Killing the Black Body Quotes

“Blaming Black mothers, then, is a way of subjugating the Black race as a whole. At the same time, devaluing motherhood is particularly damaging to Black women.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother,”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“The theme of willful self-creation is especially strong in the writings of Black women.80 The fiction of authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker revolves around Black female characters who learn to invent themselves after breaking out of the confines of racist and sexist expectations. Black women’s autobiographical accounts also describe the process of self-creation, exemplified by Patricia Williams’s statement, “I am brown by my own invention.… One day I will give birth to myself, lonely but possessed.”81”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Although these attitudes are not universally held, they influence the way many Americans think about reproduction. Myths are more than made-up stories. They are also firmly held beliefs that represent and attempt to explain what we perceive to be the truth. They can become more credible than reality, holding fast even in the face of airtight statistics and rational argument to the contrary.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“In the 1950s, Dr. Dorothy Brown, the first Black female general surgeon in the United States and a Tennessee state representative, became the first state legislator to introduce a bill to legalize abortion.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered “prime stock” to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“charts in vivid detail precisely how the shape of her life and the choices she makes are defined by her reduction to a sexual object, an object to be raped, bred, or abused.”2”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“The story of control of Black reproduction begins with the experiences of slave women like Rose Williams. Black procreation helped to sustain slavery, giving slave masters an economic incentive to govern Black women’s reproductive lives.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Even after Emancipation, political and economic conditions forced many Black mothers to earn a living outside the home.31 At the turn of the century nearly all Black women worked long days as sharecroppers, laundresses, or domestic servants in white people’s homes.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“This construct of the licentious temptress served to justify white men’s sexual abuse of Black women. The stereotype of Black women as sexually promiscuous also defined them as bad mothers. The”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“that reproductive liberty is essential to women’s political and social citizenship.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Second, the control of Black women’s reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Three central themes, then, run through the chapters of this book. The first is that regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions had been a central aspect of racial oppression in America.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Every indignity that comes from the denial of reproductive autonomy can be found in slave women’s lives – the harms of treating women’s wombs as procreative vessels, of policies that pit a mother’s welfare against that of her unborn child, and of government attempts to manipulate women’s child-bearing decisions through threats and bribes.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“The fighting over Norplant assumed that Black women's reproduction is a proper arena for social regulation.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“When people refer to the "problem" of teenage pregnancy they may mean one or a combination of several concerns-teenagers having sex, teenagers getting pregnant, teenagers raising children, teenagers having babies out of wedlock, and teenagers having babies at public expense. Does Norplant solve any of these specific problems?”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Laurence G. Paquin Middle School, a school for pregnant girls and girls who already have babies, became the first Baltimore school to implement a pilot program to provide Norplant in its clinic. All but five of the 350 students at the school are Black. Although other contraceptives are touched on in counseling sessions, the girls are urged to try Norplant.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Although most people on welfare are not Black, many Americans think they are. The American public associates welfare payments to single mothers with the mythical black "welfare queen," who deliberately becomes pregnant in order to increase the amount of her monthly check. The welfare queen represent laziness, chicanery, and economic burden all wrapped up in one powerful image.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Although most families on welfare are not Black, Blacks disproportionately rely on welfare to support their children. Black women are only 6 percent of the population, but they represent a third of AFDC recipients.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“By this I mean that millions of people are unqualified for parenthood and should remain childless," Ingle explained in the book's forewored.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“...Louisiana state representative and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke proposed paying women on welfare $100 a year to use [Norplant]. Duke's bill was an attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to enact "concrete proposals to reduce the illegitimate birthrate and break the cycle of poverty that truly enslaves and harms the black race.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“A year later Matthew Rees, writing for the New Republic, similarly defended Norplant incentives on the ground that "the current threat to children in our inner cities makes it an option that the morally serious can no longer simply dismiss." ("Our inner cities" and "the underclass," of course, are another way of referring to the Black urban poor.)”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“When she began suffering from side effects, Thomas returned to have the device removed. But the clinic staff balked at her request. "Then they tell me that it's not putting me in bed, as if they know how I feel on the inside of my body....I feel like because I'm a social service mother that's what's keeping me from getting this Norplant out of me. Because I've known other people that has the Norplant that spent money to have it put in and spent money to have it put out with no problems.... That's how they make me feel, like 'you got this Norplant you keep it.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“The federal government pays for sterilization services under the Medicaid program, while it does not make available information about and access to certain other contraceptive techniques and abortion.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“For small Indian tribes, this policy was literally genocidal. One physician that “[a]ll the pureblood women of the Kaw tribe of Oklahoma have now been sterilized. At the end of the generation the tribe will cease to exist.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“After surveying a number of these sterilization bills, Julius Paul observe in 1968, “The surgeon’s knife (sterilization) still seems to have the same magical quality in the minds of some people for ‘saving’ America from its shame, squalor, and various miseries of human or social instigation (especially poverty) as it did over sixty years ago.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“In 1958, Representative David H. Glass introduced a bill in the Mississippi Legislature entitled “An Act to Discourage Immorality of Unmarried Females by Providing for Sterilization of the Unwed Mother under Conditions of this Act,” which provided for the chancery court to order the sterilization of single mothers, most of whom were Black. The bill passed the House by a vote of 72 to 37, but was ddropped in the Senate after national protest, which included a pamplet entitled Genocide in Mississippi circulated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“But that spring Washington had ordered an end to the hormonal injections when they were linked to cancer in laboratory animals. Instead, the Relfs later learned, their daughters were sterilized.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“The doctor told her that the effect of the procedure “would wear off.” Cox’s mother consented to her daughter’s sterilization under a North Carolina law that allowed sterilization of mental defectives under age twenty-one if their parent consented. Cox underwent the operation, which left her permanently infertile, although there was no evidence that she was mentally defective.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“Dr. C, chief of surgery at a northeastern hospital, for example, gave Corea his opinion that “a girl with lots of kids, on welfare, and not intelligent enough to use birth control, is better off being sterilized.” “ ‘Not intelligent enough to use birth control,;’ “ Corea added, “is often a code phrase for ‘black’ or ‘poor.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty