The New Jane Crow

historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends are Some of my best friends are like, I'm not a blank, some of my best friends are blank. In this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country. And in this episode, we're going to talk about the recent DAPs decision and reproductive justice with someone who knows more about these issues than anyone else. Hey, Ben, Hey man, All right, Hey, hey,

always always good to be talking with you. I'm always better. Yeah. You know, today's guest has me thinking about this song that's in my head. Can you guess which song it is? Is it Sadie, Sadie May No, No, that's a that's a good one. That's a good one. This one is I'll always love my Mama. I'll always love I'll always love mym mom. I gotta say because Dorothy Roberts, our guest today, is the leading scholar of black motherhood and

the fight for reproductive justice. This scholar, this advocate, this tireless activist for reproductive justice, has written four books, probably the most influential of them in shaping how we understand the meaning of having control over your Body's a book called Killing the Black Body, Race, reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. I am so excited to have her on our show today. She's a law professor and sociologist now at your alma mater, that's right, University of Pennsylvania. And

she's a Chicagoan. I mean, it's like it's from our neighborhood. It's all real. And so we are at the fiftieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision this month, January twenty twenty three is the fiftieth anniversary. Is January nineteen seventy three, last summer when the jobs decision came down. Khalil and it ruled that a woman does not have a constitutional right to an abortion. That's right, and the uproar that happened. Then people say it shaped the midterms,

that happened, But there's so much more to the dab's decision. Yes, and Dorothy is going to help us unpack that. Yeah, because the truth is that most of the conversation has been framed only around the loss of the right to an abortion. That states can now take that right away.

But the truth is, if we had been listening to Dorothy Roberts over the course of the work that she's been doing for decades, we would have understood that this is really a fight about the right to choose what you do with your body, whether it's to choose an abortion or to not choose an abortion. This issue cuts both ways, and seeing it through the lens of race,

as she has done, helps us really understand that. And so kind of what you're saying is people might not have listened to her before, but once they listened to this podcast, done deal. We solve things. That's right. But I got one more thing to add, you know, speaking about Mama's so some of our listeners know that my mother's grandfather has this ambiguous race past, and in a way, he left Mississippi in the nineteen twenties and married a black woman because it was kind of illegal because he

was kind of white presenting. He was kind of white presenting. People say it sometimes say that about me exactly. So the reason this matters is because one of the ways that Dorothy Roberts his career has been shaped is by her own story of growing up as a product of

an interracial marriage. That's right. She helps us understand, like the motivation for her to care about even childbirth and what children mean for the world, and the right to choose what you want to do when you are thinking about planning for a child kind of has a lot to do with her own background. So we're gonna hear a lot more about who Dorothy Robberts is, as well as what she thinks we ought to be doing differently

about reproductive justice in this country. Let's jump right into this because Dorothy has a lot to say and we need to hear it. Dorothy, it is great to meet you. Thank you so much for being on Some of my best friends are Thank you very much for inviting me. I look forward to our conversation absolutely. So all three of us grew up in Hyde Park area. Wow, Khalil and I went to Kenwood together, which is the high school in Hyde Park. But I'm also the father and

parent in an interracial family. I'm maybe not unlike your father back in the sixties. I have this very bookish, sort of Dorothy Roberts like daughter who is now seventeen. Her name is Lysia. But maybe you can talk about, you know, that part of your past and sort of this interracial identity in this family that you came from in the same neighborhood that we're from. Yeah. Sure. It's so interesting because from most of my career I have not talked about my background, about my parents race, and

now it seems to come up a lot. And I'm working on a kind of memoir about my parents, so it's very present in my mind. And of course my background my family have been very influential in my career and my interests, so that only makes sense. I just, you know, I just haven't talked about it much. So I grew up in the nineteen sixties in Hyde Park.

I would have gone to Kenwood High but my father had Fullbright fellowship in Egypt, so I spent my first two years of high school in Cairo, Egypt, instead of in Hyde Park. That's really fascinating. I went to Shuesmith Elementary School, which is right, you know, down the street from Kenwood High I live a block away from Shuesmith. I passed it every morning on my dog walk. We're neighbors. Yeah, that's amazing. Historically directly, directly, so this was in the sixties.

