Saturday, December 17, 2011

(Racial) Science, (Bio) Politics, Social (Injustice) and I

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(Racial) Science, (Bio) Politics, Social (Injustice) and I

Fatal Invention

How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

Dorothy Roberts

hardcover

$29.95
A powerful new argument from a leading intellectual that explores how today’s cutting-edge genetic science helps perpetuate inequality in a “post-racial” America
While embracing a racial ideology rooted in genetics, Americans are accepting a genetic ideology rooted in race that makes everyone responsible for managing their own lives at the genetic level instead of eliminating the social inequalities that damage our entire society.
—From Fatal Invention
A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when America claims to be post-racial. Moving from an account of the evolution of race—proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science—Roberts delves deep into the current debates, interrogating the newest science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences obscured by the focus on genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a provocative call for us to affirm our common humanity.
Dorothy Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She is the author of Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Spring 2011
hardcover
6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 400 pages
978-1-59558-495-3
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Dorothy E. Roberts

Roberts, Dorothy E.

Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law

Phone: (312) 503-0397
E-mail: d-roberts@law.northwestern.edu
| Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
Related Links: Joint Center for Poverty Research | Center for Legal Studies | Institute for Policy Research
Dorothy Roberts joined Northwestern’s faculty in fall 1998 with a joint appointment as a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She is a frequent speaker and prolific scholar on issues related to race, gender, and the law and has published more than 75 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review, authored 2 award-winning books, and co-edited 5 casebooks and anthologies. Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, was published in July 2011. Roberts received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Searle Fund, Hastings Center, Fulbright Scholars Program, Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions, and Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and as a visiting professor was the recipient of the Outstanding First-Year Course Professor Award for 1997-98. She serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative and is currently conducting research on the effects of child welfare agency involvement in African-American neighborhoods and on race-based biotechnologies.

Areas of Expertise

  • Women and the Law
  • Family Law
  • Criminal Law
  • Civil Rights
  • Juvenile Law

Selected Publications

  • Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (The New Press, 2011).
  • Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and The Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997).
  • Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002).
  • Spiritual and Menial Housework in 9 yale journal of law & feminism 51 (1997).
  • The Genetic Tie in 62 university of chicago law review 209 (1995).
  • The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities in 56 stanford law review 1271-1305 (2004).
View Additional publications

Education

  • BA magna cum laude, Yale University
  • JD, Harvard University

Prior Appointments

  • Visiting Professor, spring 1998, Stanford Law School
  • Visiting Associate Professor, spring 1994, University of Pennsylvania Law School
  • Professor of Law, Associate Professor of Law, 1988-1998, Rutgers University School of Law-Rutgers
  • Fellow, 1994-1995, Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions
  • Associate, 1981-1988, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison
  • Law Clerk, 1980-1981, Hon. Constance Baker Motley, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York

Recent Consulting Activities

  • Member, Braam Panel, monitoring foster care reform in Washington State
  • Member, Lexis/Nexis Advisory Board
  • Member, Advisory Board, Program on Reproductive Health and Rights, Open So
  • Member, Board of Directors, National Black Women’s Health Imperative
  • Member, Board of Directors, National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

Dorothy Roberts

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dorothy E. Roberts (born 1956) is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, Illinois.[1]
Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and her Doctor of Jurisprudence from Harvard Law School. She is an author, lecturer, and lawyer. She has written extensively and lectured on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, motherhood, bioethics, and child welfare.

Contents

[hide]

[edit] Author/Lawyer

Roberts has published more than fifty 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 written Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Civitas Books, 2002) and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997), in which she purports to give “a powerful and authoritative account of the on-going assault – both figurative and literal – waged by the American government and our society on the reproductive rights of Black women.”[2] and was the co-author of casebooks on constitutional law and women and the law. Killing the Black Body received a 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Her influential article, “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy” (Harvard Law Review, 1991), has been widely cited and is included in a number of anthologies. Her most recent book is Fatal Invention (The New Press, 2011), which argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race, proving that race has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science.
She was also a blogger at blackprof.com.

[edit] Lecturer/Professor

Roberts has delivered several endowed lectures, including the James Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School. She was elected twice by the Rutgers University School of Law graduating class to be faculty graduation speaker, and was voted outstanding first-year course professor by the Northwestern University School of Law class of 2000. She received the Radcliffe University Graduate Society Medal in June, 1998. Her current projects concern race and child welfare policy.
Roberts has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.
In 2002-03, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, where she conducted research on family planning policy and on gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. She is currently conducting research on the significance of the spatial concentration of state supervision of children in African American communities and on the use of race in biomedical research and biotechnology.
Roberts is featured in the documentary film, Silent Choices, about abortion and reproductive rights from the perspective of African Americans. Roberts also served as an advisor to the film.

