Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

“American culture is replete with derogatory icons of Black women—Jezebel, Mammy, Tragic Mulatto, Aunt Jemima, Sapphire, Matriarch, and Welfare Queens.”

Roberts describes the stereotypes of Black women that have persisted in the US since the antebellum era. They typically depict Black women as sexually licentious, indolent, and selfless to the point of codependency.

“Whites invented the hereditary trait of race and endowed it with the concept of racial superiority and inferiority to resolve the contradiction between slavery and liberty.”

Roberts emphasizes that race is a social construct with no grounding in science. It justifies enslavement and creates permanent and incontrovertible means to retain a self-replenishing pool of free labor.

“The conception of Black women as unfit for motherhood was reinforced by their working lives. The virtuous mother depended on her husband for support, while women who worked for wages were considered deviant and neglectful.”

Most Black women, except for a handful within the middle-class, had to work to help support their families financially, as Black men had limited job opportunities. In other instances, Black women whom society left alone to rear their children had only themselves to rely on for support. Society expected white middle-class women, on the other hand, to remain in the domestic sphere. A marker of upward mobility and wealth was the privilege of having a wife who never had to work and could thus dedicate herself to looking after her home and children full-time. This implied that a woman who couldn’t look after her children full-time wasn’t sufficiently attentive.

“American culture reveres no Black Madonna. It upholds no popular image of a Black mother tenderly nurturing her child.”

Roberts describes how popular iconography has diminished the importance of Black motherhood while elevating white women as emblems of femininity and maternal love—thus, using Black women as their foils. The Madonna image as the ideal mother is problematic for women of both races, as it eliminates the notion of female sexuality and focuses only on a woman’s existing to give birth.

“The social order established by powerful white men was founded on two inseparable ingredients: the dehumanization of Africans on the basis of race, and the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction.”

These pillars are the foundation of white patriarchy, and their remnants still exist today, affecting Black women’s access to reproductive care, prenatal care, and neonatal care. In many instances, society expects Black women to give birth to children they may not be able to afford yet simultaneously condemns their dependence on social services. Middle-class Black women, meanwhile, face racism in the health care system that has led to an exorbitantly high rate of maternity deaths.

“The whipping of pregnant slaves is the most powerful image of maternal-fetal conflict I have ever come across in all my research on reproductive rights. It is the most striking metaphor I know for the evils of policies that seek to protect the fetus while disregarding the humanity of the mother. It is also a vivid symbol of the convergent oppressions inflicted on slave women: they were subjugated at once as Blacks and as females.”

Roberts uses the image of the whipped, pregnant enslaved woman to help emphasize the way in which the treatment of Black women in the antebellum South has informed the US attitude toward motherhood and, particularly, Black mothers. Roberts uses the literary terms “metaphor” and “symbol” instead of the more objective “example” or “incidence” to encourage thought about the irony and incongruity of a society that values a fetus more than an adult woman. The image also cements an understanding of the commodification of human life in the US, which could become as applicable to white women as it has been to Black women.

“Slave women’s fight to retain a modicum of reproductive autonomy despite the repressive conditions of bondage indicates the importance of reproduction to our humanity.”

Roberts note that despite the commodification of Black life in the antebellum era, many Black women tried to retain some control over when they had children—through folk birth control methods—and with whom they had children—by resisting slave owners’ sexual advances. Reproduction became a way to reaffirm one’s humanity within an intrinsically inhumane social and economic system.

“While slave masters forced Black women to bear children for profit, more recent policies have sought to reduce Black women’s fertility. Both share a common theme—that Black women’s childbearing should be regulated to achieve social objectives.”

Roberts compares policies during the antebellum era and the 1990s to illustrate that the US still fails to see Black motherhood in human terms, preferring instead to view it as a socioeconomic issue.

“What began at the turn of the century as a crusade to free women from the burdens of compulsory and endless childbearing became by World War II a method of sound social policy. The concern for women’s right to control their own reproduction was superseded by concern for the nation’s fiscal security and ethnic makeup.”

Roberts describes how the birth control movement became linked to eugenics, a key social movement during the Progressive Era. The concern became less about helping women control their own reproduction and more about managing who could reproduce. 

“Birth control in America was defined from the movement’s inception in terms of race and could never be properly understood apart from race again.”

Roberts more explicitly connects the eugenics movement’s embrace of birth control and the desire of many to prevent Black women—and those who immigrated from Eastern and Southern Europe—from bearing children in the US. As the century progressed, eugenics organizations changed their names but often didn’t abandon their social engineering policies.

“White eugenicists promoted birth control as a way of preserving an oppressive social structure; Blacks promoted birth control as a way of toppling it.”

Roberts uses contrast to show how white eugenicists’ goals diametrically opposed those of the Black community. While the eugenicists wanted to give Black women less reproductive liberty, the Black community used birth control to give them more reproductive liberty.

“It is amazing how effective governments—especially our own—are at making sterilization and contraceptives available to women of color, despite their inability to reach these women with prenatal care, drug treatment, and other health services.” 

