Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

By Dorothy Roberts

Originally published in a slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1997

With a new preface by the author

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years–using a black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare “reform” on black women’s–especially poor black women’s–control over their bodies’ autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new, and socially transformative, definition of “liberty” and “equality” for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.

The author is able to combine the most innovative and radical thinking on several fronts–racial theory, feminist, and legal–to produce a work that is at once history and political treatise. By using the history of how American law–beginning with slavery–has treated the issue of the state’s right to interfere with the black woman’s body, the author explosively and effectively makes the case for the legal redress to the racist implications of current policy with regards to 1) access to and coercive dispensing of birth control to poor black women 2) the criminalization of parenting by poor black women who have used drugs 3) the stigmatization and devaluation of poor black mothers under the new welfare provisions, and 4) the differential access to and disproportionate spending of social resources on the new reproductive technologies used by wealthy white couples to insure genetically related offspring.

The legal redress of the racism inherent in current American law and policy in these matters, the author argues in her last chapter, demands and should lead us to adopt a new standard and definition of the liberal theory of “liberty” and “equality” based on the need for, and the positive role of government in fostering, social as well as individual justice.

Paperback

Pages: 400

Published: 1999