Kim Crenshaw: I'm so excited to start the new season with this episode thinking through the 1619 project, thinking through reparations, thinking through revisiting our history from an intersectional lens. So it's an exciting time because we are now talking about things that academics, activists have talked about a lot, but really get very little traction in society. The fact that African American life is still shaped by its historic introduction into this country as enslaved people. So this is a good time. This is an important conversation. And at the same time it's important that that conversation be enacted through an intersectional lens. We have to think about black life, black history as one that is gendered in particular ways. So intersectionality is a way of reminding us that the story isn't complete unless we're talking about the way slavery impacted black women and the way black women were impacted by slavery.
So I couldn't think of a better person to talk to this about than Dorothy Roberts. Dorothy has been on the forefront of thinking about these issues from a historical lens, from the very beginning, and linking that history to today.
My first article that I ever read by Dorothy Roberts took up the question of punishing black women who were addicted to drugs. In that article, Dorothy made it clear that the carceral punitive approach to a drug addiction played a particularly harsh role against African American women and not as simply a contemporary matter, but as an extension of a long history of black women's child rearing being framed as suspect as being framed as lesser than.
So with that historical understanding, my hunch was that she would be the perfect person to ask, well, what does a revisioning of history look like when we put black women at the center of it going all the way back to slavery?
Kim Crenshaw: My guest today is my sister in the law, Dorothy Roberts. Dorothy is a leading scholar on race, gender, bioethics, and the law. She's a triple threat. She holds appointments in the Africana studies, law, and sociology departments at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founding director of the UPenn program on race, science and society. Her work has been central to the development of black feminist thought and she is the author of award winning books such as Killing the Black Body, Shattered Bonds, and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Recreate Race in the 21st Century. Dorothy, welcome to Intersectionality Matters.
Dorothy Roberts: Thank you. It's so good to be here.
Kim Crenshaw: So let's start with the 1619 Project. I guess I want to frame it this way. One of the reasons that I think there's so much excitement about 1619 is there is a sense that we would talk and think about racial inequality, anti-black racism, and what needs to be done with it very differently if history actually started with 1619, so there is a lot of energy behind that sort of reframing. What does intersectionality bring to that project? So if we were to actually be robust in 1619 bringing black women's history into it, what are some of the things that would be front and center in this conversation?
Dorothy Roberts: Well, one of the things that would be front and center is the way in which the regulation of black women's childbearing played such a central role in the justification for slavery, the way in which it operated, and its reverberations continuing to the present day. It's such a powerful trope that black women, that our reproduction, our childbearing is dangerous, is depraved, is the source of problems. Very little attention is paid to how those very notions are rooted back in 1619 and the way in which slavery formed a foundation for the American nation.
Kim Crenshaw: There is something that I do think in what you're saying really requires us to pause and think a little bit more about what is missing from our historiography on slavery. I guess I would put it like this.
I took Racism and the Law from a famous jurist, and he was trying to get the class, largely Harvard students, to think about what the experience of slavery must have been like. Okay, so I was all ready to have this conversation. He turns as inevitably one must to the experience of black women being bred, but the way he talked about it was this. Imagine what it must have been like to be forced stand by and watch while your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother, your aunt, your grandmother was forcibly taken in order to reproduce the slave population. Imagine what that must have been like.
I remember thinking, "As bad as that was, it couldn't have been as bad as being the grandmother who was forcibly taken." There was something in this moment that suggested that the gaze upon which the story of slavery's brutality is told from is still a masculine advantage point like, "I was not able to protect. I was not able to avenge." What is that telling us about what is missing from the narrative?
Dorothy Roberts: I think that is such an insightful story about what's missing because it leaves out entirely the experience of enslaved women who were being raped and forced to have children for the interests of slave owners. It doesn't address the violence to the bodies of black women but also the problem with the oppression of controlling someone else's body in order to achieve the interest of white elites. And you can see how leaving that out has harmed the very way we think about reproductive justice for everybody. As something that could be controlled by the government, that was subject to the state policy.
