Rousseau - Black Woman's Burden - Commodifying Black Reproduction (2009, Palgrave Macmillan) (Z-Lib - Io)

Black Woman’s Burden
10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

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Black Woman’s Burden
Commodifying Black
Reproduction
Nicole Rousseau

BLACK WOMAN’S BURDEN
Copyright © Nicole Rousseau, 2009.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–61530–4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rousseau, Nicole.
Black woman's burden : commodifying black reproduction /
Nicole Rousseau.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–61530–4
1. Human reproduction—Government policy—United States—
History. 2. African American women—Abuse of—United States—
History. 3. United States—Social policy. I. Title.
HQ766.5.U5R68 2009
305.896′073—dc22 2009004006
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.

For my mother, Mrs. Lynn Rousseau McDaniel, who taught
me the true value of education and to always believe that
I would succeed at anything I tried.
And to Black girls and women everywhere who continue the struggle
for liberation, autonomy, and agency.

I love you for your brownness,
And the rounded darkness of your breast,
I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice
And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest.
Something of old forgotten queens

Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk
And something of the shackled slave
Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.
Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate,

Keep all you have of queenliness,
Forgetting that you once were slave.
And let your full lips laugh at Fate!
Gwendolyn B. Bennett, To a Dark Girl, 1902

CON T E N T S
List of Tables ix
Acknowledgments xi
Part 1 Why Black Reproduction?

Introduction 3
One On Historical Womanist Theory 13
Two On Historical Materialist Method 31
Three The Significance of Social Rhetoric 43
Further Readings 53
Part 2 Slavery Matters!

Four Becoming Instruments of Production 57
Five Is This the White Man’s Burden—Or Ours? 69
Six Age Old Pimpin’: Exploitative
Reproductive Policies 77
Further Readings 85
Part 3 Emancipated . . . Not Liberated

Seven Labor in the Industrial Age 89
Eight Becoming a Social Problem 93

viii Contents
Nine Morons, Mental Defectives, Prostitutes, and Dope
Fiends: Restrictive Reproductive Policies 103
Further Readings 113
Part 4 A Brand New Day
Ten Global Capitalism in the Electronic Age 117
Eleven Pathologizing the Black Woman 123
Twelve She’s Out of Control: Controlling
Thirteen Vilifying Black Motherhood 137
Fourteen Gettin’ Your Tubes Tied: Coercive
Part 5 Commodifying Black Reproduction

Fifteen Rationalizing Commodification 159
Sixteen Justifying Commodification 161
Seventeen Critiquing Commodification: Connecting
to Historical Womanism 167
Eighteen Understanding Commodification 173
Part 6 Liberation
Nineteen Finding Freedom 181
Notes 187
Key Concepts and Definitions 205
References 211
Index 219

TA BL E S
2.1 Method of Analysis—Status of Economic Stages 37

2.2 Method of Analysis—Social Rhetoric 38
2.3 Method of Analysis—Social Responses 39
2.4 Method of Variable Analysis 40
5.1 Status of Political Economy in Agricultural Era 70
5.2 Themes of Social Rhetoric in the Agricultural Era 71
5.3 Snapshot of Social Response to Rhetoric
Campaigns in the Agricultural Era 74
6.1 Examples of Relevant Policies in
the Agricultural Era 78
6.2 Reproductive Policy Analysis: 1845–1865 83
7.1 Status of Political Economy in Industrial Era 91
8.1 Themes of Social Rhetoric in the Industrial Era 98
8.2 Snapshot of Social Response to Rhetoric
Campaigns in the Industrial Era 102
9.1 Examples of Relevant Policies in the Industrial Era 109
10.1 Status of Political Economy in Era of Global
Capitalism in the Electronic Age (1975–2009) 118
11.1 Themes of Social Rhetoric in the Era of Global
Capitalism in the Electronic Age (1975–1995) 125
11.2 Snapshot of Social Response to Rhetoric Campaigns
in the Era of Global Capitalism in the Electronic
Age (1975–1995) 129
12.1 Themes of Social Rhetoric in the Era of Global
Capitalism in Electronic Age from 1996 to 2009 133
12.2 Examples of Relevant Policies in the Era of Global
Capitalism in the Electronic Age from 1975–1995 133

x Tables
13.1 Snapshot of Social Response to Rhetoric Campaigns
in the Era of Global Capitalism in the Electronic
Age (1996–2009) 139
14.1 Examples of Relevant Policies in the Era
of Global Capitalism in the Electronic
Age (1996–2009) 142
18.1 Commodification of Black Reproduction 175

AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S
I would like to acknowledge so many who helped make first this

dissertation and later this manuscript possible. First and foremost I
would like to acknowledge my committee members, Dr. Ralph Gomes,
Dr. Walda Katz-Fishman, Dr. Ivor Livingston, Dr. Ron Manuel, and
Dr. Moses Olobatuyi, who offered me support and guidance, not just
in completing this research, but in my development as an academic
throughout my time at Howard University.
I would especially like to thank Dr. Gomes for being my teacher, my
advisor, my counselor, and my surrogate father when necessary.
Working with Dr. Gomes has been an education in self-discipline, col-
legiality, and commitment.
My academic advisor, Walda Katz-Fishman also holds a special place
in my heart as she embraced me when I first arrived at Howard, offer-
ing me much needed academic and personal guidance and encourage-
ment. Her support has helped lead me to my life’s fulfillment and I will
forever appreciate her for that.
I am blessed for the time I have spent in Howard University’s truly
hallowed halls and appreciate the hard work and commitment each of
us put forth in our cohort. I would like to acknowledge two of my
dearest Howard University colleagues. My dear friend and study part-
ner, Dr. Michelle Street, without whom none of this would be possible.
And my colleague, my classmate, my writing partner, and my friend,
Dr. Vernese Edghill-Walden, who reminded me daily that failure is not
an option and that Dr. Rousseau lives inside of me.
I would like to acknowledge a strong and powerful collective of
Black women based in the DC metropolitan area, who continue to
offer me the support, guidance, and mutual respect necessary for aca-
demic and personal success. I would like to offer praise and gratitude to

xii Acknowledgments
Dr. Bette J. Dickerson for her ongoing mentorship, love, and support of
myself as well as countless other sisters in the struggle.
I would like to thank my colleague and dear friend Dr. Alexander
Benitez for his friendship, collegiality, and ongoing support, but most
of all for the long afternoons at Mayorga and Panera.
I would like to acknowledge my colleagues in the department of
Sociology at Kent State University whose support; guidance; and
understanding made the completion of this manuscript possible.
Particularly Dr. André Christie-Mizell and Dr. Richard Serpe, whose
respect and mentorship have proven essential in my success.
I would like to acknowledge my two oldest and dearest friends,
Phylisa Carter, J.D., and Brigitte Swenson for continually motivating
me to strive for excellence.
I would like to acknowledge my stepfather, Tyrone McDaniel, for
his unending support and respect of my work and for the vigilant devo-
tion he continues to offer my mother. Ty is an inspirational Black man
that I appreciate more and more the longer I know him.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge Michael H. Mease, for listening
to every draft of this work, from idea, to proposal, to dissertation, to
manuscript. I thank Michael for listening as I read it aloud, almost
nightly, for encouraging me to keep writing, especially when I did not
feel like it, for not judging me when I just couldn’t write any more, and
for patting me on the back when I found my inner reserve. Most impor-
tantly, I thank Michael for always having faith in me.
Cover Art Photo By Laurin Rinder www.rinderart.com

Cover Model Nakela Mitchell

PA RT
1
Why Black Reproduction?


Introduction
Several years ago, I gave a talk at the annual meeting of the Association
of Black Sociologists. Though over the years I have given many talks
at these summer conferences, I recall this event as special. It was one
of my very first solo efforts. No student colleagues, no faculty to fall
back on. It was just me and my work on a panel of other young scholars
presenting their work. I was a bit anxious. I had never discussed my
dissertation topic in front of anyone beyond my university community
and my family. In truth, I wasn’t sure anyone would get it, and even if
they got it, I wasn’t sure they’d care.
I stood up and offered up a brief talk, making every effort to syn-
opsize nearly four hundred years of history into a fifteen minute spiel.
As my eyes moved around the room, I realized that people were really
listening. I don’t mean they were being polite or professional or some-
what interested; they were fully and quite personally committed. Some
actually had tears in their eyes. Heads were nodding all around the
room, people were bursting with response. At one point I asked the
audience, which by now had grown so large people were standing in
the aisles and in the back of the room, if they had ever known anyone
who had “had her tubes tied.” Hands pop up throughout the room. It
is in this moment that that I am faced with a startling epiphany. My
historical research really is culturally significant and relevant to today’s
lived experience. This community of Black intellectuals begins to
invoke heartbreaking narrative after narrative of how their mothers,
sisters, aunts, cousins, neighbors, and friends had been sterilized. Some
voluntarily, many without their knowledge; consent; or desire.
One woman in particular shares the story of her older sister’s birth
in Chicago in 1955. She recalls her parents’ struggle to find a hospital
to accept her mother for the delivery as she went into labor unexpect-
edly. After having been turned away from one Whites only facility, she

4 Why Black Reproduction?
and her husband made their way to a second major Chicago hospital.
They agreed to accept her, but only if her husband would sign a consent
form. Reportedly this form consisted of a significant amount of small
print, giving the husband enough pause to insist that he read it before
signing. Upon closer examination, he discovers that this is a steril-
ization consent form. He absolutely refuses to sign the form and this
second hospital attempts to turn him and his wife away. She is in such
agony at this point that she is literally on the f loor screaming. A doctor
is passing and insists that he will deliver the child without the afore-
mentioned sterilization consent. Had her father not taken the time, this
woman, now a sociologist and university professor would never have
been born. What’s more, without her here to tell us, none of us would
ever have known this history.
This is why I have chosen to write my first book on Black women’s
reproduction. This nation has a history to be told, and save the few
courageous Black feminists and even fewer White feminists who have
insisted on telling the story; Black women’s sexual and reproductive
histories have gone virtually ignored by the majority for hundreds and
hundreds of years. It is time that we not only tell this story, but that we
offer an analysis of how and why it has historically been socially desir-
able to legislate the morality of Black women; especially given the inhu-
mane fashion with which this so-called morality has been conveyed.
In exploring the varied and complex histories of Black women’s
reproduction, my primary point of departure is the political economy.1
As Black women’s relationship with the United States begins with her
role in a forced labor pool, it stands to reason that her continued position
in society, even in the years following slavery, would remain connected
with her labor location.2 Even as this role is transformed from one period
to the next and Black women experience various levels of oppression.
As with all other elements of the structure, oppression, evolves as soci-
ety’s needs change. As you read this book, you will learn that the needs
of the various stages of the U.S. political economy dictate social life
on a number of levels in both personal and private spheres.3 It is clear
that Black women’s historical relations with the capitalist State have
been challenging in more ways than can be described in any one text.
However, through careful historical analysis, contextualized in theory
that perceives the nuances of race, class, and gender oppressions, the links
between the needs of the political economy and the ever-intensifying
regulation of Black women’s reproduction can be discerned.
This book explores the relationship between shifts in instruments of
production—tools and technology—and shifts in the demand for Black

Introduction 5
labor in the United States, and how that impacts the vital contributions
of Black women’s various forms of labor: productive; reproductive;
and biological.4 This book further examines the various ways in which
Black women’s sexuality and reproduction are affected by policy dur-
ing stages of economic expansion and contraction.5 This exploration
links the economic wants of the State and the development of social
rhetoric surrounding Black women’s reproduction and the construc-
tion of social policies.6 These policies more often than not, encourage
regulation that both exploits and restricts Black reproduction, thereby
constructing and cultivating a system of disproportionate control over
Black women in the United States.7
Though analyses of Black women’s sexuality, reproduction, and
relationship to policies—specifically welfare—have been offered in the
past by researchers of various disciplines, such as Shulamith Firestone,
Maria Mies, Rickie Solinger, Dorothy E. Roberts, and Loretta J. Ross,
no current comprehensive historical, political, and economic analysis
of the commodification of Black women’s reproduction exists.8 This
level of analysis is needed in order to fully explore the ways in which
White supremacy, racism, and misogyny are exploited to perpetuate
the patriarchal domination inherent in capitalist structure. To that
end, the primary objective of this book is to illustrate the clear links
between historical policies and practices that have exploited, restricted,
and controlled Black reproduction as well as current assaults on Black
womanhood that have resulted in coercive policies and programming.
Employing this historical political and economic analysis, I want
this book to eradicate the myth of the “angry Black woman.” I want
us to realize that we have not simply come to the collective conclu-
sion, as a nation, that Black women are controlling and aggressive and
angry, on our own. Rather this perception has been built over genera-
tions, through clever and purposeful social rhetoric; oppressive social
policy; and reactive masses. This book illustrates the ways in which
various means of social rhetoric have been employed as hegemonic
tools to direct national opinion as well as control Black women in the
United States.
Reading this Book
Much of the research on Black women in the United States has been
limited by not linking the various analyses of exploitation, manipula-
tion, control, and coercion to the shifts in the demands of the national

economy. As such, this book challenges these limitations by applying
a unique historical analysis to research on Black women. This analy-
sis, referred to herein as historical womanism, explores the transitions of
the United States national economy and its impact on various forms
of Black women’s labor. At its root, an analysis of the political econ-
omy, historical womanist theory is derived heavily from Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels’ dialectical and historical materialism.9 However,
due to the unique nature of the role of Black women’s labor in the
United States capitalist structure, historical womanist theory draws
from several other perspectives rooted in race, class, and gender analysis
which are well suited for examining the processes of marginalization
and exploitation specific to Black women, including womanist theory;
material feminism; Black feminism; and critical race theory.
Applying an historical womanist analysis, this text highlights shifts
in the United States national economy over four key policy periods
between 1845 and 2009.10 Given the breadth of data collected and
the unwillingness of some to accept the personal impact of the State,
historical analyses analogous to historical materialism often go unem-
ployed. This text goes forward with the understanding that every
distinct element attached to personal life cannot be solely attributed
to the political economy; however, it is safe to assume that much of
our private realities directly correlate to the status of the social, politi-
cal, and economic needs of the State. By revealing this economic his-
tory, this book exposes both direct and indirect relationships between
the national economy and shifts in Black women’s reproduction that
indicate a long lasting and significant impact on Black women in the
United States.
In exploring these relationships this book addresses literature that
contextualizes the history of Black women and regulatory reproductive
policies in the United States from slavery to the present day, with par-
ticular emphasis on four key policy periods that highlight reproductive
policies that impact Black women’s reproduction through: exploita-
tion; control; restriction; and coercion. The analysis of this historical
data is achieved through the collection of historical documents and a
review of related literature. The review of previous and related litera-
ture is a significant element of this research and is infused into this text
within three major themes: literature examining the national economy
and Black labor in the United States; literature investigating regulatory
reproductive policies in the United States; and, literature researching
social rhetoric related to Black women’s sexuality and reproduction in
the United States.

Introduction 7
Because the topics discussed within this book are so delicately
nuanced and complex, no one text could ever cover every intricacy that
has erupted over the course of the past two hundred years. With that
understanding, it would still be ill-advised to attempt to explore the
current status of Black women’s reproductive rights with a callous dis-
regard for these histories that have propelled the issue to its current
location. That said, whenever possible, this text makes every effort to
focus on the key policy periods, while simultaneously maintaining an
attentiveness to the social, political, and economic trends of the previ-
ous periods that inform each of these historical policy moments. In an
effort to address as much of this relevant history as possible without
straying too far from the topic at hand, I have also included a Further
Readings section that follows each part of the book. These readings
are intended to augment the information provided in this text as well
as offer interdisciplinary and divergent perspectives on the topics
discussed here.
Part 1
Part 1 of this book, Why Black Reproduction? (chapters one–three), lays
the theoretical foundation for the analysis. Chapter one examines the
ways in which the historical womanist analysis employed in this research
has been informed by dialectical and historical materialism; womanist
theory; material feminism; Black feminism; and critical race theory.
This chapter further explores the application of historical womanist
theory—contextualized within historical race, class, and gender per-
spectives—to the topic of Black women’s reproduction. Chapter two
elucidates the role of historical materialist method in this research. And
finally, chapter three elucidates the role of social rhetoric in developing
a national image.
Part 2
Parts 2–5 of this book present a discussion of the findings of this
research. In responding to the fundamental questions that guide this
work, these chapters analyze the following variables: (a) the nature of
the economy in the specified era; (b) the societal depiction of (and
reaction to) Black reproduction in each period; and (c) the ensuing
reproductive policies that disproportionately affect Black reproduction
in each period. Each subsection is followed by an overall summary

analysis of the effects of the nature of the economy and the ensuing
social rhetoric on the reproductive policies of the era.
Part 2 of this book, Slavery Matters! (chapters four–six), contextual-
izes Black labor and reproduction in the historic slave era by examining
the first policy period, which occurs under the agricultural force of
production (1845–1865). Some of the literature discussed within part 2
that interrogates the reproductive policies and social rhetoric of the
agricultural slave era include: bell hooks, Loretta J. Ross, as well as
Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson. Hooks examines the
role of the enslaved Black woman as breeder.11 While other literature
examining the slave era, such as Ross as well as Hine and Thompson,
respectively, explore ways in which enslaved Black women manage to
resist forced reproduction in the agricultural era.12
Chapter four investigates how Blacks are transformed into instru-
ments of production under capitalism, highlighting how Black wom-
en’s reproduction in the United States has been manipulated for profit
since the arrival of the first enslaved Blacks in the country in 1619.
Chapter five stresses the significance of social rhetoric as it examines
the depiction of enslaved Black women as lascivious wild “jungle bun-
nies,” painted as overtly sexual, amoral animals, with natural inclina-
tions for both domestic and field labor.13 Chapter six examines the
exploitative reproductive policy period that arises from the economic
needs of this era, when Black women’s reproduction is exploited to its
fullest—as it becomes common practice or policy to force slaves to breed
for profit.
Part 3
Part 3 of this book, Emancipated . . . Not liberated (chapters seven–nine),
explores the second policy stage, a critical period in Black women’s his-
tory, that sees legally regulated sterilization that occurs under industrial
forces of production (1929–1954).14 Prime examples of literature that
explore reproduction, social rhetoric, and reproductive policies in the
second policy period are works by Wendy Kline and Kristin Luker.
Each of these authors examines the rise of eugenics ideology in the
United States and how it has historically been fundamentally attached
to Black women’s reproduction.15
Chapter seven looks at the United States as the nation’s economy
suffers the loss of the booming southern agricultural industry and the
painstaking rebuilding of the South’s infrastructure and economy in
the wake of the Civil War. The public image of Black women’s role in

Introduction 9
the national labor force changes as the economy’s needs change. The
nation experiences an across-the-board loss of profit caused by the end
of slave-labor. The South finds itself with a scarcity of capable and
available workers due to the significant exodus of Blacks to northern
and urban cities in the Great Migration. The South further suffers the
onset of sophisticated farming technologies that no longer demand an
abundance of human labor, skilled or unskilled. Leaving a plantocracy
that, having previously needed the Black woman to reproduce his labor
pool, is now a displaced White male planter class requiring new labor
opportunities for himself. In efforts to reserve employment for this
White male class, the nation collectively problematizes Black labor, and
in turn Black reproduction, for the first time.
With these economic, population, and technological changes, chapter
eight describes how the image of the Black woman as the able-bodied
subservient workhorse, capable of reproducing each successive generation
of the labor force while simultaneously producing a profit for the plant-
ing class, now becomes obsolete. Instead, Black women’s reproduction
becomes the source of public controversy—frowned upon as irrespon-
sible and crafted into a social problem.
Chapter nine illustrates how, already a concern throughout the
post–Civil War years, Black reproduction becomes a serious policy
issue during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This period sees the
institutionalization of policies fashioned to dictate Black women’s lives
by unnaturally suppressing Black reproduction through forced (and
coerced) sterilization.16
Part 4
Part 4 of this book, A Brand New Day (chapters ten–fourteen), exam-
ines the final two policy periods leading to the current era. The third
policy period is the time of Black women’s sexual and reproductive
repression that occurs under global capitalism in the electronic age
at the peak of White women’s sexual liberation (1975–1995). If the
transition from the agricultural to the industrial era is complex for
the nation, the move from industrial to computerized is categorically
difficult. Needs arise during this transition that had heretofore never
existed. Literature exploring the third and fourth policy periods exam-
ines the current economic era, analyzing the post–Civil Rights period
through the present day. Authors, such as Leslie J. Reagan and Bernard
Asbell, respectively, examine the journey from reproductive freedoms
to fertility control and how that has historically related to Black women

17
in the United States. While other authors such as Rickie Solinger;
Angela Y. Davis; and Dorothy E. Roberts analyze the advent of popu-
lation control policies from the turn of the twentieth century through
present day.18
Chapter ten discusses the emergence and rise of technologies in the
late twentieth and twenty-first centuries that revolutionize the concept
of skilled labor. The notion of skilled labor takes on a new meaning
during the technological boom of the mid-1970s. Thus, ushering in a
period which sees, more so than ever before, the obsolescence of Black
labor.19
Highlighting the extent to which Black women’s reproduction is
manipulated and curbed when no longer needed for labor; chapter
eleven interrogates the creation of the image of the antagonistic emascu-
lating Black woman, who is portrayed as the root of the “pathology” of
the Black race.20 This chapter goes on to explore the clear ties between
the conceptualization of a sick Black community; the expansion of the
prison industrial complex; and the launch of the wars on poverty and
drugs, the asserted goals of which are to reform the urban poor.
Chapter twelve highlights how pathologizing Black women results
in Black women’s reproduction being regulated more and more heavily
while simultaneously White women are discovering sexual and repro-
ductive freedoms. This third policy period (1975–1995) occurs in the
early period of the current stage of global capitalism in the electronic
age. This period, developing in the aftermath of the “sexual libera-
tion” of the previous era and witnessing the growing degradation of the
social contract that will take hold in the next period, sees the infusion
of powerful social rhetoric that will establish, not only control of Black
reproduction in the period, but lay the foundation for the ideological
hegemony that will follow in the next.
Chapter thirteen describes the ways in which this current economic
stage paints Black women as “welfare queens” and carriers of “crack
babies.”21 Accused of being public enemies in the wars on both poverty
and drugs, Black women have found themselves at the center of several
“moral” debates.
Chapter fourteen goes on to describe the final period (1996–2009)
occurring in the current stage that has witnessed the dissolution of the
social contract. The chapter analyzes previously restrictive and control-
ling policies that become proactively coercive, as the neoliberal period
cultivates a culture of punishment that strictly regulates Black repro-
duction and motherhood; leading to shockingly high rates of female
surgical sterilization among Black women in the United States and

Introduction 11
22
appalling trends in the child welfare industry. Revealing that, ironi-
cally, the policies that encourage the stemming of Black reproduction
in this era have been—arguably, for the first time in history, embraced
by Black women themselves. This is evidenced by the high numbers of
Black women who are voluntarily sterilizing themselves at a higher rate
than any other group in the United States.23
Part 5
Part 5, Commodifying Black Reproduction (chapters fifteen–eighteen),
advances a theory on this topic.
Chapter fifteen explores previous theoretical analyses of Black, femi-
nist, and Black feminist thought that have already begun to supply
building blocks for historically and economically grounded theories of
Black women’s reproduction.
Chapter sixteen explores the ways in which social rhetoric has
been employed as a hegemonic tool to control Black women in the
United States. This chapter further reiterates that there is a significant
relationship between key reproductive policies that have dispropor-
tionately affected Black women in the United States and the status of
the national economy.
Chapter seventeen contextualizes the historic and material forces that
have affected Black women’s labor in the United States within the frame-
work of the development of historical womanist theory that explores
the ongoing commodification of Black women’s reproduction.
Part 6
Part 6, of this book, Liberation, explores the ways in which we will
find freedom in this new era that has seen the democratic election of
a bi-racial president in the United States, yet still has politicians lob-
bying to sterilize undesirables. An era suffering incongruities today as
profound as those of a century and a half ago that saw the onset of Civil
War as the nation battled over the first emancipation.


CH A P T E R ON E
On Historical Womanist Theory
The fundamental basis of scientific research is theory. A solid theory

offers a three-dimensional systematic view of social life by examining
the relationships between and among variables in order to explore and
predict social phenomena.1 The research presented in this book is the
continuation of work originated in a dissertation.2 The initial project
tests historical materialist theory as much as it addresses the research
questions that explore the ways in which Black women’s reproduction
is reduced to an exploitable and controllable commodity by capitalist
structure. Upon completion of the initial project it became clear that,
though clearly relevant, historical materialist theory falls short of the
analysis needed for research on this topic.
Rather than examining to what extent historical materialist theory
can explain the commodification of Black women’s reproduction;
this book applies dialectical and historical materialism to several other
appropriate schools of thought, including womanist theory; material
feminism; Black feminism; and critical race theory. The resultant theo-
retical perspective, referred to herein as historical womanism, offers a
more pointed in depth analysis of the social, political, and economic
location of Black women as a unique laboring class. In applying this per-
spective of Black women as a distinct class, this work is able to develop
a theory of the commodification of Black women’s reproduction that
takes into account her position as: a person of African descent in a nation
fundamentally rooted in a racialized slave economy; her role as a woman
in a profoundly patriarchal structure; and her position as laborer: pro-
ductive; reproductive; and biological, within a capitalist system.

