29 Quotes by Dorothy Roberts

The story of control of Black reproduction begins with the experiences of slave women like Rose Williams. Black procreation helped to sustain slavery, giving slave masters an economic incentive to govern Black women’s reproductive lives.

The law made slave women’s children the property of the slaveowner. White masters therefore could increase their wealth by.

Mammy was both the perfect mother and the perfect slave: whites saw her as a “passive nurturer, a mother figure who gave all without expectation of return, who not only acknowledged her inferiority to whites but who loved them.”23 It is important to recognize, however, that Mammy did not reflect any virtue in Black motherhood.

Although these attitudes are not universally held, they influence the way many Americans think about reproduction. Myths are more than made-up stories. They are also firmly held beliefs that represent and attempt to explain what we perceive to be the truth. They can become more credible than reality, holding fast even in the face of airtight statistics and rational argument to the contrary.

The greater the percentage of blacks living in a neighborhood, the higher the neighborhood death rate, regardless of neighborhood income level.52 It is the neighborhood that makes people unhealthy, not the susceptibility of black people living there. The rate of death is higher for all residents, including whites, who live in predominantly black neighborhoods.

The state has the authority to take citizens’ private property – in this case, their genetic information – without due process. Those are the features of a totalitarian state, not a liberal democracy. Jim.

As we will see below, when a female slave’s role as worker conflicted with that of childbearer, concern for high productivity often outweighed concern for high fertility.

In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass an involuntary sterilization law, empowering state institutions to sterilize, without consent, criminals and “imbeciles” whose condition was “pronounced unimprovable” by a panel of physicians.

Jefferson conveniently attributed the physical differences he saw in blacks to their innate weaknesses rather than to their forced toil in the hot Virginia sun.