My father was a white anthropologist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, downtown Chicago. My mother was an immigrant from Jamaica who first lived in Liberia before she came to the United States. But she got a scholarship to Roosevelt and met my father there while she was a student. And my father was a researcher of interracial marriage. Interesting. You're gonna have to stop me if I get too deep into this, because I could talk just about this forever. This is

so yeah, Like I said, this is my experience. So I'm so curious about his research and how you interpreted it and how you felt it as a child. Just so you know, Dorothy, I've been also researching Ben as a white guy raising two by racial kids. So this is helpful to me. Too. Okay. So my father growing up was always writing a book from the first distant part of my memory, writing a book on interracial marriage

in Chicago, and was interviewing black white couples in Chicago. Okay, And this was an important part of my childhood because he not only was researching it, he was promoting it. He really believed that interracial marriage was the answer to America's race problem. So interesting, and this was reflected in our family because he married a black woman, my mother, and all of their friends or most of their friends were interracial couples. So I thought that my father was

working on this book in the nineteen sixties. When I came to Penn ten years ago and had to collect all the boxes in my basement, I shipped to pen twenty five boxes of my father's papers. He had passed away, and I hadn't looked at them. The first box I opened up, I see these interviews he conducted, and the dates on them are nineteen thirty seven, And I assumed these are couples who were married in nineteen thirty seven,

which he interviewed in the nineteen sixties Lower Beehall. They were actually interviews that he conducted in nineteen thirty seven when he was a master's student at University of Chicago, well before he met your mother. Aha, that's exactly right. I like this. I'm liking where this is going. I'm liking this. This gives whole new meaning to the professional.

Is the personnel or the personnel is the political? This whole new spin on it, exactly because I had always assumed he got interested in the topic because he met my mother, not prior to now, I'm sorry to think, did he marry my mother? And as part of his research project. Well then I read some more and I get to the interviews conducted to the nineteen fifties, and he's conducting them with my mother prior to their marriage.

My mother was his research assistant, and she was doing the interviews of the women, and he convicted the interviews of the men. Anyway, that's all background I only discovered

ten years ago. But our life as a family was very, very much influenced by my parents, especially my father's mission to promote interracial marriage in Chicago, and so I was surrounded by interracial couples, and early on I had adopted as a little girl, you know, in kindergarten, the philosophy of my father and was very proud to be the

child of an interracial marriage. I can remember walking down the street in between my parents and thinking, this is, you know, an example of how people of different races can get together as proud to do it. By the time I went to college, I was affirmatively hiding the fact that my father was white. I could tell you situations where I lied, I mean light about it, and I was and I didn't want people to see him. I didn't want I hid family photos when I was

with my friends that he was in. I really wanted to. I thought that I needed to be I have two black parents and for people to think I had two black parents to identify the black Now that changed also, and as you know, I wrote a book about countering the biological concept of race and highlighting the fact that, you know, black people have embraced people as black despite what their exact ethnic background is. But I've gone through

a range of feelings and positions about my blackness. I mean, now I don't feel like I need to hide the fact that my father was white. I think a lot of my ideas today the fact that I'm now a sociology professor, are so much of what I think supporting my deep feeling about our common humanity that definitely comes from my parents, i'd say, Dorothy, and thinking about your father, I don't share his sort of utopian view of interracial marriage.

I mean I think probably like like you what you're saying that you know, it's beautiful that I have this family, and it's you know, wonderful on the personal level. It's not going to change structures and injustice or change white supremacy.