In order to apply historical womanist theory to the commodification
of Black women’s reproduction, we must also draw from a number of
related theories, including the historical economic foundation of dia-
lectical and historical materialism, as well as the race, class, and gender
analyses inherent in: womanist theory; material feminism; Black femi-
nism; and critical race theory respectively. This research locates the
commodification of Black women’s reproduction within this multitudi-
nous context. In examining Black women’s reproduction, this research
uncovers Black women’s historic relationships to the capitalist mode
of production as well as the critical roles of Black women’s production
and reproduction in the success of U.S. capitalism.3 In exploring these
relations to the U.S. political economy, this research further elucidates
the role of dominance within capitalist structure and the ongoing rela-
tionship between the continued commodification of Black women’s
reproduction and hegemonic domination by the state.
This chapter discusses the theoretical perspectives that guide this
analysis. In doing this, the chapter examines the meanings of dialecti-
cal and historical materialism, including its relevant assumptions and its
limitations when applied to Black women’s reproduction. This chapter
further explores the fundamentals of capitalist structure and the contri-
butions of womanist theory; material feminism; Black feminism; and
critical race theory to the development and application of historical
womanist theory.
Why Rooted in Dialectical and

Historical Materialism?
Some scholars analyze Black women’s reproduction in the United

States without regard for social, political, and economic considerations.
These approaches present us with crucial theoretical and methodologi-
cal problems. It is the conclusion of this researcher that the analysis of
Black women’s reproduction in the United States should be undertaken
within some larger structural and institutional framework, notably, the
economic, political, and social framework, that is, dialectical and his-
torical materialist theory. Such a perspective helps reveal the structural
factors affecting Black women’s reproduction.
The historical materialist perspective, rooted in Karl Marx’s theo-
retical philosophies of dialectical and historical analysis, is by no means
original. Such views can be traced back to the early years of modern

On Historical Womanist Theory 15
4
sociology. In a celebrated passage from the Introduction to the Grundrisse,
Marx states,
It would seem to be the proper thing to start with the real and
concrete elements, with the actual pre-conditions, e.g., to start
in the sphere of economy with population, which forms the basis
and the subject of the whole social process of production. Closer
consideration shows, however, that this is wrong. Population is an
abstraction if, for instance, one disregards the classes of which it is
composed. These classes in turn remain empty terms if one does
not know the factors on which they depend, e.g., wage-labour
capital, and so on. These presuppose exchange, division of labour,
prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage-labour,
without value, money, price, etc. If one were to take population as
the point of departure, it would be a very vague notion of a com-
plex whole and through closer definition one would arrive ana-
lytically at increasingly simple concepts; from imaginary concrete
terms one would move to more and more tenuous abstractions
until one reached the most simple definitions. From there it would
be necessary to make the journey again in the opposite direction
until one arrived once more at the concept of population, which is
this time not a vague notion of a whole, but a totality comprising
many determinations and relations.5
Assumptions of Dialectical and Historical Materialism

This study asserts that though the relationship changes as the forces of
production (i.e., the farm, the factory, etc.) do, Black women’s labor—
biological, manual, and reproductive—has historically been fundamen-
tal to the development and maintenance of capitalism in the United
States. This study, addressing the inf luence of shifts in the forces of
production on the commodification of Black women’s reproduction in
the United States, is fundamentally rooted in dialectical and historical
materialism because the paradigm considers six key assumptions that
directly complement the analysis herein: inequality; exploitation; tech-
nology; bureaucracy; ideological hegemony; and revolution.
Dialectical and historical materialist theory assumes first and fore-
most that, capitalist structure, by its very definition, causes a bifurca-
tion within a given society; with the bourgeois owners of the means of

production on one side as a dominating or ruling class and the proletariat
on the other side as the oppressed working class. The bourgeois control
the means of production and capital, own the land, and dictate the dis-
tribution of resources within the capitalist society. While, the proletariat
are forced to trade their only source of power—their labor—in order
to survive.6 This structured system of inequality is inextricably linked
to the capitalist system.
As this commodification of the working class alienates the proletariat
from both the product of their labor and control of their own means
of production, they are objectified by the market and become alienated
from their very humanity. Thus, a second assumption is that capital-
ism presupposes the ongoing exploitation of the working class by those
who control the means of production.7
Further, social, political, and economic condition of the masses is
related to shifts in the productive forces: modes of production, means of
production, and relations of production.8 Therefore, a third assumption is
that, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising
the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production,
and with them the whole relations of society.”9 As evidenced in the
twenty-first century, just as technological advancements can bring us
closer together, creating what is often called a global village or a global
society, it can and often does widen the gap that separates the working
classes from the ruling classes.10
A fourth assumption is that within a capitalist system, the state and
its “political and ideological institutions that serve the interests of the
propertied classes” are used to maintain the ruling class’ power over
the working class.11 This occurs through a complex system of institu-
tions that subjugate the working classes through a maze of bureaucratic
regulations.
Gramsci “stresses that it is not enough for the capitalist class sim-
ply to take control of the state machine and rule society directly
through force, misinformation, and coercion; it must also convince the
oppressed classes of the legitimacy of its rule.”12 Thus, a fifth assump-
tion is that, “ideological hegemony of the ruling class, operating through
the state itself, prolongs bourgeois class rule and institutionalizes and
legitimizes exploitation.”13
Due to this ideological hegemony, the oppressed working class will
not only accept, but facilitate and encourage its own oppression until
a higher level of class consciousness is achieved. Leading to the final
key assumption of dialectical and historical materialism, only when “a
social class has attained full consciousness of its interests and goals and

engages in common political activity in pursuit of its class interests” can
the oppressed class achieve sociopolitical liberation.14 In other words,
the only escape from such a structured system of inequality, exploita-
tion, and abuse is through class consciousness and revolution.
Hegemonic Domination by the State
While Marx presents an analysis of the invention of the state as an

assertion of the power of the ruling class and an ongoing method of
controlling the masses, Gramsci offers an elaboration of this analysis
that examines the varying depths of control employed by the ruling
class—ideological hegemony. Gramsci, like Marx, asserts that the state
aims to rule the subordinated classes, initially through dominance and
active measures of control. However, according to Gramsci, true dom-
ination only occurs when the state no longer needs to employ complex
apparatuses to maintain power. Instead, after consistent indoctrination
and bureaucratic conditioning, the subordinated population, not only
acquiesces to the powers that be, but, embracing a false consciousness,
assists in their own domination.
Achieving this level of domination is a key to the survival of the rul-
ing class’ capitalist control:
Although the dialectics of the accumulation process, which
involves first and foremost the exploitation of labor, ultimately
results in class struggle, civil war, and revolution to seize power,
the ideological hegemony of the ruling class, operating through itself,
prolongs bourgeois class rule and institutionalizes and legitimizes
exploitation.15
Therefore, if the subordinated class believes in: (a) the strength of

the ruling class, (b) the rights of the ruling class to control them, and
(c) their location as a subordinate population, who deserve to be domi-
nated by the ruling class, then the ruling class will continue to main-
tain power over the working class, with little fear of reprisal as well as
with the consent of the very population being oppressed, exploited,
and dominated:
Gramsci argued that “the system’s real strength does not lie in the
violence of the ruling class or the coercive power of its state appa-
ratus, but in the acceptance by the ruled of a ‘conception of the
world’ which belongs to the rulers.”16

Gramsci further asserts that by “buying in” to the hegemonic control
of the ruling class, the working class further prolongs their exploitation
as their collective false consciousness prohibits them from developing
the class consciousness critical in moving toward inevitable class strug-
gle and revolution evoked by Marx and Engels.17 This condition of the
working classes is known as false consciousness.
False consciousness—or lack of working-class consciousness and
adoption of bourgeois ideas by the laboring masses—Gramsci
argued, was the result of a complex process of bourgeois ideo-
logical hegemony that, operating through the superstructural
(i.e., cultural, ideological, religious, and political institutions of
capitalist society, above all the bourgeois state, came to obtain the
consent of the masses in convincing them of the correctness and
superiority of the bourgeois world view.18
The concepts of consensual domination and false consciousness are par-

ticularly relevant to the theoretical framework of this research, as this
study seeks to examine the ways in which Black women, as well as the
rest of working-class society have accepted, embraced, and internalized
the ruling class’ image of Black women’s reproduction with little col-
lective organization and resistance. The working classes see themselves
in the very images painted of them by the ruling class, and seem to have
“bought in” to the notion that they need to be ruled; thereby forfeiting
their own liberation.
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and

adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would
require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy
and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It
must be pursued constantly and responsibly.19
Instead of banding together as a collective proletariat class, and taking

an active role, as a collective, to revolutionize the structure, workers
in the United States have allowed themselves to be divided, by race,
nationality, gender, and so forth. As a result, oppressive policies have
been ratified and accepted by the masses.
This research asserts that social rhetoric, stemming from propaganda
(media) in all forms (film, television, radio, literature, advertisements,
news reports [print and television]), has historically fed into this

national acceptance and the concept of Black women’s reproduction.
This national image has further lead to support of oppressive regula-
tory reproductive policies that disproportionately affect Black women’s
reproduction. This volume explores the ways in which media in its
various forms has been employed by the state as tools of oppression
aiding in the establishment of social rhetoric in the development of
ideological hegemony.
Fundamentals of Capitalism
Keeping the key assumptions of dialectical and historical materialist

theory in mind, it is clear that a capitalist system is based upon a social
competition for the accumulation of wealth, which by its very nature is
exploitative and dehumanizing to both classes.20
In the move from communal to capitalist societies, surplus product
emerges for the first time in history. No longer working for survival
alone, people could now accumulate product, and therefore wealth and
status and power—thus classed societies replace the primitive commu-
nal systems. With the emergence of these classes also comes inequal-
ity, as the ruling classes claim ownership of the surplus product, while
the working class producing it, has no authority. Instead the worker
receives a wage as compensation for her/his labor.21 The state, created
as an instrument of the ruling class, protects its ownership of the newly
attainable surplus product and its control over the working class:
Ensuing struggles over the control of this surplus led to the devel-
opment of the state; once captured by the dominant classes in soci-
ety, the state became an instrument of force to maintain the rule
of wealth and privilege against the laboring masses, to maintain
exploitation and domination by the few over the many. Without
the development of such a powerful instrument of force, there
could be no assurance of protection of the privileges of a ruling
class, who clearly lived off the labor of the masses . . . thus the state
developed as an institution as a result of the growth of wealth and
social classes.22
The worker must then trade this wage for goods and services for both
survival and entry into the culture of the society in which s/he lives.
The worker, needing capital to survive and thrive, now a consumer and

a laborer, is both commodified and exploited as s/he upholds the circu-
lar structure of the capitalist system, by paying into the state with both
his/her production and his/her wages. According to Marx and Engels,
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in

the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class,
developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as their
labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves
piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of com-
merce, and are consequently exposed to all vicissitudes of compe-
tition, to all the f luctuations of the market.23
The relationship between the owners of the means of production and

the workers is inherently oppressive, as the goal of the ruling class is to
accumulate wealth through profits from the labor of the working class
and co-opting their production. According to Marx’s historical analy-
sis, this final fundamental element of capitalism is the root cause of
the alienated working class’s constant struggle for survival rather than
f lourishing in the system that their labor keeps af loat.24
Sernau asserts that this is the incongruity of the capitalist struc-
ture, the more industrious, prolific, and dynamic the capitalist sys-
tem becomes, the less autonomy, agency, and freedom for the working
classes. As production increases, so do the demands on the laborers.
And further, as technological advancements bring new machinery that
in theory should lessen the pressures on the worker, now fewer workers
are expected to produce even more. The labor force is now trapped in
a new phase of labor exploitation that they cannot challenge, because
now more than ever, a constant supply of now unemployed, but willing
laborers exists to replace them at the whim of the ruling class.25
Consider the current trend in automatic checkout counters cropping
up in such varied locations as: grocery stores; banking centers; depart-
ment stores; warehouse stores; movie theaters; even fast food restaurants.
The consumer is expected to: scan sale items; input coupon informa-
tion; provide sufficient payment; and bag said items—in some cases,
the consumer is even expected to provide his/her own bags. However,
this new trend also expects the consumer to pay the same prices, if not
higher, in order to offset the costs for the new machinery. The business
in question is employing fewer laborers, providing less benefit cover-
age, for example: health care or retirement, and is now employing the
labor of the consumer. Further, the laborers that are employed are now

required to assist consumers at as many as three, five, even seven times
the rate they had been expected to work previously, as they are now
responsible for multiple lines, registers, and checkouts. Just as no adjust-
ments have been made to offer recompense to the consumer for her or
his labor, no compensation will be offered the wage laborer for this
significant increase in work.
Material Feminism
Material feminism perceives the inherent inequalities associated with

the capitalist structure and relates them to the experience of a female
laboring class. Beginning with Marx and Engels’ description of the
relations of society at the start of humanity, in which they contend
that a vital element of our nature is wrapped up in our role as primary
agents of material production. This forms the foundations of produc-
tion and the reproduction of the existence of humanity. They further
contend that working classes experience an assault on their humanity
as laborers within a capitalist system.26
Alexandra Kollontai contends that women experience an oppres-
sion, distinct from that of the general working class, as women, both
produce as laborers within the capitalist structure and reproduce the
wage labor force that perpetuates the capitalist structure.27 The indis-
pensable nature of their dual roles, as both producers and reproducers,
is considered particularly acrimonious to Kollontai as women’s labor is
the fundamental element that perpetuates the success of the system that
so oppresses them. In her analysis of the oppression of women’s labor,
Kollontai asserts that women will never fully achieve liberation from
this cycle of oppression as long as they continue to be located in a sys-
tem centered on the notions of private property and ownership.28
Just as Kollontai perceives women as located in a distinct class of work-
ers, who have suffered a historical exploitation and oppression within
the capitalist structure, specific to their class, I assert that Black women
occupy an equally distinct position as a Black working class of women.
Taking a note from theorists such as Angela Davis and bell hooks, this
text analyzes the effects of the demands of the capitalist owning class on
this Black female laboring class. Though clearly tied to the oppression
of women described by Kollontai, it seems evident that the intersection
of race within an already complex web of labor, gender, and sexual
oppressions creates yet another distinct laboring class. Further, as the

working-class women described by Kollontai are relegated to positions
of both producers, as workers within the wage labor system, and repro-
ducers of the wage labor force; Black women’s labor exploitation, inter-
laced with race, gender, and sexual exploitation, is further exacerbated
by forced labor within the slave labor system and sexual and reproduc-
tive labor exploitation and abuse both during and after slavery.
Davis and hooks each examine these evolving relationships of Black
women’s reproduction to the capitalist mode of production. Davis,
for example, examines the connection between sterilization of Black
women and institutionalized racism in the United States.29 While
hooks examines the persistence of misogynistic ideologies that tran-
scend Black and White, but are instead distinctly American—that jus-
tify the regulation of Black reproduction in the United States.30
The exploitation of these various forms of women’s labor have been
unique in regards to Black women as biological and reproductive labor
have historically been reserved for White women’s own families, while
Black women’s various forms of labor have been regulated for profit
since their arrival in the United States.31 Even in the periods following
the end of slave labor, Black women are relegated to Black women’s
work. Now beginning ongoing campaigns to restrict Black women’s
biological labor, productive and reproductive labor is even further
exploited. Black women continue to respond to the economic impera-
tive that forces them to trade productive labor for survival, even when
White middle class women struggle for their rights to work. Further,
though White women have historically experienced a noteworthy fem-
inization of work, that is, nursing, teaching, secretarial, et cetera; Black
women remain relegated to positions firmly entrenched in a reproduc-
tive labor paradigm, that is: housekeeping; hospitality; and social work,
leaving Black women superexploited by the capitalist system.
Much of the previous literature fails to analyze the status of the
Black female laboring class within a historic and material framework
and therefore fails to provide sufficient context to the role of Black
reproduction and its commodification in the United States.32 The
application of material feminist theory, illustrates the ways in which all
forms of Black women’s labor have been controlled by the state since
the inception of the U.S. nation. First through government sanctioned
policies that exploit biological, productive, and reproductive labor dur-
ing the slave era. Then, during the industrial era, while restricting Black
women’s reproduction through compulsory sterilization programs, the
capitalist structure continues to grow itself through the exploitation

of Black (and other) wage labor. Later Black women’s labor is con-
trolled through propaganda imagery that vilifies Black motherhood.
In the following period, the current era, now nationally perceived as
a problem, Black women are no longer forced or manipulated into
compliance in order to control her labor and reproduction. Instead,
she has been coerced into acquiescence by centuries of terror attacks
and hostile media campaigns that place her at odds with the national
agenda.33
Womanist Perspective
A term most often attributed to Alice Walker, womanism is typically

employed in Black women’s literary analysis; however, the conceptu-
alization of womanism has been adopted in various interdisciplinary
forms.34 Womanist theory asserts that, as Black women are profoundly
rooted in a complex history of racial oppressions, they can neither
ignore nor marginalize race matters, as some assert that other forms of
feminism would demand. Womanism asserts that Black women’s iden-
tities as oppressed people of color causes Black women to be unable or
unwilling to disentangle gender issues from racial issues.
Unlike White women, Black women have historically struggled for
the rights to be connected to Black men, not to gain independence
from them. This is not to insert a heteronormative view of Black men
and women, nor to imply that Black women cannot seek independence.
It is instead to acknowledge that Black men and Black women, though
biologically and communally connected as parents, children, siblings,
neighbors, co-workers, and friends; have historically not been free
to maintain those ties in a manner of their own choosing. This his-
toric repression of the organic bond between men and women within
Black communities logically leads Black women to seek the freedom
to connect with male members of their communities, rather than the
freedom from men, as so many historically White feminist agendas
have sought.
Further, having survived the battles in the trenches, as it were, one
could liken the experiences of Black men and women to that of war
buddies. Given the depth of the bond of shared racial oppression, there
is no way to separate the Black man from the Black woman. Again, not
to imply that this connection is, must be, or even should be a sexual
or romantic bond. Having the shared experience of the ongoing and

tumultuous realities of life within a racially stratified system, Black
women have historically occupied the role of sympathetic partner to
Black men. As in any family, Black male female relationships are not
without their own complexities. What’s more, the relationship con-
tinues to be significantly challenged by the patriarchy of the American
system. Still, Black men and women remain well-informed allies in the
ongoing struggles with racial oppressions.
As the historical oppressions suffered by Black women have been
rooted in abusing both their race and their gender. Having been forced
for so many years to choose to pursue either a Black consciousness or
a so-called feminist agenda, Black women have essentially been chal-
lenged to choose—race or gender. This historic conundrum reared its
ugly head during the 2008 presidential election. Would Black women
support Hillary Clinton as the first woman candidate or would Black
women choose race and support the Black presidential hopeful—a man.
Constantly asked to choose, womanist theory asserts that the reality for
Black women is that both her race and her gender are socially perceived
at all times. As such, she is unable to make a decision where choice
does not exist. Furthermore, womanist theory asserts that given her
positions as both female within a patriarchy and Black in a racist sys-
tem, she should not have to attempt to bifurcate and compartmentalize
her identity, and essentially privilege one oppression above another.
Demanding this of Black women would be antithetical to the subver-
sive nature of the feminist agenda.
Though revolutionary by design, the so-called feminist agenda is
fundamentally insensitive to the needs of Black women as their histo-
ries and their goals remain cataclysmically disparate. In a nation that
has propelled White women from near-property status to women’s lib-
eration; Black women have not fared as well in regards to race or gen-
der. Still assaulted by racial discrimination and never fully accepted as
women, Black women exist in a unique space somewhat removed from
White women’s feminism.
I am, however, hesitant to reference a feminist agenda as the term is
misleading, implying that there is one specific agenda that speaks to all
feminists the world over. Instead, there are a series of perspectives from
diverse and varied schools of thought that speak to myriad issues related
to various feminist ideologies. As such, womanism was never meant to
be mutually exclusive of feminism. Rather, womanist theory places the
agenda of the Black experience at the center, rather than a further mar-
ginalized population on the fringes of White feminist perspectives.

Black Feminism
Black feminism is a theory of gender, race, class, and sexuality that

is relevant to this research. Patricia Hill Collins’ exploration of Black
feminist theory highlights the intersectionality of oppressions and
describes a matrix of domination that maintains these complex systems
of oppressions.35 Though Collins would likely identify the elements of
her analysis I perceive as womanist to be Black feminist, she and I agree
that at times the terms are somewhat interchangeable.36 Like Collins
suggests, the amalgamation of theoretical perspectives employed within
this text are for the purposes of moving beyond the restrictions and the
politics of any one theory, and to instead, apply relevant analyses to the
topic of Black women’s labor.37 Therefore, though somewhat in oppo-
sition with the notion of womanism, Collins’ Black feminist theory
seems very much informed by a womanist perspective and clearly rel-
evant to the topic at hand. Asserting that Black women exist within a
realm of multiple oppressions; Collins contends that one cannot com-
partmentalize oppressions, reducing them to any one archetype. Instead,
oppressions work in tandem to create the manipulation, exploitation,
and abuse inherent in a stratified system. Collins further asserts that a
matrix of domination exists within a stratified system that maintains these
oppressions, as this system is actively perpetuated by the structure.
Relevant Assumptions of Critical Race Theory
Critical race theory is a perspective that asserts several assumptions

about race and racism in the United States that are key to the synthe-
sized theoretical framework applied here.38
Critical race theory locates the conceptualization of race in the United
States as a social construction. As such, contrary to popular under-
standings and various scientific perspectives, race is neither rooted in
phenotype nor biology. Instead critical race theory asserts that race is a
f luid concept that evolves over time, as witnessed by the ever-changing
conceptualization of Black and White in the United States.
Critical race theory further understands the role of racism in the
United States as a structural imperative. This perspective asserts that
racism holds a meaningful space within the social, political, economic,
and legal structures in the United States.39 Given its deep roots within
American structures, racism in the form of White privilege becomes an
invisible element that coexists within society, yet goes nearly unnoticed

and is therefore infrequently challenged. This system continually rein-
forces a structure that standardizes whiteness and marginalizes all non-
white groups.
Critical race theory further contends that this racism cannot be dis-
missed as deviant behavior as it is so often framed. Like dialectical and
materialist theory, critical race theory asserts that racism will never be
untangled from the fabric of the capitalist structure nor will it ever fully
be discarded. As evidenced by historical moments that have seen great
inroads against institutional racism, that is, the Civil Rights Acts of the
1960s, followed shortly thereafter by significant reassertions of White
privilege and power in the form of assaults on Black America, that is,
the growth of the prison industrial complex.
Critical race theory also asserts that racial segregation has been
socially constructed for the purposes of preserving the racialized struc-
ture. Systems of first, legally enforced, then later de facto segregation,
that persist today, are upheld by the social, political, economic, and
legal power maintained by the dominating class in the United States.
Informed by dialectical and historical materialist perspectives, criti-
cal race theory contends that the ruling class only promotes the inter-
ests of Blacks when their own interests will be served even further.
As evidenced throughout history, the dominating class does lend itself
at times to the needs of the Black population; however, according to
critical race theory, this only occurs when the results of these endeavors
are too advantageous for Whites to dismiss. For instance, the struggle
to end slavery has historically been reframed as northerners going to
war to save southern Blacks from the institution that had bound them
for hundreds of years. In actuality, threatened by the growing eco-
nomic strength of the South, the North, that had little use for slavery
in industrialized cities, was determined not to lose the battle for power.
Therefore, the Civil War was less a struggle to emancipate slaves, but
more a battle over land ownership and national and international polit-
ical and economic power.40 The Emancipation Proclamation was effec-
tively an unintended consequence of the War Between the States.
Limitations of Historical Materialist Theory
A clear pattern of labor exploitation has developed throughout U.S.

history. As such, it is evident that the capitalist structure is an impactful
force in the lives of wage laborers. However, dialectical and historical

materialist theory alone would miss the fact that “Women and people
of color are overrepresented in the contingent workforce.” 41 Chuck
Collins and Felice Yeskel describe “contingent” or “nonstandard” labor
as, “a number of different types of work for temp agencies, on-call
workers, day laborers, part-time employees, and contract workers:”42
Nonstandard workers, on average, receive lower wages than do
regular full-time workers with similar personal characteristics and
educational qualifications. The median wage for temp-agency
workers is 75 percent of that of full-time workers. . . . In 2001, 31.0
percent of women worked in nonstandard employment, com-
pared to 22.8 percent of men. Black workers comprise 10.8 per-
cent of the total workforce, but 24.5 percent of the temp-agency
workforce.43
Brewer, Fishman, Kuumba, and Rousseau address the historical

relationship of women, particularly working-class women of color, and
the state in Women Confronting Terror: Land, Labor, and Our Bodies. This
article labels the ongoing role of the U.S. political economy in female
labor-both “productive” and “reproductive”—as “state-sponsored
terror.” 44 Brief ly chronicling this reproductive imperialism, the authors
elucidate the intimate connections of patriarchy with racism, class
exploitation, and heterosexism. The authors further assert that histori-
cally, Black women’s relationship to the politically economy has been
parasitic.
Enslaved African women, in particular, suffered the super-

exploitation of being forced agricultural and domestic labor, sexu-
ally used and abused, and being used as breeders through their
reproductive labor.45
The authors go on to link the exploitative breeding of the slave era in

the years following the embargo on the transatlantic slave trade in the
nineteenth century; the coercive repression of the Negro Project of
the early twentieth century; and the current oppression of neoliberal
reproductive policy in the twenty-first century.46
Jacqueline Jones explores the relationship of Black women’s labor to
the national economy in the early to mid twentieth century, in Labor
of Love, Labor of Sorrow. Jones contends that Black women, forced into

very specific types of work, have historically been relegated to the mar-
gins of the national economy:
At the very bottom of hierarchical labor force, blacks of both sexes

lost their tenuous hold on employment in the agricultural, service,
and industrial sectors, as economic contraction eliminated many
jobs and spurred an unequal form of interracial competition for
the ones that remained. Concentrated in the marginal occupa-
tions of sharecropping, private household service, and unskilled
factory work, many black women’s jobs had, by 1940, “gone to
machines, gone to white people or gone out of style,” in the words
of activist-educator Nannie Burroughs.47
Jones goes on to assert that the state has historically controlled every
element of Black women’s realities, as the state serves as her employer,
regulator, and her provider of social services.
Shulman’s The Betrayal of Work explores the creation of what she
refers to as a caste of low-wage workers:
Who are the low-wage workers? . . . [N]early two-thirds of the

low-wage workforce is white. Yet, black and Latinos are overrep-
resented in this group relative to their participation in the overall
workforce. In fact, the proportion of minority workers in 2001
earning a low wage is substantial: 31.2 percent of blacks and 40.4
percent of Latinas in contrast to 20 percent white workers.48
It is no accident that women, Blacks, and Latinos are the lowest paid
labor pools in the United States and even with the advancements made
with the modern Civil Rights movements in the 1950s; 1960s; and
1970s, a disparity still persists for Blacks, Latinos, and women with equal
education to their White male counterparts in the United States.49
Now we understand that dialectical and historical materialism is the
most appropriate framework from which to begin this research as it
offers a context by which we can explore the impacts of the needs of
the political economy on social life. However, we must also acknowl-
edge that the historical location of materialist theories solely in class
inequalities causes the theory to lack some levels of analysis key in
understanding the experiences of populations marginalized by the state
due to racial and gender stratification. Current research has established
that Black women’s labor has historically been essential to the successful

capitalist structure that has assisted in catapulting the United States into
its position as a world superpower.50 It is undeniable that her roles as:
field laborer, reproductive laborer, and biological reproducer have con-
tributed to every possible aspect of the U.S. political economy. What
remains unclear is how this domination has continued to exist to the
present day:
The philosophy of the ruling class . . . passes through a whole tissue
of complex vulgarizations to emerge as “common sense”: that is,
the philosophy of the masses, who accept the morality, the cus-
toms, the institutionalized behavior of the society they live in . . . to
understand how the ruling class has managed to win the consent of
the subordinate classes in this way; and then, to see how the latter
will manage to overthrow the old order and bring about a new
one of universal freedom.51
The point of substance here is that adequate analysis of the commodi-

fication of Black women’s reproduction in the United States must take
into consideration the prevailing economic, social, and political location
of Black women. It is evident therefore that although historical materi-
alist theory offers the foundation of economic analysis, it falls short in
its exploration of race and gender. And though material feminist theory
does address this omission in regard to gender, the commodification of
Black women’s reproduction in the United States is not a mere demo-
graphic issue resolved by the inclusion of gender. Instead it is a complex
interplay of race, class, and gender oppressions mediated upon by a
complex system of hegemonic institutions. The historical womanist
paradigm provides a framework for analyzing these questions.


