Commencement Speaker Dorothy Roberts Shares Thoughts on Her Work, Rutgers-Newark

Dorothy Roberts: A Publicly Engaged Scholar

Interdisciplinary scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate Dorothy Roberts addressed nearly 2,000 graduating students and their many thousands more supporters at Rutgers University – Newark’s commencement at the Prudential Center on Wednesday, May 22. Known for her insightful work at the intersection of race, reproductive justice, and social systems, Roberts also is a highly sought after speaker with numerous media appearances to her credit addressing related issues. Her wildly popular TED Talk regarding the misuse of race in medicine has been viewed by more than a million people.

Roberts’ path has taken her from Chicago, where she grew up, to undergraduate study at Yale, and law school at Harvard. After clerking in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York for the Honorable Constance Baker Motley, she joined one of the nation’s most esteemed law firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison LLP. But feeling the gravitational pull of having been raised in an academic household, she shifted her career trajectory, landing a faculty position at Rutgers Law School, Newark in 1988. While here, she achieved national renown, publishing a landmark article on black women's reproductive rights in the Harvard Law Review in 1991, which was then under the editorial leadership of future President Barack Obama. She also completed her first book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, widely acclaimed as one of the most enduringly important books on the topic. After a decade at Rutgers-Newark, she joined the faculty at Northwestern University, then the University of Pennsylvania, where she remains and is the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society.

Rutgers-Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor has called Roberts “one of the nation’s leading voices striving to expunge deeply embedded discriminatory ideas and practices from the American social fabric.”

In a recent interview, Professor Roberts generously shared reflections on her influences and aspirations for the impact of her work.


Q: How would you describe yourself?

A: I am a professor of law and Africana studies and sociology. I am a long-time teacher, advocate and scholar of social justice. I’ve always tried to knit those together across several disciplines. My main interests are reflected in my books on reproductive justice, the child welfare system, and the very meaning of race. I also am a wife and mother of four children, three of whom are in their 30s and one going off to college next year.

My family is very important to me. I’m in the midst of working on a book about my parents. My father was an anthropologist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where I grew up in Hyde Park in the 1960s. My parents were an interracial couple and were interested in interracial marriage in Chicago as a subject of research, which is what I’m writing about. Their project involved interviewing hundreds of interracial couples and their children from 1937 to the 1980s.

 

Q: What would you consider some formative experiences when you were growing up in Chicago?

A: My whole childhood was spent in a community where there was a lot of civil rights and anti-war activism. It was just embedded in the fabric of the community. In elementary school, we had a lot of assemblies having to do with civil rights. Many of our teachers were active in supporting the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. I gravitated toward that. I can remember going to meetings in Hyde Park informing us of what was going on in these movements. My parents were not so much involved in that kind of political activism, but they were very much involved in promoting the idea that interracial marriage was a principal path to overcoming racism. I disagree with that premise…I think we have to end racism first and then we’ll see more intimacy across racial lines. But it did leave me with an overwhelming belief in our common humanity and commitment to working for equal human rights. My parents instilled a very strong commitment that there is only one human race and that all human beings regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, are equally valuable and deserve equal human rights. That combination of my parents’ belief in equal humanity as a way to live your life and not just as a slogan and the more political activism of Hyde Park was very important to my upbringing.

And because my father was a professor and my mother was working on her Ph.D. in anthropology when I was born but never completed her Ph.D.—they impressed on me that I needed to continue the path that she had been on. From a very young age I felt a calling to teaching and research.

 

Q: How did you find the path to fulfill that?

A: When I was in college majoring in anthropology at Yale, I didn’t have any role models among my professors who I thought were activists for social change, so I thought: I have to be a lawyer to do this. I applied to law school because I thought a law degree would be a better tool for working toward racial, gender, and class equality.

So, I went to law school and then clerked for the Honorable Constance Baker Motley, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. After that, I became an associate attorney at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison to hone my legal skills. But I soon realized that what I really wanted to do was research, writing, and teaching. At that point, I had a family in New York City and I decided that I needed to stay in New York and applied for faculty positions in that area. But I had no idea how to do that so I just wrote to the deans of law schools. I got offers from Rutgers-Newark and Hofstra. I was thrilled with the offer from Rutgers because I knew of its reputation as “The People’s Electric Law School.” I thought: this is exactly where I need to be.

 

Q: Tell us about your time at Rutgers-Newark.

