January 25, 2023 • 52 mins
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion. That is, until now. In this episode, Ben and Khalil talk with Dorothy Roberts – one of the nation’s leading scholars on the child welfare system and reproductive rights – about how the Dobbs decision is expected to have a disproportionate impact on Black women.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Push it. I immediately thought, they are punishing these women
for having children. And I think there was just something
about the punishment of reproduction, the punishment of child bearing,
that to me, was one of the most insidious, dehumanizing
(00:38):
forms of devaluing human beings, you know, to say, you
don't deserve to have children, you don't deserve to contribute
to our society. I'm Khalil Jibra Mohammed and I'm Ben Austin.
We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a
(01:00):
historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of
my best friends are Some of my best friends are like,
I'm not a blank, some of my best friends are blank.
In this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the
absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country. And in
this episode, we're going to talk about the recent DAPs
(01:22):
decision and reproductive justice with someone who knows more about
these issues than anyone else. Hey, Ben, Hey man, All right, Hey, hey,
(01:44):
always always good to be talking with you. I'm always better. Yeah.
You know, today's guest has me thinking about this song
that's in my head. Can you guess which song it is?
Is it Sadie, Sadie May No, No, that's a that's
a good one. That's a good one. This one is
I'll always love my Mama. I'll always love I'll always
love mym mom. I gotta say because Dorothy Roberts, our
(02:08):
guest today, is the leading scholar of black motherhood and
the fight for reproductive justice. This scholar, this advocate, this
tireless activist for reproductive justice, has written four books, probably
the most influential of them in shaping how we understand
the meaning of having control over your Body's a book
(02:30):
called Killing the Black Body, Race, reproduction, and the Meaning
of Liberty. I am so excited to have her on
our show today. She's a law professor and sociologist now
at your alma mater, that's right, University of Pennsylvania. And
she's a Chicagoan. I mean, it's like it's from our neighborhood.
It's all real. And so we are at the fiftieth
(02:51):
anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision this month, January
twenty twenty three is the fiftieth anniversary. Is January nineteen
seventy three, last summer when the jobs decision came down.
Khalil and it ruled that a woman does not have
a constitutional right to an abortion. That's right, and the
uproar that happened. Then people say it shaped the midterms,
that happened, But there's so much more to the dab's decision. Yes,
(03:14):
and Dorothy is going to help us unpack that. Yeah,
because the truth is that most of the conversation has
been framed only around the loss of the right to
an abortion. That states can now take that right away.
But the truth is, if we had been listening to
Dorothy Roberts over the course of the work that she's
been doing for decades, we would have understood that this
(03:35):
is really a fight about the right to choose what
you do with your body, whether it's to choose an
abortion or to not choose an abortion. This issue cuts
both ways, and seeing it through the lens of race,
as she has done, helps us really understand that. And
so kind of what you're saying is people might not
have listened to her before, but once they listened to
(03:55):
this podcast, done deal. We solve things. That's right. But
I got one more thing to add, you know, speaking
about Mama's so some of our listeners know that my
mother's grandfather has this ambiguous race past, and in a way,
he left Mississippi in the nineteen twenties and married a
black woman because it was kind of illegal because he
(04:16):
was kind of white presenting. He was kind of white presenting.
People say it sometimes say that about me exactly. So
the reason this matters is because one of the ways
that Dorothy Roberts his career has been shaped is by
her own story of growing up as a product of
an interracial marriage. That's right. She helps us understand, like
(04:40):
the motivation for her to care about even childbirth and
what children mean for the world, and the right to
choose what you want to do when you are thinking
about planning for a child kind of has a lot
to do with her own background. So we're gonna hear
a lot more about who Dorothy Robberts is, as well
as what she thinks we ought to be doing differently
about reproductive justice in this country. Let's jump right into
(05:02):
this because Dorothy has a lot to say and we
need to hear it. Dorothy, it is great to meet you.
Thank you so much for being on Some of my
best friends are Thank you very much for inviting me.
I look forward to our conversation absolutely. So all three
(05:23):
of us grew up in Hyde Park area. Wow, Khalil
and I went to Kenwood together, which is the high
school in Hyde Park. But I'm also the father and
parent in an interracial family. I'm maybe not unlike your
father back in the sixties. I have this very bookish,
sort of Dorothy Roberts like daughter who is now seventeen.
(05:45):
Her name is Lysia. But maybe you can talk about,
you know, that part of your past and sort of
this interracial identity in this family that you came from
in the same neighborhood that we're from. Yeah. Sure. It's
so interesting because from most of my career I have
not talked about my background, about my parents race, and
(06:09):
now it seems to come up a lot. And I'm
working on a kind of memoir about my parents, so
it's very present in my mind. And of course my
background my family have been very influential in my career
and my interests, so that only makes sense. I just,
you know, I just haven't talked about it much. So
(06:32):
I grew up in the nineteen sixties in Hyde Park.
I would have gone to Kenwood High but my father
had Fullbright fellowship in Egypt, so I spent my first
two years of high school in Cairo, Egypt, instead of
in Hyde Park. That's really fascinating. I went to Shuesmith
Elementary School, which is right, you know, down the street
from Kenwood High I live a block away from Shuesmith.
(06:54):
I passed it every morning on my dog walk. We're neighbors. Yeah,
that's amazing. Historically directly, directly, so this was in the sixties.
My father was a white anthropologist at Roosevelt University in Chicago,
downtown Chicago. My mother was an immigrant from Jamaica who
(07:16):
first lived in Liberia before she came to the United States.
But she got a scholarship to Roosevelt and met my
father there while she was a student. And my father
was a researcher of interracial marriage. Interesting. You're gonna have
to stop me if I get too deep into this,
because I could talk just about this forever. This is
(07:38):
so yeah, Like I said, this is my experience. So
I'm so curious about his research and how you interpreted
it and how you felt it as a child. Just
so you know, Dorothy, I've been also researching Ben as
a white guy raising two by racial kids. So this
is helpful to me. Too. Okay. So my father growing
up was always writing a book from the first distant
(08:01):
part of my memory, writing a book on interracial marriage
in Chicago, and was interviewing black white couples in Chicago. Okay,
And this was an important part of my childhood because
he not only was researching it, he was promoting it.
He really believed that interracial marriage was the answer to
America's race problem. So interesting, and this was reflected in
(08:25):
our family because he married a black woman, my mother,
and all of their friends or most of their friends
were interracial couples. So I thought that my father was
working on this book in the nineteen sixties. When I
came to Penn ten years ago and had to collect
all the boxes in my basement, I shipped to pen
(08:50):
twenty five boxes of my father's papers. He had passed away,
and I hadn't looked at them. The first box I
opened up, I see these interviews he conducted, and the
dates on them are nineteen thirty seven, And I assumed
these are couples who were married in nineteen thirty seven,
(09:11):
which he interviewed in the nineteen sixties Lower Beehall. They
were actually interviews that he conducted in nineteen thirty seven
when he was a master's student at University of Chicago,
well before he met your mother. Aha, that's exactly right.
I like this. I'm liking where this is going. I'm
(09:32):
liking this. This gives whole new meaning to the professional.
Is the personnel or the personnel is the political? This
whole new spin on it, exactly because I had always
assumed he got interested in the topic because he met
my mother, not prior to now, I'm sorry to think,
did he marry my mother? And as part of his
research project. Well then I read some more and I
(09:56):
get to the interviews conducted to the nineteen fifties, and
he's conducting them with my mother prior to their marriage.
My mother was his research assistant, and she was doing
the interviews of the women, and he convicted the interviews
of the men. Anyway, that's all background I only discovered
ten years ago. But our life as a family was very,
(10:19):
very much influenced by my parents, especially my father's mission
to promote interracial marriage in Chicago, and so I was
surrounded by interracial couples, and early on I had adopted
as a little girl, you know, in kindergarten, the philosophy
(10:41):
of my father and was very proud to be the
child of an interracial marriage. I can remember walking down
the street in between my parents and thinking, this is,
you know, an example of how people of different races
can get together as proud to do it. By the
time I went to college, I was affirmatively hiding the
(11:04):
fact that my father was white. I could tell you
situations where I lied, I mean light about it, and
I was and I didn't want people to see him.
I didn't want I hid family photos when I was
with my friends that he was in. I really wanted to.
I thought that I needed to be I have two
(11:29):
black parents and for people to think I had two
black parents to identify the black Now that changed also,
and as you know, I wrote a book about countering
the biological concept of race and highlighting the fact that,
you know, black people have embraced people as black despite
(11:49):
what their exact ethnic background is. But I've gone through
a range of feelings and positions about my blackness. I mean,
now I don't feel like I need to hide the
fact that my father was white. I think a lot
of my ideas today the fact that I'm now a
sociology professor, are so much of what I think supporting
(12:14):
my deep feeling about our common humanity that definitely comes
from my parents, i'd say, Dorothy, and thinking about your father,
I don't share his sort of utopian view of interracial marriage.