CH A P T E R T WO
On Historical Materialist Method
Historical Materialist Method
A dialectical and historical materialist framework guides the methodol-

ogy of this study. This historical materialist method is what allows the
researcher to explore the commodification of Black women’s repro-
duction in relation to the shifts in the needs of the political economy.
The strength of this qualitative approach lies in its location of social
phenomena in the material reality of the political economy. As a result,
this allows the researcher to locate the commodification of Black wom-
en’s reproduction in the United States within the realm of capitalist
development and its fundamental link to the development of society.
This study assesses the degree to which the historical commodifica-
tion of Black women’s various forms of labor, specifically biological
labor or reproduction, may be inf luenced by social, political, and eco-
nomic factors (political economy). In exploring the unique position
of Black women’s labor, it is imperative that an analysis is formed that
is not limited by racist or misogynist ideologies and considers Black
women’s historical relations to the economy at the center, rather than
as marginal to the dominating group.
In order to explore the commodification of Black women’s repro-
duction in the United States, this research highlights four key policy
periods under three forces of production: agricultural (1845–1865),
industrial (1929–1954), and global capitalism in the electronic age
(1975–2009). The first policy period occurring during the agricultural
era, highlights the final stages of the U.S. slave period, 1845–1865. The
second period, occurring in the industrial era, examines the policies
from the period of the Great Depression through post–World War II,

1929–1954. The final two policy periods occur under one overarch-
ing economic era, global capitalism in the electronic age. The first
period explored in this era highlights the policies from the post–Civil
Rights period through the period of the weakening of the social con-
tract, 1975–1995. And finally, continuing the examination of the era of
global capitalism in the electronic age, this book explores the policies
from the period of the weakening of the social contract through the
dissolution of the social contract, 1996–2009.
The Relationship of Dialectical and Historical

Materialism to Historical Materialist Method
Both the technological conditions of producing and exchanging goods

(the forces of production) and the system of ownership (the relations
of production) determine the methods used by the people to secure
the means of subsistence (mode of production). The chosen mode
of production determines the superstructure, particularly the State,
which, controlled by the economy, forms and governs social classes.
The formation of these classes inevitably leads to class struggle, as it is
a fundamental element in the process of capitalism. Within world his-
tory, where previously existed, “a complicated arrangement of society
into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank,” we see the
capitalist system replace this gradation with two major classes.1
Modern bourgeois society has sprouted from the ruins of feudal

society. . . . It has but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression. . . . Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses,
however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antago-
nisms: Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two
great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each
other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.2
The class relationship formed by the bourgeoisie, or ruling class, that

owns and controls the productive forces, and the proletariat, or working
class, demands class antagonisms. The working class exchanges their
labor to the ruling class for their own survival. While, ironically, this
same labor simultaneously increases the surplus product, and the capital
investment of the ruling class. Thus reifying the stronghold the rul-
ing class has over the laboring class. Furthermore, class antagonisms
persist as—defined by the capitalist structure—the ruling class strives

Historical Materialist Method 33
to glean as much surplus product from the workers as possible for the
lowest possible cost; while, conversely, the workers attempt to work
for the highest possible wages, under the best working conditions, for
the shortest number of hours. The two classes, clearly in fundamental
opposition, remain in constant struggle. The ruling class remains in
control of the exploited and subordinated, workers—who are alienated
from the productive process as well as from their own production.
Criticisms of Positivist Research
This qualitative method allows the researcher to examine the issue

through a critical lens as opposed to the more commonly utilized posi-
tivist research methods that disallow critical interpretation and connec-
tion to the results. According to Code,
Positivist-empiricist principles are defined around highly rarefied

ideals of objectivity and value-neutrality. Objectivity is conceived
as a perfectly detached, neutral, distanced, and disinterested
approach to a subject matter that exists in a publicly observable
space, separate from knowers/observers and making no personal
claims on them. Value-neutrality elaborates the disinterested aspect
of objectivity: the conviction that knowers must have no vested
interest in the objects of their knowledge; that they have no reason
other than the pursuit of “pure” inquiry to seek knowledge.3
Besides being uncritical, falsely objective, and judgmental in its

supposed “value-neutrality,” positivist research also suffers several
other criticisms, specifically it tends to be historical and limited in its
interpretability. Positivist research arguably narrowly examines statis-
tics and utilizes inf lexible categories and approaches in its analysis of
social phenomena without appropriate location in the social, economic,
and/or political material world. Through utilizing a historical woman-
ist approach for this study, the researcher may assess the inf luence of
the demands of the U.S. political economy on regulatory reproduc-
tive policies that disproportionately affect Black women in the United
States during four policy stages under three economic eras and forces
of production: the agricultural era from 1619 to 1865; the industrial era
from 1896 to 1950; and the electronic era from 1975 to 2009.
Quantitative research maintains a positivistic approach that by its
very nature focuses on an inf lexible measurement of the social world

through statistics. In efforts to quantitatively measure this social world,
variables are assigned numeric value, and findings produced through
statistical manipulation of these values. This mathematical analysis
can be quite effective as it can be reproduced and proved (or dis-
proved) regardless of the researcher. According to Goode and Hatt,
“Quantification simply achieves greater precision and reliability. . . . ”4
However, Goode and Hatt also state that,
Modern research must reject as a false dichotomy the separation

between “qualitative” and “quantitative” studies, or between the
“statistical” and “non-statistical” approach. . . . The fundamental
questions to ask about all research techniques are those dealing
with precision, reliability, and relevance of the data and their anal-
ysis . . . “(1) how precise are their observations? (2) can other scien-
tists repeat the observations? And (3) do the data actually satisfy
the demands of the problem?”5
Accepting this analysis that both positivist and materialist approaches

have merit, this researcher asks Goode and Hatt’s questions of positivist
research: how precise quantitative observations are; if the studies can
be repeated; and if the data fully satisfy the demands of the research
problem(s).6
Quantitative observations may be comparatively “precise,” as they
do not often rely on investigator interpretation; however, precision is a
relative concept. For example, questionnaires tend to prove limiting to
respondents, eliciting results that may best fit the available options, but
may not contain legitimately generalizable data.
The repeatability of results, though historically accepted as a valid
test, depends upon an ahistorical decontextualized approach to the
research problem. As often, sociological research yields results specific
to a complex configuration of variables, including race, class, gender,
location, forces of production, and more, the recreation of the particu-
lar moment on history that yielded the initial results, may not prove
repeatable. Does this invalidate the results? For example, could White
researchers successfully repeat a quantitative experimental study of race
relations, originally performed by a team of Black researchers? The
positivist approach would assert that the race/ethnicity of the investiga-
tors is irrelevant, but is it?
Leading to the final question introduced by Goode and Hatt, can
positivist research fully satisfy the research questions? Though the
above mentioned fictional experiment could answer some questions,

in what ways could the quantitative data respond to the “how” and
“why” of the research questions? Why would the race/ethnicity of the
researcher matter? Why are some elements of the results of the industri-
alized North so fundamentally different from those of the agricultural
South? How do the ways race matters for some differ from others?
Quantitative data cannot answer these questions, it can only tell United
States that race matters do or do not exist, and depending on the for-
mulation of the study, when, where, and in what ways.
Appropriateness of Method
While the historical materialist method is the scientific process by which

we collect the data in regard to the relationships among the variables—
economic, social, political, and technological. As a method, historical
materialism allows this research to examine how Black women’s roles
within the labor force develop in relation to the demands of shifts in
economic and social structures.
Historical materialist methodology is particularly appropriate for the
examination of the commodification of Black women’s reproduction
for several reasons. Dialectical and historical materialism allows the
researcher to historically locate the emergence of social phenomena
in material, political, and economic contexts. Historical materialist
method allows the researcher to fundamentally link the oppression and
exploitation of working class labor—productive, reproductive, and bio-
logical—to the capitalist demands of U.S. political economy. Through
the historical womanist method Black women’s reproductive freedoms
in the United States are explored in relation to the cycle of oppression
and exploitation of their productive labor rooted in the ebb and f low
of U.S. political economy.7 Historical womanist theory offers critical
analysis of social phenomena.
In conclusion, although quantitative research methods may prove
effective and useful in identifying and predicting the relationships
between certain variables in our social world, quantitative research is
limiting in its results and limited in its contribution to the scientific
community and therefore to the examination of social problems.
Data Collection
This study employs a historical case study approach utilizing a histori-

cal womanist theoretical foundation. The historical case study approach

is an in-depth, qualitative, nonexperimental technique that examines
historical events over a historical period in detail, to test a theoretical
idea or hypothesis, rather than documenting trends over a length of
time. According to Goode and Hatt,
The case study . . . is a way of organizing social data so as to pre-
serve the unitary character of the social object being studied. . . . It is an
approach that views any social unit as a whole. Almost always this
means of approach includes the development of that unit, which may
be a person, a family or other social group, a set of relationships or
processes (such as family crises, adjustment to disease, friendship
formation, etc.) or even an entire culture.8
The dialectical and historical materialist paradigm provides a frame-

work for answering questions discussed within the context of this
research and will prove useful in future analyses of social inequali-
ties. In this study the texts for collection and analysis include journal
articles, autobiographical novels, historical texts, books, and statistical
data that address varying elements of the relationship between Black
women’s reproduction and the U.S. political economy. These sources
are appropriate to this study for several reasons. The data sources include
historical and contemporary information relevant to both current and
future analysis. The historical and contemporary relevance of the data
is a key factor in addressing the longitudinal aspects of this research.
Additionally, data are collected for a variety of factors. In performing
this exploratory qualitative analysis, this study completes a historical
case study of the commodification of Black women’s reproduction in
the United States.
This study assesses the degree to which the historical commodifica-
tion of Black women’s various forms of labor, specifically biological
labor or reproduction, may be explained by social, political, and eco-
nomic factors (political economy). In exploring the unique position
of Black women’s labor, it is imperative that we form an analysis that
is not limited by racist or misogynist ideologies and considers Black
women’s historical relations to the economy at the center, rather than
as marginal to the dominating group.
In order to explore the commodification of Black women’s repro-
duction in the United States, this research highlights four key policy
periods under three forces of production: agricultural (1845–1865),
industrial (1929–1954), and global capitalism in the electronic age

(1975–2009). In exploring these policy periods, this research focuses
on several fundamental questions, that is, to what extent is there a
relationship between policies that affect Black women’s reproduction
and the forces of production in each of the key policy periods; to what
extent is social rhetoric employed as a hegemonic tool of the State; and
to what extent does social rhetoric impact social and economic policies
that impact Black women’s reproduction.
As the investigator anticipated, answers to these research questions
offer significant insight into the analysis of the commodification of
Black women’s reproduction in the United States. The following is an
explanation of the values of each variable examined in this study. Both
reproductive policies and social rhetoric are categorized as explained
herein. Once measured, each variable is examined within the context of
three categories of analysis: (a) nature of the U.S. economy, (b) images
of Black reproduction, and (c) types of reproductive policies.
Nature of U.S. Economy
As illustrated in table 2.1, the nature of the economy for each economic
stage is examined through an analysis of the forces of production of the
era. In examining the tools and technologies of each era, the role of
Table 2.1 Method of analysis—Status of economic stages
Economic Stage Mode of production, i.e., agricultural; industrialization;

computerization
How does society look in each period, i.e., economy,
technology, labor, etc.?
Political Economy What is the status of the U.S. economy? i.e., expansion,
contraction, depression, etc.
Forces of Production What are the primary tools and technologies used to produce?
i.e., agricultural, industrial, computerized, etc.
Is technology at a high or low? I.e., hand, machine,
computer, etc.
Instruments of Production Who are the workers? I.e., human, Black, female, etc.
Labor Pool
Means of Production Where does the labor come from? I.e., Black reproduction, etc.
Labor Source
Relations of Production Is labor in demand? Is there a surplus of available labor? Is there a
Labor Demand stratified system of laborers and employers?

labor is assessed as well, identifying: labor needs, labor pools, and the
primary labor sources of the respective eras. In assessing the nature of
the U.S. economy in each era, this study is able to analyze the status
of the relationship of the U.S. political economy to Black labor. This
analysis includes historical descriptive data on the stages of the U.S.
political economy and its relationship to Black labor. This category is
significant to the analysis in that it allows the researcher to explore the
relationship between the needs of the U.S. political economy and Black
women’s reproduction, as it links labor demand to labor source.
Images of Black Reproduction
As outlined in table 2.2, the images of Black women’s reproduction are

analyzed by examining the social rhetoric surrounding Black repro-
duction in a given economic stage. Each period examined in this study
offers a collective vision of typified characteristics of Black motherhood
and reproduction as well as the collective social response to the issue of
Black reproduction at the time.
Social Rhetoric
The predominating images of Black women’s reproduction, sexual-
ity, and motherhood are categorized as animalistic; parasitic; patho-
logical; or malicious, depending on the economic stage and policy
period. Images that dehumanize Black reproduction and sexuality are
Table 2.2 Method of analysis—Social rhetoric
Types of Social Rhetoric Analyzed Characteristics of Propaganda Imagery
Animalistic Blacks are portrayed as animals, likened to monkeys in

the jungles of Africa.
Parasitic Blacks are perceived as freeloaders, funneling needed
resources away from deserving Americans.
Pathological Blacks are painted as fundamentally sick.
Malicious Blacks are no longer perceived as sympathetically
simple or ill, now they are seen as conniving and
purposeful in their efforts to take advantage of
America.

considered animalistic. Images that portray Black reproduction as coun-
terproductive and/or dangerous to the American way are considered
parasitic. Images that paint Black reproduction as symptomatic of Black
dysfunction are considered pathological. Finally, images that depict Black
reproduction as criminal are categorized as malicious.
Social Response
The collective social responses examined are categorized as paternalis-
tic; separatist; reformist; and punitive (see table 2.3). Paternalistic societal
response is categorized by periods of controlled Black reproduction.
Separatist response categorizes periods when Blacks are segregated from
the rest of the U.S. population and reproduction is shaped as dissimilar
to White reproduction. Reformist response categorizes periods of social
reform that attempt to apply technology and policy to Black reproduc-
tion. Finally, punitive societal response categorizes periods when Black
reproduction is linked to punishable crimes.
Regulatory Reproductive Policies
These societal responses directly affect the status of reproductive poli-

cies that disproportionately affect Black women in the United States.
This analysis includes historical descriptive data on the development
of a societal image of Black women’s reproduction. This category is
significant to the research in that it allows this investigator to con-
nect collective social consciousness to the development of reproductive
policy.
Table 2.3 Method of analysis—Social responses
Types of Social Responses Analyzed Characteristics of Social Climate
Paternalistic Whites embrace notion that they are responsible

for Blacks
Separatist Laws are instituted by the state to legally separate
Whites from Black society
Reformist The state attempt to restructure Black society
Punitive The state incarcerates Blacks in response to social
problems, i.e., poverty, drug abuse, etc.

Table 2.4 Method of variable analysis
Variable Analyzed Method of Analysis
Policy Specific policies that disproportionately affect black women’s

reproduction w/in the policy period. Other significant
policies may have occurred at the time, but these are specific
to reproduction.
Status of Economy Nature of the political economy, i.e., status of the economy,
technology, labor, etc.
Social Rhetoric Social rhetoric surrounding black reproduction in given
policy period, i.e., animalistic, parasitic, pathological, or
malicious.
Social Response Collective social response to rhetoric campaigns, i.e.,
paternalistic, separatist, reformist, or punitive.
Type of Policy Types of policies: exploitative, restrictive, controlling, or
coercive.
Characteristics of Policy Specific elements of each policy.
Types of Policies
As outlined in table 2.4, reproductive policies that disproportionately
affect Black women are divided into four (4) key categories: (1) exploit-
ative; (2) restrictive; (3) controlling; and (4) coercive. Exploitative repro-
ductive policies are categorized as laws, statutes, and common practices
(de jure and de facto) that encourage Black reproduction for profit.
Restrictive reproductive policies are laws, initiatives, and common
practices that discourage Black reproduction as a method of overcom-
ing periods of economic depression and/or as a means of population
control. Controlling reproductive policies are defined as policies and
practices that vilify Black reproduction and weaken elements of the
social contract as punishment for errant Black reproduction. Coercive
reproductive policies are categorized as policies and procedures that
encourage Black women to repress their own reproduction on behalf
of the State as a result of coercive incentives, such as money, benefit
opportunities, et cetera. This analysis includes historical data on the
various reproductive policies that have affected Black women’s repro-
duction. This category is significant in that it allows the researcher
to explore the relationship of regulatory reproductive policies in the
United States and Black women.
Following each of these three categories—(a) status of the rela-
tionship of the U.S. political economy and Black labor, (b) status of

reproductive policy that disproportionately affect Black women in the
United States, and (c) accepted social rhetoric regarding Black women’s
reproduction in the United States—is a summary response to the three
related research questions.
Data Analysis
Exploratory research typically uses a qualitative data analysis.9 This

research analyzes information by examining data for patterns and trends.
These characteristics may guide research on the national economy’s
impact on Black women’s reproduction in the United States.
Data in this study are managed through tables and figures con-
structed to organize and code the findings of each of the four reproduc-
tive policy periods between 1845 and 2009. For this study’s analysis,
tables are constructed to organize the findings. The tables depict the data
of reproductive policy analysis: 1845–2009 as follows: Black women’s
reproduction in the agricultural era: 1845–1865; Black women’s repro-
duction in the industrial era: 1929–1954; Black women’s reproduction in
the era of global capitalism in the electronic age: 1975–1995 and 1996–
2009. For this analysis, the major patterns and trends are described.


CH A P T E R T H R E E
The Significance of Social Rhetoric
What Is Social Rhetoric?
In a nation that espouses the tenets of freedom of speech and freedom

of the press, language and words and images matter. For example,
when devastated by the shock and awe of the September 11, 2001
attacks (9/11), everyone told Americans to keep on living, to get out
there and boost the American economy. Americans took their chil-
dren trick or treating that Halloween, and went holiday gift shopping
that Christmas and Hanukkah season, all the while terrified that the
next major assault was coming. However in true American form, even
through the overwhelming fears, Americans continued to consume.
Americans soldiered on, not because we had to have another pair of
shoes, but because they told us that is how we were going to win the
war on terror. We understood that it was our job to set aside our fright
and to keep our economy strong at all costs.
How did we know that? Because that is what we were told in every
conceivable fashion—news reports, talk shows, newspaper stories, pres-
idential addresses, even situation comedies assured us that consump-
tion was the best way to fix the damage done by 9/11.1 Remember
how angry everyone was? Remember how acceptable it was that the
president spoke on television of hunting down evil and killing it?
Remember how welcome the war was in the face of all the fanati-
cally anti-Muslim pro-American rhetoric? Remember the Patriot Act?
Passed just forty five short days after 9/11, it threatened six different
Constitutional amendments with the swipe of a pen, and we barely
batted an eye as a nation.2 Why did it take the sickening images of
prisoners being tortured and made sport of at Abu Gharib before we

3
started to reevaluate? And even then, wasn’t that a well played media
blitz? Showing us women taking pictures with men in dog leashes—
wow—powerful propaganda images!
Understanding both the role and impact of social rhetoric on society
is fundamental to accepting the general assertions of this research. In
Aristotle’s critique of social rhetoric, he writes of the role of persuasion
in its establishment, implying that the ability to convince one’s audience
is the only way to achieve social rhetoric. According to Aristotle, there
are effectively three kinds of persuasion in such an exchange. The success
of the first sort of persuasion is contingent upon the perceived moral
integrity of the speaker. The second form of persuasion relies upon con-
vincing the audience to share in a specific disposition dictated by the
speaker. While the third form of persuasion is dependent upon eviden-
tiary support offered within the exchange.4 Though Aristotle is direct-
ing this philosophical analysis solely at the spoken word, his explanation
of the role of persuasion within the establishment of social rhetoric is
key. Whether addressing a population, a nation, or simply a small crowd,
the speaker must draw its listeners in, in order to achieve the goal of
spinning a narrative that his or her listeners will accept as a truth.
As we apply this classical critique of spoken persuasion to today’s
global context, it seems clear that the three methods of persuasion are
no longer mutually exclusive, nor is persuasion solely achieved through
lectures and speeches. In applying this analysis to this day and age,
when we have a plethora of media resources to turn to, ranging from:
Internet to television to music to talk radio, we have many means of
reaching a desired population as the persuader, as well as myriad means
of accessing information as the persuaded.
Continuing to apply Aristotle’s critical analysis of persuasion to our
discussion of the significance of social rhetoric, we must maintain a keen
understanding that technological advancements have clearly impacted
his original analysis. As such, we must consider Aristotle’s three forms
of persuasion both individually and collectively. Essentially Aristotle
argues that in order to be persuaded, we must trust the speaker; trust
the collective; and/or trust the proof as it is presented. Apply this analy-
sis to the topic of Black women in the United States.
Trusting the Source

Do Americans typically trust the information source? Do we believe
our media, our government? Do we assume that the radio, Internet,
television, and elected officials are speaking the truth? Or rather, do

The Significance of Social Rhetoric 45
we choose instead to believe communities generally dismissed as drug
dealers; single mothers; prisoners; and ne’er-do-wells? The truth of
the matter is that the hegemonic powers of the United States have an
inherent credibility that allows the media to present Black America
to the United States and the rest of the world in whatever fashion it
so chooses, with the general acceptance of the majority of Americans.
Contrary to the revolutionary beginnings of the nation, Americans
tend to accept what we are told. And though unfortunately, the U.S.
government and media are sullied with a laundry list of indiscretions,
to say the least, the credibility of the America media and governance
still remain somehow beyond reproach.
Trusting the Community

Further, though often critical of what we deem “nationalism” and
“fanaticism” in other countries, we prescribe to a fervent patriotism
in the United States that has historically entreated Americans to blend
into one mindset that is considered distinctly American. Those who
have dissented, though celebrated in some communities, suffer the label
of pariah in the larger view. Consider celebrated activists throughout
American history from abolitionists to revolutionary war heroes to
women’s suffragists to antiwar protesters to Civil Rights leaders. Many
of our most famed and significant leaders have risen out of dissent and
have had the most critical impact on our society. Often the impact has
been disruptive to the status quo, leaving many of these dissenters jailed,
assassinated, and/or discredited. Hindsight sometimes offers us a vener-
ated martyr, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.; but more often than not,
we have a Fred Hampton- a gifted young activist prominent in the
Black Panther Party of the Civil Rights period, assassinated by FBI and
Chicago police in 1969.5 We hear little, if anything, about his work; his
legacy; or his death in school or in the media. Americans, even those
who have benefited from the efforts of the dissent of previous gen-
erations; even those who are non-prosperous; and even those who are
nonwhite, tend to believe in America and therefore trust the collective.
Trusting the Proof

Further, Americans tend to trust the evidence. If there are more Black
men in prison than any other population, then Black men must have
a problem with criminality. If Black women are poor and need wel-
fare, then they must need some guidance in choosing when and under

what circumstances to have children. If the police stop a Black driver,
there is an inherent assumption that s/he must have done something
wrong. Americans tend not to insist on a deeper understanding of how
and why these phenomena occur, we simply trust that the prevalence
of Blacks in poverty, incarcerated, and underprivileged is proof that
Blacks do suffer from a certain pathology as a race. We may not pre-
sume to know exactly what is wrong, but America does tend to accept
that something is indeed wrong with Blacks—rather than the racially
stratified system within which Blacks must maneuver. This acceptance
leads us to encourage the legislation of morality, which history has
proven time and again is neither possible nor humane.
Persuasion
Assuming the population has been thoroughly convinced due to

ingrained trust in the source; the collective; and the proof; Americans
now seem to be prime targets of manipulation. Convinced that this
is a nation of free-thinkers, we often fail to perceive ourselves as the
manipulable masses that today’s media has created, often leaving us
even more vulnerable to deception. How much does this matter?
Significance of Social Rhetoric
Patricia Hill Collins’ 1990, Black Feminist Thought explores the impact
of propaganda imagery in the United States. She asserts that various
stereotypes, images, and other propaganda are employed to manipulate
and exploit already marginalized populations.6 Collins asserts that,
These controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism,

and poverty appear to be natural, normal, and an inevitable part
of everyday life. Even when the political and economic condi-
tions that originally generated controlling images disappear, such
images prove remarkably tenacious because they not only keep
Black women oppressed but are key in maintaining interlocking
systems of race, class, and gender oppression.7
Manufacturing typified propaganda images of Black women assists in

creating an unambiguous concept of the other that can legitimately be
maligned and denigrated, as well as feared by White Christian society.8