A: That was my first position and was so important to my trajectory as a scholar, teacher, and activist because it was a school that was very open to my unorthodox research interests at the time. I started teaching in 1988, when critical race theory was just emerging, and it was very unusual for law professors to focus on issues of institutionalized racism and sexism. The most prestigious law reviews didn’t publish many articles on those topics. My first article was about the prosecution of black women for using drugs while pregnant. I was very interested in how racism and sexism intersected in this policy that turned a public health matter into a crime. That was an unusual topic for an untenured law professor to write about.

That article, which was published in the Harvard Law Review, ended up getting a lot of attention and became the foundation of my book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. It set me on the course of investigating more broadly the regulation of black women’s childbearing and how that regulation has shaped the very meaning of reproductive freedom in the United States and needs to reshape it in the form of reproductive justice that takes account of the relationship between reproductive freedom and social justice. All of that happened while I was at Rutgers. I wrote Killing the Black Body while I was there.

Even at Rutgers there were some senior colleagues who advised me against taking this direction, at least until I had tenure, but overall the environment was very nurturing of social justice writing, advocacy, and teaching. Arthur Kinoy, the great civil liberties and civil rights attorney, occupied the office right next door to mine! He was the person I got to know best. He was so excited that I was there. He and I went to lots of conferences and meetings together and had lots of conversations about social justice issues. He was a very inspiring, courageous and dedicated attorney and professor to have as a mentor.

Others who were very supportive included Twyla Perry, who was also writing about the intersection of race, gender, and family law. She was a wonderful colleague to work with. Nadine Taub, who ran the women’s law clinic, was a remarkable mentor also. There were just so many supportive colleagues because so much of the faculty was this wonderful combination of scholar-teacher-activist: Annamay Sheppard, Eric Neisser, Frank Askin were all involved in the ACLU of New Jersey. Charles Jones—he was also interested in racism and the law—Al Slocum—he was a real firebrand. Jim Pope and Alan Hyde were working on labor rights. All these professors weren’t outliers on faculty! These were leaders at the law school!

 

Q: There’s a lot of discussion nationally about the need to reform of legal education. What are your thoughts along these lines, in light of your experience at Rutgers-Newark, Northwestern, and now Penn?

A: There are two trends I see that are very positive. One is the trend toward integrating public interest work and classroom education. I’ve seen over the course of my career how important it is to students to be able to mesh what they’re learning in the classroom and their practical experiences in public interest programs in ways that are well funded and well supported by the faculty—not relying on students to have to find ways to do this integration on their own, but having this integration done at the faculty and administrative level with the input of students.

Something Rutgers did very, very well is having clinical faculty fully involved in all faculty matters. Many of the Rutgers faculty I mentioned, like Nadine Taub and Frank Askin, were clinical professors. They ran clinical programs that were the shining stars of the institution. I’ve always tried to have a relationship with clinical faculty so we could support each other’s work.

The other positive trend I see is interdisciplinary studies. The law operates in society in conjunction with other institutions. The law shapes every institution in this country and around the world. Similarly, the law exists within and is influenced by its social, economic, and political context. My work, for example, from the very beginning always has been very related to the social sciences and the humanities. When I wrote Killing the Black Body, I drew from history and the social sciences, as much as the law, in a way that integrated them. I now hold at Penn something called a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professorship, with appointments in both the Law School and the School of Arts and Sciences, which has support from the highest levels of the administration. With this professorship, I don’t have to cobble together a program on my own, which is very difficult to do when universities are organized strictly according to disciplines or schools. It’s very hard for individual professors and students to manage this kind of integration on their own. That’s something that I think schools could better do as well. Societal systems, institutions, and structures work together and require knowledge that spans a number of areas that often are separated.

As an example: one key aspect of my life is that I circulate among realms that often aren’t seen as connected. I just came from Washington, D.C. where I was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to genomic and biomedical researchers about the ways many of them have misused race as a variable in their research. I routinely speak to medical students and do grand rounds in hospitals. I was recently elected to the National Academy of Medicine and serve on a committee.  I’m also very involved in the child welfare policy world and engage with social work scholars and practitioners to advocate for change. And the reproductive justice movement is very intersectional itself; I’ve been very involved in developing the concept and framework of reproductive justice as a way to better promote our reproductive rights, health, and freedom. Whether it’s bioethics, child welfare, medicine, biological sciences, and law and sociology, I routinely live in all of those worlds at once.

 

Q: How in the world do you keep in touch with all of these currents?