Kim Crenshaw: Right. If we reboot our understanding of enslavement not from a male gaze but from the actual experience of forced reproduction itself, it not only changes, broadens, deepens how we think about the legacy of slavery for black people but also the legacy of forced reproduction and reproductive constraints, lack of freedom for everybody.
Dorothy Roberts: That's right. It's not just that black women's enslavement and forced reproduction paints black women as the scapegoat from all sorts of social problems. That's bad enough, but it also laid the foundation for a whole future, including eugenics, of government policies aimed at controlling the reproduction of people, including forced sterilization in order to improve society.
It just seems natural that the government should be able to regulate the child-bearing of black women because black women are dangerous reproducers, and it's so powerful that you can have stereotypes and images like the black welfare queen who was supposed to have children just to get a welfare check, which is ludicrous. No one would do that because the welfare check isn't enough to support children, but that ludicrous myth that was completely rooted in these notions of black female depravity and dangerous child-bearing was powerful enough to fuel a movement to end welfare.
Kim Crenshaw: And successful.
Dorothy Roberts: It was successful.
Kim Crenshaw: To add on top of that, because we're now in a moment where ... There were two projects in the '80s and '90s that reflects the moment of neo-liberal concession. Black people were at the forefront of both of those. One is mass incarceration, which foregrounded black men, and the other was welfare reform, which foregrounded black women. Now we do have a discourse now about how that effort to position black men as the social problem that we need to be able to ramp up carceral strategies to address. We have a critical discourse about that now, not so much about the headlining role that black women played in animating basically the shredding of the social safety net. Why is that?
Dorothy Roberts: Right. Well, I think part of it is because of the way in which this form of oppression is naturalized, so people don't even see it as a form of oppression. Prisons, whether you believe they're good or not, whether you think they solve social problems or not, most people understand them to be punitive. Now, they may see that they are punitive for oppressive reasons, or they may think that they're punitive for justifiable reasons.
Kim Crenshaw: But they get it.
Dorothy Roberts: They get that it's punitive, and it's bad to have to go to prison. With respect to welfare, because it's been naturalized that black women have children in order to rip off taxpayers, that black women's reproduction is dangerous, that black women's wombs produce poverty, it seems to many people that instead it's helpful. It's a good thing to have policies that regulate-
Kim Crenshaw: To control them.
Dorothy Roberts: Right, to control them because black women's reproduction is out of control, and so you need to control it. There's nothing wrong with that. That's good. In fact, welfare reform has been portrayed as something that helps black women and other impoverished women get out of poverty to be able to rehabilitate their lives.
Kim Crenshaw: Shall we say the party that black women helped maintain-
Dorothy Roberts: Absolutely.
Kim Crenshaw: ... their hold on power.
Dorothy Roberts: That's right.
Kim Crenshaw: This isn't just on the others side of the aisle. Welfare reform, for those who were not yet around, was made possible by a democratic president who went on the attack against basically black women.
Dorothy Roberts: That's absolutely right.
Kim Crenshaw: The ability to internalize these stereotypes does not know any political or party limits.
Dorothy Roberts: That's absolutely right. Clinton was the one who signed the bill destroying welfare, eliminating the federal entitlement to welfare and opening up the floodgates to all sorts of state regulation that I call behavior modification projects. They're not designed to support anybody's family. They're designed to modify the supposedly depraved behavior of what now is seen as black mothers who are having too many children and not working hard enough.
Dorothy Roberts: I would just bring into this what an intersectional approach also points out is that the massive skyrocketing of the prison population, which by the way also includes disproportionate numbers of black women, was linked to welfare reform. That whole trend of attaching welfare to prisons began really more in the 1960s, continued to develop, and we can see the expansion of the prison system throughout those decades and then the abolition of welfare as prisons more and more become to be seen as a solution to social problems and to meeting human needs.
I think both prisons and the abolition of welfare are supported by notions of black women's depraved child-bearing and the children they produce as being potential or inevitable criminals and welfare dependents. And then I would just add to it, if that's okay, the foster care system. Another punitive way in which black mothers have been treated is by the disproportionate removal of their children. So when you ask, why is it that Black children are so much more likely to be removed from their homes. Half of black children are subject to some child welfare investigation.