And I think that's also the premise of in some ways of our Khalil n I on this podcast, that we're able to have these conversations across racial lines and we're best friends and we've been best friends for thirty five years, but that's that's not the pathway to changing these deep structural issues. I mean sort of we're and that's kind of what we're wrestling with today. And maybe that's a good transition to ask you how in your own work, how did you come to focus on black motherhood,

on reproductive rights and child welfare. What's the story of that being the focus of much of your work. Sure, so, I've always been since I was very very young, interested in social justice issues and active in some way in fighting against various forms of oppression, but especially racial oppression. And I see reproductive injustice as one of the most violent and profound, you in a negative way, damaging, dehumanizing

ways in which racial oppression is enacted. Now that fits into my overall passion about racial justice, but in particular in the late nineteen eighties, when I first started law teaching, I was reading about the prosecutions of black women who were pregnant and using drugs. This is the crack epidemic.

This is during the crack epidemic and the cracked down by federal and local governments on black communities in the name of the war on drugs and focusing on crack cocaine as if it were some exceptional, you know, especially violent, antisocial kind of drug use. And one aspect of that war against black communities was the punishment of black women who used drugs and were pregnant, and that grabbed me like nothing else. You know, I've thought about why did

I think that was such a terrible injustice? But I immediately thought, they are punishing these women for having children. And I think there was just something about the punishment of reproduction, the punishment of child bearing. That to me was one of the most insidious, dehumanizing forms of devaluing human beings, you know, to say you don't deserve to have children, you don't deserve to contribute to our society.

You're worthless, you're disposable. Even though at the time the prosecutions were being portrayed as if they were being done to protect black fetuses, I knew that was false, and I saw this as a form of racial violence against

these women. And so that's really what propelled me into scholarship and into writing an article about the lack of constitutional support for these prosecutions, arguing that they violated the Fourteenth Amendment both the right to privacy and equal protection, and that that then launched my book, Killing the Black Body, because I began to think about all the ways, the myriad ways in which black women's childbearing has been punished

from the time of slavery. Of course, during the slavery era, black women's reproduction was commodified, that was forced reproduction, forced reproductive servitude. But after the slavery era, after slavery ended, black women's childbearing continue to be seen as in need

of white supervision. We could go from the eugenic era and into the nineteen sixties and seventies with mass sterilization programs, but then also the impact of welfare restructuring and the way in which welfare became especially stigmatized when more and more black people were receiving welfare up until the end of the federal entitlement to welfare, fueled by this image of black women who were having babies false image, I should make clear, having babies just to get a welfare check.

And then I also saw that the state taking away their babies through the child welfare system and foster care was an extension of that. So in working on killing the Black body, I became aware of all the newborns, the thousands and thousands of black newborns who were being taken from their mothers at birth and put in Many of them were left in the hospital. They were called border babies or put into foster care. The foster population exploded over the course of this time, and I began

to see, first of all, became aware of this. I wasn't I wasn't aware of the huge racial disparities in foster care. But once I was aware of it, it was obvious to me that this was an extension of the valuation of black mothers that I had written about in Killing the Black Body, and that much of my book Shattered Bonds the Colored child welfare. Can I take a liberty here? This is really rich in terms of

your own intellectual journey to this important issue. I mean, what I hear you saying at its root is that the right to have a child is perhaps the most fundamental expression of being a human being, and that there's really no point in the history of black people in these United States when the reproductive freedom of black women wasn't subjected to control by the state in one way

or another. That's absolutely true. That's really fascinating. And when we come back after the break, we're going to talk about how these two systems, this system that is born out of the War on drugs and the child welfare system come together in the problem of separation. And we're going to hear the story of one woman's horrifying tale of almost losing her child. We'll be right back. We are back with Dorothy Roberts, and we're talking about the

child welfare system and how problematic it is. More than problematic, man, it's been like the primary vehicle for pathologizing blackness. This is one of her key points in her early work. Yeah, that is so right, Khalil Dorothy. You begin your book Torn Apart with the story of Vanessa People's. Can you tell us what happened to her in twenty seventeen and really how her story illustrates the way the child welfare

system criminalizes motherhood. Sure. So, Vanessa People's is the young mother who lives in Aurora, Colorado, and she was enjoying a picnic with her family at a park, a local park near her home, and she had asked one of her cousins to watch one of her two young children, the youngest one a toddler, And when the cousin left the park, the toddler traps after the cousin before Vanessa,

who saw this happen like normal family, star, normal Jess. Exactly, We've all been there, especially as Dad's where we're not paying attention. Exactly, like this happens all the time, exactly if Vanessa was peg, she was playing with the older son and had left the younger one in the cousin's care. The cousin left, the whole family was at this park so it's not as if she was abandoning her child.

