Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
Dorothy Roberts
Sep 2021 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Dorothy Roberts and Allyson Johnson
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12 hr 7 min
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About this audiobook
The story of foster care in the United States is the story of the failure of the social safety net to aid poor, largely black, parents in their attempt to make a home for their children.
Shattered Bonds tells this story as no other book has before -- from the perspective of a prominent black, female legal theoretician. The current state of the child-welfare system in America is a well-known tragedy. Thousands of children every year are removed from their parents' homes, often for little reason other than the endemic poverty that afflicts women and children more than any other group in the United States.
Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed legal scholar and social critic, reveals the racial politics of child welfare in America through extensive legal research and original interviews with Chicago families in the foster care system. She describes the racial imbalance in foster care, the concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, the alarming percentages of children in substitute care, the difficulty that poor and black families have in meeting state's standards for regaining custody of children placed in foster care, and the relationship between state supervision of families and continuing racial inequality.
Shattered Bonds tells this story as no other book has before -- from the perspective of a prominent black, female legal theoretician. The current state of the child-welfare system in America is a well-known tragedy. Thousands of children every year are removed from their parents' homes, often for little reason other than the endemic poverty that afflicts women and children more than any other group in the United States.
Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed legal scholar and social critic, reveals the racial politics of child welfare in America through extensive legal research and original interviews with Chicago families in the foster care system. She describes the racial imbalance in foster care, the concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, the alarming percentages of children in substitute care, the difficulty that poor and black families have in meeting state's standards for regaining custody of children placed in foster care, and the relationship between state supervision of families and continuing racial inequality.
About the author
Dorothy Roberts graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School. The author of more than forty articles and essays that have appeared in, among other publications, the Harvard Law Review and The New York Times, she has authored and co-authored several books, including the award-winning Killing the Black Body. Currently a professor of Africana Studies, Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dorothy directs the Penn Program on Race, Science and Society. She presented a TED Talk on the problem with race-based medicine in 2015.
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