Kim Crenshaw: Half of black children.
Dorothy Roberts: Half, yes. Now, they may not all be removed, but they're investigated at some point.
Kim Crenshaw: That's a level of surveillance that matches the surveillance of police are black men and people driving while black, but that doesn't quite reach the same level of consciousness in anti-racist discourse as other surveillance strategies do.
Dorothy Roberts: Not at all. It pales in comparison.
Kim Crenshaw: And let me set this up, when you were writing about this, and there was a famous article that you wrote that called out this conception that basically black children are just there for the taking, and any laws that got in the way of the free alienability of these black children were actually disadvantaging those black children. Talk about your debate, shall we say, with a law professor who actually made an argument that your position was actually harming black children.
Dorothy Roberts: Yes. I'm not sure exactly which Harvard law professor you're talking about.
Kim Crenshaw: Elizabeth Bartholet.
Dorothy Roberts: Okay, because I've been criticized by many Harvard professors. But yes, I've written articles. I also wrote a book called Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare where I point out that this high rate of removal of black children is actually a form of gender and race intersecting oppression of black people and targeted at black mothers in particular and based on these stigmatizing stereotypes about black mothering, including the idea that black mothers do not have a loving bond with their children. As you pointed out, that idea stems from slavery.
Kim Crenshaw: So if you're going to have an institutionalized pattern of breeding black women and then alienating them from their children, you have to develop a story, a narrative, that says, "You know what, it's not so bad. They're not that attached to it. In fact, it's better for them to be removed."
Kim Crenshaw: So taking black children and selling them isn't done anymore, but, first of all, taking them is still done, and the ideology that makes that taking appear to be reasonable, rational in the best interest of the children and society is directly connected to a continuation of an ideology that was grounded in slavery.
Dorothy Roberts: Exactly. What's important to keep your eye on is that ideology. In the same way that black women aren't being forced to have children like they were during the time of slavery. Instead, they're more likely to be coerced not to have children or even forcibly sterilized, but what connects that is the belief that black women's child-bearing must be controlled and that black women should not have control over their own child-bearing and bodies.
So, the debate that I had with this Harvard professor is the view that taking black children from their mothers is actually helpful to them. Professor Bartholet argued in the book called Nobody's Children and also in direct arguments with me.
Kim Crenshaw: Nobody's Children. Talk about erasure, right?
Dorothy: Talk about erasure.
Kim Crenshaw: -free form, drop from the sky.
Dorothy Roberts: Exactly. They're supposed to be nobody's children in the sense that their mothers do not really care for them. That's-
Kim Crenshaw: Or their mothers are nobody.
Dorothy Roberts: That's true too. That's another way of looking at it. They're nobody, they don't matter, and these children are in need of white homes. They belong. In fact, I was at a conference with somebody who yelled out, "They belong to us." A white woman yelled out, "They belong to us these children." It's this very perverse way of thinking that black children don't have connections.
Kim Crenshaw: They're commodities.
Dorothy Roberts: They're commodities.
Kim Crenshaw: They can be commodified.
Dorothy Roberts: They can be commodified, which again, goes back to slavery, so all of these ideas. We can trace back. And the language is so infuriating and provocative. You mentioned the word free. These people who supported the Adoption and Safe Families Act literally argued that we needed to free black children from their mothers in order to allow them to be adopted. This Adoption and Safe Families Act is an incentive for the speedier termination of parental rights.
Kim Crenshaw: How does it work as an incentive?
Dorothy Roberts: It works as an incentive by telling states that under federal law they have to speed up termination of parental rights, and so one way was to change the law to put time limits on states for the time they needed to petition to terminate the rights of parents whose children were in foster care. That was like the stick. The carrot was to provide financial incentives by giving states money if they increase the number of children adopted in the state.
Kim Crenshaw: That's like a market.
Dorothy Roberts: It really is. Not to mention that also then the adoptive parents get more money than you would get for raising your own children as someone relying on temporary assistance in needy families.