I mean I think probably like like you what you're
saying that you know, it's beautiful that I have this family,
and it's you know, wonderful on the personal level. It's
(12:36):
not going to change structures and injustice or change white supremacy.
And I think that's also the premise of in some
ways of our Khalil n I on this podcast, that
we're able to have these conversations across racial lines and
we're best friends and we've been best friends for thirty
five years, but that's that's not the pathway to changing
these deep structural issues. I mean sort of we're and
(12:57):
that's kind of what we're wrestling with today. And maybe
that's a good transition to ask you how in your
own work, how did you come to focus on black motherhood,
on reproductive rights and child welfare. What's the story of
that being the focus of much of your work. Sure, so,
I've always been since I was very very young, interested
(13:18):
in social justice issues and active in some way in
fighting against various forms of oppression, but especially racial oppression.
And I see reproductive injustice as one of the most
violent and profound, you in a negative way, damaging, dehumanizing
(13:44):
ways in which racial oppression is enacted. Now that fits
into my overall passion about racial justice, but in particular
in the late nineteen eighties, when I first started law teaching,
I was reading about the prosecutions of black women who
(14:07):
were pregnant and using drugs. This is the crack epidemic.
This is during the crack epidemic and the cracked down
by federal and local governments on black communities in the
name of the war on drugs and focusing on crack
cocaine as if it were some exceptional, you know, especially violent,
(14:31):
antisocial kind of drug use. And one aspect of that
war against black communities was the punishment of black women
who used drugs and were pregnant, and that grabbed me
like nothing else. You know, I've thought about why did
I think that was such a terrible injustice? But I
(14:54):
immediately thought, they are punishing these women for having children.
And I think there was just something about the punishment
of reproduction, the punishment of child bearing. That to me
was one of the most insidious, dehumanizing forms of devaluing
(15:15):
human beings, you know, to say you don't deserve to
have children, you don't deserve to contribute to our society.
You're worthless, you're disposable. Even though at the time the
prosecutions were being portrayed as if they were being done
to protect black fetuses, I knew that was false, and
(15:38):
I saw this as a form of racial violence against
these women. And so that's really what propelled me into
scholarship and into writing an article about the lack of
constitutional support for these prosecutions, arguing that they violated the
(16:00):
Fourteenth Amendment both the right to privacy and equal protection,
and that that then launched my book, Killing the Black Body,
because I began to think about all the ways, the
myriad ways in which black women's childbearing has been punished
from the time of slavery. Of course, during the slavery era,
(16:22):
black women's reproduction was commodified, that was forced reproduction, forced
reproductive servitude. But after the slavery era, after slavery ended,
black women's childbearing continue to be seen as in need
of white supervision. We could go from the eugenic era
(16:45):
and into the nineteen sixties and seventies with mass sterilization programs,
but then also the impact of welfare restructuring and the
way in which welfare became especially stigmatized when more and
more black people were receiving welfare up until the end
(17:05):
of the federal entitlement to welfare, fueled by this image
of black women who were having babies false image, I
should make clear, having babies just to get a welfare check.
And then I also saw that the state taking away
their babies through the child welfare system and foster care
(17:29):
was an extension of that. So in working on killing
the Black body, I became aware of all the newborns,
the thousands and thousands of black newborns who were being
taken from their mothers at birth and put in Many
of them were left in the hospital. They were called
border babies or put into foster care. The foster population
(17:51):
exploded over the course of this time, and I began
to see, first of all, became aware of this. I
wasn't I wasn't aware of the huge racial disparities in
foster care. But once I was aware of it, it
was obvious to me that this was an extension of
the valuation of black mothers that I had written about
(18:13):
in Killing the Black Body, and that much of my
book Shattered Bonds the Colored child welfare. Can I take
a liberty here? This is really rich in terms of
your own intellectual journey to this important issue. I mean,
what I hear you saying at its root is that
the right to have a child is perhaps the most
(18:34):
fundamental expression of being a human being, and that there's
really no point in the history of black people in
these United States when the reproductive freedom of black women
wasn't subjected to control by the state in one way
or another. That's absolutely true. That's really fascinating. And when
(18:56):
we come back after the break, we're going to talk
about how these two systems, this system that is born
out of the War on drugs and the child welfare
system come together in the problem of separation. And we're
going to hear the story of one woman's horrifying tale
of almost losing her child. We'll be right back. We
(19:32):
are back with Dorothy Roberts, and we're talking about the
child welfare system and how problematic it is. More than problematic, man,
it's been like the primary vehicle for pathologizing blackness. This
is one of her key points in her early work. Yeah,
that is so right, Khalil Dorothy. You begin your book
Torn Apart with the story of Vanessa People's. Can you
(19:55):
tell us what happened to her in twenty seventeen and
really how her story illustrates the way the child welfare
system criminalizes motherhood. Sure. So, Vanessa People's is the young
mother who lives in Aurora, Colorado, and she was enjoying
a picnic with her family at a park, a local
(20:17):
park near her home, and she had asked one of
her cousins to watch one of her two young children,
the youngest one a toddler, And when the cousin left
the park, the toddler traps after the cousin before Vanessa,
who saw this happen like normal family, star, normal Jess. Exactly,
(20:39):
We've all been there, especially as Dad's where we're not
paying attention. Exactly, like this happens all the time, exactly
if Vanessa was peg, she was playing with the older
son and had left the younger one in the cousin's care.
The cousin left, the whole family was at this park
so it's not as if she was abandoning her child.
He ran after the cousin and in a minute's time
(21:04):
before Vanessa could catch up with him, a passer by
I had seen the child in the parking lot and
called nine to one. Vanessa sees this, sees the woman
on the phone, gets to her and says, that's my son.
The woman is on the phone with the police when
(21:26):
Vanessa arrives and will not give Vanessa her son back.
Are you kidding? Really? This person thinks they're doing they're
saving a child exactly. Vanessa is not in good health.
She was suffering from anemia and she was being tested
for leukemia. She's not in the position to fight this
(21:46):
woman over her son, and she figures when the police
officer arrives, will resolve the whole thing. While the police
officer arrives and disbelieves, Vanessa doesn't believe that this is
really her son. This is unbelievable. The family has to
come and vouch for her. But the police officer hands
(22:06):
Vanessa a ticket for child to be use. It turns
out in Colorado there is a criminal charge of misdemeanor
child abuse, which doesn't even require any evidence. A physical
harm to a child. All that happened in this case
was that her son was separated from her for a
(22:29):
minute momentarily in her eyesight she could see she could
see the child, all right. She's now alerted the Child
Welfare SYS is made aware of her in some way. Absolutely,
she now is reported to the local child protection office.
So a few weeks later, Vanessa has just given her
(22:52):
two sons a bath. She's cleaning up in the basement.
She lives with her son in a basement rooms at
her mother's house, and a white caseworker knocks on the door.
Because once you're under the radar, now they come to
investigate your home. Yeah, these caseworkers rarely, rarely get a
(23:12):
warrant to search the home. They don't tell the parents
that you have a Fourth Amendment right not to have
government agents. They can restrict. The parents can say you
can't come into my home. Of course, just like you
could with a police out. You would say, where's your warrant.
There's no difference. A Fourth Amendment applies to any government
agent who wants to search your home. But there's been
(23:35):
effectively an exemption created, unconstitutional exemption. In my opinion, for
caseworkers undergrounds that they're there to protect children, and this
also is not uncommon, especially in black neighborhoods, that case
workers bring police along with them. Three police officers arrived.
(23:57):
One of them pointed a gun. Vanessa's coming up. She
comes up with a gun pointing at her head. Okay,
now they start interrogating her. Vanessa is saying, why are
you in my house? You don't need to be here.
You see, my children are fine. She calls her mother
(24:17):
to come. Her mother goes into the bedroom with the
children and Vanessa wants to come there. The police officer
is guarding the door, saying that the grandmother cannot be
in the room with the children. Vanessa says, let me in.
The police officer grabs her by the throat. Two other
(24:39):
police officers, in addition to the one, jump on top
of her what's called hobble her. They hog tie her.
They chain her arms and her ankles together and then
chain them together, carry her out the house upside down,
like she says, like a pig, Like a pig, like
an animal. And not only does she go through this trauma,
(25:02):
her children are witnessing all of this. Yeah, the idea
that they're being protected. They're subjected to this. But the
upshot of this is that Vanessa now is registered in
the state of Colorado as a child abuser. It's pretty
much the worst stigma you can have. We have a
clip of Vanessa Peoples who is telling CBS News about
(25:22):
this harrowing experience and how it really ruined her life.
I can't get jobs, i can't even get housing. I'm
still living with my mom. The fact that someone else
intervened in my life. I'm stuck at zero. And it's
just an example of the kind of violence that this
(25:45):
system inflicts on families. Fortunately they didn't take her children
from her, but in tens of thousands of cases, especially
black and Native children are taken from their families, actually
hundreds of thousands every year, taken from their families and
put in foster care, which is itself a damaging system.
