Quotes from Dorothy Roberts

Reviewing the history of official racial classifications reminds us that these categories are not natural—and neither are the institutional inequities that race undergirds.

Although these attitudes are not universally held, they influence the way many Americans think about reproduction. Myths are more than made-up stories. They are also firmly held beliefs that represent and attempt to explain what we perceive to be the truth. They can become more credible than reality, holding fast even in the face of airtight statistics and rational argument to the contrary.

scientists are using advanced genomic theories and technologies to create a new racial science that claims to divide the human species into natural groups without the taint of racism.

Three central themes, then, run through the chapters of this book. The first is that regulating Black women's reproductive decisions had been a central aspect of racial oppression in America.

Second, the control of Black women's reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America.

that reproductive liberty is essential to women's political and social citizenship.

This construct of the licentious temptress served to justify white men's sexual abuse of Black women. The stereotype of Black women as sexually promiscuous also defined them as bad mothers. The

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother

Even after Emancipation, political and economic conditions forced many Black mothers to earn a living outside the home.31 At the turn of the century nearly all Black women worked long days as sharecroppers, laundresses, or domestic servants in white people's homes.

The story of control of Black reproduction begins with the experiences of slave women like Rose Williams. Black procreation helped to sustain slavery, giving slave masters an economic incentive to govern Black women's reproductive lives.

charts in vivid detail precisely how the shape of her life and the choices she makes are defined by her reduction to a sexual object, an object to be raped, bred, or abused."2

The state has the authority to take citizens' private property—in this case, their genetic information—without due process. Those are the features of a totalitarian state, not a liberal democracy. Jim

Race persists because it continues to be politically useful.

exploring how the denial of Black reproductive autonomy serves the interests of white supremacy.

deny Black women control over critical decisions about their bodies.

we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression.

In Chapter 1, I describe the exploitation of slave women's capacity to produce more slaves and the denial of their rights as mothers. After Emancipation, racism continued to corrupt notions of reproductive liberty, helping to direct the birth control movement which emerged early in this century.

For three centuries, Black mothers have been thought to pass down to their offspring the traits that marked them as inferior to any white person. Along with this biological impairment, it is believed that Black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to their children that dooms each succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair. A persistent objective of American social policy has been to monitor and restrain this corrupting tendency of Black motherhood. Regulating

South Carolina did not overturn its ban on interracial marriage until 1998, and even then 38 percent of voters opposed the referendum.

Attributing blacks' poor health to inherent racial difference allowed whites like Jefferson both to ignore how disease is caused by political inequality and to justify an unequal system by pointing to the inherent racial difference that disease supposedly reveals.

deny Black humanity in order to rationalize white supremacy.3

race was defined as an inheritable trait