The image created constructs a population so foreign and so loath-
some that “the moral and social order” of civilized society actually
feel threatened.9 The apprehension, with which a population might
approach liberating a group so horrific that instills such terror, could
almost be understood, if not justified. Purposeful misrepresentation of
the image of the Black woman is not solely acted out due to prejudice.
Rather, controlling the images of Black women is an integral phase
in disempowering her autonomy, strength, and agency as, “domina-
tion always involves attempts to objectify the subordinate group.”10
In accepting these false representations of the Black woman a larger
divide forms between Black and White societies. Thus, creating two
antithetical factions constantly at odds with one another, yet ironically
each defining the role the other plays:
One part is not simply different from its counterparts—they are

fundamentally different entities related only through their defini-
tion as opposites. Feeling cannot be incorporated into thought or
even function in conjunction with it because in either/or dichoto-
mous thinking, feeling retards thought, values obscure facts, and
judgment clouds knowledge.11
Rickie Solinger’s 2000, Wake up little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race
before Roe v. Wade highlights the racialized disparities in the propa-
gandized image of the Black and White unwed mother. While White
pre-marital sex evolves from degenerate behavior into a form of social
activism, that is, the notion of the “Sexual Revolution,” Black sexual-
ity becomes increasingly problematized and is considered a symptom of
the so-called crisis of overpopulation, that is, the “Population Bomb.”12
Though Solinger’s astute analysis perceives the conceptualization of
the sexual revolution as equally, if not differently, problematized by the
patriarchal establishment; I must contend that the invocation of “the
bomb” in postwar America is an insurmountable image that haunts
Black women to this day. These socially accepted disparate narratives
situate White sexuality within the realm of liberation as White women
become encouraged to assert their reproductive rights and sexual free-
doms. While during the same period, Black women’s sexuality and
reproduction becomes the target of increasingly harsh regulation, as
state reproductive policies begin to center on social responsibility and
the so-called duty of the state when it comes to Black reproduction.13
Loretta J. Ross’ 1993 “African-American Women and Abortion:
1880–1970” addresses the intricacies of Black women’s sexuality and

reproduction in the United States between the periods following
Reconstruction and immediately preceding Roe v. Wade. Located
somewhere between Black American Civil Rights and women’s suffrage
movements, Ross asserts that Black women’s struggles for reproductive
freedoms and sexual liberation have been undermined on several levels.
One key reason is because reproductive rights have been co-opted as
a White woman’s issue, not considered an issue for all women or even
a general social concern of male and female members of society. A
second significant reason has been the historic sexism of the Black Civil
Rights Movement that has stigmatized women’s issues as oppositional
to and unsupportive of The Movement. A final important reason Black
women’s struggles for reproductive rights and sexual liberation have
been obscured is the historical reality that women of all races in the
United States are believed to lack agency as well as the ability to make
their own choices.14
The significance of the socially accepted propaganda-enhanced nar-
rative is no better explored than in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s 1999
Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in
French. Offering an analysis of nineteenth century French literature,
Sharpley-Whiting shines a light on a historical and international per-
verse absorption with Black women’s sexuality exemplified by a clear
obsession with Black women’s actual sex organs. This literary analysis
reveals a historical conceptualization of degraded Black female sexuality
that is based primarily in White male fantasy. This point is easily illus-
trated by Sharpley-Whiting as she highlights a key historically observ-
able fact of French literature—the focus on the, “perverse nature” of
sex, sexuality, and sex for sale.15 According to Sharpley-Whiting, these
literary examinations of sex slaves, courtesans, prostitutes, and fallen
women are invariably presented as Black women. This reality illustrates
either how Black women came to represent “infected sex,” or possibly
the very fact that they already symbolized taboo sexuality in the minds
of the populace. Either choice is ironic and appalling given that histori-
cal data illustrate that only a smattering of the thousands of registered
prostitutes in France were even of African descent.16
This exploration of French literature demonstrates the international
development of the portrayal of Black woman as sexual savage. These
literary depictions cast the Black woman as the epitome of taboo sexu-
ality. A sexuality that titillates White men and proves overwhelming
to the Christian consciousness and conscience. Like Sharpley-Whiting,
hooks’ 1981 Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism contends that
at least some portion of Whites’ tireless ongoing endeavors to regulate

Black female sexuality and reproduction through methods of: exploita-
tion; control; repression; and coercion are generated more out of fear of
their own White male sexuality, than of any issue that can legitimately
be attributed to Black women themselves.
In the years following the end of slavery, as the United States moves into
Reconstruction the evolution of these imaginings emerges. Previously
used to justify vicious mistreatment of enslaved Black women, now the
social rhetoric described by Sharpley-Whiting embeds itself into the
fabric of a now free American society. Black women are epitomized as
the antithesis of femininity and respectability. Barbara Christian com-
ments on the racist misogyny displayed in post Civil War America in
her “Introduction” to Dorothy Sterling’s 1988 Black Foremothers. In her
analysis Christian describes a monumental social effort to keep Black
women relegated to the lowest ranks that entails discrediting her honor
and reducing her to a level lower than that of prostitute. Though not
explicitly referred to as “social rhetoric,” by Christian, she does allude to
the furthering of a negative mythology about Black women that impacts
her material conditions. Described by Christian as an arsenal of cruelty
against Black women, the social rhetoric of the period impacts every
aspect of Black women’s lives. Black women are refused common cour-
tesies allowed other women, spoken to in the same fashion as one would
address a child, and go unprotected from rape and sexual abuse, as she is
believed to be so promiscuous that she cannot even be sexually assaulted.
The narrative promulgated by the social rhetoric of the Reconstruction
era is thorough and leaves Black women wholly mistreated.17
Deborah G. White’s 2000, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense
of Themselves: 1894–1994, explores the onslaught of attacks endured
by Black women from the period entering Jim Crow segregation to
the period entering welfare reform. Though negative social rhetoric
weaves ugly narratives that assail all Blacks, Black women experience
a unique brand of stereotyping. Besieged from all sides, she is regarded
as contemptibly unfeminine, not only among Whites, but Blacks as
well. Designed as the antithesis of the American woman by White
propaganda images, she is portrayed as harmful to the Black race and
accepted as such by a variety of Black male intellectuals:
This misogyny had been in the making at least since Frazier’s

critique of black middle-class women and Moynihan’s matriar-
chy thesis. African-American men, from Black Panther Eldridge
Cleaver and sociologist Calvin Hernton, to psychiatrists William
Grier and Price Cobbs, to ideologue Frantz Fanon, accused black

women of harming and holding back the race. Hernton, for
example, explored black female history and concluded that it had
produced in her a “sort of ‘studism,’ which expressed itself in a
“strong matriarchal drive.” The black woman could be expected
to be “too dominating, too demanding, too strict, too inconsider-
ate, and too masculine,” said Hernton. . . . She is “the antithesis of
American beauty,” explained the two psychiatrists.18
The Social Construction of an Identity
As we explore the historical context of Black women’s labor in the U.S.

political economy, we see that the demands placed on Black women’s
labor vary depending on the given requirements in the specified era.
Depending on the requirements of the period, the vision of Black
women’s reproduction is socially constructed through a system of typi-
fication. These socially constructed images project the character traits
and f laws needed to support and reproduce the needs of the capitalist
structure at the time. These typologies are created to supply or restrict
the needed labor as dictated by the demands of the political economy
during a given production era. The typologies directly relate to the
ways in which Black sexuality and reproduction is exploited, restricted,
controlled, and manipulated to support capitalist development and
expansion during each era.19
These socially constructed typologies evolve over the decades from
portrayals of generic members of an animalistic population lacking
self control into an increasingly devious shrew bent on taking every
advantage of a caring and just system that has made every effort to
save her from her self. The images shift from sexual savage in the slave
period, to needy surplus labor during the Depression, to pathological
matriarch in the Civil Rights period, to conniving welfare queen in
the current period.
The image of the sexual savage encompasses the entire slave era and
endures even beyond. The sexual savage is characterized by images of
an uncivilized and amoral animal. She is portrayed as a multifaceted
industrious worker, who, though simple minded, follows direction well.
Of course left to her own devices her instincts for sex and reproduction
will consume her and overwhelm Christian society. Painted as instinc-
tively sexual, and in turn, maternal the enslaved Black woman is in short
a perfect labor source, able to provide: reproductive; productive; and
biological labor in an era that relies almost entirely on Black labor.

The image of Black women as needy surplus labor emerges dur-
ing the lowest economic point in U.S. history, the Great Depression.
Needy surplus laborers are characterized by the image of the shiftless
children and grandchildren of former slaves with no marketable skills,
whose very presence drains the scarce resources available to a desperate
White wage labor force in Depression era United States. Portrayed as
unable to control herself, she is perceived as producing a multitude of
children. This aspect of propaganda is particularly ironic, given the
nation’s refusal to allow women of any race; age; or marital status access
to birth control. With no meaningful means of contraception and the
ongoing transition from rural farm life to urban industrialism, there
is an enormous increase in large poor inner city families across the
nation, without regard for race. Black women’s large families; however,
sometimes unsupported by husbands, who are often lost to lynch mobs
and the Great Migration in an effort to make his way in the world,
are scapegoated as sources of a problem far greater than Black women
could legitimately claim responsibility for.
The image of the Black woman as the pathological matriarch is
prevalent in the post-Civil Rights period. This image can easily be
infamously attributed to the release of the Moynihan Report. This
document presents data collected by a government study with the intent
of exploring the condition of the Black family in the early 1960s.20 This
poorly constructed study determines that Black families are suffering a
sickness that is primarily attributed to the failings of Black women as
wives and mothers. This thesis is commonly referred to as the theory of
the Black matriarchy. Presented as aggressive, emasculating, and manip-
ulative, the Black woman of the post-Civil Rights period is perceived
as unattractive and unappealing in every sense of the term. Her lack of
a socially desirous femininity as a Black woman in a nation that prizes
the aesthetics of White women’s appearance as the epitome of female
attractiveness and her capability to survive independently in a patri-
archal society make her suspect. Further, her purportedly masculine-
level aggressive nature is believed to drive men out of her life. This in
turn, leaves her to parent her children without fathers. The very notion
of fatherless households awakens every misogynistic fear possible in this
period, still fundamentally rooted in a patriarchal structure that only
recognizes women, of any race, within the context of their relation-
ship to their fathers or husbands. A Black family dependent upon the
welfare system is perceived as a dangerous scenario in which Black
women’s children are in danger of growing uncontrollable within the
confines of society. Further, Black women are perceived to be unable as

well as unwilling to offer the guidance, support, and protection that is
not provided when there is no father or husband in the household.
The image of the conniving welfare queen is ubiquitous in the new
millennium. In this neoliberal period, Black women are now not only
presented as conniving welfare queens, but wholly accepted as such,
even within many Black communities. In this period, there is a com-
mon understanding of the Black female experience in the United States
that is heavily warped as it is based on historical social rhetoric and con-
f lated statistics. Perceived as persistently low-income, unskilled, poorly
educated, and drug-addicted, Black women in the current period have
grown to encompass all that is abhorrent in American society. And
now, after so many generations of programs, services, and opportuni-
ties, America has decided that Black women simply need to be forced
off of welfare, coerced into working, and dissuaded from having exces-
sive numbers of children.
This stereotyping, advanced through media, propaganda, and other
forms of social rhetoric, is employed as an apparatus of hegemonic
domination performed by the state and only serves to perpetuate the
interests of the ruling class.21

Further Readings
Alaimo, Stacy (Ed.). Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Austin, Regina. “Sapphire Bound!” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the
Movement, ed. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Garry Peller, and Kendall
Thomas, pp. 426–440. New York: New Press, 1996.
Callanan, Valeri J. Feeding the Fear of Crime: Crime-Related Media and Support for Three Strikes
(Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship). El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly, 2004.
Churchill, Ward and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s
Secret Wars against Dissent in the United States. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981.
Collins, Patricia Hill. “What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond.” In The
Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips, pp. 57–68. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006 [1996].
Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence against Women of Color.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed
the Movement, ed. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Garry Peller, and Kendall
Danner, Mark. Torture and Truth: America, Abu Graib, and the War on Terror. New York: New York
Review of Books, 2004.
Davis, A.Y. 1977. “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” In The
Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. J. James, pp. 161–192. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London, England: Verso, 2007.
Gourevitch, Philip and Errol Morris. Standard Operating Procedure. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Helen (Charles). “The Language of Womanism: Rethinking Difference.” In The Womanist
Reader, ed. Layli Phillips, pp. 361–378. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006.
Mankiller, Wilma, Gwendoline Mink, Marysa Smith, Barbara Smith, and Gloria Steinem.
The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. New York: Houghton Miff lin, 1998.
Mohanty, Chandra. Feminisms without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Morton, Adam D. Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and passive revolution in the global political economy.
Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007.
Nagel, Joane. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Pierson, C. 1998. Beyond the Welfare State? The New Political Economy of Welfare, second edition.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Roberts, Dorothy E. “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality,
and the Right to Privacy.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement,
ed. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Garry Peller, and Kendall Thomas,
pp. 384–425. New York: New Press, 1996.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and the Discourses (Everyman’s Library). London:
David Campbell, 1992.
Rupert, Mark. “Alienation, Capitalism and the Inter-state System: Toward a Marxian Gramscian
Critique.” In Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, ed. Stephen Gill,
pp. 67–92. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Simson, Rennie “The Afro-American Female: The Historical Context of the Construction of
Sexual Identity.” In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. A. Snitow, C. Stansell, and
S. Thompson. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.
Strauss, David Levi, Charles Stein, Barbara Ehrenreich, John Gray, Meron Benvenisti, Mark
Danner, and David Metlin. Abu Graib: The Politics of Torture (The Terr Nova Series). Berkeley,
CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004.
Torres, Sasha. Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Young, Lola. Fear of the Dark: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity
Series). New York: Routledge Press, 1995.

PA RT 2
Slavery Matters!
Year Key Historical Moments during Agricultural Slave Era (1619–1865)
1619 First Africans traded as Slaves in the United States

1622–1898 American-Indian Wars
1662 Follow the Condition of the Mother
1667 Christianity Status does not free slaves
1682 All “non-Christian” servants entering the United States are slaves
1691 Killing slaves is declared within the rights of slave-owners
1705 Illegal for enslaved Blacks to reading
1775–1783 American Revolution
1787 U.S. Constitution
1808 Embargo on Slave Importation
1846–1848 Mexican-American War
1848 Seneca Falls Convention
1857 Dred-Scott Decision reifies inequality embedded within the Constitution
1861–1865 U.S. Civil War
1863 Emancipation Proclamation
1865 Thirteenth Amendment outlawing Slavery


CH A P T E R FOU R
Becoming Instruments of Production
In establishing a New World, the settlers of the original colonies maintain

constant battles with several opponents, leaving them financially frus-
trated. Though initial contact is promising, they will find themselves
embroiled in centuries of struggle over fertile lands the settlers wish
to control. Though many other significant skirmishes certainly occur,
three major conf licts characterize the struggle of the early colonies
that lay the foundation for the superpower status the United States
has maintained into the new millennium. First, the American-Indian
Wars—a series of efforts to defeat the indigenous Indian populations—
would persist for centuries.1 On the heels of the French and Indian
War, fought to protect the interests of the British Empire, the colo-
nists enter into their next major conf lict-the American Revolution.2
Upon excessive taxation and other tyrannical policies imposed by the
English monarchical rulers, the colonists begin fighting for indepen-
dence from overseas sovereignty.3 This hard-fought freedom from the
British Empire is only brief ly enjoyed before the turn of the nineteenth
century sees the onset of the third major conf lict, that with Mexico
over the expansion of the United States.4
Throughout these battles, conf licts, and wars, the settlers-turned-
occupying-conquering-slavers are determined to gain and maintain
control of fertile American soil in order to develop an agricultural
industry in a new land that will solidify both their financial indepen-
dence as well as their political autonomy. America grew in size and
economic strength through European immigration; the importation of
Africans for enslaved labor; the growth of the domestic Black popula-
tion; and the agricultural industry that was born of and cultivated by
the institution of slavery.5

58 Slavery Matters!
Why Enslave Black Africans?
As indicated by dialectical and historical materialist theory, the land-

owners in the New World seek a cost-effective labor force, which is
knowledgeable of agricultural production; capable of hard physical
labor; and psychologically and physically controllable. Before expand-
ing their search for this cheap exploitable labor to Africa in the early
1600s, the colonizers seek to fulfill their labor needs with White wage
workers and servants.6 This proves challenging on several levels, four
of which are described here.
The first challenge that presents itself is a lack of a critical mass of
employable laborers. As the New World is in transition and has only
indigenous populations and European settlers, there is neither a steady
stream, nor a stable population of White wage laborers.7 The second
issue is the lack of familiarity the available labor source has with farm-
ing in the region. Coming from various areas of Europe—particularly
the British Isles—the colonists, often landed aristocrats, have little to
no experience with the tobacco, cotton, rice, and other crops prevalent
in the American territories. Thirdly, and of great significance, wage
employees prove expensive. Given the goal of the enterprising endeav-
ors of the colonizers to exploit the resources of the land to its fullest,
paying wage laborers is the least profitable business plan. And a final
key challenge to tapping in to the White labor source for the colonizers’
agricultural needs in the New World is religious doctrine that privilege
Christian Whites and women and disallow their maltreatment.8 Farm
life in the seventeenth century is harsh and unforgiving and would
prove an indefensible slight against Christian peoples according to
popular doctrine.
As a result of these obstacles to securing a cheap manipulable wage
labor force, the planters brief ly seek to enslave the indigenous popula-
tions of the region—the American Indian. This proves a failure for
several reasons as well, specifically Indian’s susceptibility to European
germs and inability to survive in close proximity to Whites. Also, the
Indian knowledge of the land allows more opportunities to escape
enslavement. Ultimately, neither White wage labor; indentured ser-
vants; nor Indians prove as profitable or as acquiescent as the Black
African population:
For a number of reasons, Native Americans were seldom held as

slaves in the colonies. For one thing, it was too easy for them to
run away. They were also susceptible to European diseases and,
when they lived around whites, their mortality rate was high.

Becoming Instruments of Production 59
Besides, enslaving whole tribes was beyond the capability of most
groups of colonists, so enslaving individual tribe members could
lead to reprisals. And so, for slave labor, that left Africans and
African Americans-black people.9
Black Africans are proven knowledgeable farmers, experienced hard
laborers, with readily identifiable appearances, and due to the sadisti-
cally complex nature of the transatlantic slave trade, would prove to be
fairly docile captives.10
Only after these described efforts to tap into White and Indian labor
sources fail, do the White colonizers turn their search for a mass of
manipulable labor outward and begin to exploit a cheap and profitable
labor source from Africa—and the Black woman. Of course both male
and female Africans are forced into slavery; however:
. . . it was a widespread belief among white plantation owners that

black women were often better workers than their male coun-
terparts. . . . Given their African heritage, it was easy for enslaved
black women to adapt to farm labor in the colonies. Not only was
the displaced African man unaccustomed to various types of farm
labor, he often saw many tasks as “feminine” and resented having
to perform them.11
Further, due to differing labor needs from the Caribbean and both
Latin and South America, unlike other ports in the Americas, the
Colonies imported a fairly even number of African men and women to
be enslaved. This led to a significant number of American-born Blacks
and eventually a premium on the worth of enslaved Black women of
childbearing age. As a result—although the colonies imported the
smallest number of Africans for enslavement in the Americas, they
grew to have the largest population of Blacks in the New World.12 The
breeding of enslaved Blacks, though employed throughout the slave era,
would prove particularly profitable in the half century between the
embargo on slave importation that is finally imposed and enforced in
1808 and 1865—the date of Emancipation.
Slavery and the Capitalist Structure
In analyzing the development of capitalism in the United States, the role

of slavery, though reprehensible, should be clear. Slavery, though pro-
foundly inhumane, proved to be a fundamentally profitable endeavor.

60 Slavery Matters!
Slavery in the agricultural era propels a region of settlers into the role
that the United States maintains nearly four hundred years later. The
Black woman is a vital element in the historical relationship between
the slave mode of production and the developing capitalist economy,
as, together with her male counterparts, she becomes a significant labor
force of the U.S. economy.
In keeping with capitalist ideology, the landed planters, who would
become slave owners, seek the most cost effective labor force they can
access. Though several of the myriad factors that lead to the decision
to enslave Black Africans have already been discussed in this volume,
three key justifications for the exploitation of Black women’s various
forms of labor during slavery are outlined here. These three key jus-
tifications are the Black African woman’s familiarity with farm labor;
the preexistence of a patriarchal structure in Africa; and the lack of
Christianity on the Continent.
As previously mentioned, one major justification employed is the
practical fact of Black African women’s farming and domestic capabili-
ties. Coming from agricultural societies, with a previously established
gendered division of labor, African women are familiar with effective
reproductive and manual labor:
As much of the work to be done in the American colonies is in the

area of hoe-agriculture, it undoubtedly occurred to slavers that
the African female, accustomed to performing arduous work in the
fields while also performing a wide variety of tasks in the domestic
household, would be very useful on the American plantation.13
A second justification is the pre-existence of male patriarchy within the

African communities. The planters see populations of women already
accustomed to both being controlled by men and hard physical labor:
White male observers of African culture in the 18th and 19th

centuries were astounded and impressed by the African male’s
subjugation of the African female. They were not accustomed to
a patriarchal social order that demanded not only that women
accept an inferior status, but that they participate actively in the
community labor force.14
And finally, after identifying the Black African woman as a manual

laborer, acquiescent to male control and skilled in both farm and domes-
tic labor, a third justification employed is the Black African woman’s

lack of Christian “morality,” that would allow the White planter to
take full ownership of her, spirit and body:
Christian mythology depicted woman as the source of sin and

evil; racist-sexist mythology simply designated black women the
epitome of female evil and sinfulness. White men could justify
the de-humanization and sexual exploitation of black women by
arguing that they possessed inherent evil demonic qualities.15
In accepting the Black African woman as a hedonistic heathen, the

White slaver could separate her from her humanity and justify claims
of absolute ownership of her as though she were mere property, rather
than a fully sentient being:
The white slaver could exercise freely absolute power, for he

could brutalize and exploit her without fear of harmful retalia-
tion . . . rape was a common method of torture slavers used to sub-
due recalcitrant black women. The threat of rape or other physical
brutalization inspired terror in the psyches of displaced African
females.16
In every attack, assault, abuse, and rape, the White slavers reify their
false assertions that the Black African women are not human beings,
but slaves. They are imagined as savages without God and humanity,
with insatiable sexual appetites, who need the structure of slavery for
survival as much as the state relies on slavery to survive.
This false consciousness created by the ruling class in support of
ruling class domination over the poorest members of society—in this
case an enslaved people—is typical in a capitalist structure. The state
will protect the interest of the ruling class, as the state has historically
been the organic extension of the ruling class that serves as an appa-
ratus to control the other classes, often through violence. This control
is seldom simply a matter of economic power; instead it encompasses
far reaching controls of culture, norms, and values, and ensures ongo-
ing domination by the ruling elite. This domination is felt no deeper
than by Black women. Instead of taking her place within the capitalist
structure, as a worker—whose labor is exploited and whose humanity
is alienated true enough, but with the ability to survive by choosing
to trade her labor power for survival—Black women’s labor is instead
taken from them. As a result of this exploitation, Black women (and
men) enter this country as the actual instruments of production, rather

62 Slavery Matters!
than as possessors of a commodity—with autonomy over their own
labor, which they are able to sell.17
This is clearly evidenced by the state’s treatment of U.S. slavery as
the mid to late 1600s see a barrage of inhumane legislation further
embroiling Blacks in the institution of slavery. By 1667, though initially
cited as a fundamental justification for enslavement of Black Africans,
conversion to Christianity could have no impact on one’s slave status.
However, by 1682, all servants entering the country who were not
Christian would be considered slaves. If religion has no bearing on
slave status in 1667, then why would it matter fifteen years later in
the case of new arrivals? This contradiction highlights the develop-
ment of a double standard instituted to support the dominating class at
all costs, non-Christian, is an obvious euphemism for Black. Meaning
only Blacks could be forced into slavery. By 1691, it is not considered
a felony to take the life of an enslaved person. And in fact, as long as
you are the owner of said slave, it is not even considered a crime. This
depth of authority administered by the state is inf lexible in regards
to the oppressed classes and can only be dismantled by a fundamental
restructuring of the system.18
Reproduction for Maximum Production
The history of the oppression and exploitation of Black women’s bio-

logical labor, or reproduction, in the United States begins with the
forced breeding of enslaved women in the 1600s.19 Obliged to submit
to livestock-type breeding goals of plantation owners, enslaved women
are coerced through a variety of methods—including: violence, brib-
ery, threats, and more, to reproduce and reproduce often.20
Black women are exploited for various types of labor, including
productive labor, in the form of field labor; reproductive labor, in the
form of domestic work; and biological labor, that is, breeding. Given
the versatility of her contributions to the system, one could argue that
the Black woman herself is the key to the development of the capitalist
economy in the United States. And though all forms of Black women’s
labor are critical to the slave economy, no one proves more essential
than her biological labor. With an eye on profit, the slavers import
comparatively few people directly from Africa for enslavement. Rather,
they primarily exploit the nearby markets in the Caribbean nations who
supply them with seasoned workers and encourage domestic Blacks to
breed, in order to increase their numbers. As such, U.S. slavery quickly

develops into a system that breeds human beings for profit as humans
breed livestock for food.21
If the Black U.S. slave experience is exploitative and alienating, then
the position of the Black female slave is uniquely dehumanizing in that
the success of the very structure that oppresses her immensely relies on
her abilities to sustain it through production and reproduction. The
added ignominy of sexual abuses, regulated reproduction, and forced
reproductive labor further exacerbate Black women’s labor exploitation
during and after slavery.
Enslaved Black Women as Breeders
The ruling class continues to dominate Black labor—both male and

female; however, the means of control have arguably been different
for the two populations. According to bell hooks, “In a retrospective
examination of the black female slave experience, sexism looms as large
as racism as an oppressive force in the lives of black women.”22 The
fundamental domination over Black women that occurs could only
exist within the patriarchal structure that is the very foundation of the
United States:
Institutionalized sexism—that is, patriarchy—formed the base

of the American social structure along with racial imperialism.
Sexism was an integral part of the social and political order white
colonizers brought with them from their European homelands,
and it was to have a grave impact on the fate of enslaved black
women.23
Hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, offers a historical

feminist analysis of the social, cultural, economic, and political location
of Black women in the United States. In so doing, hooks describes the
first sexual and reproductive roles of the Black woman in the United
States, that of the reproducer of the slave laborer. According to hooks,
the latter portion of the slave era sees a significant push toward the
breeding of slaves.24
Hooks asserts that planters are besieged by “virulent attacks on slave
importation” and turn to breeding slaves to encourage profit.25 As
such, beginning with legislation in 1662, children born of slave women
are legally mandated to follow the condition of the mother. This excep-
tional mandate means that all children born to enslaved women would

64 Slavery Matters!
be slaves, no matter the mother or child’s religion, nation, or race.26
Further, according to hooks, since nineteenth century settlers already
“defined the primary function of all women to be that of breeding
workers,” their exploitation of vilified enslaved Black women “was a
widespread and common practice.”27
Hooks further elucidates the breeding process as it often played
out in its various forms, describing a system of offering incentives to
enslaved Black women to encourage reproduction during the slave era:
“Some slave owners devised a system of rewards to induce women to
breed.”28 These incentives were comprised of elements for survival, not
small luxuries.
Enslaved Black women might be provided with extra food for her-
self and her family as compensation for producing a child. Consider that
enslaved peoples survive at a subsistence level, consigned to the most
meager of diets. Trapped in a circumstance that precludes healthy foods
and meats, they are of good fortune if they receive the leftover meat
from parts of animals that Whites would not even consider eating, such
as the lining of the pig’s stomach; its feet; and its intestines. Under the
tortuous conditions of malnourishment and abuse, extra food, in the
form of a small pig, could be the difference between life and death.
Some slave-owners might offer the enslaved Black woman clothing
as payment, enticement, or gift when she produces a healthy child;
while others might even at times offer small sums of money. Some slave
owners even go so far as to promise freedom upon the delivery of any
number of children. Of course, no laws protect the enslaved women
to ensure that the owner follows through with his promises. And fur-
ther, this freedom would not encompass the family of the enslaved Black
woman, and would therefore be a bittersweet victory, if ever there was
such a thing.29
According to hooks, these petty offerings manifested themselves as
both reproductive exploitation and rape, forcing Black female slaves
into the role of reluctant (but powerless) prostitute. Hooks expresses
this final role—of prostitute—as the saddest irony, given that “prosti-
tutes are women and men who engage in sexual behavior for money
or pay of some kind, it is . . . inaccurately used when applied to enslaved
Black women [being used as] sexual latrines.”30
Slave Resistance
Though enslaved Blacks—both male and female—find themselves

at the mercy of a brutal and inhumane system, with opportunities

to communicate effectively, organize, develop a coherent plan, and
execute a full blown revolt few and far between, many revolutionary
acts rise up in defiance of the disgraceful institution of enslavement. As
with so many other exploited, abused, and marginalized populations
throughout world history, enslaved Blacks find ways to resist.
Many enslaved Blacks escape from plantations. Some of those who
escape make countless journeys back and forth between the North
and the South helping others in their escape. Some go on to publish
articles and books that speak against the institution of slavery and even
become activist leaders. Beyond these significant numbers of men and
women, countless Black women who cannot escape the shackles of
slavery, take another route and revolt in a profoundly impactful and
personal way.31
Some enslaved Black women refuse to have children born into slav-
ery. At times, the refusal of these women to breed is obscured by other
pregnancies on the plantation; however, it eventually becomes com-
mon practice for slave owners to keep specific enslaved Black women
for the primary purpose of reproducing more slaves.32 And though this
makes this covert resistance more dangerous, there are a great num-
ber of instances reported over the generations of slavery that illustrate
the myriad ways that slave women refuse to accept this forced role
of breeder:
A planter had kept between four and six slave women “of proper
age to breed” for twenty-five years and that “only two children
had been born on the place at full term.” It was later discovered
that the slaves had concocted a medicine with which they were
able to terminate their unwanted pregnancies. He also found evi-
dence of a master who claimed that an older female slave had dis-
covered a remedy for pregnancies and had been “instrumental in
all . . . the abortions on his place.”33
Enslaved Black women, aware of their shared status, conspire together

to strategize a method to deny the slaver their children’s lives.34
Though homeopathic remedies play a significant role in enslaved Black
women’s resistance to the role of breeder, lack of medical care and
scientific knowledge often leave them with few options in regards to
reproduction. However, an even more devastating and drastic option
that requires little medical know-how, always remains-infanticide:
Possibly the most psychologically devastating means that the slave

mother had of undermining the slave system was infanticide.

