The story of foster care in the United States is the story of the failure of the social safety net to aid poor, largely black, parents in their attempt to make a home for their children. Shattered Bonds tells this story as no other book has before-from the perspective of a prominent black, female legal theoretician.The current state of the child-welfare system in America is a well-known tragedy. Thousands of children every year are removed from their parents' homes, often for little reason other than the endemic poverty that afflicts women and children more than any other group in the U.S. Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed legal scholar and social critic, reveals the racial politics of child welfare in America through extensive legal research and original interviews with Chicago families in the foster care system. She describes the racial imbalance in foster care, the concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, the alarming percentages of children in substitute care, the difficulty that poor and black families have in meeting state's standards for regaining custody of children placed in foster care, and the relationship between state supervision of families and continuing racial inequality.

Shattered Bonds

History

Roberts, Dorothy

World

Civitas Books

Shattered Bonds is a stirring account of a worsening American social crisis--the disproportionate representation of black children in the U.S. foster care system and its effects on black communities and the country as a whole. Tying the origins and impact of this disparity to racial injustice, Dorothy Roberts contends that child-welfare policy reflects a political choice to address startling rates of black child poverty by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. Using conversations with mothers battling the Chicago child-welfare system for custody of their children, along with national data, Roberts levels a powerful indictment of racial disparities in foster care and tells a moving story of the women and children who earn our respect in their fight to keep their families intact.

Shattered Bonds: The Color Of Child Welfare

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Killing The Black Body

Random House Value Publishing

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new , and socially transformative, definition of "liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Pantheon

In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas. Now, some two decades later, Killing the Black Body has not only exerted profound influence, but also remains as crucial as ever—a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women.

Vintage

In the Flight of Stars, Dorothy Roberts's seventh book of poetry and her first in more than a decade, is — in her own words — " a collection of latter-life poems," the mature work of a firm intelligence. No sentimentalist, Roberts unflinchingly confronts the polarities of birth and death, decay and renewal, the gradual passage of light, the forces of dissolution, the patterns and requirements of nature. Growing old, she observes the pleasures of age and the interwoven pattern of loss. Like the best of her earlier work, In the Flight of Stars demonstrates Roberts's ease with language, her preference for meter and movement, her interest in subtle variations of sound and her ability to combine idea and metaphor. The result is a signifcant collection of verse which is formal without being austere; muscular yet singularly delicate and sensuous.

In the Flight of Stars

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Goose Lane Editions

The extent and quality of First Amendment literature provides a significant challenge to the selection process that ultimately defines an anthology. Content decisions for this anthology have been driven by concern with a work's accessibility to students, capacity to generate critical reflection, and potential for stimulating classroom discussion. The aim of the editing process has been to reconcile imperatives of economy with the breadth and depth of each author's vision and purpose. At the end of each section, a bibliography provides a departure point for further exploration of relevant issues.

First Amendment Anthology (Anthology Series)

Weaver, Russell

Lively, Donald

Law Practice

Carolina Academic Press

Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change\nMany believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment.\nThe only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing, Torn Apart argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.

Basic Books

An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and offers a "a brilliant and impassioned call for abolition" (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow)&nbsp; &nbsp; Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as&nbsp;Torn Apart&nbsp;uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a "family policing system" that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare&nbsp;a majority of&nbsp;Black children,&nbsp;putting&nbsp;their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and&nbsp;placed&nbsp;in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment.&nbsp; &nbsp; The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing,&nbsp;Torn Apart&nbsp;argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.&nbsp;

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.

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

Anthropology

The New Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roberts, Dorothy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Roberts, Dorothy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roberts, Dorothy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Shattered Bonds

Shattered Bonds: The Color Of Child Welfare

Killing The Black Body

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

In the Flight of Stars

First Amendment Anthology (Anthology Series)

Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

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