Understanding Abolition: A Conversation with Dorothy Roberts and Alan Dettlaff

Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, activist, and social critic, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her latest book, TORN APART is about how the child welfare system destroys black families and how abolition can build a safer world.

Dorothy is also the author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, which documents the rise of a new racial politics that relies on re-inventing the political system of race as a biological category written in our genes and obscures deepening racial inequities in a supposedly post-racial society, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, which received a 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America, and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, which received research awards from the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. She is also the co-editor of Sex, Power and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond, as well as of casebooks on gender and constitutional law and has published more than 100 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and “Race” in the 1619 Project book.

Dorothy has served on the boards of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Center for Genetics and Society, Juvenile Law Center, and National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Fulbright Program, Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Northwestern Institute for Policy Research. Recent recognitions of her work include election to the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine, Rutgers University-Newark Honorary Doctor of Law Degree, Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize, Abortion Liberation Fund of PA Rosie Jimenez Award, New Voices for Reproductive Justice Voice of Vision Award, Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement, and American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.

Source/Additional Info: dorothyeroberts.com/about

Alan began his career as a social worker in the family policing system, where he worked as an investigative caseworker and administrator. Today his work focuses on ending the harm that results from this system.

In 2020, Alan helped to create and launch the upEND Movement, a collaborative effort dedicated to abolishing the family policing system and building alternatives that focus on healing and liberation. Through the upEND Movement, Alan co-authored upEND’s foundational policy document, How We endUP: A Future Without Family Policing, and upEND’s recently released Framework for Evaluating Reformist Reforms versus Abolitionist Steps to End the Family Policing System.

In 2020, Alan helped to create and launch the upEND Movement, a collaborative effort dedicated to abolishing the family policing system and building alternatives that focus on healing and liberation. Through the upEND Movement, Alan co-authored upEND’s foundational policy document, How We endUP: A Future Without Family Policing, and upEND’s recently released Framework for Evaluating Reformist Reforms versus Abolitionist Steps to End the Family Policing System.

Alan is author of Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition, published by Oxford University Press in 2023. He is co-editor of Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice: Reckoning with Our History, Interrogating Our Present, Reimagining Our Future, also published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Alan is also the co-founding editor of Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, a peer-reviewed, open access scholarly journal dedicated to developing and disseminating an abolitionist praxis in social work. 

Source/Additional Info: alandettlaff.com/about-5

Lia Epps is a Black same race adoptee. She spent time in foster care before being adopted. She is the founder of Adoptees Crossing Lines, a podcast where she has honest conversations about being an adoptee and the adoption industry as whole. Lia is an abolitionist. She is passionate about social issues and using her voice to amplify marginalized communities. When Lia is not working, she enjoys traveling, photography, trying new cuisine, and spending time with her friends. You can learn more about Lia here.