66 Slavery Matters!
The frequency with which this occurred is not at all clear. . . .
However, it is important to note that the relatively small number
of documented cases is not as significant as the fact that it occurred
at all.35
Though there is some debate about the frequency of such resistance, as
stated above, the very fact that such action would have ever been taken
is a testament to the vicious and cruel nature of a life of enslavement.
Though it is clearly tragic to remember the women who literally took
their newborn’s lives into their own hands, it is important to note that
this is not only a sacrifice on the part of the mother, to save her child
from the pain of enslavement, it is also an assault on the owners and
the very system that enslaves her and would enslave her child given the
opportunity:
The daily resistance of enslaved women was, as White stated,

‘seldom politically oriented, consciously collective, or violently
revolutionary,’ but it was effective. It often changed their own
lives and those of their children. At the same time, it affected the
slaveholders in a practical, often economically related way. And
out of the spirit of resistance came a stronger and stronger impulse
toward the kind of action that would change the country itself.36
Loretta J. Ross also writes of resisting forced breeding in the slave era
in her 1993 “African-American Women and Abortion: 1880–1970.” In
this piece, Ross cites essays written by nineteenth century physicians,
asserting that forced to breed, Black women came up with effective
methods of inducing homeopathic abortion. These probable methods
varied, from “medicine, violent exercise, or by external and internal
manipulations,” but all succeeded in the destruction of “the foetus at
an early age of gestation.”37
References to the conspiracy among Black slave women to wrench
reproductive control from slave owners is also addressed in Brodie’s
1994 Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America. Though
Brodie admits her analysis is sorely lacking depth as it relates to the
issues of contraception, abortion, reproductive rights and biological
regulations of slave women; she does acknowledge both the complex-
ity of the topic as well as the need for further research on the various
means and motivations of Black slave women’s covert contraception
and abortions.38

Regardless of the debates over the extent to which enslaved Black
women employed abortion and infanticide to resist forced breeding,
it seems clear that the fewest number of cases remain testament to the
inhumanity of the system and the indomitable and courageous spirit
exhibited by enslaved Black women. The enslaved Black woman activ-
ist simply refuses to perpetuate this system, at whatever costs. Even
from her depressed location, the enslaved Black woman can see that
this system is dependent on her in order to continue successfully. She
sees her power from the most impotent of locations, and when all other
options are exhausted, she takes the only meaningful action possible.
She internalizes the pain of her choice to resist and carries on with the
life of a slave.
She will likely be violently punished for this resistance. Undoubtedly,
given her circumstances, short of death, or an unforeseen biological
determinant, she will likely be impregnated again. With no regard for
her will, her safety, or the psychological impact of having lost a child,
she will be forced to go on. Her resistance however, cannot ever be
considered futile, because the child she lost will never become a slave.
She has saved her child from a fate worse than death and cost the slaver
the only thing that matters to him—profit. The loss of that child will
cost the slave owner, if only a few dollars or a few months, the loss will
be felt. Thus her resistance is effective and though the slave system may
not have been overthrown, it has been disrupted.


CH A P T E R F I V E
Is This the White Man’s Burden—Or Ours?
Barring the resistance described in the previous chapter, gaining the

absolute physical and psychological power over Black Africans nec-
essary to maintain such an inhumane system, the slave trade proves
incredibly lucrative and catapults the United States into a strong posi-
tion of agricultural production for the world economy. Slave ownership
is the most profitable investment in the nation next to land ownership
in 1860, with 60 percent of the nation’s wealth invested in the agri-
cultural south (see table 5.1). In the period between 1845 and 1865 the
United States is in a state of expansion. And though farming receives a
significant boost from developing technologies—particularly the cot-
ton gin—the fundamental force of production of the agricultural era
remains human labor.
With cheap abundant labor in high demand and the slave economy
profoundly dependent upon Black slave labor for profit, every effort
is made to justify the institution of slavery and rationalize rampant
(Black) slave reproduction. These rationales come in the form of state-
sponsored legal sanctions, mentioned in the previous chapter, as well as
collectively embraced images of Black women’s sexuality and reproduc-
tion.1 Painting Blacks as ignorant animalistic heathens, White America
comes to accept the notion that Blacks are somehow less than human.
The slave era sees the establishment of an ever-present theme of nega-
tive propaganda surrounding Blacks in the United States and Africa.
Not only meant to widen the gulf that separates Blacks and Whites,
this ongoing propaganda campaign is further justifies the enslavement
of Blacks, as it is rooted in the belief that Whites bear a responsibility to
tame and supervise savage peoples for the sake of the greater society, the
so-called White man’s burden.2

70 Slavery Matters!
Table 5.1 Status of political economy in agricultural era
Mode of Production Slavery
Political Economy • Increasingly expanding throughout agricultural era

1619–1865 • 60% of nation’s wealth invested in agricultural
South by 1860
Forces of Production • Technology at a low in seventeenth century
• Cotton Gin increases production exponentially in
eighteenth century
• Hand Labor remains primary technology for
harvesting crop through 1865
Instruments of Production Primarily Human Labor
Labor Pool • White indentured servants through eighteenth
century
• White wage laborers minimally used throughout
• Native American wage labor minimally used
throughout
• Native American slave labor primarily practiced in
late seventeenth through early eighteenth century,
but remains in various forms through late nineteenth
century
• Black Slaves from 1619 to 1865
Means of Production Labor Source After 1808, Black reproduction becomes the sole
source of replenishing labor pool
Relations of Production Labor Cheap abundant labor is in high demand
Demand Indentured servant vs. Employer
Wage laborer vs. Capitalist
Slave vs. Master
During the agricultural era the notion of the “White man’s burden”
is introduced at the core of a multilayered series of responsibilities that
fall upon the White race. This “burden” is described as the bringing
of Christianity to a supposedly heathen people. Ignorant of Christian
doctrine, Africans are painted as childlike, unknowledgeable, and
hedonistic. With the acceptance of this image, one might almost con-
sider slavery a sort of twisted kindness toward a “savage” group in need
of parental structure and guidance.3
Image of Sexual Savage
Though social rhetoric is circulated about the Black race in general,

there is much negative propaganda specific to female slave sexuality
and reproduction. Presented as lewd; sexually deviant; and animalistic,

Is This the White Man’s Burden—Or Ours? 71
Table 5.2 Themes of social rhetoric in the agricultural era
Theme of Social Rhetoric 1845–1865 Representation of Sexual Savage
Heathen Portrayed as being Godless

Savage Depicted as uncivilized
Puerile Described as childlike
Hedonistic Represented as having a lascivious nature
White Man’s Burden Responsibility of Whites to manage and control Blacks
Animalistic Imagined as being instinctively maternal
Black reproduction is perceived as an animal instinct of an inhuman

population (see table 5.2). Depicted as lacking the moral compass that
leads civilized peoples to modesty, temperance, and humility, Black
African women are often illustrated as naked savages wallowing in
an overt and foul sexuality that threatens to corrupt their supposedly
moral Christian captors.
Propaganda images illustrating the hypersexual “savage slave” myth
includes artwork; political cartoons; even dramatic characters in books
and stage plays. Paintings of the slave period can be found often depicting
naked bodies of Black Africans arriving on American shores, seemingly
writhing in the still images, as though unable to control their insatiable
desires. Subliminal hints abound implying that Black men and women
are not only animals, but even demonic. Rarely did the media rep-
resentations of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries
include images of mortified confused strangers in a strange land. Often
sick and abused in countless ways, women arriving without clothing,
never did so by their own choosing. Having been raped, humiliated,
and tortured, these women are now forced to stand on an auction block
where she will be sold. Yet, she is perceived as the animal?
As a result of this persistent social rhetoric, Black women, purport-
edly lacking the morality of White women, suffer intolerable indignities
at the hands of their White Christian oppressors. As owned property,
sexual abuse is perceived as a right of the moral slave owner, rather than
an illegal and immoral crime:
Generally, when sexual liaisons did occur between the female

slave and the slave owner, the compelling image of the bad-black-
girl, or Jezebel, was used to explain this relationship. That is, slave
owners who privately coerced their female slaves, or surrepti-
tiously offered them harsh alternatives if they were unwilling to

72 Slavery Matters!
submit to their owner’s sexual whims, attributed these liaisons to
the hypersexuality of the female slave who was purported to be
the aggressor or seducer. Therefore, the bad-black-girl image as
a symbol of African American women has been used to depict
the African American woman as an eager, available and willing
sexual partner for her slave owner and for other males, with rela-
tive degrees of power and wealth, in American society.4
Further, enslaved Black men are at a loss to protect the Black women
of their communities, as they suffer some similar elements of sexual
exploitation, as they themselves are commodified as instruments of
production—for both manual and biological labor.
Womanhood in Society
Also, impactful rhetoric on Black women in U.S. society is the fabled

notion of the Cult of True Womanhood. Common social rhetoric from
the mid to late 1800s, the Cult idea reasserts the power of the patriar-
chal structure over White women as they are called upon to eschew
employment outside the home and take their place as wives and mothers,
reproducing the labor pool and caring for the male laborers. According
to Giddings,
For White men, the cult [of true womanhood] was convenient.
In an increasingly industrialized economy, more of them were
forced to leave the farms for occupations that middle-class women
had enjoyed. During the early rise of the factory system, the main
source of labor was proud-if needy-Puritan girls who saw their
work as a stopgap until they married. Although the work was
strenuous and the wages low, such employment still carried a cer-
tain status.5
With these radical economic changes, these women find themselves

forced back into the home. As housewives and mothers, no longer wage
earners, any sense of autonomy previously enjoyed by White middle
class women is lost:
With the coming of the cult idea, however, work outside the
home lost its prestige, and women . . . were no longer expected to

be in the labor force but to stay home and reproduce the labor force.
So when the cult of the lady took hold, they were replaced by
poorer immigrant women, a cheaper, more permanent, and more
exploitable source of workers.6
The cult of true womanhood presents itself as a reification of the vision
of the American woman as White and middle class, and cements the
Black woman’s role as an interloper:
For women, the vehicle for these aspirations was what became
known as the “cult of the lady” or the “cult of true womanhood.”
Now a woman had to be true to the cult’s cardinal tenets of
domesticity, submissiveness, piety, and purity in order to be good
enough for society’s inner circles. Failing to adhere to any of these
tenets-which the overwhelming number of Black women could
hardly live up to-made one less than a moral “true” woman.7
Being a woman takes on new meaning in the age of true womanhood.

Enveloped in class and status, this position falls far out of reach for both
slave and free Black women. Now faced with insurmountable rhetoric
that firmly situates Black women in the role of incomprehensible other,
Black women have no means of overcoming the social conception that
she is less than a “lady.” According to Giddings,
Free Black women in the North also had to struggle with the con-
sequences of being perceived as a “different kind of humanity.”
Abolition hadn’t erased the taint of their alleged immorality, and
converging social and economic forces in the 1830’s added a new
challenge. With the emergence of a self-conscious middle class,
Black women had to overcome notions about the relationship of
class—as well as color—to morality.8
And though the notion that women should behave as ladies and be
treated as such is, today, clearly acknowledged as misogynistic tyranny
and an overt exertion of patriarchal domination; working; living; and
surviving in the nineteenth century, is far more dangerous and less
manageable for any women perceived as anything less than a lady. This
common rhetoric ensures that Black women are even further wounded
by society’s refusal to accept her as a woman, rather than as a manual
and reproductive workhorse for physical and sexual exploitation.

74 Slavery Matters!
Paternalistic Response
The social response to these omnipresent campaigns is paternalistic (see

table 5.3). Americans embrace the notion that enslaved Blacks need to
be tamed and supervised and that Blacks require patriarchal Whites
to take care of both enslaved Black mothers and offspring, through the
organized system of slave ownership, for the very survival of Blacks.
Throughout the period the State imposes more and more stringent
legislation that controls every breath of the enslaved Black human
being. And though the response to the social rhetoric that implies that
Blacks need White supremacy and control for their own well-being is
paternalistic, the manner in which this paternalism is conveyed upon
enslaved Blacks varies from one White slave owner to the next.
Some feel it is their duty to spread the word of God to the heathen
non-Christian population. As the religious doctrine is spread, many
enslaved Blacks convert to Christianity. So many in fact that the State
feels threatened and implements a number of policies to circumvent
the acceptance of Blacks as Christian peoples. Claiming that Blacks are
too ignorant to comprehend the word of God, many assert that Blacks
could only mimic their White owners’ devotion to Christianity and
could not actually feel it themselves.
Conversely, it is argued that Blacks could be misrepresenting them-
selves as true believers. Instead they could potentially be cunning
enough to feign conversion in order to take advantage of the kindness
of Whites who offer them the word of God, as part of a larger scheme
to escape slavery. If this is the case, then all Blacks attempting to con-
vert should be considered suspect, and perhaps even denied acceptance
into the Christian faith.
This tactic is of course dangerous as it implies that Blacks are think-
ing intelligent human beings, rather than the ignorant animals they are
portrayed as. Regardless of the logic behind the sentiment, policies are
set in place by the latter part of the seventeenth century to dismiss these
Table 5.3 Snapshot of social response to rhetoric campaigns in the agricultural era
Social Climate 1845–1865 Characteristics of Social Climate
Paternalistic Social Response Society believes all Blacks, both free and slave, need to
be tamed and supervised (White Man’s Burden)
Society believes enslaved Blacks require patriarchal
White owners of both mother & offspring to survive

converted peoples and keep them relegated to slave status. Further, by
1705, though it had historically been taboo, it becomes illegal to teach
an enslaved Black person to read. This particular policy challenges
efforts to bring Christianity to Blacks, as it becomes illegal for Blacks
to read the Bible.
The paternalistic response of the era extends much further than the
few supposedly sympathetic Whites who choose to confer Christianity
onto their slaves. This paternalism embeds itself in the very culture of
the day. Whites perceive themselves to be located in several key loca-
tions essential to Black survival, including that of: parent; protector;
and owner. Emboldened by the perception that they are righteous in
their endeavors, Whites in the slave period, develop a false conscious-
ness that supports the evil enterprise in every way.
As mythical parent, the general sentiment of the era is akin to the
adage: spare the rod and spoil the child. As such, it grows customary to
abuse enslaved Blacks—for their own good. The conceptualization that
enslaved Blacks are mindless children and Godless heathens instills
within Whites a sense of moral superiority that facilitates the wide-
spread justification of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse of
enslaved Blacks. This allows Whites to beat and torture enslaved Blacks
without reservation.
As professed protectors of their Black slaves, Whites perceive them-
selves as deserving of enslaved Blacks’ respect, loyalty, and hard work.
The White slavers actually see themselves as saving the Blacks from
either the White images of the jungle in Africa or from harsher slavers
who would treat them more cruelly, or even from themselves. Fully
embracing the false notion that Black people are lesser beings, there is a
genuine belief among Whites (around the world) that left to their own
devices; lazy, shiftless, and ignorant Blacks would suffer far worse than
they ever could in the grips of slavery.
Finally, Whites believe themselves to be the owners of enslaved
Blacks. Contrary to all religious doctrine, Whites hold tight to the
notion that they control Blacks mind, body, and spirit. This is perhaps
the most dangerous element of the paternalistic view that arises in the
slave era. Whites place themselves in the role of gods, determining every
aspect of Black reality. This misguided belief leads Whites to unthink-
able levels of abuse. Rape becomes a common and expected practice
within slave life. So common in fact that policy has to be implemented
to address the visibly White children being born to enslaved Black
women.9 Whites even begin choosing when Blacks live and die, even
when they reproduce.


CH A P T E R SI X
Age Old Pimpin’: Exploitative

Reproductive Policies
As highlighted in table 6.1, due to economic expansion, low technology,

and high demand for cheap manipulable labor, Black reproduction
is encouraged for the sake of profit in the agricultural south. This
encouragement comes in the form of several policies and protocols
that directly affect Black reproduction in the slave era. As illustrated in
table 6.1, the reproductive policies of the agricultural era are exploit-
ative as offspring of enslaved Black women are legally owned by White
slavers and enslaved Black women are forced to breed through coercive
and forced policies such as cash incentives for reproducing and threats
of violent retribution for refusal of reproduction for profit.1
Establishing the Value of the Female Slave
As a struggling new agricultural society, the colonies tap into the labor
capabilities of Black African women early on. Already accustomed to
patriarchal farming communities in Africa, enslaved Black women in
the United States are assigned to: cooking; cleaning; child rearing;
fieldwork; and more. In fact, enslaved Black women of childbearing
age are such multifaceted workers—useful for biological, reproductive,
and manual labor—that they are actually worth more money on the
slave market.
Receipts for enslaved people often include the cash amount of the
sale alongside a space to notate miscellaneous information about the
purchased person. These notations might describe any number of issues

78 Slavery Matters!
Table 6.1 Examples of relevant policies in the agricultural era
Influential Policies of the Slave Era Characteristics of Influential Policies of the Slave Era
Forced Breeding • Forced impregnation of enslaved Blacks through rape and

“mating.”
Coerced Breeding • Cash and extra food and privilege incentives to reproduce
Black slave labor force.
Slave Codes Codes were instituted throughout the slave era and varied
from state to state but were often similar
• Slaves are not allowed to be armed—1650
• Black babies “follow the condition of the mother”—1662
• Baptism does not change slave status—1667
• Non-Christian servants entering the country are
considered slaves—1705
• Illegal for slaves to read—1705
• Killing a slave is legal—1705
Value of Black Reproduction • Enslaved Black women of childbearing age purchased and
sold for more money than non-childbearing enslaved
women.
deemed important and relevant to the sale, such as: the slave’s fertility;
demeanor; and/or general constitution. Women of childbearing age are
often described as fertile or the number of children she has given birth
to is listed with a promise or guarantee that she is able to produce more
children. While infertile women, though of a lesser cash value, are just
as aggressively marketed as domestic laborers. Referred to as Auntie or
Mammy, they are often sold with the guarantee that, though infertile,
she will contribute to the reproduction of slave labor in other ways. As
a reproductive laborer, she will perform any number of tasks, includ-
ing: cooking; cleaning; sewing; tending to community children, both
enslaved and the “master’s” children; often alongside the promise that
she can perform significant field labor as well.
Managing Black Populations
Accepting the cruelty of the institution of slavery does not come easily
to all of the new Americans:
Defining slavery was not an easy task in a democracy, or rather, a

group of democracies. And it is not easy for patriotic Americans to
accept the fact that it was going on at the very time that colonists
were chafing under the oppression of British rule and talking in

Age Old Pimpin’ 79
lofty terms about freedom and the rights of man. Essentially, slav-
ery, as a legal category, defined certain people as part people and
part property. In the half-century or so following 1641, hundreds
of laws would be passed clarifying the position of these “part-
people” socially and economically. But the most significant laws
were those that defined exactly who could be classified as a slave
and who could not legally be slaves.2
Slave Codes
As the culture of farming, trade, and slavery takes shape in the colonies,
so does the legal structure; and countless laws regarding slavery and
Black women’s reproduction pass throughout individual states across
the nation in response to every aspect of the slave system. The slavers
institute various and sundry policies related to production, sales, and
myriad other aspects of the slaving business, often as the issues pres-
ent themselves. The effort to control the enslaved population through
legislation culminates in the development of slave codes.
These codes are comprised of a host of restrictive policies and laws
that maintain the system of power between White slavers and enslaved
Blacks. Codes cover a broad range of issues, such as: establishing the
fine for stealing or killing someone else’s slave; the punishment for
harboring fugitive slaves; and the consequences for running away from
slavery. Some codes, like the 1705 statute, prevent Black children from
learning to read; while others declare that White women who dare
to marry a slave will themselves become slave to her husband’s master;
while still others proclaim that Blacks are not allowed to be armed as
free men are; while others preclude Blacks from accessing the legal
system or of accusing a White slave owner of a crime; or even resisting
any orders given them.3 “These ‘slave codes’ were based on force and
violence—in short, white terrorism,” acted out domestically, White
against Black.4 The list of codes goes on and on, each one varying
slightly from one state to the next. The peculiar institution of slavery is
fraught with minutiae detailing how the system is organized.
Efforts to dominate the Black Africans begin at the moment of cap-
ture. Rape, humiliation, and other forms of torturous brutality are the
weapons of choice. Oftentimes, African women, having survived the
horrors of the Middle Passage, arrive at the slave auction already preg-
nant, having been raped and tortured throughout the rigorous voyage
across the ocean. Sexual abuse is so prevalent that even often silent
White women would be moved to comment on its role in the structure

80 Slavery Matters!
of the slave system—no matter how unforgiving the characterization
of the victims:
The sexual exploitation of enslaved women by white men was

so common that South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chestnut would
write in the middle 1800s, “Like the patriarchs of old, our men
live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and
the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white
children.”5
African women who survived the Middle Passage unimpregnated are

forced to create a new home amongst the slave quarters in a strange new
land. Though a wholly unnatural environment, families begin to form.6
In the early years of slavery these families are often interracial, as Black
Africans work and live in close proximity to White indentured servants
and Native Americans, two other systematically exploited labor popula-
tions of the period. Faced with the implications of having fostered a new
indigenous American population, southern planters are compelled to
address the legal status of these new biracial “Americans:”
Children were born who were black and white. Or black and
Native American. This was a completely natural result of the liv-
ing condition at the time, as enslaved Africans and indentured
white servants often worked side by side. They relaxed together,
rebelled against their situation together, became friends, and cre-
ated families.7
Having established early on that Whites are barred from enslavement,

the slave owners now need to mandate the legal status of the offspring
of the enslaved, who are no longer exclusively Black:
This mixed population was problematic to the lawmakers. Could

they be enslaved? Did their white blood protect them or did their
black blood condemn them . . . ? In the early 1600s-beginning
with the 1662 Virginia law-the American colonies without excep-
tion passed laws stating that “all children born in this country
shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the
mother.”8
With the passing of these laws, arguably for one of the first times in
world history, a mother’s status, not the father’s, would determine the

Age Old Pimpin’ 81
child’s future. From 1662 through 1865, individual state policies dictate
that any child born to an enslaved woman would him/her self become
a slave owned by the same “master” that owns the mother of the child.
In a system that incorporates rape and ongoing sexual abuse into its
very foundation, this policy protects the White slave owners from hav-
ing to free their own offspring. Instead, a child born to an enslaved
Black woman, even if the father is White, would always be considered
Black and always be born a slave. Black women are at the absolute
mercy of a sadistic slave system that protects the White slave owners’
capital interests above the humanity of the enslaved Blacks:
[Children] born to slave women would be slaves and, of course,

the property of the woman’s owner. . . . [The law] altered the status
of black women in the most profound way, by redefining their
position as women. From then on, black motherhood is, at least
for slaves, a legal curse. . . . Henceforth, black women would be
valued not only for their work, but for their ability to produce
more workers.9
In the thirty years, from 1700 to 1730, the number of Africans and
African Americans living in the colonies rises from 26,000 to 70,000.10
Between 1740 and 1780 a reported 210,000 more Africans are imported
into the colonies. Forced Black labor is an extremely profitable endeavor
that helps accelerate an agricultural boom in the United States that
predicates the United States’ position as a major superpower in later
eras. With the rising number of Blacks in America, the status of chil-
dren born to slave women is no longer the only issue involving slavery
the White slave owners need to be explicitly defined.
Other Impactful Policies
Having been assailed with policy that dissolves their right to parent
their own children, and being forced to reproduce the very system that
enslaves them, by providing the labor pool for the next generation;
motherhood becomes—on some levels—a “curse” for enslaved Black
women.11 Black women’s reproduction is systematically forced and
harshly regulated by U.S. policy. Under threat of torturous, yet legal,
repercussions, such as, being sold away from her family; being beaten
with a whip; and/or being subjected to violent, painful, and degrading
sexual abuse; enslaved Black girls are expected to begin reproducing as