[edit] Political views

Professor Roberts has drawn parallels between what she sees as current U.S. “imperialism” and white supremacy, asserting U.S. torture of terrorist suspects is a tool to maintain supremacy just as violence has been used to maintain white supremacy, and comparing the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison to racist lynchings of blacks.[3]

[edit] Resources

[edit] References

  1. ^ IPR People: Dorothy Roberts
  2. ^ Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts – Books – Random House
  3. ^ Dorothy Roberts Speaks to PC Students About Race and Torture – News
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People section
Dorothy Roberts
Kirkland & Ellis Professor, Northwestern University Law School
Professor, Department of African-American Studies and Sociology
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
JD, Harvard Law School, 1980
d-roberts@law.northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information
Dorothy Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. She is the author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (The New Press, 2011); Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997), which received a 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America; and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), which received research awards from the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. She is also the co-editor of Sex, Power and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond, as well as casebooks on constitutional law and women and the law and has published more than 70 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Signs, and Social Text.
Roberts has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Fordham and a fellow at Harvard University’s Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Progam. She serves as the chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative and on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. She also serves on a panel of five national experts that is overseeing foster care reform in Washington State and on the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. She received awards from the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for her latest book project.
Current and Recent Research
Legal and Political Approaches to Race Consciousness in Biotechnology Research. This Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and NSF-funded project uses legal theories of racial equality to analyze the relationship between the emergence of race-based biomedicine and biotechnology and political contests over race consciousness in social policy. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of scientific interest in race-based genomic variation that has yielded biotechnology research and products that may reinscribe the biological nature of race. This project situates the emergence of race-based biotechnologies within the political struggle over colorblindness and race consciousness, linking debates about the validity and proper use of race as a category in science, law, and social policy. This project will contribute to biotechnology research and to public policy by helping scientists, policy makers, and the broader public better understand the social implications of race-based biotechnologies in the context of political and legal debates about racial equality. The ethical framework it proposes will provide practical guidance to researchers and policy makers charged with determining the proper role of race as a scientific category.
Race and Child Welfare Policy and Practice. Roberts has been studying the racial disparity in state removal of children from their homes, the impact of the child welfare system on black families, and how racial politics helps to shape child welfare policy. Using both statistical analysis and interviews, she focused on the effects of state intervention on family and community life, the impact of recently enacted adoption and welfare reform laws on parental rights, and the role of poverty and racial bias in determining child neglect. The study, which culminated in the book, Shattered Bonds, also proposed ways to improve the child welfare system and considers whether a goal of policy should be to reduce numbers in foster care through either family preservation policies or policies that make adoption easier. Roberts is continuing to research the impact of racial disparities in the child welfare system on black children, families and communities.
Interaction of Welfare Reform and Child Protective Services. Researchers estimate that about half of all cases referred to child protection services involve families on welfare. In Illinois alone, data from the state Department of Child and Family Services indicate that nearly two-thirds of the children placed in foster care had received welfare in the recent past. Roberts believes there is a clear need for more empirical work that examines the actual effect of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act on families involved with child protective services. Focusing on a subsample of 40 families from the Illinois Families Study, she investigated the impact of welfare reform measures on the actual experiences of welfare-recipient families involved in the state’s child welfare system. Using both qualitative and quantitative data, she examined the impact of TANF rules on the timing and type of services received; the type of substitute care; the experience of families with conflicting requirements from welfare and child welfare caseworkers; and outcomes such as reunification of families and termination of parental rights.
Selected Publications
Books
Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. The New Press (2011).
Roberts, Dorothy, Rhoda Reddock, Dianne Douglas, and Sandra Reid, eds. Sex, Power, and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond. Ian Randle Publishers (2008).
Roberts, Dorothy, with Libby Adler, Lisa Crooms, Judith Greenberg, and Martha Minow, eds. Frug’s Women and the Law, 4th ed. Foundation Press (2007).
Roberts, Dorothy. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. Basic Books (2002).
Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Pantheon Books (1997).
Articles and Chapters
Roberts, D. 2011. What’s Wrong with Race-based Medicine? Genes, Drugs, and Health Disparities. Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 12: 1-21.
Roberts, D.  2010. Race and the New Biocitizen. In What’s the Use of Race, ed. Ian Whitmarsh & David Jones, 259-276. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Roberts, D. 2010. The Social Immorality of Health in the Gene Age: Race, Disability, and Inequality. In Against Health, ed. Jonathan Metzl & Anna Kirkland.  New York: NYU Press.
Roberts, D. 2009. Race, gender, and genetic technologies: A new reproductive dystopia? Signs 34:783–804.
Roberts, D. 2008. The racial geography of child welfare: Toward a new research paradigm. Child Welfare 87(2): 125–50.
Roberts, D. 2008. Race and the new reproduction. In The Reproductive Rights Reader: Law, Medicine, and the Construction of Motherhood, ed. N. Ehrenreich, 308–19. New York: New York University Press.
Roberts, D. 2008. Is race-based medicine good for us?: African American approaches to race, biomedicine, and equality. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 36(3): 537–45.
Roberts, D. 2008. Torture and the biopolitics of race. University of Miami Law Review 62(2): 229-48.
Roberts, D. 2006. Adoption myths and racial realities in the United States. In Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, ed. J. Trenka, J. Oparah, and S. Shin, 49–56. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.
Roberts, D. 2004. The social and moral cost of mass incarceration in African American communities. Stanford Law Review 56(5): 1271–305.

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