In my book Shattered Bonds I spent a lot of time with a mother whose child was taken from her on grounds of medical neglect. Now, that should be corrected if that was truly a problem. We know also that doctors are much more likely to report black mothers for harms to their children than white mothers. A broken leg, for example, is much more likely to be reported as child abuse. I should add, though, that most children in foster care are there because of neglect that's usually connected to poverty, not because of physical or sexual abuse. But this mother instead of being given help in giving her child the right medical treatment, according to the doctors. She had no interest in harming her child. She wanted to give her child the appropriate medical treatment. They put the child in foster care.
Kim Crenshaw: And gave someone else the resources to provide the medical care.
Dorothy Roberts: Well, that's the thing. Exactly. Then the children are much more likely to get those resources. In fact, many parents have to so-called voluntarily give up the custody of their children to the state in order to get the medical care that their children need.
Kim Crenshaw: And may not know once they've done that, that they might fast-tracked into parental termination.
Dorothy Roberts: This is the problem. That once children are placed in a foster care, there are lots of incentives to keep them there. There are financial incentives, so the agencies that get money from the federal government for everyday the child is in foster care. There's also the incentive on judges to keep children there because they're more afraid of the story that they made the wrong decision not to keep the child at foster care than the opposite.
You don't hear about the thousands and thousands of children who are traumatized by being taken from their homes and being put in foster care. They may move to multiple homes. This is another connection to the criminal punishment system. They're also much more vulnerable to being put in juvenile detention themselves because they don't have parents to help them, to represent them. Often the response of foster care agencies, if a child isn't complying in the way they want, is to call the police on them.
Kim Crenshaw: Wow.
Dorothy Roberts: When children run away from foster care, they're now seen as criminals themselves, and the typical response is to call the police to find them. Many times these children end up in juvenile detention because they were escaping a situation that was traumatizing to them.
Kim Crenshaw: So, the child is actually in the system that itself is a system of surveillance and punishment-
Dorothy Roberts: Absolutely.
Kim Crenshaw: ... having been put there because their parents are disproportionate.
Dorothy Roberts: Yes.
Kim Crenshaw: It's just like the criminal justice thing. Enhanced exposure leads to enhanced risk of family disillusion, which in turns put the children in enhanced risk of actually being caught up in the-
Dorothy Roberts: And then the other side looking at what happens with black mothers, it's very common in some states and cities that when a mother calls the police or child welfare agencies because they themselves have been victimized by violence in the home their children are taken away from them. Comparing the experience of many black women that when they call the police to protect them they themselves get violently beaten, or tased, or as we've seen even shot by police, there's also the parallel experience with the child welfare system that their children get taken from them because they've called for protection against violence against themselves.
Here again, we've got these myths that any mother who would allow herself to be beaten must be a bad mother, and therefore the children must be removed, because this happens even in cases where the children were not abused by the abuser
Kim Crenshaw: So her abuse is a justification for her to lose her children.
Dorothy Roberts: Absolutely.
Kim Crenshaw: The common denominator, again, is the initial assumption that's sort of now hardwired into the culture. That these are not safe and secure homes in the first place. Being a product of a black womb is a risk factor.
Dorothy Roberts: That's absolutely true. That is a very good way of putting it. The womb itself is risky, and being a product of it is a risk factor because of the mother, not because or racism. I talk about ideologies. There is a very common ideology in science, in general, in the United States that race, and gender and the combination are risk factors. No, it's racism and patriarchy that are the risk factors that black women disproportionately experience. It's not that we are the risk factors. No, that's not the problem.
Kim Crenshaw: That subtle slippage explains virtually everything in how black women become the source of social pathology.
Dorothy Roberts: Absolutely.
Kim Crenshaw: We see that in social policy and even in the things that were celebrated. We've been talking about the failure to talk about gender within race, but there's also a way in which there is an absenteeism of race and racism within the way we tell stories about feminism, in particular the story of the history of birth control and Margaret Sanger. There are huge gaps there. What are they, and why are they perpetuated? How are they perpetuated?