(26:09):
Just mounds and amounts of research showing that foster care
is a pathway to prison j given out the tension, homelessness,
drug addiction, mental health problems. You know, not to say
that every child who's been in foster care suffers from these,
but you're at greater risk than others in the population
(26:31):
of having these very negative outcomes as a result of
being in foster care. You know, when I read what
you described of Vanessa's story and her children and the outcome,
I found it deeply upsetting. And I've written about the
origins of racial criminalization, and just before Thanksgiving contributed as
(26:53):
a co chair of the National Academies of Sciences report
on how to Reduce racial inequality in crime. We call
it in crime and justice rather than in the criminal
justice system. And in that report, one of the things
that we say is that we all to rely less
on the criminal punishment system and more on other systems,
(27:14):
even with their flaws, because they are less viscerally lethal
in terms of contact with them, like sending in our
first responder who might be part of the child welfare system.
Is that what you mean, that's correct or caseworker. And
there are alternatives to this being called upon in cities
across the country, and some of this is being stood
up right now in terms of police diverting a call
(27:36):
a non emergency call to the child welfare system or
the mental health sector. And after reading more of your work, Dorothea,
I have to say, I mean it was devastating because
I felt like if Ben and I've been writing about
the story of mass incarceration, you know, I would say
my interpretation of what you've been writing about is a
story of mass separation. Yes, this history since the nineteen sixties,
(27:58):
of this skyrocketing foster care system that's doubled on itself
from I think you say in nineteen eighty five there
were two hundred and seventy six thousand people. By ninety nine,
less than twenty years later, there are five hundred and
sixty eight thousand. I mean, you know the system bed
in the nest, right, what is the scale of this thing? Yes,
so you're right. By the late nineteen nineties, there were
(28:22):
almost six hundred thousand children in the foster care system,
and black children were the largest group in foster care,
four times as likely as white children to be taken
from their families. Now, the disparities have shrunk somewhat, and
the foster care population has gone down somewhat, but it's
(28:43):
still hundreds of thousands of children, like four hundred thousand
I think exactly more than four hundred thousand children, and
black children still are twice as likely to be separated,
and one finding that from a recent study that I
didn't know about. When I wrote Shattered Bonds, I've included
(29:03):
it in torn Apart, is that half of Black children,
more than half of black children, fifty three percent, will
be subject to a child welfare investigation before they reach
aga teen. That is incredible. Half of all Black children
in America, half of all Black children America will experience this.
It's so huge, it's so huge, But it's also in
(29:25):
terribly for frustrating because I'm sitting here and I mean,
I told I shared this with Been even in preparations.
Conversation like you know, brought tears Tomise, because I'm like,
how did I not even know? Yes? And how is
it possible that the three of us are in this
conversation and we're both expressing our own ignorance about how
pervasive and punitive and devastating the system is. I'd even
(29:47):
add to that, Khalil, like we think of the child
welfare system as a force for good of taking care
of the neediest. Yes, and you know that you're educating
us that it's actually a force for harm, that it
does much much more harm than good. Absolutely, So I
was not aware of the harm. I only became aware
of it because of the work I was doing on
(30:07):
the prosecutions of black mothers, have discovered that they're newborns
who are being taken from them by the system. And
I think the system has just done a great job
at propaganda, and the media until very recently, has gone
along with it. Often the story goes the opposite way
that there'll be a case of a parent who harms
(30:30):
a child or even murders a child, and this is
very much like the criminal justice system. There'll be an
extreme case of crime or abuse, and then that sparks
more emphasis and investment in expanding the system and investigations. Yes,
that you're right, the parallels to the criminal justice system
are all over the place. I took this status from
(30:51):
your own work, but they're about sixteen percent of the
cases are of physical or sexual abuse, where a casework
will go in and protect a child from those but
the vast majority of the rest of the eighty four percent,
which are considered neglect are usually issues of poverty. It's
punishing need that these are parts who actually could use
much more investment. And I'm thinking about another corollary between
(31:15):
this and policing that when a caseworker shows up, when
a child productive surfaces shows up. The only tool they
have to help to help in quotes, is removed. They
can't help someone with housing, they can't help them with food,
they can't help them with clothes, they can't help them
with a job or with education. Inherent with childcare. The
only thing that they could do is say I'm going
to take the child exactly. That is the primary tool
(31:37):
of this system, So it's both practically that's what the
caseworker has to deal with the problems the family is encountering,
which mostly are problems of poverty. Neglect means failure to
meet the needs of a child, and usually parents who
don't meet the needs of their children. It's not because
(31:57):
they're deliberately withholding food that they have. It's not because
they're deliberately withholding clothing or housing. They're not living in
the hall with shelter because they want to neglect their child.
They're living there because there isn't affordable housing in their city.
And so the response is to take the children away
(32:18):
and then require the parents or other family caregivers to
somehow come up with the answers. And on top of that,
they're given these therapeutic remedies. You know, they have to
go to various kinds of counselors and I have to
take parent training classes. So it makes it even more difficult.
(32:38):
As I mentioned the case of Vanessa People's it made
her life more difficult to get involved with this system.
It's harder for her to take care of her children now.
And so yes, this is a system that punishes poverty.
It diverts attention away from all the structural impediments to
meeting children's needs and blames parents for it. It polices
(33:02):
families instead of supporting families. This is really enlightening, I
think I can say forbidding me and I certainly many
of our listeners are learning a lot. We've been talking
to the professor scholar in various advocacy and activist circles
around black motherhood and particularly reproductive rights and bringing together
(33:24):
the right to control one's body, including the fight for
racial and social justice. And when we come back from
the break, we're going to talk about the recent Adopts
decision and how this is really something that Dorothy saw
coming many decades ago when she first started this work,
because she could see the limits of Rob Wade and
what they provided we'll be right back after the break.
(34:06):
We are back on some of my best friends are
We're here with Dorothy Roberts. Dorothy. We are at the
fiftieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. And last
year we had this other Supreme Court ruling, the Dab's decision,
that said there was no constitutional right to an abortion.
It sort of nullifies Rove Wade, And I wanted to
ask you first, what did Roe achieve and what didn't
(34:29):
it achieve. Rowe achieved a recognition that the Constitution protects
the right to abortion, and so it protected us against
government bans on abortion. It protected us against criminalizing abortion.
But what it did not achieve was recognizing the full
(34:52):
scope of reproductive freedom we should have. So it did
not provide for government funding for abortion, for example. It
did not recognize the ways in which structural inequities prevent
people from having truly free reproductive lives. It didn't address
all the policies that devalue black people's reproduction, for example,
(35:18):
that have devalued black women's child bearing. So it didn't
recognize the full scope of our reproductive lives that include
not only the ability not to have a child, to
terminate a pregnancy, but also the ability to have a
child and to be supported in raising that child. Those
(35:42):
second two aspects of reproductive freedom were not touched upon
at all in row versus way, nor did Row recognize
the need for support for actually effectuating a reproductive decision. Yeah,
this is one of the things I was so excited
to talk to you about, because when Dobbs first happened,
(36:04):
I had this really perplexed problem. I'm thinking to myself,
I'm like, wait a minute, I know that on the
literal right side of our political divide, that there are
white nationalists and white supremacists who are invested in this
replacement theory, which is that they won't be replaced, that
we have to save America for white Christians. And so
(36:26):
I'm thinking that if abortions increase the likelihood that black
women will have fewer babies, isn't this a contradiction with
the politics of Dobbs. And it wasn't until I dug
into your work that I understood that what you've been
saying is that the entire movement for abortion was really
(36:48):
not the issue that black women wanted to protect in
terms of the reproductive freedom. Surely they did want access
to it, but what they wanted was full control over
their bodies. And unlike white women, their bodies had been
subjected to increased state interventions since ROW and even before ROW,
(37:11):
and so ROW didn't protect them. So tell us particularly,
how we are to understand that at some point in
the very recent past, the state increased its capacity to
essentially either force birth control on women or to outright
sterilize Black women. We have to distinguish between birth control
(37:31):
as a form of reproductive freedom that's in the control
of the person who's using it for themselves, and birth
control is a form of population control. So similarly, black
women have demanded access to all forms of birth control,
including abortion, and we should be able to have birth control,
(37:57):
including abortion, if we want it. But at the same time,
throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were government programs,
federally funded government programs that forced sterilization on black women.
An example is the Ralph Sisters. These two young women
(38:18):
teenagers in Alabama, who were sterilized without their consent, even
when their mothers signed a form with an X she
was an illiterate sharecropper. They became the name plaintiffs of
a big class action lawsuit that revealed that hundreds of
thousands of people in recent years had been sterilized under
(38:42):
these programs. Now, the programs would force people to a
so called agreed a sterilization in order to get healthcare
or in order to get welfare benefits. In North Carolina,
the Eugenics Board operated into the nineteen seventies, and by
the time it was exposed, it was mostly forcing sterilizations
(39:06):
on impoverished black women, black women who received welfare benefits.
So the state itself is actually trading its public goods,
its resources, it's welfare benefits, whether it's food stamps or
access to housing, as a way of saying, you can
have these things if we take away your right to
bear children. Absolutely, this is a very common idea in
(39:30):
welfare policy in the United States. I want to ask
you to connect the dots for me. Okay, tell me
how that leads to the dab's decision. Okay. So my
first point is we have to understand that reproductive freedom
involves resisting ending all of these forms of reproductive violence.
Whether it's control over the ability to end a pregnancy
(39:55):
in other words, forcing someone to give birth, or whether
it's denying someone the ability to give birth, and that
denial can be through sterilization, it could be through welfare policies,
other kinds of policies that pressure people not to have children.
So when khalils as well, it seems like a like
(40:15):
a contradiction that you would support a ban on abortion
but also support a policy that would discourage black women
from having children. Well, it's it's not a contradiction because
they're both policies that deny Black women and others. But
let's focus on black women for a minute, the ability
(40:37):
to control their own reproductive lives. And by the way,
when you are in a position where you cannot afford
another child, you can't get an abortion, you are pressured
into being sterilized. So I see no contradiction. Yeah, that's
really helpful. Yeah, they don't want more Black children born.
(40:57):
What they want is more Black women to be sterilized.
And that is the pressure that you feel. You can't
get government support to take care of your child, you
can't get at us to abortion, what are you going
to do? Believe me, they will fund your sterilization in
a minute and you won't have any trouble getting sterilized.
(41:19):
Is it possible then that we will see legislation in
some near future that will begin to invest in birth
control at the state level to achieve just this purpose.
In light of DABS decision, well, I would say we
already have it, but I think it may become more
explicit and more obvious. Now let me let me say
(41:39):
another connection between jobs and family policing and these other
forms of reproductive violence. What is going to happen as
a result of jobs is that people who decided, knowing
their own life circumstances, they cannot manage another child, and
(41:59):
are yet are forced to give birth to that child.
In most cases, they will keep the child, and they
will be now at risk of having their children taken
from them by the family policing system because they're struggling
to take care of the child. The dob's decision explicitly
suggests that what should happen to children in those cases
(42:22):
babies born as a result of abortion bands is that
their parents should give them up for adoption. Justice Amy
Coney Barrett suggested this during the oral argument, and then
Alito puts in the majority opinion a favorable suggestion that
people can just drop off the babies at these safe
(42:43):
haven places for people who want to give up their babies,
and then drops the footnote about the unmet demand for
adoptable children, as if these children should just be commodities
in a market for adoption that probably is not gonna have.
The way in which these children are going to end
(43:04):
up in the market for adoption is that their children
will be for possibly taken from them by the family
policing system, parents' rights terminated, and the children become available
for adoption. But even that is a false picture to
some extent, because black children are the least likely to
be adopted, they're the most likely to stay in foster care,
(43:27):
the most likely to age out of foster care. So
we have to see these connections between criminalization of parenting
and pregnancy, family policing, and the end of any entitlement
to support for your children. And Dobbs is going to
(43:48):
intensify that because it is going to force people who
are unable to meet children's needs, who've made the decision
I cannot manage this child, force them to give birth,
and then punish them when they're unable to meet that
baby's needs. Dorothy, one of the things I'm hearing in
all of your work in terms of resisting and fighting
(44:11):
against the dab's decision, fighting for women's reproductive freedom. Is
the need to link those fights to the fight against
systemic racism, to all of these historical problems. We can't
think of them separately. Yes. And the other thing that
I'm thinking about, because we talk so much about the
child welfare system, is how you call for the abolition
(44:31):
of the child welfare system. You think it's such a
troubled and oppressive system that we need to scrap it.
And it's not like that's not something we've tried, Like
like you've talked about this that during the COVID nineteen
pandemic that we actually had a sort of trial run
with getting rid of the child welfare system. That's right,
(44:52):
because you know, people, not surprisingly are concerned, well, if
we get rid of it, what's going to protect children?
And we know that children can remain safe without this system,
because we have examples of that. And one very telling
exam is the unintended abolition of family policing during the
(45:15):
pandemic in New York City and the Cares Act, which
in itself did more to reduce poverty in a faster
time than anything else in the history of the country
childhood poverty exactly. So we know from the evidence from
the Cares Act and other studies as well that have
looked at what happens when you actually give impoverished families
(45:35):
extra income, you know, and as if we needed a
study to figure this out, but studies have shown the
child poverty goes down, children fare better. And so that's
what happened during the pandemic. Child poverty went down and
children stayed safe. Now not only because of the government
(45:57):
infusion of supplemental income to these families, but also in
New York City in particular, there was a strong network
of mutual aid organizations that sprang into action and distributed
material resources to families. And so that those two things
(46:18):
are important components of what abolition is about. It's not
just about dismantling the oppressive system. It's also about building
a replacement that actually supports families and keeps children safe.
And so that could include a change of government policy
to provide income to impoverished families, but also importantly mutual
(46:41):
aid community based networks that provide the material resources that
families need. Well. I think that it goes without saying
that what you've shared with us everyone should know period Hardstole.
I mean, if the story of the New Gemcrow, as
Michelle Alexander once described it, or as the references that
(47:03):
you have in your book of the punitive welfare child
welfare system as the new Jane Crow, we are past
time to see the fullness of this really nvidious system.
And I'm just really grateful that you've dedicated all of
your career to drawing our attention to this. And while
(47:25):
I remain hopeful in this moment that we see things
with clarity as the predicate for the possibility of change,
I also am a realist. We've got a really tough
fight ahead of us, and this is not an easy
subject to master, but you've done it. And so Dorothy Roberts,
thank you so much for all your work, for your
tireless commitment to justice, and for helping us see what
(47:49):
we should have seen a long time ago. But now
now that we can't unsee it, we have our work
cut out for us. Thank you well. Thank you so much.
Kill Will and Ben I really enjoyed speaking with you.
We have to work together collectively in these movements, and
the movement to end carcera logics and punitive approaches to
(48:10):
human needs. I think it's going to be stronger than ever,
and that that's my hope. Thank you so much, Dorothy,
This is inspiring. Thank you. Damn well. That was a lot,
and man, it was so interesting to hear how interconnected
(48:32):
all these things are. Yeah, no, I mean I feel
the same way as I said to you. This was
very emotional for me. And one of the reasons why
is because all my kids, dude ran away. You know,
at some point they ran away from home. Well not
exactly home away from home, but they left our site.
Did they ever come back? Well, yes they did. We
put them through college and all of this. But okay,
(48:52):
I mean we were at this massive holiday celebration when
we were living in Bloomington, Indiana, and our middle child
at the time, Jordan, who was like six years old,
she she just disappeared in the crowd and we got
her back because someone found her and instead of calling
the police on us, they took her to the announcer
and said, this child is lost. Now, you could imagine
(49:12):
this exact scenario where this happened to you, where you're
in this white town and they're like, you screwed up this.
I'm a bad parent, right, I'm neglectful. Yeah. And the difference,
of course, is that I was a professor at Indiana
University and not someone who was struggling as a low
income resident of that community. Yeah. This is the difference
between you having your parental rights and your right to
(49:34):
govern your life and your children's life versus a system
that has held bent on taking children away from people. Yeah.
As a parent, one of the worst horrors you could imagine,
I mean, short of the death of a child, of
just the child being taken from you and you being incapable,
powerless to do anything about it. That's right. I am
walking away from this conversation empowered with more information, particularly
(49:57):
this idea about the family policing system. I just think
that as you and I move forward in our work
talking about mass incarceration, now, we've got to deal with
this problem mass separation and the way that the child
welfare system works. Man, mass separation. Did you coin that
phrase in the middle of this conversation, because that's kind
of impressive. I did, But you know, my brain works
like that sometimes. Damn, damn, that's why you're top billing
(50:21):
on this show. I was left also with thinking the
more that we think of these issues interconnected, that the
rights of reproduction, a history of racial oppression, that there's
a way rather than rather than, as people usually say
in these separate fights, like don't make it too convoluted,
that's right, stay in your lane, we have to think
of them as connected, and you know, you feel like
(50:43):
you can get some mobilization if everyone feels this is
their problem on both ends. That's right. All right, man,
Well I'm glad that you're part of my kid's life.
So yeah, yeah, these are my nieces and my nephew.
If someone comfortable, I want to say, but they've got
a white uncle, I'm the white guy that's going to vouch. Yeah,
all right, man, love you, Love you too. Some of
(51:09):
My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries.
The show is written and hosted by me Khalil, Gibron
Mohammed and my best friend sometimes Ben Austin Hey. It's
produced by John Assanti and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is
Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our
(51:30):
showrunner is Constanza Gallardo. At Pushkin. Thanks to Lee Tall, Mulad,
Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Greta Khane,
and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Lill Lily is by
fellow Chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young. It is from
(51:51):
his album Tubman. Okay, you definitely want to check out
more of his music at his website Avery R. Young
dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms
at Pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our
newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you
(52:16):
like to listen. Hey, and if you like our show,
please give it a five star rating and a review.
And okay, even if you don't like it, come on
give it a five star rating, review it and please
tell all of your best friends about it. Thank you
so much,
Push it. I immediately thought, they are punishing these women
for having children. And I think there was just something
about the punishment of reproduction, the punishment of child bearing,
that to me, was one of the most insidious, dehumanizing
(00:38):
forms of devaluing human beings, you know, to say, you
don't deserve to have children, you don't deserve to contribute
to our society. I'm Khalil Jibra Mohammed and I'm Ben Austin.
We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a
(01:00):
historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of
my best friends are Some of my best friends are like,
I'm not a blank, some of my best friends are blank.
In this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the
absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country. And in
this episode, we're going to talk about the recent DAPs
(01:22):
decision and reproductive justice with someone who knows more about
these issues than anyone else. Hey, Ben, Hey man, All right, Hey, hey,
(01:44):
always always good to be talking with you. I'm always better. Yeah.
You know, today's guest has me thinking about this song
that's in my head. Can you guess which song it is?
Is it Sadie, Sadie May No, No, that's a that's
a good one. That's a good one. This one is
I'll always love my Mama. I'll always love I'll always
love mym mom. I gotta say because Dorothy Roberts, our
(02:08):
guest today, is the leading scholar of black motherhood and
the fight for reproductive justice. This scholar, this advocate, this
tireless activist for reproductive justice, has written four books, probably
the most influential of them in shaping how we understand
the meaning of having control over your Body's a book
(02:30):
called Killing the Black Body, Race, reproduction, and the Meaning
of Liberty. I am so excited to have her on
our show today. She's a law professor and sociologist now
at your alma mater, that's right, University of Pennsylvania. And
she's a Chicagoan. I mean, it's like it's from our neighborhood.
It's all real. And so we are at the fiftieth
(02:51):
anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision this month, January
twenty twenty three is the fiftieth anniversary. Is January nineteen
seventy three, last summer when the jobs decision came down.
Khalil and it ruled that a woman does not have
a constitutional right to an abortion. That's right, and the
uproar that happened. Then people say it shaped the midterms,
that happened, But there's so much more to the dab's decision. Yes,
(03:14):
and Dorothy is going to help us unpack that. Yeah,
because the truth is that most of the conversation has
been framed only around the loss of the right to
an abortion. That states can now take that right away.
But the truth is, if we had been listening to
Dorothy Roberts over the course of the work that she's
been doing for decades, we would have understood that this
(03:35):
is really a fight about the right to choose what
you do with your body, whether it's to choose an
abortion or to not choose an abortion. This issue cuts
both ways, and seeing it through the lens of race,
as she has done, helps us really understand that. And
so kind of what you're saying is people might not
have listened to her before, but once they listened to
(03:55):
this podcast, done deal. We solve things. That's right. But
I got one more thing to add, you know, speaking
about Mama's so some of our listeners know that my
mother's grandfather has this ambiguous race past, and in a way,
he left Mississippi in the nineteen twenties and married a
black woman because it was kind of illegal because he
(04:16):
was kind of white presenting. He was kind of white presenting.
People say it sometimes say that about me exactly. So
the reason this matters is because one of the ways
that Dorothy Roberts his career has been shaped is by
her own story of growing up as a product of
an interracial marriage. That's right. She helps us understand, like
(04:40):
the motivation for her to care about even childbirth and
what children mean for the world, and the right to
choose what you want to do when you are thinking
about planning for a child kind of has a lot
to do with her own background. So we're gonna hear
a lot more about who Dorothy Robberts is, as well
as what she thinks we ought to be doing differently
about reproductive justice in this country. Let's jump right into
(05:02):
this because Dorothy has a lot to say and we
need to hear it. Dorothy, it is great to meet you.
Thank you so much for being on Some of my
best friends are Thank you very much for inviting me.
I look forward to our conversation absolutely. So all three
(05:23):
of us grew up in Hyde Park area. Wow, Khalil
and I went to Kenwood together, which is the high
school in Hyde Park. But I'm also the father and
parent in an interracial family. I'm maybe not unlike your
father back in the sixties. I have this very bookish,
sort of Dorothy Roberts like daughter who is now seventeen.
(05:45):
Her name is Lysia. But maybe you can talk about,
you know, that part of your past and sort of
this interracial identity in this family that you came from
in the same neighborhood that we're from. Yeah. Sure. It's
so interesting because from most of my career I have
not talked about my background, about my parents race, and
(06:09):
now it seems to come up a lot. And I'm
working on a kind of memoir about my parents, so
it's very present in my mind. And of course my
background my family have been very influential in my career
and my interests, so that only makes sense. I just,
you know, I just haven't talked about it much. So
(06:32):
I grew up in the nineteen sixties in Hyde Park.
I would have gone to Kenwood High but my father
had Fullbright fellowship in Egypt, so I spent my first
two years of high school in Cairo, Egypt, instead of
in Hyde Park. That's really fascinating. I went to Shuesmith
Elementary School, which is right, you know, down the street
from Kenwood High I live a block away from Shuesmith.
(06:54):
I passed it every morning on my dog walk. We're neighbors. Yeah,
that's amazing. Historically directly, directly, so this was in the sixties.
My father was a white anthropologist at Roosevelt University in Chicago,
downtown Chicago. My mother was an immigrant from Jamaica who
(07:16):
first lived in Liberia before she came to the United States.
But she got a scholarship to Roosevelt and met my
father there while she was a student. And my father
was a researcher of interracial marriage. Interesting. You're gonna have
to stop me if I get too deep into this,
because I could talk just about this forever. This is
(07:38):
so yeah, Like I said, this is my experience. So
I'm so curious about his research and how you interpreted
it and how you felt it as a child. Just
so you know, Dorothy, I've been also researching Ben as
a white guy raising two by racial kids. So this
is helpful to me. Too. Okay. So my father growing
up was always writing a book from the first distant
(08:01):
part of my memory, writing a book on interracial marriage
in Chicago, and was interviewing black white couples in Chicago. Okay,
And this was an important part of my childhood because
he not only was researching it, he was promoting it.
He really believed that interracial marriage was the answer to
America's race problem. So interesting, and this was reflected in
(08:25):
our family because he married a black woman, my mother,
and all of their friends or most of their friends
were interracial couples. So I thought that my father was
working on this book in the nineteen sixties. When I
came to Penn ten years ago and had to collect
all the boxes in my basement, I shipped to pen
(08:50):
twenty five boxes of my father's papers. He had passed away,
and I hadn't looked at them. The first box I
opened up, I see these interviews he conducted, and the
dates on them are nineteen thirty seven, And I assumed
these are couples who were married in nineteen thirty seven,
(09:11):
which he interviewed in the nineteen sixties Lower Beehall. They
were actually interviews that he conducted in nineteen thirty seven
when he was a master's student at University of Chicago,
well before he met your mother. Aha, that's exactly right.
I like this. I'm liking where this is going. I'm
(09:32):
liking this. This gives whole new meaning to the professional.
Is the personnel or the personnel is the political? This
whole new spin on it, exactly because I had always
assumed he got interested in the topic because he met
my mother, not prior to now, I'm sorry to think,
did he marry my mother? And as part of his
research project. Well then I read some more and I
(09:56):
get to the interviews conducted to the nineteen fifties, and
he's conducting them with my mother prior to their marriage.
My mother was his research assistant, and she was doing
the interviews of the women, and he convicted the interviews
of the men. Anyway, that's all background I only discovered
ten years ago. But our life as a family was very,
(10:19):
very much influenced by my parents, especially my father's mission
to promote interracial marriage in Chicago, and so I was
surrounded by interracial couples, and early on I had adopted
as a little girl, you know, in kindergarten, the philosophy
(10:41):
of my father and was very proud to be the
child of an interracial marriage. I can remember walking down
the street in between my parents and thinking, this is,
you know, an example of how people of different races
can get together as proud to do it. By the
time I went to college, I was affirmatively hiding the
(11:04):
fact that my father was white. I could tell you
situations where I lied, I mean light about it, and
I was and I didn't want people to see him.
I didn't want I hid family photos when I was
with my friends that he was in. I really wanted to.
I thought that I needed to be I have two
(11:29):
black parents and for people to think I had two
black parents to identify the black Now that changed also,
and as you know, I wrote a book about countering
the biological concept of race and highlighting the fact that,
you know, black people have embraced people as black despite
(11:49):
what their exact ethnic background is. But I've gone through
a range of feelings and positions about my blackness. I mean,
now I don't feel like I need to hide the
fact that my father was white. I think a lot
of my ideas today the fact that I'm now a
sociology professor, are so much of what I think supporting
(12:14):
my deep feeling about our common humanity that definitely comes
from my parents, i'd say, Dorothy, and thinking about your father,
I don't share his sort of utopian view of interracial marriage.
I mean I think probably like like you what you're
saying that you know, it's beautiful that I have this family,
and it's you know, wonderful on the personal level. It's
(12:36):
not going to change structures and injustice or change white supremacy.
