Quotes from Dorothy Roberts

Racial profiling by doctors can also lead to overmedication. A 2009 federally funded study found that doctors are four times as likely to prescribe powerful antipsychotic drugs to children covered by Medicaid as they are to children whose parents have private insurance.

Mammy was both the perfect mother and the perfect slave: whites saw her as a "passive nurturer, a mother figure who gave all without expectation of return, who not only acknowledged her inferiority to whites but who loved them."23 It is important to recognize, however, that Mammy did not reflect any virtue in Black motherhood.

In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass an involuntary sterilization law, empowering state institutions to sterilize, without consent, criminals and "imbeciles" whose condition was "pronounced unimprovable" by a panel of physicians.

Biologically, there is one human race. Race applied to human beings is a political division: it is a system of governing people that classifies them into a social hierarchy based on invented biological demarcations.

Along with these disparaging images of Black mothers, the media increasingly portray Black children as incapable of contributing anything positive to society.

The powerful Western image of childhood innocence does not seem to benefit Black children. Black children are born guilty.

The law made slave women's children the property of the slaveowner. White masters therefore could increase their wealth by

As we will see below, when a female slave's role as worker conflicted with that of childbearer, concern for high productivity often outweighed concern for high fertility.

Slaveholders were willing to overwork pregnant slaves at the expense of the health of both mother and child.

Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered "prime stock" to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.

The article ended by downplaying "disparate access to medical care or other environmental factors," arguing that "our data suggest that the proposed genetic component to preterm birth may be a greater etiological contributor than previously recognized"—despite presenting no genetic data whatsoever!22

In the 1950s, Dr. Dorothy Brown, the first Black female general surgeon in the United States and a Tennessee state representative, became the first state legislator to introduce a bill to legalize abortion.

For the years 1995 to 2004, a search of research awards in the National Institutes of Health database using the term genetics identified 21,956 new grants (including 181 cross-indexed by the term race), while only 44 new grants were indexed by the terms racism or racial discrimination .56 When the NIH launched a new center to study population health, it was originally named the Center for Genomics and Health Disparities—the environmental component was completely missing from the title.

A black man in San Diego who developed hypertension because of exposure to toxic chemicals lost half of his disability award after a doctor reported that blacks are genetically prone to hypertension.

Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.

The greater the percentage of blacks living in a neighborhood, the higher the neighborhood death rate, regardless of neighborhood income level.52 It is the neighborhood that makes people unhealthy, not the susceptibility of black people living there. The rate of death is higher for all residents, including whites, who live in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Consider a 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Devah Pager and Bruce Western finding that whites just released from prison fared better in the New York City job market than blacks with identical résumés but no criminal record.

There is less genetic variation in the entire human race than in a typical wild population of chimpanzees.

race was presumed to be an essential biological category. This is not a happy-ending tale of science overcoming racism.

Laurence G. Paquin Middle School, a school for pregnant girls and girls who already have babies, became the first Baltimore school to implement a pilot program to provide Norplant in its clinic. All but five of the 350 students at the school are Black. Although other contraceptives are touched on in counseling sessions, the girls are urged to try Norplant.

When people refer to the problem of teenage pregnancy they may mean one or a combination of several concerns-teenagers having sex, teenagers getting pregnant, teenagers raising children, teenagers having babies out of wedlock, and teenagers having babies at public expense. Does Norplant solve any of these specific problems?

The fighting over Norplant assumed that Black women's reproduction is a proper arena for social regulation.

Because the children of two people from different races were fertile, Buffon's rule meant that all human beings belonged to the same species.

The American legal system is rooted in this monstrous combination of racial and gender domination. One of America's first laws concerned the status of children born to slave mothers and fathered by white men: a 1662 Virginia statute made these children slaves.3