Dorothy Roberts: Well, you have to ask yourself How could it be that birth control, which is supposed to be a form of freedom for people, and Margaret Sanger promoted birth control initially as a way of freeing women from perpetual child-bearing, so it was a feminist project, but she also joined forces with eugenisists in a number of ways in terms of rhetoric and supporting the eugenics movement in various ways to allow for ... It might be too strong to say that this became her campaign. It didn't. She still was campaigning for birth control as a form of freedom for women, but she also allowed in for strategic reasons I think and because she didn't see it as prohibitively racist to do this.
She argued for birth control as well as a form of eugenics of improving society by limiting the birth of people deemed socially not valuable. It's complicated. I don't think we should see her either as promoting birth control solely for the purpose of controlling black people, for example, which has been manipulated by anti-abortion campaigners today to try to discredit planned parenthood. But, on the other hand, it's wrong to see her as this champion of feminism without taking account of the eugenics discourse that she engaged in.
And I think that's important, not just to examine Margaret Sanger in particular, but to ask about how it was that a movement for birth control that could have been a movement of freedom for everybody turned into a way of controlling certain populations. How was it that birth control became sabotaged by racist and white supremacists and misogynists to control people instead of a means to give them freedom for their own reproductive lives? And so, if we move forward into the 1960s and 1970s, we see even after eugenics supposedly ended we see government policies that supported the massive sterilization of women who relied on welfare, and this is disproportionately black women.
Kim Crenshaw: Against their will many times not even knowing-
Dorothy Roberts: That's absolutely right. That's where the term Mississippi Appendectomy comes from, which is when a black woman goes to the doctor and thinks she's got her appendix taken out, and actually she's gotten her uterus removed.
Kim Crenshaw: My understanding is this happened to Fannie Lou Hamer.
Dorothy Roberts: Yes, absolutely. It did. Fannie Lou Hamer was one of them.
Kim Crenshaw: Although this was so ubiquitous that there was a name for it, and although it happened to some of the leading women of the civil rights women, where does sterilization abuse turn up in the way we imagine or list some of the most common abuses or expressions of white supremacy?
Dorothy Roberts: It doesn't turn up enough, and if it turns up, it turns up often in a very patriarchal way that, "Black women should be producing babies for our movement."
Kim Crenshaw: Still not about our freedom and-
Dorothy Roberts: Exactly.
Kim Crenshaw: Why is it? If we were to look at the list of dynamics, things that happened that are textbook what does anti-black racism look like, we know lynching is one of them. We know incarceration and police control. Those are all things that just spring immediately to mind, but the things that happened and happen to black women are at best after thoughts if they are thought at all. There is a way in which one could say the entire civil rights movement was somewhat truncated and undermined by this idea that we can have all the structural institutional reforms you can imagine, but until this black woman head family source of miscreants is handled, black inequality is going to be where it is now. Talk a little bit about when that ideology really came online and the surprising ways in which it still shows up 50, 60 years later.
Dorothy Roberts: That's right. One shining example of this is Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the negro family, which comes up during the civil rights movement. It's part of the war on poverty. As I was saying earlier, the war on poverty is met at the same time with law enforcement approaches, and what links that together is this idea that black women are destroying the black family, and that's really where the problem is. You cannot just give resources to black people because if they're going to be channeled through the family, and black women are just going to waste them and, in fact, use them in depraved ways. Again, you see how this ideas about black women's reproduction are critical to-
Kim Crenshaw: The foundation.
Dorothy Roberts: ... to these key policies having to do with how to address racism in America.
Kim Crenshaw: Fortunately, that's all behind us, right?
Dorothy Roberts: No, it's not all behind us.
Kim Crenshaw: You know I'm joking-
Dorothy Roberts: I know. It's not all behind us because we can see the same ideas and policies rolling out in so many different ways. One, and you are the key expert on this, is Obama's policies, My Brother's Keeper. That the answer to supporting black communities is by directing resources toward black men and boys, ignoring the fact that black women and girls are also subject to these repressive, violent policies. Because of, again, this intersection of racist and sexist stereotypes that make black girls fall outside the norm just innately, inherently.