82 Slavery Matters!
early as age twelve. Legally sanctioned sexual exploitation of children
for profit is an unthinkable concept in the United States in the new
millennium, yet a customary expectation of slave production in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Evidenced by the 1860 U.S. Census, the final period of slavery, 1845
to 1865, sees the southern owning class fiercely clinging to their estab-
lished slavocracy. According to the 1860 Census, there is a consistent
increase in the number of slaves between 1840 and 1860, averaging
25 percent per year. This steady increase seems inconsistent with the
policy of the day, given that slave importation ends in 1808 due to a
federally enforced embargo. Evidently this federal restriction on slave
importation, though ending the nearly two hundred years period of
abduction and trade of Africans for involuntary enslavement; simul-
taneously exacerbates the reproductive exploitation of Black slaves in
the United States. This has a particularly profound impact on enslaved
Black women.
In order to maintain the trend of increasing slave numbers in the
generations following the embargo, enslaved Black women, already
condemned by the invasive and cruel laws that obligate their children to
slavery, are now forced to acquiesce to unofficial policies that promote
black slave reproduction. Enslaved Black women are raped, mated like
animals, and/or coerced with violence and through incentives, such as
small amounts of cash, extra food, and other basic necessities in order
to increase the labor pool, thereby increasing agricultural production,
and in turn maximizing profit.12
Other Significant Edicts
None of the previously discussed policies, laws, and edicts proves

more damaging to Blacks than the very document that liberates the
colonists—the Constitution. The Constitution itself is the culmination
of one hundred fifty years of constructing a system of chattel slavery in
the New World.13 This damaging document is clever and illusive in its
institutionalization of racism in the United States:
Not even the term ‘slavery’ was allowed to mar the sublime con-
cepts articulated in the Constitution, which euphemistically refers
to ‘persons held to service of labor’ as those exceptional human
beings who did not merit the rights and guarantees otherwise
extended to all.14

Table 6.2 Reproductive policy analysis: 1845–1865
Slave period Exploitative Nature of Economy Social Response Type of Policy Characteristics of Exploitative Reproductive
Reproductive Policies 1845–1865 1845–1865 Policies of the Slave Period
Forced Breeding • Expansion Paternalistic Exploitative protocol • Black women are raped by White owners to
• Low technology • Channel savage to maximize profit- increase reproduction
Forcing Enslaved Black
• Hi labor demand behavior applied throughout • Black women are mated w/male slaves like
Women to Produce
• Black reproduction slave era, particularly animals to increase reproduction
Children
is primary labor salient 1808–1865 • Black women are forced to submit to Black male
source slaves by White owners to increase reproduction
• Black women are violently punished for not
reproducing
Buying Black Babies • Expansion Paternalistic Exploitative protocol • Black women are forced to trade their
• Low technology • Channel savage to maximize profit- reproduction for minimal incentives, otherwise
Cash, Food, & Clothing
• Hi labor demand behavior applied throughout typically denied them
Incentives for Reproduction
• Black reproduction slave era, particularly
is primary labor salient 1808–1865
source
Owning Black Babies • Expansion Paternalistic Exploitative law to • Slave offspring “follow the condition of the
• Low technology • Tame wild maximize profit- mother”
Co-Opted Ownership of
• Hi labor demand animalistic custom throughout • Whites legislate absolute autonomy over Black
Black Babies
• Black reproduction Blacks slave era, government women’s offspring
is primary labor sanctioned 1662–1865 • Slave owners often “own” their own biological
source biracial offspring after rape of Black slave women
Establishing Cash Value • Expansion Paternalistic Exploitative protocol • Black woman is only worth as much as she can
• Low technology • Glean some to maximize profit- produce
Reproductive Capabilities
• Hi labor demand value from custom throughout
Determine Black Woman’s
• Black reproduction savages slave era, particularly
Value
is primary labor salient 1808–1865
source

84 Slavery Matters!
In its conspicuous silence on the explicit topic of slavery, the Constitution
implicitly consents to the “peculiar institution.”
Two other profoundly damaging blows dealt to Blacks by the
Constitution are the “three-fifths rule” and “states’ rights.”15 The
three-fifths rule determines that one Black person only constitutes
three-fifths of a human being. As such, Blacks, both free and enslaved,
hold no political strength. In fact, the enslavement and customarily
cruel mistreatment of Blacks carries with it no moral or legal retribu-
tion. While states’ rights give each individual state the power to deter-
mine local laws that govern voting qualifications, slavery issues, and
Civil Rights. The Constitution thoroughly eliminates any possibility
of federal support or protection for Blacks in the current and future
eras. This maltreatment would remain a constant in the United States
for nearly the next two hundred years. Even continuing to dog Blacks
after the Emancipation Proclamation; Blacks would not achieve any
meaningful inclusion or protection from the U.S. government until the
passing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964. These policies
finally offer federal intervention into legalized state discrimination and
the systematic disenfranchisement of Blacks through cruelty, intimida-
tion, and social, political, and economic exclusion.16
Summary
In sum, as illustrated in table 6.2, historical data show that the needs
of the national economy during the policy period between 1845 and
1865 are clearly linked to the passage of exploitative policies as they
relate to enslaved Black women in the United States. In this period the
U.S. economy is in a state of expansion with low technology and high
labor demand. Black reproduction is depended upon as the primary
source of labor. In order to justify the commodification of this labor
source, various forms of media present Black women as savages needing
their sexual energies channeled. A pseudo-paternalistic social response
develops justifying the enslavement of Black women. As a result of this
paternalistic social climate and the reliance of the White owners on
the institution of slavery as a system of controlling a cheap manipulable
labor force, exploitative types of policies and protocols are developed
that dehumanize the Black mother and maximize the profits of the
White owners.

Further Readings
Botti, Timothy J. Envy of the World: A History of the US Economy and Big Business. New York:
Algora, 2006.
Gillham, Nicholas W. “Sir Francis Galton and the Birth of Eugenics.” In Annual Review of
Genetics 35: pp. 83–101, 2001.
Gordon Linda. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, revised
and updated edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Green, Ronald Walter, Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population
Crisis (Polemics). Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.
Himes, Norman Edwin. “Note on the Early History of Contraception in America.” In New
England Journal of Medicine 205: pp. 438–440, 1931.
Jones, Jacqueline. A Social History of the Laboring Classes: From Colonial Times to the Present
(Problems in American History). Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.
Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
Katz E. “The History of Birth Control in the United States.” In Trends in History 4: pp. 81–101,
1988.
Ledbetter Rosanna, A History of the Malthusian League, 1877–1927. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1976.
Leung M. “Making the Radical Respectable. Little Rock Clubwomen and the Cause of Birth
Control during the 1930s.” In Arkansas Historical Quarterly 57: pp. 17–33, 1988.
MacFarlane, D.R. and K.J. Meier. The Politics of Fertility Control. Family Planning and Abortion
Policies in the American States. New York, 2001.
Perrin, L.M. “Resisting Reproduction. Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old South.”
In Journal of American Studies 35: pp. 255–75, 2001.
Reis, Elizabeth (Ed.). American Sexual Histories. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
Smith, Merril. Sex and Sexuality in Early America. New York: New York University
Press. 1998.
Solinger, Rickie. “Racializing the Nation: From the Declaration of Independence to the
Emancipation Proclamation, 1776–1865.” In The Reproductive Rights Reader: Law, Medicine,
and the Construction of Motherhood, ed. Nancy Ehrenreich, pp. 261–274, New York: New York
Tucker S. 1988. “The Black Domestic in the South: Her Legacy as Mother and Mother
Surrogate.” In Southern Women, ed. C.M. Dillman, pp. 93–102. New York: Hemisphere.
Williams, P. Autumn 1988. “On Being the Object of Property.” In Signs 14: pp. 5–24.


PA RT 3
Emancipated . . . Not Liberated
Year Key Historical Moments during Industrial Era (1866–1950)
1866–1877 Reconstruction
1870 Fifteenth Amendment-No race restrictions on Suffrage
1877 Tilden-Hayes Compromise
1907 Fist Court-Mandated Sterilization
1910–1940 The Great Migration
1914–1918 World War I
1920 Nineteenth Amendment—Woman’s Suffrage
1921 American Birth Control League
1927 Buck v. Bell
1929 Stock Market Crash
1929–1939 The Great Depression
1933–1936 New Deal Policies
1939–1945 World War II
1939–1942 Negro Project
1942 Planned Parenthood Federation


CH A P T E R SE V E N
Labor in the Industrial Age
Having contextualized the historical sexual exploitation of enslaved

Black women in the agricultural era, we now turn our attentions for-
ward, toward a second watershed moment in Black women’s repro-
ductive history—reproductive policies of the industrial era, specifically
between 1929 and 1954. As the slave era enters its last generations,
industrialization begins to take hold of the nation and to show itself in
innumerable ways. According to Giddens these changes were
Symbolized by the humming New England textile mills, north-

ern industrialization was reaching new heights in this period. The
consequent broader f low of capital created a new middle class
striving for upper-class status.1
The end of slavery sees nearly four million slaves freed and thousands
of former owners who have lost land and capital.2 Without the labor;
land; and capital resources available in the previous era, many of the
former slave owners find themselves no longer able to maximize agri-
cultural profits. As a result, the nation sees its wage labor force increase
exponentially and for the first time in U.S. history Black reproduction
becomes symptomatic of the financial crises of society, rather than its
successes. Following their emancipation from slavery, Black women’s
manual and reproductive labor continues to be exploited; however,
the economic landscape changes such over the decades following the
Civil War—due to the national move toward industrialization—that
the general need for Black labor diminishes significantly. Whereas the
United States previously relied on Blacks as instruments of production
and reproduction for maximization of agricultural profit; now, Black

90 Emancipated . . . Not Liberated
production has become a threat to White production and Black repro-
duction has become a social problem.
Though in using the term, instrument of production, Marx is references
any slave system not, not specifically Blacks in the United States, hav-
ing been the instruments of production for 246 years, Black workers had
historically been both literally and figuratively chained to the shifts
in the U.S. forces of production; even further alienating Blacks from
American society. Marx asserts that,
. . . laborers are free in two senses. . . . The typical laborers of capi-

talism are neither a part of the means of production, as are slaves
and bondmen; nor do they possess means of production of their
own. . . . Laborers under capitalism have been ‘freed’ or separated
from their means of production.3
If Marx’s definition of laborers in the working class is correct, then

Black women are even further alienated from U.S. society as their for-
mer position as slaves predisposes them to exist on the margins of an
already classed culture. With Emancipation and this transition from
agricultural to industrial forces of production, many formerly enslaved
Black women find themselves still trapped in the fields, continuing to
provide manual labor for their former masters and other White land-
owners. A significant portion of these Black women laborers are mar-
ried mothers forced to work outside the home in a system which expects
honorable women to stay home and care for their husbands and children.
Just five years after Emancipation, statistics show that 40 percent of
married southern Black women work outside the home; while more
than 98 percent of married southern White women do not.4 Excluded
from factory opportunities, that at least carry a certain prestige, those
who do not join the sharecropper ranks are often relegated to domestic
service, effectively continuing the reproductive labor that many Black
women performed while previously enslaved.
Sixty years later, by the onset of the Great Depression, 90 percent of
Black women’s labor remains either agricultural or domestic. Due to
the shifts toward industrialization, though many Black women and men
continue to work in farming, Black women are no longer primarily
employed in agriculture. Instead she is largely employed as a domestic
employee, typically performing as: laundress; maid; seamstress; nanny;
and cook in White women’s homes. Due to the nature of such private
employment, Black women are offered no organizational protection,
and are left wholly unprotected by the reform policies of the New Deal

Labor in the Industrial Age 91
5
era. Hit hard by the status of the economy, Black women suffer the
highest unemployment rate across the nation. Black women are denied
basic labor rights of fair compensation and employee benefits. Further,
Black women only earn 38 percent of White women’s wages—who
themselves do not earn a fair wage. It is evident that within this histori-
cal context of former slave laborers, Black women exist within a par-
ticular social location in the United States, rooted in socially accepted
discrimination and institutionalized misogyny and racism. This loca-
tion, arguably, makes Black women more vulnerable to the attacks of
the political economy than the other classes.
As shown in table 7.1, it is apparent that, with the dissolution of
slavery, Black women’s productive and reproductive labor, though
continuously exploited, ceases to play as significantly positive a role in
the U.S. economy as in the previous era. As a result, Black women’s
labor—both reproductive and productive—becomes problematized,
Table 7.1 Status of political economy in industrial era
Mode of Production Industrialization
Political Economy • Nation is in a state of increasing expansion through

1896–1950 1929 stock market crash
• Nation experiences significant period of Contraction-
The Great Depression from 1929 through end of
World War II
• Nation experiences booming expansion from 1945
beyond 1950
• Industrial production for world Economy
Forces of Production • Technology at a high
• Factories are significant source of capitalist profit
• Mechanical labor is employed in factories and on farms
Instruments of Production • Human Labor is primarily Black sharecroppers, Black
Labor Pool domestic and service workers.
• Blacks are excluded from union and factory work
• Blacks, White Americans, and primarily European
immigrants vie for wage employment
Means of Production • Blacks, Whites, and immigrants
Labor Source • Black reproduction is no longer necessity for profit and
is problematized for the first time
Relations of Production Labor • Labor demand is low as there is a surplus of now free
Demand Blacks, immigrants, and Whites vying for limited
employment
• Industrial age serf vs. Landlord in the form of
sharecropping
• Wage laborer vs. Capitalist

rather than sought after, as it had been in the past. With the dissolution
of slavery Black women find that—previously encouraged to reproduce
for profit—the nation now deems Black reproduction as a social prob-
lem that clogs the workforce and overwhelms the White population.6
No longer marketable and without capital in a capitalist system, the
Black woman is unlike others of the subordinated working class in
the capitalist United States, having been exploited, both sexually and
physically as slaves and forced to provide “free” productive; reproduc-
tive; and biological labor.
The Great Depression
With the stock market crash of 1929, the United States falls deeply
into an economic depression that persists throughout the 1930s.
Technological development is at a standstill. Unemployment rates are
at the highest the United States has ever seen. Labor demands are at
their absolute lowest. Further, the U.S. experiences the lowest birthrate
the nation has seen before or since this period of severe contraction.
In the years following the Great Depression, the United States emerges
successfully from World War II into an era of economic prosperity
and into the role of global superpower. By 1945, technology is at an
absolute high and industry loses its dependence on human labor and
instead relies on automation. And though not widely commercially
produced until the 1960s, various incarnations of the computer and
other computer-assisted technology are developing rapidly beginning
in 1937. These technological advancements are launching the United
States head-on into the next age of computerization. In the meantime,
White Americans and (mostly European) immigrants continue to vie
for wage labor. This competition leads to anti-immigration and anti-
Black propaganda. This social rhetoric leads to policies that encourage
discord between the marginalized groups and systematically excludes
Blacks from unions. The social rhetoric of the period will eventually
lead to the racial segregation or ghettoization of both Blacks and immi-
grants, such as Italians, Poles, Irish, and Ukrainian. Though White
middle-class reproduction is encouraged in the prosperous post–World
War II era (postwar era), Black reproduction is condemned as a drain
on American resources.

CH A P T E R EIGH T
Becoming a Social Problem
The ongoing mechanization of the agricultural industry coupled with

the significant shifts in the relations of production drive many former
agricultural laborers to the already industrialized North in turn of the
century America. Though typically referenced as a Black migration
period, the four decades before the U.S. entry into World War II see
tremendous migration of both Whites and Blacks, who are unable to
thrive in the new South. As a result of this migration of Blacks and
Whites, as well as primarily European immigrants, by the onset of the
Great Depression of the 1930s, the United States finds itself with an
overabundance of labor and little to no labor demand. As a result of
these changes in the national economy, there is an end to the previously
high demand for Black labor. At this point, Black women’s reproduc-
tion of the primary labor pool is no longer tantamount to economic
success and in fact becomes a national concern.
These economic concerns impact significantly on the development
of restrictive reproductive policies between 1929 and 1954. Having
already begun the debate on the nature and intelligence of Blacks
in previous eras, the twentieth century begins with a renewed “sci-
entific” examination of the Negro problem. Originally published in
1859, Charles Darwin’s seminal work, The Origin of Species, becomes
a key element within the ongoing debate. The impact of this issue is
evidenced by the political platforms that drive the 1868 presidential
campaign—White supremacy and the degradation of the human spe-
cies by Blacks. According to historian Eric Foner, Francis P. Blair, Jr.,
the vice-presidential candidate for the 1868 election,
. . . embarked on a speaking campaign. . . . In blatantly racist lan-
guage . . . [Blair spoke of ] “a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are

worshippers of fetishes and polygamists.” . . . Having read Darwin’s
Origin of Species, Blair now asserted that racial intermixing would
reverse evolution, produce a less advanced species incapable of
reproducing itself, and destroy the accumulated improvement of
the centuries.1
Having long been considered a burden to the White race; Blacks
had most recently been blamed for the so-called disenfranchisement
of White men. As many White slave owners and their families had
been unable to recover from the Civil War; Reconstruction; and the
nation’s moves toward industrialization, they found themselves alien-
ated from the political structure; unable to secure economic stability;
nor to obtain gainful employment. Much of this was blamed on Blacks
as they had already historically been deemed a threat to the morality of
White men and women; a threat to their livelihood was not inconceiv-
able. Now, on top of everything else, according to the predominant
scientific theories of the day, Blacks are also a danger to the future of
the species. As a result, during the early part of the twentieth century,
inside a period that is already rife with struggle for the Black popu-
lation, Black reproduction is reviled in both intellectual and popular
communities as a deleterious parasitic drain.
With the onset of industrialization, the state reasserts its position
of patriarchal authority over Black women’s biological; manual; and
reproductive labor; radically redefining her previous contributions to
the system. Similarly to the manner in which Black reproduction is
framed as a social concern through vehement social rhetoric; White
reproduction is crafted as a social responsibility of the middle class. The
historical notions of “true womanhood” and the new emerging middle
classes both buy into and feed into eugenics ideologies.
Rise of Eugenics
In the years following the forced labor of the slave period, the United
States undergoes significant political and economic changes. As the nation
approaches its lowest point, economically—The Great Depression—
Black women are not only discouraged from reproducing, but legislation
rooted in eugenics ideology is designed to enforce these policies.
Eugenics is a pseudo-scientific theoretical perspective originated in the
late nineteenth century by Sir Francis Galton.2 A British polymath by all
accounts and cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton is taken with the concepts
discussed in Darwin’s 1859 work The Origin of Species. Picking up where his

Becoming a Social Problem 95
cousin leaves off, Galton begins devising a theory that includes the analysis
of “survival of the fittest,” “nature vs. nurture,” and both “positive” and
“negative” reproduction. By 1883 Galton presents the theory of eugenics.3
Derived from the Greek for “well born” or “good breeding;” Galtonian
eugenics proposes the improvement of the human species by controlling
reproduction through: (1) stemming the reproduction of the undesirable
members of the species; and (2) encouraging the reproduction of the “fit-
test” most desirable members of the species. A racist condemnation of
nonwhite populations is inherent in eugenics philosophies. Galton, along
with countless other scientists; educators; activists; and politicians continue
to develop the theory well into the early twentieth century. Eugenics can
be found at the core of the most insidious state sponsored crimes against
humanity that have ever been enforced in the United States and around
the world. Including the era of segregation in the United States; compul-
sory sterilization programs that run rampant throughout the United States;
Australia; Europe; Asia; and some Latin American countries; and the rise
of the final solution in Nazi Germany.4 Some would assert that scientific
analysis rooted in eugenics ideologies persist even today.
Kline’s 2001 Building a Better Race argues the rise of eugenics phi-
losophies is the result of a nation afraid of its own changing morality.
According to Kline, the further away the United States moved from its
Victorian “passionlessness,” the closer its White upper classes were drawn
to eugenics ideologies.5 In the late nineteenth century the growing
concern for “mental and moral deficiency,” was focused on the lower
classes, immigrants, and Blacks.6 However, after a period of attempting
to segregate members of these populations—primarily women perceived
as promiscuous and morons—proved unsuccessful in thwarting changes to
traditional sexual mores; by the turn of the century, sterilization became
the answer to the plight of the human race.7 In the age of the “new moral-
ity” and the roaring 20s, eugenics is embraced as a way to save the collec-
tive American soul.8 A nation, fundamentally rooted in both White and
male supremacy, according to Kline, understandably gravitates toward a
philosophy that would not only legitimize, but justify, racial and gender
inequity as, “an appealing solution to the problem of moral disorder.”9
Luker’s 1996 Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy
asserts that America’s fears for future generations has existed for generations
before the emergence of policies regulating mainstream reproduction.
However, according to Luker, the United States did not see the advent of
legislation that would police reproduction until the nineteenth century,
. . . only in the nineteenth century did the United States insti-

tute formal, legal policies ensuring that some people would never

contribute to those coming generations. Limiting the right to
marry, incarcerating “wayward girls,” and passing laws to sterilize
the poor, the criminal, or the “unfit” from reproducing.10
Luker further asserts that to focus solely on the push towards negative
eugenics tells only a piece of the history. In order to fully examine the
United States’ relationship to eugenics ideology, one must also examine
the push for the upper classes to reproduce:
Inf luenced by Darwinian thought and its domestic variants,
Americans realized that policies to keep the unfit from reproduc-
ing needed to be matched with policies encouraging childbearing
among the fit.11
This fear of the fit failing to reproduce at rates commensurate with
those of the foreign-born, poor, and black populations led to federal
policies restricting contraception:
The differences in fertility between immigrants and the native-
born, between blacks and whites, and between the well-off and
the poor were so striking that in 1903 Theodore Roosevelt coined
a term “race suicide” to describe this long-standing and worri-
some phenomenon. . . . Clearly, the government had to ensure that
the ‘fit’ bore their fair share of children, and it did so by limiting
access to contraceptives and abortions.12
Consistent with the eugenics rhetoric of the day, intrinsic with the cul-
tural push for Black women to stop reproducing is the push for White
middle-class women to have more children. According to Davis,
During the first decades of the twentieth century the rising
popularity of the eugenics movement was hardly a fortuitous
development. Eugenic ideas were perfectly suited to the ideologi-
cal needs of young monopoly capitalists. Imperialist incursions in
Latin America and in the Pacific needed to be justified, as did the
intensified exploitation of Black workers in the South and immi-
grant workers in the North and West. The pseudo-scientific racial
theories associated with the eugenics campaign furnished dramatic
apologies for the conduct of the young monopolies. As a result, this
movement won the unhesitating support of such leading capitalists
as the Carnegies, the Harrimans and the Kelloggs.13

The Image of Needy Surplus Labor
The image of Blacks is already firmly rooted in historical social rhetoric

that presents Blacks as lazy; ignorant; and unable to take care of them-
selves. During a period in American history when nearly everyone is
hyper extended, this leaves a palpable sentiment of resentment. During
such desperate times, such as the Great Depression; World War II; or
dramatic industrial transitions. It is far less improbable to propagate
social rhetoric that portrays millions of Blacks as a surplus labor force;
contributing only to the population density in urban America; add-
ing extra mouths to feed in soup kitchens; and draining the nation
of its available resources; when Americans are already vulnerable and
economically unstable. Particularly given that a population has already
been exiled from mainstream society, as in the case of Blacks who can
only live in designated areas; work particular types of jobs; and social-
ize in certain race-specific venues. They already occupy a space outside
of American society. Having historically been indoctrinated with the
image of hedonistic Black slaves, who, supposedly lacking humanity,
need White ownership and guidance; Whites are quick to embrace
images of a freeloading useless rabble in the industrial era. Thus the
notion that they could be culpable for the social; economic; and politi-
cal crises of the era is not at all farfetched for much of White America.
Though the Great Depression is a period of economic struggle
throughout the nation, and Blacks seldom benefit from New Deal
reform policies; Blacks are seen as a threat to the social safety net cre-
ated to protect White Americans during this tumultuous period. Blacks
are presented as sexually corrupt, morally bankrupt parasites in dire
need of already dismal resources. Black women bear the brunt of this
perception as their previously sought after ability to reproduce the labor
force, is now reimagined as burdensome and problematic.
As the development of the Black woman as surplus labor is a key
moment in the historical development of capitalism in the United
States this industrial period is a fundamental moment in the develop-
ment of the relationship between Black women’s reproduction and the
national economy. As stated previously by Marx, the ruling class must
continuously revolutionize its instruments of production in order to
profit.14 The economic transition from agricultural forces of produc-
tion to industrial must be analyzed as Zeitlin argues.
For a proper understanding of the concept of “productive forces,”

we must remember that Marx makes a fundamental distinction

between capitalist and precapitalist modes of production. Modern
capitalist industry, Marx writes, “. . . never looks upon and treats
the existing form of a process as final.” The technical basis of that
industry is therefore revolutionary, while earlier modes of produc-
tion were conservative.15
When examining the processes of revolutionizing the instruments of
production one should consider technological advancements as well as
the labor force. As, according to hooks, before the advent of the tech-
nologies that lead to the invention of the cotton picking machine,
. . . harvesting of crops depended heavily on the labor of black

females. Although both black women and men labored to pick ripe
cotton, it was believed that the more delicately tapered fingers of the
black female made it easier for her to gather cotton from the pod.16
These new technologies are key in separating Black women from their
previous position as instruments of production and forcing them into
the role of surplus labor. Though Black women remain agricultural
laborers with the onset of the new tenant farming, often referred to as
sharecropping, and continues to perform domestic work; having previ-
ously been the very backbone of the economic structure, the Black
woman in the United States now finds her labor obsolete, and herself
irrelevant. Black reproduction at this point becomes perceived as a bur-
den on society and Black women depicted as needy surplus labor. At
which time, as described in table 8.1, Black reproduction is vilified
and alleged as parasitic. Once firmly established, this public image that
reinforces a nationwide derision is used as a political platform from
which contraceptive movements firmly attached to anti-Black rhetoric
are launched.
Table 8.1 Themes of social rhetoric in the industrial era
Theme of Social Rhetoric Representation of Needy Surplus Labor

1929–1954
Freeloading Image of free Blacks overrunning United States

Irresponsible Illustrated as unable or unwilling to take care of themselves or
their offspring, leading to degeneracy
Immoral Seen as destroying moral fiber of nation
Indigent Perceived as overwhelming nation’s workforce, leaving no space
for White workers
Parasites Believed to consume the few resources available to White
Americans