He ran after the cousin and in a minute's time before Vanessa could catch up with him, a passer by I had seen the child in the parking lot and called nine to one. Vanessa sees this, sees the woman on the phone, gets to her and says, that's my son. The woman is on the phone with the police when Vanessa arrives and will not give Vanessa her son back. Are you kidding? Really? This person thinks they're doing they're saving a child exactly. Vanessa is not in good health.

She was suffering from anemia and she was being tested for leukemia. She's not in the position to fight this woman over her son, and she figures when the police officer arrives, will resolve the whole thing. While the police officer arrives and disbelieves, Vanessa doesn't believe that this is really her son. This is unbelievable. The family has to come and vouch for her. But the police officer hands

Vanessa a ticket for child to be use. It turns out in Colorado there is a criminal charge of misdemeanor child abuse, which doesn't even require any evidence. A physical harm to a child. All that happened in this case was that her son was separated from her for a minute momentarily in her eyesight she could see she could see the child, all right. She's now alerted the Child Welfare SYS is made aware of her in some way. Absolutely, she now is reported to the local child protection office.

So a few weeks later, Vanessa has just given her two sons a bath. She's cleaning up in the basement. She lives with her son in a basement rooms at her mother's house, and a white caseworker knocks on the door. Because once you're under the radar, now they come to investigate your home. Yeah, these caseworkers rarely, rarely get a warrant to search the home. They don't tell the parents that you have a Fourth Amendment right not to have government agents. They can restrict. The parents can say you

can't come into my home. Of course, just like you could with a police out. You would say, where's your warrant. There's no difference. A Fourth Amendment applies to any government agent who wants to search your home. But there's been effectively an exemption created, unconstitutional exemption. In my opinion, for caseworkers undergrounds that they're there to protect children, and this also is not uncommon, especially in black neighborhoods, that case

workers bring police along with them. Three police officers arrived. One of them pointed a gun. Vanessa's coming up. She comes up with a gun pointing at her head. Okay, now they start interrogating her. Vanessa is saying, why are you in my house? You don't need to be here. You see, my children are fine. She calls her mother to come. Her mother goes into the bedroom with the children and Vanessa wants to come there. The police officer is guarding the door, saying that the grandmother cannot be

in the room with the children. Vanessa says, let me in. The police officer grabs her by the throat. Two other police officers, in addition to the one, jump on top of her what's called hobble her. They hog tie her. They chain her arms and her ankles together and then chain them together, carry her out the house upside down, like she says, like a pig, Like a pig, like an animal. And not only does she go through this trauma, her children are witnessing all of this. Yeah, the idea

that they're being protected. They're subjected to this. But the upshot of this is that Vanessa now is registered in the state of Colorado as a child abuser. It's pretty much the worst stigma you can have. We have a clip of Vanessa Peoples who is telling CBS News about this harrowing experience and how it really ruined her life. I can't get jobs, i can't even get housing. I'm still living with my mom. The fact that someone else

intervened in my life. I'm stuck at zero. And it's just an example of the kind of violence that this system inflicts on families. Fortunately they didn't take her children from her, but in tens of thousands of cases, especially black and Native children are taken from their families, actually hundreds of thousands every year, taken from their families and put in foster care, which is itself a damaging system.

