The theme of willful self-creation is especially strong in the writings of Black women.80 The fiction of authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker revolves around Black femal...
Neglect is usually better classified as child maltreatment defined by poverty rather than maltreatment caused by poverty. The main reason child protection services deal primarily with poor families is...
The story of control of Black reproduction begins with the experiences of slave women like Rose Williams. Black procreation helped to sustain slavery, giving slave masters an economic incentive to gov...
This construct of the licentious temptress served to justify white men’s sexual abuse of Black women. The stereotype of Black women as sexually promiscuous also defined them as bad mothers. The
The state has the authority to take citizens’ private property—in this case, their genetic information—without due process. Those are the features of a totalitarian state, not a liberal democracy. Jim
In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass an involuntary sterilization law, empowering state institutions to sterilize, without consent, criminals and imbeciles whose condition was pronounced un...
Scientists are using advanced genomic theories and technologies to create a new racial science that claims to divide the human species into natural groups without the taint of racism.
Race persists because it continues to be politically useful.
Reviewing the history of official racial classifications reminds us that these categories are not natural—and neither are the institutional inequities that race undergirds.
Even after Emancipation, political and economic conditions forced many Black mothers to earn a living outside the home.31 At the turn of the century nearly all Black women worked long days as sharecro...
Blaming Black mothers, then, is a way of subjugating the Black race as a whole. At the same time, devaluing motherhood is particularly damaging to Black women.
Three central themes, then, run through the chapters of this book. The first is that regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions had been a central aspect of racial oppression in America.