Postwar Reproduction
As the nation pulls itself from the depths of the Great Depression
and positions itself as an international superpower in the postwar
era, Americans are absolutely intoxicated by both positive and negative
eugenics.17 Buying into eugenical rhetoric that perpetuates images of
superiority, competitions are held to prove who has the “fitter fam-
ily” and the “better baby.”18 Textbooks include eugenics as a valid sci-
ence. Advertisers for soap and cleaning supplies even get on board, as
cleanliness is considered one of the tenets of the eugenically superior.
According to Stephanie Coontz,
. . . the 1950s sitcoms were aimed at young couples. . . . The mes-

sage was clear: Buy these ranch houses, Hotpoint appliances, and
child-raising ideas . . . and you too can escape from the conf licts of
race [and] class. . . . There was tremendous hostility to people who
could be defined as “others”: Jews, African Americans, Puerto
Ricans, the poor, gays or lesbians, and “the red menace.”19
As sterilization laws and policies aimed at Blacks are supported by all of

the nation’s major institutions: education; church; media; government;
et cetera; the image of the “American Dream” is inculcated into society
and intertwined with the notion that White reproduction is good for
society and Black reproduction is wrong.
Baby Boom vs. Population Bomb
Baby Boom
A term coined by the media, the baby boom, is commonly accepted as
the period of extensive reproduction from 1946 to1964.20 Not specific
to the United States, a boom is a natural phenomenon that typically
occurs after a major war. However the notion of the American baby
boom has been co-opted as the very image of hometown America.
Having survived the struggles of the Great Depression and the horrors
of World War II, the postwar era is considered the height of American
suburbanization. A period of rampant reproduction, the baby boom is
commonly revered as the most prosperous and nostalgic stage in U.S.
history. Even today the nation honors this brief period in American
history with a commemorative postage stamp series designed to encap-
sulate the joy of propagation and the simple pleasures of the American

family. Characterized by images of a cherubic faced healthy White
child and excited and anxious new fathers seeing their new children for
the first time through a pane of glass in the hospital nursery, the baby
boom is nostalgia at its very best.21
The 1950s, in particular, has been venerated as a period when White
middle class American families; like their television counterparts—
Ozzie & Harriet, Donna Reed, and Leave It To Beaver—have achieved
the American Dream. Mom and Dad relish their unaffected gender
roles—he, the sole breadwinner and head of household and she, the
homemaker and mother. Though this purportedly ideal reality is short-
lived, and specific to a select population of Americans, the myth of the
all-American nuclear family has transcended reality and become locked
in our collective memory as America’s glory days.22
In truth, the suburbanization of the 1950s is an attempt at the
reorganization of the American institution of family. According to
Coontz, “1950s family forms and values . . . [is an] experimentation with
the possibilities of a new kind of family, not as the expression of some
longstanding tradition.”23 In previous generations families had often
been extended, as newlyweds lived with parents; in-laws; siblings; and
grandparents. The 1950s sees the kinship community that in the past
had helped with finances, childrearing, and offered emotional and
psychological support, abandoned. In the 1950s, with the creation of
the nuclear family, for the first time young couples are on their own,
with the responsibilities of a mortgage, expensive cars, and the cultural
insistence that they become an active consumer.24
And though, for a few years, many of the men and women in these
suburbanized families find comfort in their positions and even thrive
in their roles, the harsh realities of life are inevitably revealed. In fact,
Coontz reports that the same White middle class families that are
so revered in contemporary memories as having lived the American
dream; are actually fraught with social; culture; and economic crises
of their own. War veterans returning to families that no longer accept
his authority, wives often having “two or more children in diapers,”
leaving them clearly overwhelmed and tethered to a role that many
women and men in the 1950s take on as early as eighteen.25 According
to Coontz, the postwar family is comprised of,
. . . couples who had married in haste, women who had tasted new
freedom during World War II and given up their jobs with regret,
veterans whose children resented their attempts to reassert pater-
nal authority, and individuals disturbed by the changing racial and
ethnic mix of postwar America.26

Such glaring incongruities between the actual circumstances of
American history and Americans’ collective musings, is a key insight
into the American psyche. These contradictions illustrate the American
people’s willingness to accept false realities, when instilled by media
and other major U.S. institutions. It further demonstrates Americans’
willingness to deny evident truths that are clearly exemplified in the
lived history of the United Sates. As America’s historical context prior
to the postwar era is replete with slavery; exploitation; poverty; and
abuse. During the supposedly prosperous 1950s the nation begins to
witness the outcomes of these centuries of abuse. The experiment of
the postwar era is shattered by strife; chaos; turmoil; and revolution in
the form of a variety of activist struggles, including: Black Civil Rights
movements; women’s rights movements; gay rights movements; antiwar
movements; and a significant number of ethnic and youth movements.
Leaving one to reconsider the commemorative postage stamp series
mentioned earlier, disseminated by the U.S. post office to venerate the
so-called baby boom. In its efforts to stir up nostalgic visions of the
White American Dream, it only serves to reinforce the institutional-
ized racist patriarchal misogyny of yesteryear.
Population Bomb
This cooperative denial that dismisses the varied disaffected members
of society is further illustrated by the cavalier disregard for the contra-
dictions of being Black in America. While in a reality parallel, and in
appalling contrast, to White middle class America’s cheerfully revered
baby boom; rooted in Malthusian, Darwinist, and Galtonian philoso-
phies, Black reproduction is termed a metaphorical population bomb.27
Blacks exist in a hostile reality where they fight tooth and nail for the
slightest civil freedoms: choosing his/her own seat on a public bus;
the option of eating in any restaurant; or even to attend a good public
school. As Whites live the so-called American Dream, Blacks are mired in
a centuries-long struggle for the recognition of their very humanity.
Separatist Response
The response to the imagery of the period, as highlighted in table 8.2,
is devastating to all Blacks, male and female. Bearing the brunt of blame
for the status of the political economy, Blacks again find themselves
at the center of whirlwind debates demanding what to do about the
“Negro problem.” The first half of the twentieth century sees the rise
of industry and shifts in migration patterns. Blacks, drawn to northern

Table 8.2 Snapshot of social response to rhetoric campaigns in the industrial era
Separatist Social Response Society believes all Blacks, both free and slave, are draining
American resources
Society believes all Blacks, both free and slave, should live lives
separate from White America
cities, such as Chicago and Detroit; are vehemently attacked in a deluge

of so-called race riots in the early part of the century.28 White America
enforces rules that Blacks must remain separate from Whites at all costs.
Controlled by angry lynch mobs of Whites, Blacks are kidnapped,
assaulted, and killed—in short lynched—in record numbers. Under the
threat of death, Blacks are relegated to small sections of major cities, such
as the Black Belt on Chicago’s south side or Harlem in New York City.
Perhaps it not so surprising that near the end of the first decade of the
new millennium, facing, arguably, the most significant economic crisis
in U.S. history since the Great Depression; the media offers a familiar
refrain—blame the poor and “minority.”29 Perhaps this is not the exact
language being employed. It is true that the constant chatter about the
collapse of the housing market being a direct result of poor urban resi-
dents going into foreclosure could hypothetically be a reference to any-
one who has fallen upon hard times. However it is evident that media
references to terms such as urban; inner city; and welfare, have all come
to be coded language for the more controversial Black. In the words
of much of the American media and many elected officials, including
George W. Bush, many of these urban and inner city borrowers should
not have received a home loan in the first place. Inserting urban in lieu
of Black does not lessen the implication of culpability.
Thus the belief that Blacks are ultimately responsible for social prob-
lems. Be the issue: urban crime; lack of education; or unemployment, at
the core Blacks are scapegoated as the antithesis of American prosper-
ity. Supporting their continued victimization within an unforgiving
structure rooted in systematic racial; gender; class; and labor oppression
and exploitation. This image results in generations of state sponsored
racial segregation.

CH A P T E R N I N E
Morons, Mental Defectives, Prostitutes,

and Dope Fiends: Restrictive
Becoming African Americans
After the Civil War, the thirteenth amendment is passed abolishing

slavery. Unfortunately the mere abolition of slavery does not offer
instant inclusion for the Africans who had become Americans over the
many generations of forced servitude. Instead, Blacks suffer a terrible
backlash to federal efforts to incorporate them into the U.S. structure,
such as Reconstruction policies and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. As
the nation continues to plod clumsily forward out of the depths of
slavery and the anguish of civil war, desperately grasping at de jure seg-
regation and terrorism along the way, there is a brief period of rigorous
and significant federal mandates to correct the misdeeds of the previous
generations.
Throughout this period known as Reconstruction (1866–1877),
the U.S. government attempts to demand inclusion of Blacks through
political and military force. Similarly to the laws governing slavery in
the preceding era, freedom requires a number of amendments, laws,
and policies that regulate equality, inclusion, and access for Black
Americans. For a length of time, at least during Reconstruction, Blacks
finally enjoy some political freedom and inclusion. However, with the
Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877, it becomes apparent that Blacks
have been used as pawns in a political struggle, rather than integrated
into the national political structure.1

Even still, Reconstruction is a meaningful historical moment for
Blacks. At one point, over 800,000 Blacks are registered to vote due to
Black suffrage movements attached to Reconstruction.2 Further, for the
first time in American history Blacks—now Americans—hold elected
posts within the U.S. government.3 It is a new era; and for the first
time in their history in America, there is hope for African Americans.
Reconstruction is a period, not only of restoration, but also of bestow-
ing citizenship on a previously denied people. Reconstruction sees
more Black political involvement in the U.S. democratic process across
the nation than in any years since.4
Unfortunately the successes of the period are short-lived. Even with
the passing of the fifteenth amendment, which specifies Blacks’ right to
vote, de facto and de jure violence and intimidation tactics occur both
at the ballot and in the streets by terrorist organizations, as well as by
city, state, and government officials.5 According to Giddings,
Racial hostility was especially focused on Afro-Americans who
had made substantial economic gains in the postwar period-gains
now being checked by the South’s counterrevolution, the eclipse
of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and later the depression of 1893.6
Southern states respond almost immediately to the successful federal
efforts with their own state-sanctioned vigilante anti-incorporation
efforts, by implementing “Black Codes” and launching an organized
series of terrorist attacks. Southern Blacks, having just escaped the deg-
radation and dangers of slavery are now inundated with these new poli-
cies of disenfranchisement and violence. Prohibited from the freedoms
to: bear arms; organize; own property; vote; or fully integrate into
American society; Blacks, particularly in the South, also live under the
constant threat of terror.7
American Terrorism
Terrorist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, are launched and

avidly take up the cause to enforce these Black codes across the South
in order to keep Blacks from gaining any further social; political; or
economic ground. The Ku Klux Klan is a White supremacist terrorist
organization, known colloquially throughout the nation as the KKK.
It is launched “in 1866 as a Tennessee social club, the Ku Klux Klan
spreads into nearly every southern state, launching a ‘reign of terror.’8
The lawlessness; mayhem; and mass murder perpetrated by the orga-
nization is unprecedented. The former Louisiana governor, George

Restrictive Reproductive Policies 105
Michael Hahn declares that, “murder and intimidation are the order of
the day in this state.”9 They target and assassinate politicians; Blacks; and
anyone who would stand in their way. Attacking as angry mobs; they
are known to have killed hundreds of people in a single strike. Their
mob rule becomes so feared that White supporters of Black inclusion
must rescind their backing and accept that the previous inroads would
soon be reversed.10 The Ku Klux Klan’s campaigns of violence prove
incredibly effective in their war against Black progress in the late nine-
teenth century. Even after successfully disenfranchising Blacks from
political power after the Civil War, they would continue to evolve as a
violent terrorist organization over the generations. The Ku Klux Klan
has seen many incarnations over the decades, presenting themselves as:
concerned citizens; vigilantes; and even politicians. They continue to
thrive across the nation today.
Though reportedly condemned by the northern part of the nation,
the Black codes of the nineteenth century are federally supported by
legally sanctioned anti-integration laws that follow. Specifically, the
1896 Supreme Court ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson which determines that
“separate but equal” accommodations for Blacks and Whites are con-
stitutional.11 This ruling ushers in the Jim Crow segregation era that
persists for the next half a century. Terrorist actions, further fueled
by “Jim Crow” segregation laws, enforce the harsh and unreasonable
policies and laws assailing, now free, Blacks. These policies range from:
voting regulations, such as: literacy tests; poll taxes; and the grandfather
clause; substandard educational institutions; disparate healthcare; and
unequal access to community resources, including: retail stores; restau-
rants; and public parks.12
Though still drowning in discrimination, many Black men fight in
World War II. Upon returning home, having travelled to Europe and
northern cities in the United States, many could no longer reconcile the
reprehensible systemic racism of the south.13 Failed by the U.S. govern-
ment, many southern Blacks choose to leave the poverty and hopelessness
of their rural communities. In the mass exodus of this Great Migration,
many Blacks are forced to leave their families and head north, either
until they establish themselves in the north or because many Black
women who had not travelled remain wary of the unknown and remain
mired in familial ties—such as senior kin care. Those who do choose to
migrate, head north in search of enfranchisement, civil freedoms, work,
and above all—hope. According to Giddings,
All these things added to the pressures on Black family life that
were exacerbated by Black migration to the cities, both southern

and northern. Between 1890 and 1910, as many as 200,000 Blacks
left the soil that had borne so much of their blood and tears. Blacks
were beleaguered. The Black family was under siege.14
Restricting Black Reproduction
In search of a freedom of opportunity not afforded them in the rural
south, Blacks now find themselves in competition for work in ways they
had not experienced in the past.15 This new reality is not lost on White
America. By 1907, as a result of powerful lobbying on behalf of eugenics
philosophies, sterilizations could be court-mandated to control crimi-
nality, amorality incompetence, imbecility, and degeneracy.16 These policies
are most often invoked in poorer rural regions and urban inner cities.
American Eugenics
Illustrated by the image of a large tree sprouting roots and limbs in all
directions, eugenics is presented as an organic and biological reality that
impacts every aspect of our humanity. Supported by the intertwining
roots of knowledge labeled with various disciplines, such as: the humani-
ties; social sciences; the law; medicine; mathematics; and physical sciences.
The allegorical reference to the tree of life as it were, stands tall surrounded
by a caption that reads, “Eugenics is the self direction of human evolu-
tion.”17 The very idea of eugenics is presented as the pathway to knowl-
edge, self-improvement, and the future of humanity. Though wholly
inhumane in its blatant and overt message of forcible and coercive steril-
ization of the so-called unfit—which typically means Blacks; Latina(o)s;
Native Americans; the poor; and/or the mentally ill, eugenics is presented
as an intelligent, logical, even harmonious way to better civilization.18 A
burgeoning notion at the end of the nineteenth century, eugenics ideolo-
gies are so embraced in American society midway through the first half
of the century, that according to Angela Y. Davis,
By 1932 the Eugenics Society could boast that at least twenty-

six states had passed compulsory sterilization laws and that thou-
sands of ‘unfit’ persons had already been surgically prevented from
reproducing.19
By 1935, thirty-three states have eugenics-based sterilization statutes

on their books across the nation.20 Though the invocation of these

laws for the purposes of forced sterilization falls out of favor and there-
fore declines in use in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of these
laws remain on the books in individual states, and are even periodically
updated. Further, local policies continue to be implemented across the
nation to disproportionately force and coerce poorer; Black; Latina;
and Native American women into sterilization.21
Margaret Sanger
A women’s rights activist and a trained nurse, Margaret Sanger, pre-

scribes to Galton’s theories of eugenics and applies its ideologies to the
ongoing battle for contraceptive rights in the United States. Margaret
Sanger is an activist who protests on behalf of women’s rights her entire
career. In 1921 Sanger attends a court hearing wearing a gag over her
mouth protesting a judge’s refusal to allow her to speak in court. In
violation of federal law, Sanger publishes pamphlets and articles illu-
minating female reproductive issues, such as menstruation; pregnancy;
avoiding pregnancy; and female sexuality. In 1921 Sanger founds the
American Birth Control League, which eventually becomes the Planned
Parenthood Federation in 1942. Sanger is so committed to negative
eugenics that listed among the eight goals of the organization, is
STERILIZATION of the insane and feebleminded and the

encouragement of this operation upon those aff licted with inher-
ited or transmissible diseases, with the understanding that steril-
ization does not deprive the individual of his or her sex expression,
but merely renders him incapable of producing children.22
There are explicit contradictions in the legacy of Margaret Sanger’s

active involvement in the fight for reproductive rights of women.
Though contrasted with her overtly racist ideologies, Sanger has made
many significant gains on behalf of women’s reproductive rights in
the United States. However, there has been much debate as to her role
in oppressing Black women’s reproductive rights and the overall goals
of her efforts. Though her work is credited with much of the repro-
ductive freedoms of all American women today, according to Angela
Davis, Margaret Sanger is quite blatantly an avid negative eugenicist.23
According to Davis, in a radio interview Sanger reports that,
Morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unem-

ployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends; ought to be

surgically sterilized, [Sanger] argued in a radio talk . . . if they
wished, she said, they should be able to choose a lifelong segregated
existence in labor camps.24
Sanger’s legacy persists today in the ongoing work of Planned

Parenthood. This organization that has stood for nearly one hundred
years; continues to maintain the role as leading provider of gyneco-
logical, contraceptive, and general medical healthcare services to
poorer women and women of color throughout the nation to this day.
Unfortunately, its connections to Sanger and its original goals make
the organization suspect. Tainted by this history, the debate continues
today as to whether or not the organization’s dedication to provid-
ing abortion; contraceptive; and sterilization services is due to a com-
mitment to reproductive rights or to negative eugenics. That said the
organization’s current mission clearly denotes an explicit commitment
to bioethics; education; and patient’s rights to privacy, in stark contrast
to Sanger’s initial vision.
Victims of Eugenics
Just as Sanger’s struggles for women’s reproductive rights have not

impacted on a singular population; it must be noted that the eugenics
movement is not specific to Blacks only. The push by Sanger and many
of her contemporaries for negative eugenics has severely impacted
many populations other than Black women. Though this research
highlights the historical relationships of Black women’s reproduc-
tion to the state, it is by no means meant to purposefully ignore other
populations impacted by these abuses. I would be remiss if I did not
acknowledge the effects that sterilization abuse ha had on populations
other than Black women. A great number of physically and sexually
abused children; Native American women and men; Asian women and
men; immigrants; mentally ill and otherwise infirmed or impoverished
people—both men and women—are victims of eugenics ideology.25
In fact, the first court mandated sterilization procedure, in 1907, is
performed on a White male inmate in Indiana.
Arguably, the population most heavily impacted by sterilization
abuses of the state may be Latina women. As Roosevelt’s government
had determined that the economic problems in Puerto Rico should
be attributed to overpopulation, many overt and covert efforts were

26
employed to reduce the number of children produced. As such, since
then, any opportunity to perform permanent surgical sterilizations
has been exploited. At times these sterilizations are performed openly
through government programs instituted to reduce the population. At
other times, more covert methods are employed.
In the 1970s pharmaceutical companies exploring various contra-
ceptive devices and technologies routinely perform clinical trials on
animals and inner city Black and Latina populations in the United
States and in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.27 As such, as the U.S.
medical community seeks methods of perfecting the permanent surgi-
cal sterilization procedure, they perform the surgery on thousands of
women in Puerto Rico. Initially a process by which the fallopian tubes
are simply cut; doctors eventually learn that nature tends to find a way
and that given time, the tubes may reconnect and resume functionality.
Through performing the surgery on countless Puerto Rican women,
they eventually discover that the ends should not only be cut, but also
cauterized, in order to achieve a truly permanent procedure. More than
35 percent of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been steril-
ized by the 1970s.28 Today, it is said that up to half of the women of
childbearing age in Puerto Rico have received this surgery, which has
become so inevitable and commonplace that many refer to it as simply,
the operation.
That said, there is a tangential movement born of eugenics phi-
losophies known as the Negro Project, which is specific to Blacks.29
Arguably, as illustrated in table 9.1, these forced sterilization policies and
Table 9.1 Examples of relevant policies in the industrial era
Influential Policies of the Characteristics of Influential Policies of the Industrial Era

Industrial Era
Eugenics State supported eugenics Movement to discourage Black

reproduction and encourage White reproduction
The Negro Project Negro Project to encourage Black contraception and sterilization
Jim Crow Jim Crow laws enforcing “separate but equal” from 1896 to 1954
Compulsory Sterilization State imposed forced sterilization programs leading to over 70,000
court-mandated sterilizations from 1907 to mid-1980s. Many
state laws remain on the books today.
The New Deal The New Deal Reform Policies, first instituted in 1933, exist in
various forms through the turn of the century. Begin moving
towards dissolution in the 1990s.

programs, such as the Negro Project are part and parcel of a concerted
effort to rid White America of the burden of Black reproduction. The
reproductive policies of the industrial era are restrictive, as the nation
legally forces Black women into sterilization procedures through
eugenical sterilization laws and initiatives such as the Negro Project.
The Negro Project
By the 1930s Black women are commonly considered feeble-minded,

promiscuous, and generally degenerate. There is both a social and
political push to regulate Black populations that is legitimized by the
eugenics movement. According to Giddings,30
The birth control movement which, though legalizing contracep-

tion in this country, and launched with the idea of eradicating
poverty, degenerated into a campaign to ‘keep the unfit from repro-
ducing themselves with all its Social Darwinist implications.’31
Well before the inception of the Negro Project, compulsory and coer-
cive sterilization programs had already begun targeting Blacks. What’s
more they would continue to target Black women well after the pro-
gram’s end. The Eugenics Commission of North Carolina, which
had diligently administered eugenics sterilization policies since 1933,
admits that of the 7,686 sterilizations that had been performed in the
state by the early 1960s, “about 5,000 of the sterilized persons had been
Black.”32 They assert their purpose for sterilizing Black girls as young
as ten years old is, “to prevent the reproduction of ‘mentally deficient
persons.”33 North Carolina continues to perform sterilizations at the
same alarming rate, of 65 percent Black compared to 35 percent White,
for the next twenty years.34
In the late 1930s Margaret Sanger commissions a government funded
project that centers on Black reproduction—the Negro Project. Though
presented as a program to offer marginalized Black communities access
to reproductive information and healthcare, through the manipulation
of Black doctors and clergy, the project actually serves as a vehicle to
persuade Blacks to curb reproduction and volunteer for surgical steril-
ization. In fact, Sanger writes in a letter to a co-conspirator on the
Negro Project that they must be particularly careful that the Black
community does not learn that the primary goal of the program is

the extermination of Blacks. To that end, she suggests the use of reli-
gious leaders to mollify the Black masses and undermine any Black
rebels.35 Though the nation remains adamantly against contraception
throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Sanger, alongside
other significant advocates, such as Mary Lasker and heir to the Procter
and Gamble fortune, Clarence Gamble, manage to garner powerful
supporters of the birth control movement, as it promises to resolve one of
the nation’s most pressing issues-population control.36
Sanger leads the Negro Project from 1939 to 1942. Though the pro-
gram does not end for another decade, Sanger leaves the project in the
capable hands of the largely Black volunteer staff she has trained. At
which time she opens a clinic in Harlem, where Black women in New
York City are sterilized through similar initiatives employed in the
south. Little information is available on the depths of the Negro Project.
What is known is that they are incredibly successful at their endeavors.
Sanger is able to enlist the support of several major Black leaders, such
as Mary McCleod Bethune, activist and educator; Rev. Adam Clayton
Powell Sr., pastor of a famed Harlem church; and Charles S. Johnson,
president of Fiske University.37 The public face of Sanger’s initiatives
varies depending on her audience. For White communities she clearly
advocates the extermination of Blacks and perceives them as a detri-
ment to the human race. While in front of Black audiences she presents
herself as a progressive who offers only support of Blacks and women’s
causes.38 Much debate on this matter continues to this day.
In the public discourse, much of the discussion of Margaret Sanger
and the Negro Project is reduced to a simplistic level. Too often the
Negro Project is invoked today as a part of some effort to discour-
age Black women from using birth control or from having abortions.
Though within the context of the tragic history that locates forced
steril ization programs within an ongoing struggle against genocide,
there is a certain logic to these concerns. And within that context, the
fear of the abortion industry is, if not unadvisable, somewhat under-
standable. However, it is unfortunate that this history has been co-opted
by extremists whose goals include curbing Black women’s reproductive
rights. And even worse, this horrid blight in American history has not
been taught in schools and openly acknowledged in the media. Instead
it has been reduced to a publicity stunt for misogynistic conservative
politics that would deny a woman’s right to choose in order to prove a
political point.

Industrial Era Nature of Social Response Type of Policy Characteristics of Industrial

Restrictive Economy 1929–1954 Era Restrictive Reproductive
Reproductive 1929–1954 Policies
Policies
Court • Contraction Separatist Restrictive • Criminalization of
Mandated • Expansion • Curtail danger • To keep Blacks undesirable heredity,
Sterilizations • High of Black from i.e., race, illness, sanity
Technology overpopulation multiplying • Criminalization of
• Surplus labor and future • Save undesirable
supply intermingling government characteristics, i.e.,
• Broad funds for future poverty, perceived
unskilled children intelligence, chastity
labor force • Criminalization of
undesirable status, i.e.,
orphan status, prisoner
The Negro • Contraction Separatist Restrictive • Manipulate Black
Project • Expansion • Curtail danger • To keep Blacks doctors and clergy to
• High of Black from convince Blacks to
Technology overpopulation multiplying volunteer for
• Surplus labor and future • Save sterilization
supply intermingling government
• Broad funds for future
unskilled children
labor force
Summary
In sum, the data, as seen in table 9.2, show that in the policy period
between 1929 and 1954, the nation experiences periods of both con-
traction and expansion as well as an explosion of technology leading
to the obsolescence of Black women’s labor—both productive and
reproductive. Once Black reproduction is no longer directly linked
to the forces of production, as it had been during slavery, Black
reproduction—previously encouraged for profit—becomes problema-
tized in the social consciousness. The new demands of the industrial
forces of production in the United States render Black women’s labor
superf luous and push Black women’s production and reproduction
to the periphery of society. Policies in this period are restrictive in
an effort to maintain distance from Blacks who are freely migrating
across the country and to stem concerns of Black overpopulation. In
restrictive reproductive freedom of Black women in the period, Black
reproduction is criminalized and vilified.

