29 Quotes by Dorothy Roberts

Race persists because it continues to be politically useful.

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

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

A black man in San Diego who developed hypertension because of exposure to toxic chemicals lost half of his disability award after a doctor reported that blacks are genetically prone to hypertension.

Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health – because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.

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

Racial profiling by doctors can also lead to overmedication. A 2009 federally funded study found that doctors are four times as likely to prescribe powerful antipsychotic drugs to children covered by Medicaid as they are to children whose parents have private insurance.

Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered “prime stock” to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.

The powerful Western image of childhood innocence does not seem to benefit Black children. Black children are born guilty.