Quasi Colonial Bodies: An Analysis of the Reproductive Lives of Poor Black and Racially Subjugated Women
This Article analyzes the relationship between the struggle for the recognition of Black women's reproductive rights in the United States and the fight for racial justice. Specifically, it argues that the problematization of poor Black women's fertility evidenced by the depiction of single Black motherhood as a national crisis, (1) the condemnation of poor Black women who rely on public assistance, (2) and the portrayal of their children as an embryonic "criminal class" (3) ought to be understood as a form of contempt for Black women's reproductive rights. (4) Differently stated, the lack of acknowledgment in legal, political, and popular discourse that motherhood is a legitimate choice for poor Black women demonstrates that their right to reproduce is disparaged. Further, this censure of poor Black women's fertility ought to be understood not only as a failure of the reproductive rights movement, but also as a matter of racial injustice. That is, the struggle of poor Black women to have their reproductive choices respected is a struggle for racial equality. Conceptualizing Black women's reproductive rights struggles as a racial injustice may seem counterintuitive. This is in part due to the widespread exclusion of gender related issues from social movements for racial equality. (5) Many Black feminists have noted that the paradigmatic subject of racial justice movements has been the Black man, while the paradigmatic subject of gender justice movements has been the White woman. (6) As political scientist Shatema Threadcraft recently commented, "that our understanding of contemporary race problems is dominated by issues of criminal justice and public education, and that our understanding of gender politics assumes that the biggest struggles that women have faced are around access to legitimate public roles, reveals troubling gender and racial bias, respectively." (7) In a similar vein, legal theorist Dorothy Roberts recounts an incident where she was asked to speak at a forum entitled Civil Rights Under Attack." Recent Supreme Court Decisions. (8) After giving a speech addressing obstacles facing Black women in their struggle for reproductive autonomy, Roberts was criticized by a male audience member, who admonished her to "stick to traditional civil rights concerns, such as affirmative action, voting rights, and criminal justice." (9) This list of civil rights priorities reveals a Black male subject the subject for whom matters of racial justice have historically, and now intuitively, been thought to concern. This paper seeks to regender the subject of racial justice movements and to comprehend the denial of Black women's reproductive rights as a contemporary race problem. Two conceptualizations of race influence this paper. The first is a commonsensical understanding of race, which conceives of it as a visually distinct expression of phenotype. In Parts I and II, this definition of race predominates. Thus, references to "Black women" here refer to women who are Black because they possess the skin color, facial features, and hair texture that are commonly associated with the "Black race." (10) However, subsequent Parts rely on a more expansive understanding of race using the term to denote categories of phenotypic expression as well as relative stations of marginalization and privilege. As Cheryl Harris aptly explains: "Black" and "White" signify ideological concepts and do not operate as phenotypic markers. [They] are relationally constructed. Whiteness is the position of relative privilege marked by distance from Blackness; Blackness, on the other hand, is a legal and social construction of disadvantage and subordination marked by the distance from White privilege. (11) Accordingly, Blackness is a position occupied not only by women who are "Black" because their appearance accords with historical understandings of race, but also those who, for sundry reasons, find themselves disqualified from White privilege.