How long does it take to read Killing the Black Body?
Killing the Black Body by Dorothy E. Roberts takes about 6 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 50 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1997. 373 pages, about 102,575 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 50 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 16 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"The image of the 'Welfare Queen' still dominates white America's perceptions of Black women. It is an image that also continues to shape our government's policies concerning Black women's reproductive decisions. Proposed legislation to alleviate poverty focuses on plans to deny benefits to children born to welfare mothers and to require insertion of birth-control implants as a condition of receiving aid. Meanwhile a booming fertility industry serves primarily infertile white couples. ... Roberts exposes America's systemic abuse of Black women's bodies, from slave masters' economic stake in bonded women's fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s. These abuses, Roberts argues, point not only to the degradation of Black motherhood but to the exclusion of Black women's reproductive needs from the feminist agenda."
Subjects: Birth control, Civil rights, Race discrimination, African American women, Welfare recipients, Fiction, general