Just mounds and amounts of research showing that foster care is a pathway to prison j given out the tension, homelessness, drug addiction, mental health problems. You know, not to say that every child who's been in foster care suffers from these, but you're at greater risk than others in the population of having these very negative outcomes as a result of being in foster care. You know, when I read what you described of Vanessa's story and her children and the outcome,

I found it deeply upsetting. And I've written about the origins of racial criminalization, and just before Thanksgiving contributed as a co chair of the National Academies of Sciences report on how to Reduce racial inequality in crime. We call it in crime and justice rather than in the criminal

justice system. And in that report, one of the things that we say is that we all to rely less on the criminal punishment system and more on other systems, even with their flaws, because they are less viscerally lethal in terms of contact with them, like sending in our first responder who might be part of the child welfare system.

Is that what you mean, that's correct or caseworker. And there are alternatives to this being called upon in cities across the country, and some of this is being stood up right now in terms of police diverting a call a non emergency call to the child welfare system or

the mental health sector. And after reading more of your work, Dorothea, I have to say, I mean it was devastating because I felt like if Ben and I've been writing about the story of mass incarceration, you know, I would say my interpretation of what you've been writing about is a story of mass separation. Yes, this history since the nineteen sixties, of this skyrocketing foster care system that's doubled on itself from I think you say in nineteen eighty five there

were two hundred and seventy six thousand people. By ninety nine, less than twenty years later, there are five hundred and sixty eight thousand. I mean, you know the system bed in the nest, right, what is the scale of this thing? Yes, so you're right. By the late nineteen nineties, there were almost six hundred thousand children in the foster care system, and black children were the largest group in foster care, four times as likely as white children to be taken

from their families. Now, the disparities have shrunk somewhat, and the foster care population has gone down somewhat, but it's still hundreds of thousands of children, like four hundred thousand I think exactly more than four hundred thousand children, and black children still are twice as likely to be separated, and one finding that from a recent study that I

didn't know about. When I wrote Shattered Bonds, I've included it in torn Apart, is that half of Black children, more than half of black children, fifty three percent, will be subject to a child welfare investigation before they reach aga teen. That is incredible. Half of all Black children in America, half of all Black children America will experience this.

It's so huge, it's so huge, But it's also in terribly for frustrating because I'm sitting here and I mean, I told I shared this with Been even in preparations. Conversation like you know, brought tears Tomise, because I'm like, how did I not even know? Yes? And how is it possible that the three of us are in this conversation and we're both expressing our own ignorance about how

pervasive and punitive and devastating the system is. I'd even add to that, Khalil, like we think of the child welfare system as a force for good of taking care of the neediest. Yes, and you know that you're educating us that it's actually a force for harm, that it does much much more harm than good. Absolutely, So I was not aware of the harm. I only became aware of it because of the work I was doing on the prosecutions of black mothers, have discovered that they're newborns

who are being taken from them by the system. And I think the system has just done a great job at propaganda, and the media until very recently, has gone along with it. Often the story goes the opposite way that there'll be a case of a parent who harms a child or even murders a child, and this is very much like the criminal justice system. There'll be an extreme case of crime or abuse, and then that sparks

more emphasis and investment in expanding the system and investigations. Yes, that you're right, the parallels to the criminal justice system are all over the place. I took this status from your own work, but they're about sixteen percent of the cases are of physical or sexual abuse, where a casework will go in and protect a child from those but the vast majority of the rest of the eighty four percent,

which are considered neglect are usually issues of poverty. It's punishing need that these are parts who actually could use much more investment. And I'm thinking about another corollary between this and policing that when a caseworker shows up, when a child productive surfaces shows up. The only tool they have to help to help in quotes, is removed. They can't help someone with housing, they can't help them with food, they can't help them with clothes, they can't help them

with a job or with education. Inherent with childcare. The only thing that they could do is say I'm going to take the child exactly. That is the primary tool of this system, So it's both practically that's what the caseworker has to deal with the problems the family is encountering, which mostly are problems of poverty. Neglect means failure to meet the needs of a child, and usually parents who don't meet the needs of their children. It's not because

they're deliberately withholding food that they have. It's not because they're deliberately withholding clothing or housing. They're not living in the hall with shelter because they want to neglect their child. They're living there because there isn't affordable housing in their city. And so the response is to take the children away and then require the parents or other family caregivers to somehow come up with the answers. And on top of that,

