Roberts Among 2024 MacArthur Fellows

PIK Professor Dorothy E. Roberts was named a MacArthur Fellow in the latest round of “genius grants” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The award provides an $800,000 stipend over five years to be used as the recipients see fit to support their creative, scholarly, and scientific pursuits.

Roberts [“Dangerous Ideas,” Jul|Aug 2016] is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the Penn Carey Law School and author of several books, including Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011); and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022) [“Gazetteer,” May|Jun 2022], as well as more than 100 scholarly articles and essays.

“I am extremely honored to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship,” Roberts said in a statement. “It is my hope this award will shine a light on Black women’s visions and struggles for reproductive and family justice.” 

Penn Interim President J. Larry Jameson praised Roberts’ “transformative scholarship … addressing issues of inequality, social justice, and race,” and said she “exemplifies Penn’s commitment to impactful, interdisciplinary, creative pursuits.” Sophia Lee, Penn Carey Law’s Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law, called the selection of Roberts as a MacArthur Fellow “fitting for a scholar who has reframed debates on critical issues ranging from child welfare to the biological basis of race. We are incredibly proud of her achievements and fortunate to have her as a faculty member at Penn Carey Law.”

The award announcement from the MacArthur Foundation credited Roberts’ work with “exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems. She sheds light on systemic inequities, considers the voices of those directly affected, and calls for a wholesale transformation of existing systems.”

“Most people think that America’s child welfare system supports families and protects children, but it actually operates as a family policing system. The system we have now blames vulnerable families for the harms to their children that are actually caused by structural inequities,” Roberts said in a video message posted on the MacArthur Foundation website. “We need a radically different approach that actually supports families, that actually keeps children safe, that actually attends to the material needs of children and their families.”

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