And I think that's also the premise of in some
ways of our Khalil n I on this podcast, that
we're able to have these conversations across racial lines and
we're best friends and we've been best friends for thirty
five years, but that's that's not the pathway to changing
these deep structural issues. I mean sort of we're and
(12:57):
that's kind of what we're wrestling with today. And maybe
that's a good transition to ask you how in your
own work, how did you come to focus on black motherhood,
on reproductive rights and child welfare. What's the story of
that being the focus of much of your work. Sure, so,
I've always been since I was very very young, interested
(13:18):
in social justice issues and active in some way in
fighting against various forms of oppression, but especially racial oppression.
And I see reproductive injustice as one of the most
violent and profound, you in a negative way, damaging, dehumanizing
(13:44):
ways in which racial oppression is enacted. Now that fits
into my overall passion about racial justice, but in particular
in the late nineteen eighties, when I first started law teaching,
I was reading about the prosecutions of black women who
(14:07):
were pregnant and using drugs. This is the crack epidemic.
This is during the crack epidemic and the cracked down
by federal and local governments on black communities in the
name of the war on drugs and focusing on crack
cocaine as if it were some exceptional, you know, especially violent,
(14:31):
antisocial kind of drug use. And one aspect of that
war against black communities was the punishment of black women
who used drugs and were pregnant, and that grabbed me
like nothing else. You know, I've thought about why did
I think that was such a terrible injustice? But I
(14:54):
immediately thought, they are punishing these women for having children.
And I think there was just something about the punishment
of reproduction, the punishment of child bearing. That to me
was one of the most insidious, dehumanizing forms of devaluing
(15:15):
human beings, you know, to say you don't deserve to
have children, you don't deserve to contribute to our society.
You're worthless, you're disposable. Even though at the time the
prosecutions were being portrayed as if they were being done
to protect black fetuses, I knew that was false, and
(15:38):
I saw this as a form of racial violence against
these women. And so that's really what propelled me into
scholarship and into writing an article about the lack of
constitutional support for these prosecutions, arguing that they violated the
(16:00):
Fourteenth Amendment both the right to privacy and equal protection,
and that that then launched my book, Killing the Black Body,
because I began to think about all the ways, the
myriad ways in which black women's childbearing has been punished
from the time of slavery. Of course, during the slavery era,
(16:22):
black women's reproduction was commodified, that was forced reproduction, forced
reproductive servitude. But after the slavery era, after slavery ended,
black women's childbearing continue to be seen as in need
of white supervision. We could go from the eugenic era
(16:45):
and into the nineteen sixties and seventies with mass sterilization programs,
but then also the impact of welfare restructuring and the
way in which welfare became especially stigmatized when more and
more black people were receiving welfare up until the end
(17:05):
of the federal entitlement to welfare, fueled by this image
of black women who were having babies false image, I
should make clear, having babies just to get a welfare check.
And then I also saw that the state taking away
their babies through the child welfare system and foster care
(17:29):
was an extension of that. So in working on killing
the Black body, I became aware of all the newborns,
the thousands and thousands of black newborns who were being
taken from their mothers at birth and put in Many
of them were left in the hospital. They were called
border babies or put into foster care. The foster population
(17:51):
exploded over the course of this time, and I began
to see, first of all, became aware of this. I
wasn't I wasn't aware of the huge racial disparities in
foster care. But once I was aware of it, it
was obvious to me that this was an extension of
the valuation of black mothers that I had written about
(18:13):
in Killing the Black Body, and that much of my
book Shattered Bonds the Colored child welfare. Can I take
a liberty here? This is really rich in terms of
your own intellectual journey to this important issue. I mean,
what I hear you saying at its root is that
the right to have a child is perhaps the most
(18:34):
fundamental expression of being a human being, and that there's
really no point in the history of black people in
these United States when the reproductive freedom of black women
wasn't subjected to control by the state in one way
or another. That's absolutely true. That's really fascinating. And when
(18:56):
we come back after the break, we're going to talk
about how these two systems, this system that is born
out of the War on drugs and the child welfare
system come together in the problem of separation. And we're
going to hear the story of one woman's horrifying tale
of almost losing her child. We'll be right back. We
(19:32):
are back with Dorothy Roberts, and we're talking about the
child welfare system and how problematic it is. More than problematic, man,
it's been like the primary vehicle for pathologizing blackness. This
is one of her key points in her early work. Yeah,
that is so right, Khalil Dorothy. You begin your book
Torn Apart with the story of Vanessa People's. Can you
(19:55):
tell us what happened to her in twenty seventeen and
really how her story illustrates the way the child welfare
system criminalizes motherhood. Sure. So, Vanessa People's is the young
mother who lives in Aurora, Colorado, and she was enjoying
a picnic with her family at a park, a local
(20:17):
park near her home, and she had asked one of
her cousins to watch one of her two young children,
the youngest one a toddler, And when the cousin left
the park, the toddler traps after the cousin before Vanessa,
who saw this happen like normal family, star, normal Jess. Exactly,
(20:39):
We've all been there, especially as Dad's where we're not
paying attention. Exactly, like this happens all the time, exactly
if Vanessa was peg, she was playing with the older
son and had left the younger one in the cousin's care.
The cousin left, the whole family was at this park
so it's not as if she was abandoning her child.
He ran after the cousin and in a minute's time
(21:04):
before Vanessa could catch up with him, a passer by
I had seen the child in the parking lot and
called nine to one. Vanessa sees this, sees the woman
on the phone, gets to her and says, that's my son.
The woman is on the phone with the police when
(21:26):
Vanessa arrives and will not give Vanessa her son back.
Are you kidding? Really? This person thinks they're doing they're
saving a child exactly. Vanessa is not in good health.
She was suffering from anemia and she was being tested
for leukemia. She's not in the position to fight this
(21:46):
woman over her son, and she figures when the police
officer arrives, will resolve the whole thing. While the police
officer arrives and disbelieves, Vanessa doesn't believe that this is
really her son. This is unbelievable. The family has to
come and vouch for her. But the police officer hands
(22:06):
Vanessa a ticket for child to be use. It turns
out in Colorado there is a criminal charge of misdemeanor
child abuse, which doesn't even require any evidence. A physical
harm to a child. All that happened in this case
was that her son was separated from her for a
(22:29):
minute momentarily in her eyesight she could see she could
see the child, all right. She's now alerted the Child
Welfare SYS is made aware of her in some way. Absolutely,
she now is reported to the local child protection office.
So a few weeks later, Vanessa has just given her
(22:52):
two sons a bath. She's cleaning up in the basement.
She lives with her son in a basement rooms at
her mother's house, and a white caseworker knocks on the door.
Because once you're under the radar, now they come to
investigate your home. Yeah, these caseworkers rarely, rarely get a
(23:12):
warrant to search the home. They don't tell the parents
that you have a Fourth Amendment right not to have
government agents. They can restrict. The parents can say you
can't come into my home. Of course, just like you
could with a police out. You would say, where's your warrant.
There's no difference. A Fourth Amendment applies to any government
agent who wants to search your home. But there's been
(23:35):
effectively an exemption created, unconstitutional exemption. In my opinion, for
caseworkers undergrounds that they're there to protect children, and this
also is not uncommon, especially in black neighborhoods, that case
workers bring police along with them. Three police officers arrived.
(23:57):
One of them pointed a gun. Vanessa's coming up. She
comes up with a gun pointing at her head. Okay,
now they start interrogating her. Vanessa is saying, why are
you in my house? You don't need to be here.
You see, my children are fine. She calls her mother
(24:17):
to come. Her mother goes into the bedroom with the
children and Vanessa wants to come there. The police officer
is guarding the door, saying that the grandmother cannot be
in the room with the children. Vanessa says, let me in.
The police officer grabs her by the throat. Two other
(24:39):
police officers, in addition to the one, jump on top
of her what's called hobble her. They hog tie her.
They chain her arms and her ankles together and then
chain them together, carry her out the house upside down,
like she says, like a pig, Like a pig, like
an animal. And not only does she go through this trauma,
(25:02):
her children are witnessing all of this. Yeah, the idea
that they're being protected. They're subjected to this. But the
upshot of this is that Vanessa now is registered in
the state of Colorado as a child abuser. It's pretty
much the worst stigma you can have. We have a
clip of Vanessa Peoples who is telling CBS News about
(25:22):
this harrowing experience and how it really ruined her life.
I can't get jobs, i can't even get housing. I'm
still living with my mom. The fact that someone else
intervened in my life. I'm stuck at zero. And it's
just an example of the kind of violence that this
(25:45):
system inflicts on families. Fortunately they didn't take her children
from her, but in tens of thousands of cases, especially
black and Native children are taken from their families, actually
hundreds of thousands every year, taken from their families and
put in foster care, which is itself a damaging system.