Kim Crenshaw: And you know, what so surprises me about the continuity of this idea that black communities will remain underdeveloped and unequal because of this gender pathology, this gender disrepair, is that we live in a time in which all of the traditional ideas about what is a family and what is a father and a mother and role disruption, is sort of a dominant progressive policy. So when it comes to everyone else, we've moved away from Ozzie and Harriet, we rejected that when it comes to, it seemingly everyone else. But when it comes to black people-
Dorothy Roberts: Yeah.
Kim Crenshaw: ... there's still this sense that there's something wrong with us and largely because our women don't get it right and our men don't stick around and that's the problem that needs to be fixed. So do you see that as a continuing dimension of the history of slavery as it shapes, frames, who black women are thought to be?
Dorothy Roberts: I think so. Because what, why is it that this is so persistent over this centuries, when we see more progressive advances and disruptions in other context, and a lot of it has to do with this idea that there's something innate in black women. Again, going back to this is a natural, a reproduction of inequality. That policy had only addressed through discipline. Because we can't be trusted to have control over our own bodies. We can't be trusted to lead families. We can't be trusted to take care of our children. We can't be trusted to take care of the taxpayer money. And it seems so obvious that black women are treated differently as innate, innately defective, innately depraved. As opposed to other people in our society.
So one example is the way in which black women who had substance abuse problems during the so called crack epidemic, were treated with prosecution, with punishment, with the most dehumanizing treatment. Women being dragged out of maturity wards after they gave birth to children. Pregnant women being locked up in County jails. Just really violent approaches to this public health problem. The response of many experts and prosecutors written up in the media was that black women had some kind of natural depravity that forced them to use drugs but also that then deprived them of any maternal instinct. They couldn't possibly take care of their children. It was the way to treat them was through punishment. If we contrast that to today, the opioid epidemic, no one is saying that white women or white people in general are-
Kim Crenshaw: Just depraved.
Dorothy Roberts: ... are depraved. That they have some kind of innate disposition to use drugs that they have some kind of virological propensity to war, death, and disease.
Kim Crenshaw: Creating a super predator class of children.
Dorothy Roberts: Of children! No! It's a very different response. There are lots of different kinds of responses, but none of them is about anything inherently wrong with white reproduction. It's a completely different response than we saw with crack cocaine and black women.And so that contrast is so obvious and yet people continue to make these statements about inherent depravity of black women. And even if they don't say it explicitly policies that are based on that, which by the way then create laws that put all people at risk of prosecution or conduct during pregnancy.
Kim Crenshaw: Mm-hmm.
Dorothy Roberts: But with black women as the target and the myths about us as a way to push forward these extremely punitive policies.
Kim Crenshaw: You know, we've talked about how the sort of naturalization of black women's wounds as the source of depravity and the product being freely alienable is a core dimension of slavery of 1619 that has been continuous in various ways and particularly the ideology of it.
Kim Crenshaw: So it leads me to wonder and we are also having a new conversation or a renewed conversation about reparations.
Dorothy Roberts: Mm-hmm
Kim Crenshaw: What would the conversation about reparations look like? Sound like? What would it address differently if this story, this continuity of the contemporary consequences of racism were more centered to how we understand it? If it was more fully intersectional, what would be on the table that's not on the table right now?
Dorothy Roberts: Well, one obvious thing that would be on the table would be reparations for sterilization.
Kim Crenshaw: Mm-hmm.
Dorothy Roberts: And other forms of reproductive violence that black women have experienced from the time of slavery to the present day.
It would be a more capacious, broader thinking about what reparations would mean because now it has focused largely on wealth, which is important. I'm not criticizing that. The theft of black people's wealth, both the wealth created by enslaved labor and the wealth that was stolen from black people after emancipation and continues to be through various forms, very important.
Dorothy Roberts: There's also a theft of black people's freedom. And taking that into account, I think, really helps us to see more broadly the way in which current institutions like, prison, and foster care, and welfare all are continuations of the theft of black people's wealth and freedom that are broader than the ways in which we ordinarily think about taking a property that a black person owns, or not allowing them to own property.