Roberts editorializes here, taking the US government in particular to task for being more interested in Black women’s reproduction than in their long-term care. The purpose, as she not so subtly suggests, is to control the population of Black people and other communities of color to maintain the nation’s current white majority.

“The selective funding of birth control options takes place within a broader context of misdirected government priorities that emphasize free family planning as a solution to poverty rather than the general improvement of community health.”

As with Roberts’s previous comment about American disinterest in Black women’s long-term care, she condemns the short-sightedness and racism of policymakers who fail to see the connection between poverty and a weak social safety net.

“In the same way, the primary threat to the Black community posed by coercive birth control schemes is not the actual elimination of the Black race; it is the biological justification of white supremacy.”

Because race is a social construct, eliminating people of African descent is impossible (many people who identify as white have sub-Saharan ancestry). Instead, the problem is that these policies help justify and uphold the white supremacist ideals that the US claims it wishes to uproot and overcome.

“White Americans resent the welfare queen who rips off their tax dollars, but even more they fear the Willie Horton she gives birth to.” 

In discussing the impetus to encourage Black women, particularly teenage moms, to use Norplant, Roberts elucidates the social connection between poor Black mothers, illegitimacy, and criminality. The “welfare queen” is the false stereotype, borne during the Reagan era, of Black women who have additional children to collect welfare while (presumably) taking no interest in rearing those children. Willie Horton was a furloughed convict whom George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, cited in 1988 as an example of Democratic opponent Michael S. Dukakis’s (supposedly) soft record on crime. Horton, while furloughed in Massachusetts, committed assault, armed robbery, and rape. His image came to exemplify the “Black boogeyman” whom many white Americans feared in the late 1980s and early 1990s—that is, an image of unmitigated and pathological criminality.

“The myth that inner-city teens would be miraculously lifted out of poverty if they would only stop having babies is one of the cruelest hoaxes of our time.”

Roberts refutes the notion that teen pregnancy inhibits economic advancement. Many inner-city teens, she notes, were already living in dire poverty with few prospects to advance. In some instances, teens who begin life in these conditions and become pregnant develop the incentive to finish high school, get full-time jobs, and discontinue their welfare benefits.

“The often tragic consequences of teen parenting could be alleviated if teen mothers had better social support, including prenatal care, adequate nutrition, and assistance with child care.”

Roberts contextualizes all the ills that people associate with teen pregnancy by relating them to those that relentlessly plague Black women, regardless of their age or even economic status.

“In many cases prescribing Norplant to teenagers is like using a bazooka to kill a gnat.”

Roberts’s simile illustrates how extreme a measure the Norplant implant is for teens, who statistically don’t have frequent sexual intercourse. The prevalence of the practice also shows how much panic existed in the 1990s around the subject of teen sex, especially among low-income teens of color.

“While powdered cocaine was glamorized as a thrilling amusement of the rich and famous, crack was vilified for stripping its underclass users of every shred of human dignity.”

Though the drug is the same, the form and method of consumption differ. Roberts illustrates the contrast between perceptions of powdered cocaine and crack. Powdered cocaine, despite its dangers, bore a patina of glamour and was the usual choice among white people. Crack, because it was cheap and plentiful in poor communities, was associated with people whom society already considered beyond redemption and unworthy of respect, many of them people of color.

“The pregnant crack addict, then, was the exact opposite of a mother: she was promiscuous, uncaring, and self-indulgent. She was also Black.”

Roberts explains how crack use among Black women exacerbated already prevalent negative stereotypes about Black female sexuality and Black motherhood. The vilification of Black mothers during the crack epidemic made it far easier for states to institute policies that denied them maternal rights. Many such cases were devastatingly like antebellum practices toward enslaved mothers and children born into bondage.

“Although there are white crack smokers, the public’s image of the pregnant crack addict is distinctively Black. Selecting crack abuse as the primary fetal harm to be punished, then, has a discriminatory impact that cannot be medically justified.”

Roberts reiterates the racial stigmatization of drug-addicted mothers, with the focus on crack due to its prevalence in predominantly Black and poor inner-city communities. Medical evidence refutes the notion that crack use is more harmful to a fetus than smoking or alcohol use during pregnancy.

“Poor Black mothers are thus made the scapegoats for the causes of the Black community’s ill health. Punishing them assuages the nation’s guilt for an underclass of people whose babies die at rates higher than those in some Third World countries. Making Black mothers criminals appears far easier than creating a healthcare system that ensures healthy babies for all our citizens.”

The punishment of Black mothers, Roberts asserts, is a way to distract from the US legacy of white supremacy and institutional racism. By making Black women seem pathologically unfit for parenthood, the nation can point to them as the root cause of the ill health within communities and perpetuate myths about the system being fair and equal to all.

“Patients have historically shared a confidential relationship with their doctors. One of the cardinal rules of medical ethics is that physicians must be loyal to their patients; with rare exceptions, they must not act as agents for other conflicting interests.”

Roberts illustrates how legal policies that have punished pregnant drug users also interfered with the principle of doctor-patient confidentiality. As the threat of arrest hovered over them, Black women with drug problems would have been reluctant to disclose their illness to health care providers, thereby disallowing themselves access to both the prenatal care they needed and drug treatment.