Dorothy Roberts, University Professor of Law, Sociology, Civil Rights, and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Acclaimed scholar of race, gender and law, Dorothy Roberts will deliver annual Howard B. Schonberger Peace and Social Justice Lecture. Schonberger was esteemed professor of history at UMaine and a founder of Socialist and Marxist Studies Lecture Series. Roberts’s major books include “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and The Meaning of Liberty and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re‐create Race in the Twenty‐first Century.”
Her Schonberger Lecture, part of History Department Colloquium Series, is based on her forthcoming book, “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and. How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” She argues that the U.S. child welfare system is a state apparatus that investigates, supervises, and terrorizes Black families to control them, not to protect their children. She describes how warrantless home investigations, monitoring of families by state agents, civilians deputized to report on parents, and coerced compliance with agency dictates reflect carceral logic with parallels in the criminal punishment system.
Go to umaine.edu/SocialistAndMarxistStudiesSeries for the Zoom link to join all programs and for more information about the Spring series