Kim Crenshaw: And one of the core dimensions of your work is that you go beyond mapping the disempowerment to reconceptualize what freedom has to look like.
There's one move to say this is not just about compensation, it's about us seeing the constraints that are still grounded in that past and articulating an affirmative vision of what has to be brought into existence right now.
Kim Crenshaw: Right? So it's a, not a negative freedom, it's a positive freedom. There is the question then, once you restate it, and reimagine it that way, the sources of a repair might not simply be the people who hold the advantages now.
Dorothy Roberts: Right. Right.
Kim Crenshaw: It could be the people haven't shown up for us. It could be the people who talk about the history of racism, who look like us but don't talk about us.
Dorothy Roberts: Right, right.
Kim Crenshaw: People talk about the history, a patriarchy who are also women, but don't talk about how we've experienced that.
Dorothy Roberts: Right, absolutely. I have two thoughts about this. One is in order to have reparations, a true reparations that involves changing society, you have to be able to envision a different society. And in order to get there, we have to make a lot of changes. It's not just abolishing prisons. We have to have an alternative to prisons, which means that we have to have a way to deal with domestic violence within the black community. We can't dismantle the oppressive structures unless we have a different type of society to replace it with. What we want is not just the absence of the oppressive structures we see now, it has to be a new society that doesn't include those forms of oppression. Which include forms of oppression of black women that are not just inflicted by white men. It's got to include that in order to achieve this new society where we're advocating.
The other thing I want to point out is that without the perspective of black women and taking our lives and experiences into account, it is possible to look at reparations from a patriarchal point of view. An example I'll give which I think draws together a lot of what we've been saying, is a campaign against abortion services that went on in cities around the country that involved posters of-
Kim Crenshaw: A black woman.
Dorothy Roberts: .. a black, while it, the one that is, to me the most significant was a black girl who with the caption, the most dangerous place where an African American is in the womb.
Kim Crenshaw: Yes.
Dorothy Roberts: All right, so that was supposed to play on the past sterilization abuse of black women. Really distorting the history I discussed about Margaret Sanger and eugenics and its intersection with birth control. The backdrop to this is that the message that they were trying to send is black women are responsible for genocide in their own communities because they seek abortion services.
Without an intersectional approach that actually listens to black women and takes our own interests and our own self determination into account, our own freedom and Liberty into account. You can see reparations for eugenics as something that's very anti black women.
Kim Crenshaw: Yeah.
Dorothy Roberts: And the fact that you can distort it in that way. Clarence Thomas did this also in a recent concurrence - he supported laws that ban abortions based on race or gender. This is just a ploy to try to restrict abortion services, but an access to abortion. He said he was supporting these bans because of the history of black women being forced into abortion for eugenics purposes.
Kim Crenshaw: So, your oppression gets twisted to justify your continuing oppression.
Dorothy Roberts: Yeah, exactly! Exactly! So we've got to have an intersectional approach to the way we address history in America or else it can be a way of continuing oppression of black women. Instead of advocating and promoting and working toward the freedom for all of us.
Kim Crenshaw: Dorothy Roberts, you are such an inspiration.
Dorothy Roberts: Aw, thank you! You are too Kim!
Kim Crenshaw: To millions of people follow your work and are empowered by the clarity that you bring to the demands that this history be brought forward. I said from the beginning that once we get going, we get going, and we could continue, we will have to have part two of this. Thank you for this great shot in the arm, this wonderful conversation.
Dorothy Roberts: You're welcome. Thanks Kim. My pleasure.
Kim Crenshaw: Keep listening and support us on our patreon page for bonus content from all our interviews. You can find us at Intersectionality Matters on social media, at aapf.org, and everywhere podcasts are available. Intersectionality Matters is produced and edited by Julia Sharpe-Levine. This episode was recorded by Emmett O’Malley and Julia Sharpe-Levine. Additional support was provided by Andrew Sun, Michael Kramer, and G’Ra Asim. Special thanks to my guest, Dorothy Roberts. I'm your host Kimberlé Crenshaw and this is Intersectionality Matters.