Roberts says the original motivation for her research-the prosecutions of black women who use drugs during pregnancy-continues to this day, with states passing fetal protection laws to make it easier to prosecute women for their conduct during pregnancy.įurthermore, a year before the book was published, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, a major restructuring of the welfare system that Roberts says allowed states to enact policies designed to deter women on welfare from having children, and regulate the reproductive and sexual decisions of women receiving benefits. When slavery ended and the wombs of black women could no longer be seized for financial gain, policies were put in place to contain, control, and punish black reproduction, which was deemed a danger to society. Roberts says these oppressive policies continued through the eugenics era, and into the 1960s and ’70s, and were being implemented at the time she was conducting her research.įor the book’s 20th anniversary, “Killing the Black Body” has been reissued, with a new preface from Roberts, who reflects on its publication and findings two decades later. She has continued her work on contesting anti-black reproduction policies, and says many of the programs have intensified. The more children an enslaved woman produced-to be owned and sold at her master’s discretion-the more valuable she was, which Roberts says “led to a regime of practices, and laws, and ways of thinking about black women’s bodies that permitted coercion of their reproduction.” Their owners had the legal power to exert complete control over their bodies, deciding when they would have children, and with whom. The chattel property of their masters, enslaved black women were valuable for their reproductive labor and had no legal right to control it. “Killing the Black Body,” published in 1997, chronicles the war against black reproduction, from slavery to present day. “The other thing that motivated me was that I was, at the same time, studying feminist theory and jurisprudence, and I was struck by the way in which most scholars neglected to address these issues that were especially relevant to black women,” she says. Roberts, also the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, says she was driven to write the book after reading news articles in the late 1980s about black women who were arrested and jailed for using drugs while pregnant. Roberts saw the prosecutions as punishing black women for having babies, which led her to research the history of punitive policies directed toward African-American women, and write about the regulation of their childbearing. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at Penn Law School and the School of Arts & Sciences, released her formative book, “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty,” which laid bare the systematic assault on the bodies of black women in the United States. Twenty years ago, Dorothy Roberts, the George A.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |