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