(26:09):
Just mounds and amounts of research showing that foster care
is a pathway to prison j given out the tension, homelessness,
drug addiction, mental health problems. You know, not to say
that every child who's been in foster care suffers from these,
but you're at greater risk than others in the population
(26:31):
of having these very negative outcomes as a result of
being in foster care. You know, when I read what
you described of Vanessa's story and her children and the outcome,
I found it deeply upsetting. And I've written about the
origins of racial criminalization, and just before Thanksgiving contributed as
(26:53):
a co chair of the National Academies of Sciences report
on how to Reduce racial inequality in crime. We call
it in crime and justice rather than in the criminal
justice system. And in that report, one of the things
that we say is that we all to rely less
on the criminal punishment system and more on other systems,
(27:14):
even with their flaws, because they are less viscerally lethal
in terms of contact with them, like sending in our
first responder who might be part of the child welfare system.
Is that what you mean, that's correct or caseworker. And
there are alternatives to this being called upon in cities
across the country, and some of this is being stood
up right now in terms of police diverting a call
(27:36):
a non emergency call to the child welfare system or
the mental health sector. And after reading more of your work, Dorothea,
I have to say, I mean it was devastating because
I felt like if Ben and I've been writing about
the story of mass incarceration, you know, I would say
my interpretation of what you've been writing about is a
story of mass separation. Yes, this history since the nineteen sixties,
(27:58):
of this skyrocketing foster care system that's doubled on itself
from I think you say in nineteen eighty five there
were two hundred and seventy six thousand people. By ninety nine,
less than twenty years later, there are five hundred and
sixty eight thousand. I mean, you know the system bed
in the nest, right, what is the scale of this thing? Yes,
so you're right. By the late nineteen nineties, there were
(28:22):
almost six hundred thousand children in the foster care system,
and black children were the largest group in foster care,
four times as likely as white children to be taken
from their families. Now, the disparities have shrunk somewhat, and
the foster care population has gone down somewhat, but it's
(28:43):
still hundreds of thousands of children, like four hundred thousand
I think exactly more than four hundred thousand children, and
black children still are twice as likely to be separated,
and one finding that from a recent study that I
didn't know about. When I wrote Shattered Bonds, I've included
(29:03):
it in torn Apart, is that half of Black children,
more than half of black children, fifty three percent, will
be subject to a child welfare investigation before they reach
aga teen. That is incredible. Half of all Black children
in America, half of all Black children America will experience this.
It's so huge, it's so huge, But it's also in
(29:25):
terribly for frustrating because I'm sitting here and I mean,
I told I shared this with Been even in preparations.
Conversation like you know, brought tears Tomise, because I'm like,
how did I not even know? Yes? And how is
it possible that the three of us are in this
conversation and we're both expressing our own ignorance about how
pervasive and punitive and devastating the system is. I'd even
(29:47):
add to that, Khalil, like we think of the child
welfare system as a force for good of taking care
of the neediest. Yes, and you know that you're educating
us that it's actually a force for harm, that it
does much much more harm than good. Absolutely, So I
was not aware of the harm. I only became aware
of it because of the work I was doing on
(30:07):
the prosecutions of black mothers, have discovered that they're newborns
who are being taken from them by the system. And
I think the system has just done a great job
at propaganda, and the media until very recently, has gone
along with it. Often the story goes the opposite way
that there'll be a case of a parent who harms
(30:30):
a child or even murders a child, and this is
very much like the criminal justice system. There'll be an
extreme case of crime or abuse, and then that sparks
more emphasis and investment in expanding the system and investigations. Yes,
that you're right, the parallels to the criminal justice system
are all over the place. I took this status from
(30:51):
your own work, but they're about sixteen percent of the
cases are of physical or sexual abuse, where a casework
will go in and protect a child from those but
the vast majority of the rest of the eighty four percent,
which are considered neglect are usually issues of poverty. It's
punishing need that these are parts who actually could use
much more investment. And I'm thinking about another corollary between
(31:15):
this and policing that when a caseworker shows up, when
a child productive surfaces shows up. The only tool they
have to help to help in quotes, is removed. They
can't help someone with housing, they can't help them with food,
they can't help them with clothes, they can't help them
with a job or with education. Inherent with childcare. The
only thing that they could do is say I'm going
to take the child exactly. That is the primary tool
(31:37):
of this system, So it's both practically that's what the
caseworker has to deal with the problems the family is encountering,
which mostly are problems of poverty. Neglect means failure to
meet the needs of a child, and usually parents who
don't meet the needs of their children. It's not because
(31:57):
they're deliberately withholding food that they have. It's not because
they're deliberately withholding clothing or housing. They're not living in
the hall with shelter because they want to neglect their child.
They're living there because there isn't affordable housing in their city.
And so the response is to take the children away
(32:18):
and then require the parents or other family caregivers to
somehow come up with the answers. And on top of that,
they're given these therapeutic remedies. You know, they have to
go to various kinds of counselors and I have to
take parent training classes. So it makes it even more difficult.
(32:38):
As I mentioned the case of Vanessa People's it made
her life more difficult to get involved with this system.
It's harder for her to take care of her children now.
And so yes, this is a system that punishes poverty.
It diverts attention away from all the structural impediments to
meeting children's needs and blames parents for it. It polices
(33:02):
families instead of supporting families. This is really enlightening, I
think I can say forbidding me and I certainly many
of our listeners are learning a lot. We've been talking
to the professor scholar in various advocacy and activist circles
around black motherhood and particularly reproductive rights and bringing together
(33:24):
the right to control one's body, including the fight for
racial and social justice. And when we come back from
the break, we're going to talk about the recent Adopts
decision and how this is really something that Dorothy saw
coming many decades ago when she first started this work,
because she could see the limits of Rob Wade and
what they provided we'll be right back after the break.
(34:06):
We are back on some of my best friends are
We're here with Dorothy Roberts. Dorothy. We are at the
fiftieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. And last
year we had this other Supreme Court ruling, the Dab's decision,
that said there was no constitutional right to an abortion.
It sort of nullifies Rove Wade, And I wanted to
ask you first, what did Roe achieve and what didn't
(34:29):
it achieve. Rowe achieved a recognition that the Constitution protects
the right to abortion, and so it protected us against
government bans on abortion. It protected us against criminalizing abortion.
But what it did not achieve was recognizing the full
(34:52):
scope of reproductive freedom we should have. So it did
not provide for government funding for abortion, for example. It
did not recognize the ways in which structural inequities prevent
people from having truly free reproductive lives. It didn't address
all the policies that devalue black people's reproduction, for example,
(35:18):
that have devalued black women's child bearing. So it didn't
recognize the full scope of our reproductive lives that include
not only the ability not to have a child, to
terminate a pregnancy, but also the ability to have a
child and to be supported in raising that child. Those
(35:42):
second two aspects of reproductive freedom were not touched upon
at all in row versus way, nor did Row recognize
the need for support for actually effectuating a reproductive decision. Yeah,
this is one of the things I was so excited
to talk to you about, because when Dobbs first happened,
(36:04):
I had this really perplexed problem. I'm thinking to myself,
I'm like, wait a minute, I know that on the
literal right side of our political divide, that there are
white nationalists and white supremacists who are invested in this
replacement theory, which is that they won't be replaced, that
we have to save America for white Christians. And so
(36:26):
I'm thinking that if abortions increase the likelihood that black
women will have fewer babies, isn't this a contradiction with
the politics of Dobbs. And it wasn't until I dug
into your work that I understood that what you've been
saying is that the entire movement for abortion was really
(36:48):
not the issue that black women wanted to protect in
terms of the reproductive freedom. Surely they did want access
to it, but what they wanted was full control over
their bodies. And unlike white women, their bodies had been
subjected to increased state interventions since ROW and even before ROW,
(37:11):
and so ROW didn't protect them. So tell us particularly,
how we are to understand that at some point in
the very recent past, the state increased its capacity to
essentially either force birth control on women or to outright
sterilize Black women. We have to distinguish between birth control
(37:31):
as a form of reproductive freedom that's in the control
of the person who's using it for themselves, and birth
control is a form of population control. So similarly, black
women have demanded access to all forms of birth control,
including abortion, and we should be able to have birth control,
(37:57):
including abortion, if we want it. But at the same time,
throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were government programs,
federally funded government programs that forced sterilization on black women.
An example is the Ralph Sisters. These two young women
(38:18):
teenagers in Alabama, who were sterilized without their consent, even
when their mothers signed a form with an X she
was an illiterate sharecropper. They became the name plaintiffs of
a big class action lawsuit that revealed that hundreds of
thousands of people in recent years had been sterilized under
(38:42):
these programs. Now, the programs would force people to a
so called agreed a sterilization in order to get healthcare
or in order to get welfare benefits. In North Carolina,
the Eugenics Board operated into the nineteen seventies, and by
the time it was exposed, it was mostly forcing sterilizations
(39:06):
on impoverished black women, black women who received welfare benefits.
