Prof. Dána-Ain Davis, Queens College, convincingly argues that longstanding poor birth outcomes for Black women, including higher mortality and morbidity rates, cannot simply be explained as a feature of poverty. Rather, reproduction is one of the key sites through which we can identify forms of structural racism, or what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery.”
Dána-Ain Davis discusses her book, “Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth.” Professor Davis argues that black women’s health and reproduction has never been respected as human, but rather a part of a capitalist system of property reproduction. As such, racism contorts ideas of black motherhood from nurturing to threatening; dismisses black women’s health concerns while blaming them for their disparate outcomes; all while sustaining a medical industrial complex that endangers black mother and baby’s lives. Radical birth workers, midwives and doulas, offer some hope for recreating medical services which embrace social justice and uplift and empower change while catching babies.
Dána-Ain Davis is Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and on the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center.
