Horrifying. Absolutely bloody horrifying read in which the history of the US government's attempts to control the reproduction of black women is made abundantly clear. I was ignorant of most of the stuff in here - being neither black nor American a lot of this passed beneath my radar - but in this exhaustively researched and well-written study, Roberts builds her argument brick by brick to a conclusion that's very hard to ignore.

This is a difficult read. Given the subject matter, it simply cannot be anything else, but it is certainly a necessary read. It's all too easy sometimes, I think, to see an isolated policy and hand-wave it away as isolated, as a strange and doubtful thing that is not indicative of the whole. But studies like this, in which the apparent isolation of dozens of different policies are brought together, give a picture of a society which has so internalised racism, which has made it such a substantial part of culture, that it is indivisible not only from government policy, but from what the general public is prepared to tolerate and support. And the result is gut-wrenching.