Shattered Bonds, Dorothy Roberts
Shattered Bonds, Dorothy Roberts
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Shattered Bonds
The Color of Child Welfare

Author: Dorothy Roberts

Narrator: Allyson Johnson, Dorothy Roberts

Unabridged: 12 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/21/2021


Synopsis

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.

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Esther

The first time I read Dorothy Roberts (fatal invention) she rocked my world, and she’s done it again! I’m a baby obsessed freak who’s excited about family planning, and I really really wanted to read more critical takes on the foster care system, and if that is also you then this is absolutely it. A......more

Goodreads review by Travis

This is an excellent analysis of the US child welfare system and how ridiculously broken it is. While the general view of foster care is that children are only taken from their families when they are abused or grossly neglected, the truth is that many children (especially black children) are taken f......more

Goodreads review by Quin

In this gripping account of the racial injustices perpetuated by the child welfare system, Roberts powerfully argues for a transformation of child welfare policy from its current punative, "rescue-based" orientation towards a vision of community empowerment and collective concern for the well-being......more

Goodreads review by Gaylynn

It was like Dorothy Roberts followed me around every day at work. Crazy and haunting and frustrating and outrageous. This book is a must-read.......more

Dorothy Roberts has written a second genius work of scholarship with specific implications for my life - the other book being "Fatal Invention" which concerns the use of race in genomics science. This book, on foster care, feels bizarrely up-to-date for a book written more than 15 years ago. That's......more