they're given these therapeutic remedies. You know, they have to go to various kinds of counselors and I have to take parent training classes. So it makes it even more difficult. As I mentioned the case of Vanessa People's it made her life more difficult to get involved with this system. It's harder for her to take care of her children now. And so yes, this is a system that punishes poverty. It diverts attention away from all the structural impediments to

meeting children's needs and blames parents for it. It polices families instead of supporting families. This is really enlightening, I think I can say forbidding me and I certainly many of our listeners are learning a lot. We've been talking to the professor scholar in various advocacy and activist circles around black motherhood and particularly reproductive rights and bringing together the right to control one's body, including the fight for

racial and social justice. And when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about the recent Adopts decision and how this is really something that Dorothy saw coming many decades ago when she first started this work, because she could see the limits of Rob Wade and what they provided we'll be right back after the break. We are back on some of my best friends are We're here with Dorothy Roberts. Dorothy. We are at the

fiftieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. And last year we had this other Supreme Court ruling, the Dab's decision, that said there was no constitutional right to an abortion. It sort of nullifies Rove Wade, And I wanted to ask you first, what did Roe achieve and what didn't it achieve. Rowe achieved a recognition that the Constitution protects the right to abortion, and so it protected us against government bans on abortion. It protected us against criminalizing abortion.

But what it did not achieve was recognizing the full scope of reproductive freedom we should have. So it did not provide for government funding for abortion, for example. It did not recognize the ways in which structural inequities prevent people from having truly free reproductive lives. It didn't address all the policies that devalue black people's reproduction, for example,

that have devalued black women's child bearing. So it didn't recognize the full scope of our reproductive lives that include not only the ability not to have a child, to terminate a pregnancy, but also the ability to have a child and to be supported in raising that child. Those second two aspects of reproductive freedom were not touched upon at all in row versus way, nor did Row recognize

the need for support for actually effectuating a reproductive decision. Yeah, this is one of the things I was so excited to talk to you about, because when Dobbs first happened, I had this really perplexed problem. I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, wait a minute, I know that on the literal right side of our political divide, that there are white nationalists and white supremacists who are invested in this replacement theory, which is that they won't be replaced, that

we have to save America for white Christians. And so I'm thinking that if abortions increase the likelihood that black women will have fewer babies, isn't this a contradiction with the politics of Dobbs. And it wasn't until I dug into your work that I understood that what you've been saying is that the entire movement for abortion was really not the issue that black women wanted to protect in

terms of the reproductive freedom. Surely they did want access to it, but what they wanted was full control over their bodies. And unlike white women, their bodies had been subjected to increased state interventions since ROW and even before ROW, and so ROW didn't protect them. So tell us particularly, how we are to understand that at some point in the very recent past, the state increased its capacity to essentially either force birth control on women or to outright

sterilize Black women. We have to distinguish between birth control as a form of reproductive freedom that's in the control of the person who's using it for themselves, and birth control is a form of population control. So similarly, black women have demanded access to all forms of birth control, including abortion, and we should be able to have birth control,

including abortion, if we want it. But at the same time, throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were government programs, federally funded government programs that forced sterilization on black women. An example is the Ralph Sisters. These two young women teenagers in Alabama, who were sterilized without their consent, even when their mothers signed a form with an X she

was an illiterate sharecropper. They became the name plaintiffs of a big class action lawsuit that revealed that hundreds of thousands of people in recent years had been sterilized under these programs. Now, the programs would force people to a so called agreed a sterilization in order to get healthcare

or in order to get welfare benefits. In North Carolina, the Eugenics Board operated into the nineteen seventies, and by the time it was exposed, it was mostly forcing sterilizations on impoverished black women, black women who received welfare benefits. So the state itself is actually trading its public goods, its resources, it's welfare benefits, whether it's food stamps or access to housing, as a way of saying, you can have these things if we take away your right to

bear children. Absolutely, this is a very common idea in welfare policy in the United States. I want to ask you to connect the dots for me. Okay, tell me how that leads to the dab's decision. Okay. So my first point is we have to understand that reproductive freedom involves resisting ending all of these forms of reproductive violence.