So the state itself is actually trading its public goods,
its resources, it's welfare benefits, whether it's food stamps or
access to housing, as a way of saying, you can
have these things if we take away your right to
bear children. Absolutely, this is a very common idea in
(39:30):
welfare policy in the United States. I want to ask
you to connect the dots for me. Okay, tell me
how that leads to the dab's decision. Okay. So my
first point is we have to understand that reproductive freedom
involves resisting ending all of these forms of reproductive violence.
Whether it's control over the ability to end a pregnancy
(39:55):
in other words, forcing someone to give birth, or whether
it's denying someone the ability to give birth, and that
denial can be through sterilization, it could be through welfare policies,
other kinds of policies that pressure people not to have children.
So when khalils as well, it seems like a like
(40:15):
a contradiction that you would support a ban on abortion
but also support a policy that would discourage black women
from having children. Well, it's it's not a contradiction because
they're both policies that deny Black women and others. But
let's focus on black women for a minute, the ability
(40:37):
to control their own reproductive lives. And by the way,
when you are in a position where you cannot afford
another child, you can't get an abortion, you are pressured
into being sterilized. So I see no contradiction. Yeah, that's
really helpful. Yeah, they don't want more Black children born.
(40:57):
What they want is more Black women to be sterilized.
And that is the pressure that you feel. You can't
get government support to take care of your child, you
can't get at us to abortion, what are you going
to do? Believe me, they will fund your sterilization in
a minute and you won't have any trouble getting sterilized.
(41:19):
Is it possible then that we will see legislation in
some near future that will begin to invest in birth
control at the state level to achieve just this purpose.
In light of DABS decision, well, I would say we
already have it, but I think it may become more
explicit and more obvious. Now let me let me say
(41:39):
another connection between jobs and family policing and these other
forms of reproductive violence. What is going to happen as
a result of jobs is that people who decided, knowing
their own life circumstances, they cannot manage another child, and
(41:59):
are yet are forced to give birth to that child.
In most cases, they will keep the child, and they
will be now at risk of having their children taken
from them by the family policing system because they're struggling
to take care of the child. The dob's decision explicitly
suggests that what should happen to children in those cases
(42:22):
babies born as a result of abortion bands is that
their parents should give them up for adoption. Justice Amy
Coney Barrett suggested this during the oral argument, and then
Alito puts in the majority opinion a favorable suggestion that
people can just drop off the babies at these safe
(42:43):
haven places for people who want to give up their babies,
and then drops the footnote about the unmet demand for
adoptable children, as if these children should just be commodities
in a market for adoption that probably is not gonna have.
The way in which these children are going to end
(43:04):
up in the market for adoption is that their children
will be for possibly taken from them by the family
policing system, parents' rights terminated, and the children become available
for adoption. But even that is a false picture to
some extent, because black children are the least likely to
be adopted, they're the most likely to stay in foster care,
(43:27):
the most likely to age out of foster care. So
we have to see these connections between criminalization of parenting
and pregnancy, family policing, and the end of any entitlement
to support for your children. And Dobbs is going to
(43:48):
intensify that because it is going to force people who
are unable to meet children's needs, who've made the decision
I cannot manage this child, force them to give birth,
and then punish them when they're unable to meet that
baby's needs. Dorothy, one of the things I'm hearing in
all of your work in terms of resisting and fighting
(44:11):
against the dab's decision, fighting for women's reproductive freedom. Is
the need to link those fights to the fight against
systemic racism, to all of these historical problems. We can't
think of them separately. Yes. And the other thing that
I'm thinking about, because we talk so much about the
child welfare system, is how you call for the abolition
(44:31):
of the child welfare system. You think it's such a
troubled and oppressive system that we need to scrap it.
And it's not like that's not something we've tried, Like
like you've talked about this that during the COVID nineteen
pandemic that we actually had a sort of trial run
with getting rid of the child welfare system. That's right,
(44:52):
because you know, people, not surprisingly are concerned, well, if
we get rid of it, what's going to protect children?
And we know that children can remain safe without this system,
because we have examples of that. And one very telling
exam is the unintended abolition of family policing during the
(45:15):
pandemic in New York City and the Cares Act, which
in itself did more to reduce poverty in a faster
time than anything else in the history of the country
childhood poverty exactly. So we know from the evidence from
the Cares Act and other studies as well that have
looked at what happens when you actually give impoverished families
(45:35):
extra income, you know, and as if we needed a
study to figure this out, but studies have shown the
child poverty goes down, children fare better. And so that's
what happened during the pandemic. Child poverty went down and
children stayed safe. Now not only because of the government
(45:57):
infusion of supplemental income to these families, but also in
New York City in particular, there was a strong network
of mutual aid organizations that sprang into action and distributed
material resources to families. And so that those two things
(46:18):
are important components of what abolition is about. It's not
just about dismantling the oppressive system. It's also about building
a replacement that actually supports families and keeps children safe.
And so that could include a change of government policy
to provide income to impoverished families, but also importantly mutual
(46:41):
aid community based networks that provide the material resources that
families need. Well. I think that it goes without saying
that what you've shared with us everyone should know period Hardstole.
I mean, if the story of the New Gemcrow, as
Michelle Alexander once described it, or as the references that
(47:03):
you have in your book of the punitive welfare child
welfare system as the new Jane Crow, we are past
time to see the fullness of this really nvidious system.
And I'm just really grateful that you've dedicated all of
your career to drawing our attention to this. And while
(47:25):
I remain hopeful in this moment that we see things
with clarity as the predicate for the possibility of change,
I also am a realist. We've got a really tough
fight ahead of us, and this is not an easy
subject to master, but you've done it. And so Dorothy Roberts,
thank you so much for all your work, for your
tireless commitment to justice, and for helping us see what
(47:49):
we should have seen a long time ago. But now
now that we can't unsee it, we have our work
cut out for us. Thank you well. Thank you so much.
Kill Will and Ben I really enjoyed speaking with you.
We have to work together collectively in these movements, and
the movement to end carcera logics and punitive approaches to
(48:10):
human needs. I think it's going to be stronger than ever,
and that that's my hope. Thank you so much, Dorothy,
This is inspiring. Thank you. Damn well. That was a lot,
and man, it was so interesting to hear how interconnected
(48:32):
all these things are. Yeah, no, I mean I feel
the same way as I said to you. This was
very emotional for me. And one of the reasons why
is because all my kids, dude ran away. You know,
at some point they ran away from home. Well not
exactly home away from home, but they left our site.
Did they ever come back? Well, yes they did. We
put them through college and all of this. But okay,
(48:52):
I mean we were at this massive holiday celebration when
we were living in Bloomington, Indiana, and our middle child
at the time, Jordan, who was like six years old,
she she just disappeared in the crowd and we got
her back because someone found her and instead of calling
the police on us, they took her to the announcer
and said, this child is lost. Now, you could imagine
(49:12):
this exact scenario where this happened to you, where you're
in this white town and they're like, you screwed up this.
I'm a bad parent, right, I'm neglectful. Yeah. And the difference,
of course, is that I was a professor at Indiana
University and not someone who was struggling as a low
income resident of that community. Yeah. This is the difference
between you having your parental rights and your right to
(49:34):
govern your life and your children's life versus a system
that has held bent on taking children away from people. Yeah.
As a parent, one of the worst horrors you could imagine,
I mean, short of the death of a child, of
just the child being taken from you and you being incapable,
powerless to do anything about it. That's right. I am
walking away from this conversation empowered with more information, particularly
(49:57):
this idea about the family policing system. I just think
that as you and I move forward in our work
talking about mass incarceration, now, we've got to deal with
this problem mass separation and the way that the child
welfare system works. Man, mass separation. Did you coin that
phrase in the middle of this conversation, because that's kind
of impressive. I did, But you know, my brain works
like that sometimes. Damn, damn, that's why you're top billing
(50:21):
on this show. I was left also with thinking the
more that we think of these issues interconnected, that the
rights of reproduction, a history of racial oppression, that there's
a way rather than rather than, as people usually say
in these separate fights, like don't make it too convoluted,
that's right, stay in your lane, we have to think
of them as connected, and you know, you feel like
(50:43):
you can get some mobilization if everyone feels this is
their problem on both ends. That's right. All right, man,
Well I'm glad that you're part of my kid's life.
So yeah, yeah, these are my nieces and my nephew.
If someone comfortable, I want to say, but they've got
a white uncle, I'm the white guy that's going to vouch. Yeah,
all right, man, love you, Love you too. Some of
(51:09):
My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries.
The show is written and hosted by me Khalil, Gibron
Mohammed and my best friend sometimes Ben Austin Hey. It's
produced by John Assanti and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is
Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our
(51:30):
showrunner is Constanza Gallardo. At Pushkin. Thanks to Lee Tall, Mulad,
Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Greta Khane,
and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Lill Lily is by
fellow Chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young. It is from
(51:51):
his album Tubman. Okay, you definitely want to check out
more of his music at his website Avery R. Young
dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms
at Pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our
newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you
(52:16):
like to listen. Hey, and if you like our show,
please give it a five star rating and a review.
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