Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

She is the author of three monographs: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, Killing the Black Body (1997), and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001). Killing the Black Body examines systemic racism’s violence as enacted against Black women and, specifically, their reproduction. Roberts argues that reproductive justice is essential for racial justice and discusses reproductive enslavement as well as forced sterilization programs in the 20th century and the dismissive discourse in late 20th-century America surrounding Black motherhood. Shattered Bonds examines the racial politics of the child-welfare system in the United States and the ease with which mothers are separated from their children, who are then forced into foster care, and the intense difficulties that many Black parents face in getting their children back.

As a legal scholar, Roberts focuses on the ways that the law has been weaponized against African Americans from slavery into the present moment, though she also has an intense interest in science and medicine’s systemic abuses as well.