About Dorothy

Dorothy Roberts is an internationally acclaimed legal scholar, public intellectual, and activist focused on the complex ways that race, gender, and class affect U.S. laws and institutions. She holds the prestigious title of Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in Law, Sociology, and Africana Studies. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. Dorothy has been a key leader in reshaping policy discussions around reproductive justice, child welfare, and bioethics. Her research critically examines the systems that disproportionately harm Black families. Her influential books include the award-winning Killing the Black Body and her most recent work, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022). This book argues that the child welfare system functions as a form of “family policing.” Her work exposing embedded racial inequities has earned her numerous honors, including the 2015 Solomon Carter Fuller Award from the American Psychiatric Association and a 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. The MacArthur Foundation specifically praised her for “exposing racial inequities embedded in social service systems.” Her enduring mission is to challenge the idea of race as a biological concept (the focus of her book Fatal Invention) and advocate for a radically just world.