Reimagining Race, Resistance, and Technoscience: A Conversation with Dorothy Roberts

Interviewer: Ruha Benjamin

Page author: Allie Diaz

Summary
Benjamin interviews Dorothy Roberts, a distinguished professor and scholar of Africana studies and sociology. Roberts remembers growing up in an interracial family; her father was white and her mother was Black, and both parents were heavily involved in advanced liberal arts studies. Roberts spent most of her childhood in Illinois, but she also lived for a few years in Liberia and Egypt. Her parents held a strong view that “there was only one human race” and wanted to raise their children as “citizens of the world,” which Roberts appreciates and remembers fondly (328-329).

Roberts attended Yale University for her undergraduate studies in anthropology and studied abroad in Bogotá, Columbia, during her junior year. Roberts states that she “gained [her] critical theory perspective” in Bogotá and remembers studying abroad as “one of the most liberating experiences of [her] life” (333-334). She became passionate about social justice and was accepted to Harvard Law School. After graduating, Roberts became a legal clerk under Constance Baker Motley, who was the first African American female federal judge in the United States and a hero of the civil rights movement. Roberts then pursued a job at the law firm that she thought was “the quirkiest and least elitist,” where she remained for six years while becoming a mother to three children. Roberts then realized that her talents would be better used in a less tedious profession, and she began applying to teach at law schools.

As a new professor of law at Rutgers University, Roberts became passionately interested in reproductive justice and reproductive freedom, specifically as they pertain to women of color. She published her first law review article, “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies,” in 1991 in Harvard Law Review, which radically addressed the prosecution of women who use drugs during pregnancy. Her first book, Killing the Black Body, was published in 1997, when Roberts transferred positions to Northwestern University. Roberts and Benjamin discuss how the institutionalized racism that punishes Black women for having children that Roberts explores in Killing the Black Body is still present today.

Roberts then planned to write a book about how the overrepresentation of Black children in the foster care system is a deep-rooted political problem. She explains how the foster care system operates like a prison that especially punishes, monitors, and regulates black women. Roberts relates her book, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, to the systemically oppressive technologies that Benjamin explores elsewhere in the volume. She notices how state agencies are using algorithms of risk to identify which families are unsafe for children and how these algorithms perpetuate the racial and economic biases that are already in the system. “If you’ve got a criminal justice system that incarcerates black people for multiple discriminatory reasons and you incorporate that into the test for when a child is in danger, you are importing that discrimination” (341).

Roberts dedicated her next book, Fatal Invention, to her parents and their belief that “there is only one human race” (342). The book addresses the resurgence of the biological concept of race and its relation to institutionalized racism. Roberts admits that she has faced criticism that she is “anti-science” and unqualified to be dabbling in the medical field of knowledge. Roberts responds to these criticisms by questioning the idea that biologists should be critiquing their own research, otherwise unchecked, when their research has a direct impact on society. “[I]f you are going to use race as a variable in your research, then you’re using a social category. So you should not be doing this research without critique from outside the lab. That’s just not good science” (344).

When Benjamin asks what technological developments Roberts believes young scholars should be paying close attention to, she responds immediately with gene editing. Roberts explains that gene editing not only privileges people who can afford to access it, but it more specifically privileges “people who don’t have a stake in social change” (346). She laments the waste of material and political resources that intend to “improve” future children without changing the unequal conditions that children are living in now. Benjamin and Roberts continue to discuss predictive algorithms that import biases while appearing neutral. “The thing is,” Roberts states, “part of the smokescreen is that when you say we don’t trust human beings, we’ll trust the robots, you’re actually taking away agency from the most disadvantaged people who don’t have control over the algorithms” (347). Roberts believes that the most obvious solution to this dilemma is the empowerment of people who are victimized and targeted by these algorithms, namely women of color. “What would it mean to give agency to the survivors of state and private violence to imagine and implement the best way to deal with it?” Roberts asks. “That’s such a different way of thinking” (348).

Benjamin concludes his interview with Roberts by saying that Roberts still has the “fire” of the fifteen-year-old Dorothy in Chicago and the nineteen-year-old Dorothy in Columbia. “I think so often we get schooled out of our idealism and our fire, with the more people learn about unjust social structures, we often become cynical and disillusioned. But you’ve retained the fire!” (348). Roberts hopes her future students will come out of her classes more enlightened about how inequality operates and with the mindset that they can make a difference.

Connection to other readings
Here are some thoughts about how this chapter connects to other readings from our class (or even outside of it!)

Connection to other chapters
Scratch a Theory, You Find a Biography: A Conversation with Troy Duster: There are multiple levels of connections here. The obvious is that they are both interviews, so if you like the style of this chapter, you'll like the style of the other chapter. But, I also think that both interviewees touch on similar topics. They both talk about their life stories (which makes them function as a form of counterstory), but they also talk about science and technology, especially genetics.