29 Quotes by Dorothy Roberts

Blaming Black mothers, then, is a way of subjugating the Black race as a whole. At the same time, devaluing motherhood is particularly damaging to Black women.

Slaveholders were willing to overwork pregnant slaves at the expense of the health of both mother and child.

Reviewing the history of official racial classifications reminds us that these categories are not natural – and neither are the institutional inequities that race undergirds.

Second, the control of Black women’s reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America.

Along with these disparaging images of Black mothers, the media increasingly portray Black children as incapable of contributing anything positive to society.

Attributing blacks’ poor health to inherent racial difference allowed whites like Jefferson both to ignore how disease is caused by political inequality and to justify an unequal system by pointing to the inherent racial difference that disease supposedly reveals.

In Chapter 1, I describe the exploitation of slave women’s capacity to produce more slaves and the denial of their rights as mothers. After Emancipation, racism continued to corrupt notions of reproductive liberty, helping to direct the birth control movement which emerged early in this century.

Even after Emancipation, political and economic conditions forced many Black mothers to earn a living outside the home.31 At the turn of the century nearly all Black women worked long days as sharecroppers, laundresses, or domestic servants in white people’s homes.

For three centuries, Black mothers have been thought to pass down to their offspring the traits that marked them as inferior to any white person. Along with this biological impairment, it is believed that Black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to their children that dooms each succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair. A persistent objective of American social policy has been to monitor and restrain this corrupting tendency of Black motherhood. Regulating.