A: I try to stay involved with organizations that are working in all of these areas. I’ve been on the boards of a range of organizations from the Center for Genetics and Society to the Black Women’s Health Imperative, National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, American Academy of Political and Social Science, Still She Rises—which advocates for incarcerated mothers—and in Philadelphia I’m involved with a group called Every Mother is a Working Mother. I try to be involved locally as well as nationally and globally. Even if I’m not on the board, having affiliations and close relationships with organizations that are doing on-the-ground work in the areas that I’m researching is a key way that I stay on top of developments in all of these fields. I also do a lot of public speaking, which brings me to campuses and organizations around the country routinely where I go not only try to impart knowledge but engage in discussion with people who are doing similar or related work and I learn from them.

For example, when I spoke at AAAS, I had a number of scientists approach me afterward about what they were doing in genomic science. In fact, one of the leading scholars in human genomics came up to me to chat about his work and I was taking notes and he asked me for key articles that he should be reading to understand the true meaning of race. That engagement has been really important for me, as has working with students. I have my regular classes that I teach, but I also always have students I’m mentoring, advising, and engaging with one on one. I have Ph.D. students in sociology and independent study students in the law school who come to me for advice, but I am learning from them and their research.

I have a lot on my plate, but it’s all fascinating engagements with other people who are doing research on the common mission of making this a better world. It’s an exciting life. I sometimes complain that it's hard to keep up, but I have decided that this is what I want to do and what I want to contribute with my work.

Another way I keep on top of developments is being active on Twitter. The main reason I’m on Twitter is to share information and ideas with people who also are committed to these issues. I am constantly discovering new articles—both academic and popular—that are helpful to the work I’m doing. This morning, I made note of at least three articles circulated on Twitter that are relevant to research I’m doing right now. It makes a difference who you follow. I follow people who are doing research and activism in the fields I’m working in, so I don’t find it a waste of time at all. I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter, but even in 15 minutes I usually gain new knowledge that’s helpful to my work. It’s also a way that I can share my research and ideas with others.

 

Q: Where do you see your work heading? What are the next big questions that need to be addressed?

A: I have been continuing the work that I began with my research for my latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, which is about the misconception of race as if it were a biological, natural division of human beings rather than what I like to call a political invention to govern people and promote a racist hierarchy. I am looking beyond genomics, to broader fields of science that promote the view that social inequality is caused by biological differences. That’s a theme that I realize ties together all of my work. All of my work has been in opposition to the false belief that the reason we have social inequalities is because of human beings’ biological differences. I think that’s one of the most harmful ideas that has ever been promoted, including by scientists. It is a barrier to social change and supports deep divisions among human beings that have caused centuries of abominable violence against people. I want to continue that work in a more positive direction that imagines ways that scientists and humanities scholars can work together to dispel that myth, but also to imagine how we can understand human beings apart from dividing them into biological races. That is where I see my work going: beyond pointing out the historical roots of this false belief to dismantling it and envisioning a more just future. What are the tools? What are the paths? What are the transformative ways of thinking that we can develop in order to move forward with a new understanding about human commonality and difference?

I founded the Program on Race, Science, and Society at Penn for this reason. I want to grow it and grow the more transformative direction in my research, writing, and activism.

I do also want to find time to finish the book project about my parents’ interracial marriage and their research. When I think about what I want to do with the rest of my career that is definitely on my bucket list.

 

Q: What do you think students want to hear from a commencement speaker?

A: I am teaching two classes this semester. one is called Race, Science, and Justice, for undergraduates; the other is Reproductive Rights and Justice, which is a first-year law course with some other students mixed in. These are both classes that I hope will be inspirational. I aspire for both classes to cause students to think about the world in critical and transformative ways. The students in my classes are deeply interested and committed to understanding these issues. I think one thing my students and those graduating from Rutgers-Newark want is clarity in areas that can be very confusing and full of conflict. They want a message that will help them clarify their perspective and understanding of how to help build a more equal society. I always tell my students that you don’t have to agree with me, but you have to try to understand these issues and know why you think what you think. I don’t want you to spout “Race is a social construction,” and you have no clue what you’re saying. I want you to understand what that means, and if you believe it, know why you believe it.

I think students want to leave a class or lecture or commencement inspired to live according to their highest principles. I also think students want a simple message about a path to take. I’ve been reflecting a lot about transformative imagination. What is the key is being able to imagine another way of thinking?  We have to imagine a better way of relating to each other, of dealing with human needs, social problems and conflicts. We may not create it immediately, but it takes imagination.

 

Q: Okay, no pressure, then.

A: Ha! Right!