Race and Birth Activism

Jill from The Unnecesarean posted this sobering slideshow about racism and its effects on the lives of black women and their babies. Black women are much more likely than other races to go into labor early, and their babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday. This is true even when controlling for socioeconomic status, maternal smoking, and dozens of other factors.

The conclusion drawn from these studies is that the racism that black women face is responsible for the disparity.

That’s not a shocker to me. Racism kills people of color. My desire to dismantle the racial hierarchy that we live in does not stem from some hippy we-are-the-world type of philosophy; it’s because racism murders people of color. So when people say things like “I’m not really an anti-racist, I don’t see what the big deal is,” what I hear is “I don’t care whether people of color live or die.”

Jill’s post was excellent, but the comment section was, predictably, full to the brim with fail. Here are some snippets:

I am not buying it. It really comes off as flashing the race card…You never even listed reasons for these babies to die. Did they die in that first year due to child abuse? Improper care? Murder? Domestic abuse? Malnutrition?

As Tim Wise has said, what kind of a card is race? Also, racism doesn’t kill babies. Black mothers (who are apparently abusive, murderous, and neglectful) kill babies.

I truly hope that it turns out to be something a little more controllable than the nebulous “racism.”

The definition of nebulous is “lacking definite form or limits; vague.” Doesn’t sound like racism fits the bill to me.

I am a mom who was pregnant with a visible disability. If you want to talk about interpersonal stress, it would seem women with disabilities would have to deal with that at least as much as black women

Oppression Olympics: bingo!

The entire conversation was more than a little disheartening for me, as an aspiring health care professional. My future colleagues are going to be overwhelmingly white, and thus many will be happily unaware of their racial privilege. What are they going to say when I, a woman of color, speak up about the racial disparity in breastfeeding rates and outcomes? I want to help black parents breastfeed; I feel that as a black woman and lactivist, that it is my obligation to help identify and address the obstacles that black parents face when they choose to nurse their children. And I want to make sure that black parents have a choice in the first place.

Will addressing these concerns earn me the label of racemonger, of a woman who plays the “race card” in order to gain some intangible benefit? I’m sure it will, and I do not look forward to it. But I intend to put myself out there anyway, because racism is killing little brown babies like mine.

I think commenter Heather said it best on Jill’s blog:

Holy crap. Much of this comment thread is like a cross between racism bingo and Derailment for Dummies.

Yep, that pretty well covers it.

My Lorde!

[The image shows a book cover with the title Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde and additional subtext New Foreword by Cheryl Clarke. The design is of a pair of stylized faces with recognizably African features such as full lips and cornrowed hair over an olive-colored background.]

Last night I picked up a copy of Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches by Audre Lorde, a poet and black activist with whom I am only just starting to acquaint myself. It’s only recently that I realized that if I’m going to convince Eve of just how amazing women of color can be (and if she’s like I was as a child, bombarded  by the anti-woman and anti-black messages that permeate this society, she WILL need to be convinced), I need to familiarize myself with amazing women of color. I know more about white celebrities, white history, white politics, white entertainment, white cultural norms, and white pop culture more than I do about people of color (or also, for that matter, about people with disabilities, or gay people, or trans women and trans men). This has to change. Amazing things have been said and done by people who are not white, cis, temporarily able-bodied, wealthy or middle class, or straight, and their histories deserve to be acknowledged and celebrated. (And in fact, Audre Lorde was a lesbian of color and also legally blind – hooray for intersecting identities!)

Anyway, about Audre Lorde. So far I’ve only read two chapters out of the book: her essay “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” and her open letter to Mary Daly (aptly titled “An Open Letter To Mary Daly”), the radfem white lesbian whose recent death sparked a bit of controversy when many feminist bloggers mourned her death uncritically*, failing to acknowledge her racism and abhorrent and unfettered hatred for trans women (to the point that she actively called for their Nazi-style extermination… yeeeaah), and in fact those bloggers became defensive and let their racism and transmisogyny really fly when called out on it.

I liked “Poetry” well enough, but the letter spoke to me in a big way. In it, Lorde expressed her exasperation, her anger, and her exhaustion as a result of dealing with white feminists, who, for all their talk about equality, had no problems using the same oppressive and silencing tactics against women of color that men use against women. (My summary of it does it no justice and I really would recommend that you read it for yourself – you can find the full text archived here.) I identified strongly with Lorde’s experiences with and disappointment in white feminists, and she does it with such eloquence that I pretty much want to get every beautiful scathing word tattooed on my forehead just so that I can read it again as I brush my teeth every morning.

There is a reason that I identify as a womanist and not a feminist. I started calling myself a feminist about a decade ago, and over time, as I became more aware of the fact that white feminists, by and large, are only interested in securing respect and equality for a very specific kind of woman (a definition that, more frequently than not, excludes me and mine), I started to distance myself from the label.

A situation that sticks out in my mind is of a pages-long debate in a pro-choice group, in which a pro-life man who apparently did not like the direction that our debate was going suddenly said to me, “Let’s not fight, let me tell you a joke. Why is there cotton in pill bottles?”** Suddenly, all of the women who were so quick to call out posters for their use of sexist slurs, slut-shaming, or victim-blaming were silent. Not one member of the group called him out on his very explicitly racist attack, save for a moderator who intervened at my request (and even then, her admonishment was pretty lukewarm, along the lines of “I’m disappointed that you would think slave jokes are funny”). The man, who had been banned before for his sexism but never for his racism, was free to engage openly in as much as racism as he wanted, and no one ever said anything but me (that incident was only one of many with him). The very same women who had been right beside me when defending a woman’s right to abort would suddenly distance themselves and become silent when my race was used as a weapon against me (and some of them cheerfully joined in on the attacks). Eventually I quit participating, as it just became too much for me to deal with.

Too many white women who will freely discuss what it means to navigate this society without male privilege will shit themselves in violent denial whenever white privilege is mentioned. Attempts to discuss race are either discarded as irrelevant, unimportant, or worse, actively antagonistic. The mere mention of the fact that women of color frequently experience sexism in a racialized context is decried as either playing the “race card”*** or muddling up the discourse by taking time and energy away from the “real” (read: white) issues.

Suffice to say, I am excited to have discovered Audre Lorde’s writing and am looking forward to reading more of her works. It’s cathartic to discover that someone has managed to put words to my experience as a woman of color with such nuance and power. I’ll leave you with this quote, which I found to be a simple but powerful reminder of why I am making myself speak out against racism and oppression, and I probably really WILL have it tattooed on me someday (although not on my forehead, I promise).

“Your silence will not protect you.”

Likewise, my silence will not protect her.

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*This particular blog post by Sady Doyle entitled “Acts of Contrition: Feminism, Privilege, and the Legacy of Mary Daly” is, unlike most of the posts regarding her death by cis white women, a terrific read and I highly recommend it.

**The punchline to this grotesque little joke is “To remind black people that before they were drug dealers, they were cotton pickers.”

***For an insightful look at just how ridiculous the notion of a race card is, read Tim Wise’s “What Kind of Card is Race? The Absurdity (and Consistency) of White Denial”