Whether it's control over the ability to end a pregnancy in other words, forcing someone to give birth, or whether it's denying someone the ability to give birth, and that denial can be through sterilization, it could be through welfare policies, other kinds of policies that pressure people not to have children. So when khalils as well, it seems like a like a contradiction that you would support a ban on abortion but also support a policy that would discourage black women

from having children. Well, it's it's not a contradiction because they're both policies that deny Black women and others. But let's focus on black women for a minute, the ability to control their own reproductive lives. And by the way, when you are in a position where you cannot afford another child, you can't get an abortion, you are pressured into being sterilized. So I see no contradiction. Yeah, that's really helpful. Yeah, they don't want more Black children born.

What they want is more Black women to be sterilized. And that is the pressure that you feel. You can't get government support to take care of your child, you can't get at us to abortion, what are you going to do? Believe me, they will fund your sterilization in a minute and you won't have any trouble getting sterilized. Is it possible then that we will see legislation in some near future that will begin to invest in birth control at the state level to achieve just this purpose.

In light of DABS decision, well, I would say we already have it, but I think it may become more explicit and more obvious. Now let me let me say another connection between jobs and family policing and these other forms of reproductive violence. What is going to happen as a result of jobs is that people who decided, knowing their own life circumstances, they cannot manage another child, and are yet are forced to give birth to that child.

In most cases, they will keep the child, and they will be now at risk of having their children taken from them by the family policing system because they're struggling to take care of the child. The dob's decision explicitly suggests that what should happen to children in those cases babies born as a result of abortion bands is that

their parents should give them up for adoption. Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested this during the oral argument, and then Alito puts in the majority opinion a favorable suggestion that people can just drop off the babies at these safe haven places for people who want to give up their babies, and then drops the footnote about the unmet demand for adoptable children, as if these children should just be commodities in a market for adoption that probably is not gonna have.

The way in which these children are going to end up in the market for adoption is that their children will be for possibly taken from them by the family policing system, parents' rights terminated, and the children become available for adoption. But even that is a false picture to some extent, because black children are the least likely to be adopted, they're the most likely to stay in foster care,

the most likely to age out of foster care. So we have to see these connections between criminalization of parenting and pregnancy, family policing, and the end of any entitlement to support for your children. And Dobbs is going to intensify that because it is going to force people who are unable to meet children's needs, who've made the decision I cannot manage this child, force them to give birth, and then punish them when they're unable to meet that

baby's needs. Dorothy, one of the things I'm hearing in all of your work in terms of resisting and fighting against the dab's decision, fighting for women's reproductive freedom. Is the need to link those fights to the fight against systemic racism, to all of these historical problems. We can't think of them separately. Yes. And the other thing that I'm thinking about, because we talk so much about the child welfare system, is how you call for the abolition

of the child welfare system. You think it's such a troubled and oppressive system that we need to scrap it. And it's not like that's not something we've tried, Like like you've talked about this that during the COVID nineteen pandemic that we actually had a sort of trial run with getting rid of the child welfare system. That's right, because you know, people, not surprisingly are concerned, well, if we get rid of it, what's going to protect children?

And we know that children can remain safe without this system, because we have examples of that. And one very telling exam is the unintended abolition of family policing during the pandemic in New York City and the Cares Act, which in itself did more to reduce poverty in a faster time than anything else in the history of the country

childhood poverty exactly. So we know from the evidence from the Cares Act and other studies as well that have looked at what happens when you actually give impoverished families extra income, you know, and as if we needed a study to figure this out, but studies have shown the child poverty goes down, children fare better. And so that's what happened during the pandemic. Child poverty went down and

children stayed safe. Now not only because of the government infusion of supplemental income to these families, but also in New York City in particular, there was a strong network of mutual aid organizations that sprang into action and distributed material resources to families. And so that those two things are important components of what abolition is about. It's not

just about dismantling the oppressive system. It's also about building a replacement that actually supports families and keeps children safe. And so that could include a change of government policy to provide income to impoverished families, but also importantly mutual aid community based networks that provide the material resources that families need. Well. I think that it goes without saying that what you've shared with us everyone should know period Hardstole.

