institutions that work to control and separate Black families.

Race, medicine, and bioethics

Roberts has also been a strong critic of the intersection of race and medical science, particularly the ways in which genetic research, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical industries reinforce the false notion of race as a biological category. In Fatal Invention, she warns that race-based medical research and genetic testing perpetuate racial myths under the guise of scientific objectivity. She argues that health disparities stem from social inequalities rather than inherent genetic differences, and that medical racism continues to shape race-specific treatments and policies, reinforcing existing hierarchies rather than addressing structural inequities in healthcare.

Political advocacy

Roberts has been a vocal critic of global injustices, often drawing connections between racial oppression in the U.S. and state violence in international contexts. Following Oct. 7, 2023, Roberts signed a letter alongside other sociologists condemning Israel's actions in Gaza. The letter accused Israel of engaging in "genocide and ethnic cleansing" and labeled it an "apartheid regime."

Academic contributions

Roberts work explores the intersections of race, gender, and the law, with a particular focus on reproductive justice, bioethics, and the carceral state. She has authored four influential books that critically examine the impacts of race on reproductive rights, family regulation, and medical ethics, shaping discourse in legal and social justice fields.

''Killing the Black Body''

Roberts wrote Killing the Black Body on history of punitive policies directed towards African American women that have sought to control Black women's reproductive autonomy in the United States. Roberts traces these practices from slavery, where Black women were forced to reproduce for economic gain, to 20th-century eugenics programs that promoted coercive sterilization, and modern welfare policies that she argues continue to regulate and restrict Black motherhood. She contends that these policies reflect a broader framework of white supremacy that has historically viewed Black women's reproductive capabilities as a societal 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." She uses this book to advocate for a more expansive understanding of reproductive freedom- one that includes not only the right to avoid childbirth but also the right to bear and raise children without interference.
This work also led Roberts to further examine the treatment of children of color within the U.S. child welfare system. After nearly two decades of research and advocacy with parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, she argues that the system functions as a form of family policing, with unequal practices and outcomes that disproportionately affect Black families