Keynote speaker Dorothy Roberts knows how to grab an audience’s attention, and Friday night she did it by announcing that in 2002, there were 83,570 “excess” black deaths. If the mortality gap between blacks and whites was eliminated, she said, these 83,570 people would still be alive today. She held the audience’s attention for the next hour and 15 minutes.
Roberts’ speech, entitled “The New Biopolitics of Race and Health,” covered why the politics and social implications of race influence biology and turn health issues into stereotypes. Roberts introduced audience members to a side of biology that most probably did not know existed, and shocked them with disturbing statistics and facts about the society of which they are a part. For example, in Chicago, while white women have a higher incidence of breast cancer, more black women die from it. Shocking, right? Why is this? According to Roberts, it’s because white women have better access to better health care, and the highest breast cancer mortality rates are in poor, black areas. The solution is to give black women better access to better health care. Roberts made the claim that, “the advantaged on average live longer than the disadvantaged.” She was not making up these statements; she had the statistics to back them up.
“If child death rates in the poorest 80 percent of the world were reduced to rates in the richest 20 percent, then we could reduce childhood deaths to 40 percent,” she said.
Roberts says these problems have not been solved because of the, “new biopolitics of race.” In other words, people have been changing race from a social issue to a biological one. Instead of recognizing the impact of racism on our society, people use biology as a “means of reinforcing racial inequality in a neo-liberal, post-civil rights era.” Roberts explained how some people, including the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), are trying to find a “race gene” and explain our racial differences through genetics. Roberts spent the rest of her time focusing on how “race-specific pharmaceuticals” and a “colorblind social policy” are contradictory, and how the disparity in races is “inequity,” not merely “difference.”
Her controversial speech is currently being published and is due out next year, ready to inform the rest of the world about this injustice. Roberts’ speech seems to have made an impact on students at Middlebury as well.
“Dorothy Roberts was an incredible speaker, and I learned so much from her speech,” said Anne Yoon ’14. “The inequality in our country is astounding, and trying to pass it off as genetics is quite frankly disgusting. I hope Middlebury brings more speakers as enlightening as her to the school.”
The Clifford Symposium’s keynote speaker was informative and interesting, and showed Middlebury students and faculty that inequality is still rampant. She proved that it is our job to stop it.
The Clifford Symposium: Keynote speaker Dorothy Roberts on “The New Biopolitics of Race and Health”
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