I mean, if the story of the New Gemcrow, as Michelle Alexander once described it, or as the references that you have in your book of the punitive welfare child welfare system as the new Jane Crow, we are past time to see the fullness of this really nvidious system. And I'm just really grateful that you've dedicated all of your career to drawing our attention to this. And while I remain hopeful in this moment that we see things with clarity as the predicate for the possibility of change,

I also am a realist. We've got a really tough fight ahead of us, and this is not an easy subject to master, but you've done it. And so Dorothy Roberts, thank you so much for all your work, for your tireless commitment to justice, and for helping us see what we should have seen a long time ago. But now now that we can't unsee it, we have our work cut out for us. Thank you well. Thank you so much. Kill Will and Ben I really enjoyed speaking with you.

We have to work together collectively in these movements, and the movement to end carcera logics and punitive approaches to human needs. I think it's going to be stronger than ever, and that that's my hope. Thank you so much, Dorothy, This is inspiring. Thank you. Damn well. That was a lot, and man, it was so interesting to hear how interconnected all these things are. Yeah, no, I mean I feel the same way as I said to you. This was very emotional for me. And one of the reasons why

is because all my kids, dude ran away. You know, at some point they ran away from home. Well not exactly home away from home, but they left our site. Did they ever come back? Well, yes they did. We

put them through college and all of this. But okay, I mean we were at this massive holiday celebration when we were living in Bloomington, Indiana, and our middle child at the time, Jordan, who was like six years old, she she just disappeared in the crowd and we got her back because someone found her and instead of calling the police on us, they took her to the announcer

and said, this child is lost. Now, you could imagine this exact scenario where this happened to you, where you're in this white town and they're like, you screwed up this. I'm a bad parent, right, I'm neglectful. Yeah. And the difference, of course, is that I was a professor at Indiana University and not someone who was struggling as a low

income resident of that community. Yeah. This is the difference between you having your parental rights and your right to govern your life and your children's life versus a system that has held bent on taking children away from people. Yeah. As a parent, one of the worst horrors you could imagine, I mean, short of the death of a child, of just the child being taken from you and you being incapable,

powerless to do anything about it. That's right. I am walking away from this conversation empowered with more information, particularly this idea about the family policing system. I just think that as you and I move forward in our work talking about mass incarceration, now, we've got to deal with this problem mass separation and the way that the child welfare system works. Man, mass separation. Did you coin that phrase in the middle of this conversation, because that's kind

of impressive. I did, But you know, my brain works like that sometimes. Damn, damn, that's why you're top billing

on this show. I was left also with thinking the more that we think of these issues interconnected, that the rights of reproduction, a history of racial oppression, that there's a way rather than rather than, as people usually say in these separate fights, like don't make it too convoluted, that's right, stay in your lane, we have to think of them as connected, and you know, you feel like you can get some mobilization if everyone feels this is

their problem on both ends. That's right. All right, man, Well I'm glad that you're part of my kid's life. So yeah, yeah, these are my nieces and my nephew. If someone comfortable, I want to say, but they've got a white uncle, I'm the white guy that's going to vouch. Yeah, all right, man, love you, Love you too. Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil, Gibron Mohammed and my best friend sometimes Ben Austin Hey. It's

produced by John Assanti and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our showrunner is Constanza Gallardo. At Pushkin. Thanks to Lee Tall, Mulad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Greta Khane, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Lill Lily is by fellow Chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young. It is from his album Tubman. Okay, you definitely want to check out more of his music at his website Avery R. Young

dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you like to listen. Hey, and if you like our show, please give it a five star rating and a review. And okay, even if you don't like it, come on give it a five star rating, review it and please tell all of your best friends about it. Thank you so much,