Dorothy Roberts’ lecture, “Family Surveillance” co-sponsored by
University of Maine School of Law, March 7, 2022.
Acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and law Dorothy Roberts, Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Chair in the Carey Law School and founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, gave the 2022 Howard B. Schonberger Peace and Justice Lecture on Monday, March 7 at 6 p.m. via Zoom. Roberts’s lecture — introduced and facilitated by Bruce King, co-executive director of Maine Inside Out —drew from Roberts’ forthcoming book, “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World” (Basic Books, 2022). Roberts argued that the U.S. child welfare system is a state apparatus that investigates, supervises and terrorizes Black families to control them, not to protect their children.
Dorothy Roberts’ pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine and bioethics. Her major books include “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century” (New Press, 2011); “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare” (Basic Books, 2002), and “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty” (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.
