SOCIOLOGY

Sociology of Families



Sociology of Families

1) Killing Black Body

Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts is the Pandagon book club. Amanda's thoughts on it are great and fairly comprehensive, so check them out, and go participate in the discussion if you've read the book yourself.

This book is an excellent primer on exactly that. Killing the Black Body traces the history of reproductive rights issues since Black women were first brought to America through slavery. The book is astonishingly comprehensive. It's also really dense and written in a highly academic manner. But Roberts is a great theorist and historian, not to mention even-handed and highly persuasive.

The main argument of this book is that Black women's reproductive capacity has consistently been used against them throughout American history as a means of race control and devaluation. From the time of slavery, Black women's role as mothers has been discredited, minimalized, directly attacked and used to blame Blacks for the inferior social status that has been constructed by whites. They have been forcefully impregnated, had their children stolen from them, sterilized against their will, coercively implanted with Norplant, refused welfare due to their procreation and sent to jail because of their reproductive choices.

One of the earliest images in the book that recurs symbolically throughout is how whites first theoretically divided the concept of woman and fetus. As slaves, Black women's main value was the capacity to produce offspring, i.e. more slaves for the white owner. When a pregnant slave would rebel or upset the slave master, there was the need to reconcile punishing the woman without harming the economically valuable fetus inside of her. So they would dig a hole just large enough to fit her pregnant belly, force her to lay face down in it so that the fetus would not be harmed and whip her back, effectively sending the message that she was nowhere nearly as valuable as the unborn child she was gestating.

This concept is repeated through accounts of Black women being forced into prenatal care, cesarean sections and other medical treatment “for the good of the fetus,” because the women themselves were deemed too selfish or ignorant to choose for themselves. It's also seen when looking at the cases of almost-exclusively Black women who have been imprisoned for smoking crack while pregnant. For racist reasons, only crack smokers are targeted, with other types of gestational drug use either ignored or treated. Instead of being offered treatment for their drug habit, these women have their babies removed from their care, are dragged out of the hospital post-birth in shackles, sometimes sent to jail while pregnant “for the benefit of the fetus” and often forced to be implanted with Norplant as a condition of probation. All of this happens even if the woman seeks help for her drug problem because of concern for her fetus, and even if the baby is fine when it's born. Horribly, if a pregnant woman found to be doing crack chooses to abort rather than carry ...