Two Harvard alumnae are among the 2024 MacArthur Fellows announced today. Roberts’s work has focused in particular on reproductive freedom and black women’s reproductive rights, and on the child welfare system’s treatment of families of color. Later, in Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001), and her most recent book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), Roberts examined how race and class disproportionately lead to state intervention in child welfare cases. She calls for dismantling the current child welfare system, which she sees as irredeemable, and building a new one from the ground up. The funds are a no-strings-attached investment in the promise of the fellows’ work.