Further Readings
Bennett, Lerone. Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867–1877. Chicago,
IL: Johnson, 1967.
DuBois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in the United States, 1860–1880. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1995.
Franklin, John Hope and Alfred Moss, Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans,
seventh edition. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Gordon, Linda. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare. New York: Free
Press, 1994.
Jones, Jacqueline. The Dispossessed: America’s Underclass from the Civil War to the Present. New York:
Basic Books, 1992.
Leavitt Judith W. (Ed.). Women and Health in America. Historical Readings, second edition.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
Lehmann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America.
New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Miele, Frank. Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversation with Arthur R. Jensen. Cambridge, MA:
Westview, 2002.
Schoen, Johanna. Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and
Welfare. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Tarry, Ellen. The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman. New York:
D. McKay, 1955.


PA RT 4
A Brand New Day
Year Key Historical Moments during Era of Global Capitalism

in the Electronic Age (1975–2009)
1954 Brown V Board of Education

1957 Civil Rights Act—Voting Rights Act
1960 Civil Rights Act—Federal inspection of Voter
Registration Polls
1964 Civil Rights Act—Outlawed Segregation
1968 Civil Rights Act—Fair Housing Act
1959–1975 Vietnam War
1960 Legalization of Birth Control Pill
1962–1975 Antiwar Movement (Vietnam)
1965 Moynihan Report
1964–1975 Modern Civil Rights Period
1964 War on Poverty
1971 War on Drugs
1973 Roe V Wade
1990 Human Genome Project
1990–2002 Norplant
1992 Depo-Provera
1996 Welfare Reform


CH A P T E R T E N
Global Capitalism in the Electronic Age
With hundreds of thousands of Blacks having already migrated north

between 1890 and 1910; the postwar era sees upward of 5 million
Blacks join their ranks by 1970.1 Already previously abhorred as a drain
on American resources, urban cities now feel overrun with Blacks,
who in this new market are considered a glut on the labor force. Black
reproduction, now unnecessary with the new skilled labor and access
to international labor pools, is portrayed as a pathological danger. As
the industrial forces of production strive to new heights due to the
exploitation of significant new technologies, specifically the computer
chip leading to automation, industry is revolutionized in the United
States and around the world.
Black labor becomes even less profitable in the latter years of the
twentieth century, due to technological advancements that exclude the
unskilled worker and allow access to a global labor force.2 The policy
period between 1975 and 1995 sees the nation experience cycles of
expansion, contraction, and recession. The policy period between 1996
and 2006 sees expansion persist for the wealthiest and contraction for
the poorest. While 2007 through 2009 sees the collapse of the housing
market and a significant recession still debated as a possible depression;
which has the potential to impact labor and capital alike.
The expansion of exploitable technologies continues to expand at an
extraordinary rate throughout both policy periods allowing access to
a global labor force, as illustrated in table 10.1. Black labor, dismissed
as unskilled and unprofitable, continues to be devalued throughout the
twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The automation of indus-
try that occurs in this period even further alienates the unskilled laborer
from productive American society. The technological advancement

118 A Brand New Day
Table 10.1 Status of political economy in era of global capitalism in the electronic age
(1975–2009)
Mode of Production Global Capitalism in the Electronic Age

Political Economy • Expansion
• Recession
• Expansion for wealthier/Contraction for poorer majority
Forces of Production • Automation for global consumption
• Computerization for global consumption
Instruments of • Technology at an all time high with the introduction of the
Production Labor Pool computer chip
• Mechanization of work-machines replacing skilled labor
• Computerization
• Specialization of Skills
• “skilled” employment replaces previously “unskilled” wage labor
Means of Production • There is a surplus of available labor globally
Labor Source • Working class Blacks, Latinos, & Caribbean immigrants vie for
“unskilled” employment that remains
• Emergence of global corporations, outsourcing, & “sweatshops”
Relations of Production • Cheap abundant labor is in high demand
Labor Demand • Wage laborer vs. Capitalist
of industry in the electronic age, not only brings unemployment for

Blacks, it also carries with it significant reproductive technologies that
aid in the repression of Black women’s reproduction. In the years fol-
lowing civil rights gains for all Blacks, Black women are beleaguered
with regulatory reproductive policies that undermine the Black family
and continue the historic assault on Black motherhood.
Brief Status of 1970s Economy
The 1970s is a period of some despair for the nation. The country’s
leader impeached; a previous president assassinated; kids protesting in
the streets; the nation had been violently snatched from the Rockwellian
vision of the postwar period before it. And though the Vietnam War
is finally ended in April 1975, the nation emerges changed. Among
many tumultuous years of the period, 1975 can easily be designated
as a watershed moment in the history of the U.S. economy as well as
in the consciousness of America. For those who fought in the war and
returned home to skyrocketing unemployment; antiwar sentiments;
and for many, lingering illness and drug addiction; the end of the war

Global Capitalism in the Electronic Age 119
is only the beginning. While others who had fought against the war
find that now that the draft had ended, they no longer have a defined
path to follow. The first baby boomers are turning thirty years old and
of those who had identified with the counterculture of the previous
period, many become lost in substance abuse and dysphoria. Further,
Americans experience inconceivable inf lation that sees a profound ele-
vation in the cost of living, including unaffordable home prices; energy
crises; and other major cost increases.
Neoliberal policies begun in the 1970s, starting with the degradation

of the efficacy of the New Deal reform policies through deregula-
tion of: the savings and loan industry; communications; and energy;
give rise to Reagan’s deregulation policies of the 1980s, which send an
unmistakable ripple through the U.S. economy.3 As such, the 1980s
sees tremendous spikes in unemployment and poverty. With this, there
is an explosion of homelessness and drug abuse, the likes of which
Americans had not seen in the past.
No longer hippies choosing to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Instead
these diverse populations of people are often beset with a number of
social; physical, psychological; and economic issues. Frequently: men-
tally ill; physically challenged; and/or poor people; the many in home-
less communities often self-soothe by abusing a number of substances,
including alcohol; heroine; and cocaine.
The use of drugs by the poorer communities is only rivaled by
that of the indulgent hard-partying yuppie that emerges in the same
era. A bastardized amalgamation of the previous two generations, the
twenty- and thirty-somethings of the 1980s resist the counterculture
leftist philosophies of the 1960s and early 1970s; yet rebuke the quiet
suburbanization of the 1950s. Instead, the 1980s sees the ascension of
young urban capitalist greed and excess that still remains legendary in
the new millennium.
The neoliberal policies of Reagan era economics, supported by the

legendary greed of the 1980s is challenged when the nation experiences
a significant recession in the early 1990s. Bolstered by the savings and

120 A Brand New Day
loan crisis as well as numerous failing banks, the U.S. government is
forced to fund hundreds of billions of dollars through FDIC insurance.
The United States, though deeply in debt emerges the victor of the
decades-long cold war with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the mid 1990s amid a f lurry of technological expansion that
includes cell phones; home computers; and the Internet, an informa-
tion explosion occurs. Catapulting the world into an innovative global
age, these revolutionary technologies drastically impact our methods
of telecommunications and industry; and redefine our cultures; thus
reducing a previously compartmentalized world into what some con-
sider one accessible community. It is important, however to note that
along with the growing accessibility for some, this globalization also
sees industrial, economic, political, social, cultural, and ecological
impacts, the world over.4 And though often framed as an evolutionary
aspect of civilized humanity, actually the globalization occurring in
the neoliberal era is often a process that reinforces global inequity and
reifies structural economic divides. Now more than ever the disparity
between the wealthy minority and the poorer majority is painfully
evident in the United States.
Brief Status of Millennium Economy
By the year 2000 the initial thrill of the unchartered terrain of the
Internet had clearly waned and the so-called dot-com bubble burst. In the
wake of this economic crisis, the nation experiences the first attack on
American soil since Pearl Harbor, the September 11, 2001 attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The impact of this attack
is felt throughout the economy. Coupled with the devastation of a
U.S. attack and the deaths and injuries of thousands upon thousands
of people, primarily civilian, the U.S. economy grinds to a near halt.
Billions of dollars are lost in the state of New York and by the airline
industry. The stock market is closed for a week following the attacks
and suffers record losses. The nation is at a virtual standstill. Less than
one month later, the U.S. military invades Afghanistan in its search for
the perpetrators of the American attacks. Nearly a decade later there
has been much controversy over the so-called war on terror, as many
consider it “unwinnable” and misleading.5
Four years after the September 11 attacks, while still firmly embroiled
in the war, the nation is faced with another crisis, Hurricane Katrina.6
August 2005 a gargantuan tropical storm attacks the Gulf Coast.

Global Capitalism in the Electronic Age 121
Though many cities across several states in the United States and the
Caribbean are impacted, none prove as heartbreakingly tragic as the
effects on greater New Orleans, Louisiana. Thousands of people die;
hundreds of thousands are displaced, some permanently; and there are
over one hundred billion dollars in damages.
Meanwhile the United States sees an unprecedented rise in home
prices, reifying the divide between working and middle classes. Home
prices begin moving out of reach of average working class families
supplying the impetus for the growth of a subprime lending mar-
ket. Within this inf lated market, a fraction of loans begin to cater to
so-called subprime borrowers, who often have little or poor credit and
scant resources to secure a deposit for a home. Often the loans them-
selves are subprime, as they are frequently attached to variable interest
rates and involve balloon payments that working class borrowers typi-
cally cannot afford. As evidenced by the increase in foreclosures and
subsequent collapse of the housing market in the second half of the
millennium.
Global Economy and the Black Labor Pool
By the dawn of the new millennium companies had already begun pro-
duction in international territories. A now truly global economy, the
United States has come to embrace the cycles of war, recession, tech-
nological advancement, expansion, recession, war, et cetera. This cycle
leads to unemployment f luctuations, downsizing, layoffs, and changing
labor markets. No longer wedded to the available domestic labor pool,
the less than desirable populations in the United States—Blacks, immi-
grants, et cetera—are no longer (even periodically) sought after. Even
the small proportion of the working poor still exploited for service and
care work are in danger of losing their status, as computerized labor is
increasingly replacing human production.


CH A P T E R E L E V E N
Pathologizing the Black Woman
As feared in the previous periods, an explosion of civil disobedience

and unrest does indeed ignite throughout the nation in the 1950s;
1960s; and 1970s. However, it is no population bomb as once feared.
It is instead a direct result of the longstanding ongoing exploitation
and abuse endured by marginalized Americans. The overt divergence
of experience between marginalized peoples and middle-class White
America leads to a series of uprisings of the oppressed populations of
the nation, including: Blacks; women; gays and lesbians; antiwar pro-
testers; Latina(o) populations; and more. As a result, the nation sees a
shift from the homogenized nuclear family of the 1950s into a stage of
sexual liberation and political dissent in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ironically, as effective as the Civil Rights and women’s liberation
movements are for Blacks and women respectively, they are equally as
ineffective for Black women.
Indeed, the late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of learning
for many groups, including black women who felt betrayed or
somehow underrepresented by the black and women’s movements
of the civil rights era.1
Marginalized from both Black politics and women’s rights, Black

women find themselves lost in the shuff le in the efforts to gain civil
liberties, and vilified in the efforts to blame someone for the ongo-
ing unrest. In an unfortunate backlash to the successes of these move-
ments, Black women, persistently trapped in a misogynistic and racist
structure, find themselves held morally responsible for the perceived
immorality of a nation.

124 A Brand New Day
By 1965, the year the notorious Moynihan Report is released, Blacks
have made tremendous strides as Americans.2 They are still, however,
intellectually, scientifically, and morally considered failures. Over the
next ten years, between 1965 and 1975, White American women will
make meaningful progress. White women gain the freedom of repro-
ductive choice. Both married and single women are able to experience
the liberation of the birth control pill. White middle class women will
be able to reject motherhood and marriage as their only options. And
for the first time since World War II White middle class women will be
able to earn a living outside the home in force. But unlike their experi-
ences in the previous era, they can now unabashedly embrace paths that
lead to education and careers. During this same period, Black women
are labeled as the root cause of a sickness destroying Black America.
At the same time, White women are discovering their own free-
doms; Blacks continue to be embroiled in the ongoing fight for civil
liberties that had heretofore not been won. As Black women and men
express their discontentedness through grassroots organizing and pur-
poseful protests, various forms of propaganda emerge to portray the
Black woman as the ultimate culprit behind the catastrophic state of
Black America. As illustrated in table 11.1 depicted by government
reports; social science research; radio; television; news; and film, as a
failure as both a woman and as a mother, Black women become the
scapegoat for historically institutionalized racism endemic to American
society. According to White,
“Depreciated by her own kind, judged grotesque by her society,

and valued only as a sexually convenient laboring animal,” the
black girl, they reasoned had the cards stacked against her. . . . The
failure of a black female to develop a healthy narcissism in girl-
hood caused her, later in life, to neglect her figure, allow herself
to become obese, concern herself more with the utility of clothing
and less with style, and resign herself to the “asexual maternal role
in which work and hovering concern for the family” occupied her
entirely. According to the argument the black woman’s concern
with family was emasculating. This put black women in league
with white men in their attempt to destroy black men.3
Rendered as emasculating of Black men, overbearing to her family,

and sexually and emotionally abandoned due to a supposed gen-
eral unattractiveness, the Black woman is held responsible for the

Pathologizing the Black Woman 125
Table 11.1 Themes of social rhetoric in the era of global capitalism in the electronic age
(1975–1995)
Theme of Social Rhetoric 1975–1995 Representation of Pathological Matriarch
Black “Pathology” Myth Myth of sickness among Blacks that causes failure in
society
Aggressive/Angry Perpetuate notion of antagonistic Black women and
hostile Black men
Emasculating Image of belligerent Black women that renders Black
men and therefore Black society as impotent
“Welfare Queen” Portrayed as indigent and irresponsible, forcing
taxpaying Americans to support Black families
Drug Addicted Depicted as addicted to Crack cocaine, and at the root of
a drug epidemic that is destroying the nation
Part of “population bomb” Seen as having children indiscriminately
dysfunctionality of the Black family and the so-called pathology of

Black America.
From Reproductive Freedom to Fertility Control
Just as there had been a purposeful manipulation of the image of Black

women in the previous periods; there is a purposeful degradation of
Blackness and Black womanhood that occurs in the 1970s. This social
rhetoric campaign serves to further the political agendas of a system
fundamentally rooted in racism; misogyny; and class antagonisms.
According to hooks,
. . . most people tend to see devaluation of black womanhood as

occurring only in the context of slavery. In actuality, sexual exploi-
tation of black women continued long after slavery ended and
was institutionalized by other oppressive practices. Devaluation of
black womanhood after slavery ended was a conscious, deliberate
effort on the part of whites to sabotage mounting black female
self-confidence and self-respect.4
In the wake of the conceptualization of the Black population bomb and

the revolutionary movements of the previous era, Black reproduction
takes on a new meaning. Within this context of impending disaster,

126 A Brand New Day
Black reproduction ceases to be a mere ideological issue, it becomes
perceived as an actual threat and treated as such.
Reagan’s 1997 When Abortion Was a Crime asserts that the birth
control movement and the population control movement, though two
separate and distinct agendas, with one rooted in feminist liberation
and the other in state-sponsored control, are inexorably linked. This
occurs as a result of philosophical changes in major women’s rights
platforms, characterized by organizations such as Planned Parenthood,
The emphasis on planning that the birth control movement

adopted in the 1940s would haunt the movement to decriminal-
ize abortion. The movement’s new name, “Planned Parenthood,”
implied that planned children were better and unplanned children
undesirable.5
This approach advocates the planning of wanted pregnancies and labels

unplanned pregnancies; that is unwanted children, as socially irrespon-
sible. This shift does not come without consequence,
Exercising [family planning], however, was a middle-class privi-

lege and virtue. Many, particularly in the working class, did not
“plan” their families and did not necessarily regard an unplanned
pregnancy . . . as unwanted. The emphasis on family planning had
the unfortunate [implication] . . . that “accidental” childbearing
was reprehensible.6
As a result of the fight for women’s reproductive freedoms being envel-

oped by a push toward contraception as a way to combat so-called
overpopulation, the birth control movement becomes a threat to Black
women’s reproduction.7 The national reproduction agenda is felt most
saliently in “low-income and ‘nonwhite neighborhoods,’ prompting
“urban black nationalists” to deem birth control as ‘black genocide.’ ”8
Bernard Asbell’s 1995 The Pill: A Biography of the Drug that Changed
the World focuses on the journey of access to oral contraception. Asbell
explores the pill in the context of a journey toward reproductive free-
dom-which it often is for White middle class women. In the recounting
of this history Asbell brief ly touches on the reaction of the Black media
to the Negro Project.9 In December 1967, the Pittsburgh branch of the
NAACP charged Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood with attempt-
ing to keep “the Black birthrate as low as possible.”10 The statement
released called Planned Parenthood’s commitment to contraceptive

services in non-White communities tantamount to “genocide for the
Negro people.”11 Though Dr. Charles E. Greenlee, the NAACP rep-
resentative who had originally made the statement, later concedes that
“genocide” might have been too strong a term, he and the NAACP still
assert that Planned Parenthood is a detriment to Blacks:
He [Greenlee] said that Planned Parenthood coerced disadvan-
taged black people to employ birth control by sending workers
door-to-door until women feel they are forced to go to a clinic.
I don’t oppose contraceptives per se, but I’m against this “Pill-
pushing” in black neighborhoods where many people are made
to feel that they’d better obey official suggestions’ to visit a birth
control clinic or risk losing their monthly welfare checks.12
Dr. Greenlee is not alone in his assessment of the politics of contracep-

tion and its relationship to Black communities.13 Both the mainstream
middle class Black reformist organizations as well as the grassroots
working class Black radical organizations agreed, that the Negro
Project and Planned Parenthood are indeed suspect. As a result, though
Dr. Greenlee effectively recants his charge of ‘genocide,’ the Black
media picked up on the term and continues to use it widely in con-
nection with Planned Parenthood, the eugenics movement, and the
Negro Project.
Loretta J. Ross’ 1993 “African-American Women and Abortion:
1880–1970” states that “birth control advocacy quickly becomes a tool
of racists who argued in favor of eugenics, or other population control
policies, based on fears of African-Americans and others thought to
be ‘undesirable’ to the politically powerful.”14 Ross depicts her own
personal history of fighting social stereotyping of Black women’s sexu-
ality. She describes, “doctors’ diagnoses of African-American women
[that] were distorted with theories of diseases brought back by soldiers
returning from Vietnam.”15 Ross’ personal analysis then shifts to ref lec-
tions on her own experiences as a Black woman seeking contraceptive
and reproductive care during the electronic age, stating, “My pelvic
infection from the IUD is treated as a mysterious venereal disease.
I wondered who really controlled my body.”16 Ross’ analysis reveals
the affects of regulating private reproductive decisions and begs us to
acknowledge the personal impact on Black women of the period.
According to the 2005 documentary film, The Pill, that illustrates
the origin and life of the birth control pill, Black women are in general
agreement with Black organizations and Black media regarding the

128 A Brand New Day
political undertones of the Negro project. However, according to the
documentary, when faced with the choice of taking a political stance
against genocidal mistreatment or having the freedom that comes with
the pill—as do the majority of women around the United States—they
choose contraception.17
Birthing the Image of the Pathological
Matriarch (1975–1995)
Painted in the image of a poor single mother with several children

and no male partner, the Black woman in this period is imagined as a
moral and financial drain on her own community as well as the nation.
Her perceived promiscuity is only matched by her allegedly aggressive
nature and therefore, she is only able to seduce men long enough to get
pregnant, but fails to have the ability to keep him involved in her and
her children’s lives. Her children are portrayed as unkempt and poorly
cared for; learning more from the harsh and unforgiving city streets
than from his/her Black mother and absent father. This imagined home
life is believed to be the start of a cycle, referenced as a culture of
poverty by some and an underclass by others.18 These allegedly inad-
equately parented children grow into adult Black men and women who
struggle to become constructive members of society. These generations
of Blacks are believed to be the most in need of reform.
Crack
Broadly labeling Black women as drug addicts in an era overwhelmed

with addiction brings to mind the onset of the U.S. AIDS epidemic.
Though the disease couldn’t possibly have set its sights on any one
population, the nation becomes convinced that it is a “gay plague.”
Hopefully you are equally appalled by such a foul and ignorant reaction
to an illness that, let’s face it, can impact any of us at any time. And no
matter: our nation; our gender; our race; our class; our religion; or our
sexual orientation; the sickness would have the same detrimental effect
on any of our lives.
Similarly, in the same period, characterized by excess and partying
on the one hand and severe economic depression on the other, it seems
the nation meets in the middle and becomes addicted to drugs. It first

reveals itself in Black communities, but over the generations has come
to show itself as an equal opportunity addiction. Cheap, accessible, and
powerfully addictive, no one could have known the impact this drug
would have on society. Theft; overdose; prostitution; mental illness;
vagrancy; and worst of all crack babies. Though these are all monu-
mental social problems, one wonders why these same things cannot be
said for Crystal meth in the 1990s or Oxycontin in the millennium;
or for that matter powder cocaine. The same is not said because the
social rhetoric around crack cocaine has created a stigma around the
user and the offspring of the user that has never before been applied to
another population.
Reformist Response
The primary focus of this work is certainly on Black sexuality and

reproduction. However it must be noted that significant changes in
the prison industrial complex begin to emerge in this policy period.
This same period that experiences a meaningful shift in the nation’s
response to Black women and Black reproduction and motherhood,
also begins to envision Blackness differently. As the prison industrial
complex evolves from a reformist endeavor into a punitive approach to
crime, so does the social climate regarding Blacks; Black women; and
Black reproduction. No longer the innocent simpletons, they had been
perceived as during the slave era; nor even the rural farm laborer of the
first half of the century. Blacks have now permeated every aspect of
American industrial society, standing up and demanding to be noticed,
no doubt vexing much of White America.
Blacks are now perceived as spreading their so-called pathology and
fears erupt about the relationships with the White children with whom
Table 11.2 Snapshot of social response to rhetoric campaigns in era of global capitalism in the
electronic age (1975–1995)
Reformist Social Response Believes nation need to returns to “family values”

Nation feels responsible for “epidemics” that are
“destroying” America
Believes nation must reevaluate the social safety net
that has allowed blacks

130 A Brand New Day
they now attend school. Perceived as taking over the cities and infil-
trating the youth culture, Americans look toward reforming the Black
population. Unlike the Reconstruction period of the previous century,
the goals of this reform period are rooted in controlling Blacks, rather
than integrating them into White society. Whites perceive Blacks as
overrunning city streets and changing the face of the nation, and there-
fore take their reformist stance seriously.
As it grows increasingly apparent that Blacks no longer fear express-
ing their discontent, be it on television; through music; in their
writings; or in person, the state becomes increasingly focused on con-
trolling their behavior. Tools employed to control pathological Blacks
in the period include: increased incarceration; the growth of a child
welfare industry; assaults on welfare programming; and increasing
sterilization efforts.19

CH A P T E R T W E LV E
She’s Out of Control: Controlling

Population Control Policies
One meaningful result of the dissent that follows the postwar era is the
introduction of oral contraceptives in the 1960s and 1970s. In explor-
ing the road to the pill, it is impossible to ignore the hypocrisy of
the national emphasis on securing reproductive freedoms for White
women while establishing fertility control for “other” populations.
According to Angela Davis’ 1983 Women, Race, & Class, Depo-
Provera—a test drug in 1973—is in use in U.S. hospitals. Though a test
drug it is dispensed to third world; poor; illiterate; and Black women
and girls as young as twelve years old in efforts to curb undesirable
reproduction. Through animal testing on monkeys and dogs it is dis-
covered that the drug is carcinogenic. Wanting to continue to inhibit
the reproduction of these undesirable populations; health administra-
tors resort to far more drastic measures. They begin invoking the states
longstanding eugenics policies as justification for sterilizing women and
girls, often with neither their permission nor their knowledge. In one
instance, the Montgomery Community Action Committee orders the
sterilization of two sisters, one twelve and one fourteen, after coercing
their illiterate mother into signing a consent form with the mark of
an “X.”1
In the aftermath of the publicity exposing the Relf sisters’ case,

similar episodes were brought to light. In Montgomery alone,
eleven girls, also in their teens, had been similarly sterilized.

132 A Brand New Day
HEW-funded birth control clinics in other states, as it turned out,
had also subjected young girls to sterilization abuse.2
According to Davis, “Moreover, individual women came forth with
equally outrageous stories [including threats] to discontinue . . . welfare
payments [without] surgical sterilization . . . [and being told that the
permanent surgical sterilization procedure] would be temporary.”3
Eventually, the mandatory sterilization laws are repealed in the
mid-1970s, having survived for over seventy years; however not before
over 70,000 court-mandated surgical sterilizations are performed.4
Rickie Solinger’s 2000 Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race
before Roe v. Wade examines women’s reproductive policy from both
an economic and historical perspective. Solinger focuses on the post-
war period from 1945 to 1965; highlighting the growth of dissimilar
views of White and Black reproduction as the nation moves into the
Civil Rights era. According to Solinger, even in the years following
the end of compulsory sterilizations, the practice continues to dog
Black women:
Even without state laws or a national, public mandate for steril-
ization of black women who had illegitimate babies, the practice
of this form of population control remained a part of the de facto
race-specific population policy of some states.5
As illustrated in table 12.1, Black women become perceived as a genu-
ine threat that needs to be controlled. These efforts to control Black
populations become more and more dangerous for Black women as
reproductive policies and practices become more adamantly anti-Black
reproduction, as outlined in table 12.2. No longer relegated to special
programs or court cases, the sterilization of Black women becomes a
common occurrence at inner city hospitals. The eugenics movement
remains a strong force within the United States—aimed primarily at
Black women—through the mid-1970s:
Fannie Lou Hamer [Black female activist] created a big stir when
she was quoted in the Washington Post to the effect that “six out
of every ten women were taken to Sunf lower City Hospital to be
sterilized for no reason at all. Often the women were not told that
they had been sterilized until they were released from the hospi-
tal.” . . . She was never effectively refuted.6
Concerns for Black women’s reproductive health and freedoms become
so intense in Black communities that various forms of community level

Controlling Reproductive Policies 133
Table 12.1 Themes of social rhetoric in the era of global capitalism in electronic age from
1996–2009
Theme of Social Rhetoric Representation of Conniving Welfare Queen

1996–2009
Single-mother “Epidemic” See Black women as part of an epidemic of irresponsible
indiscriminate mothering of children without fathers
Teen Mother “Epidemic” See Black teens, particularly girls, as part of an epidemic
of teen pregnancies
Black Mothers are Irresponsible Depicted as lazy, abusive, and neglectful mothers
and Childlike
Black Motherhood is a Tool of Perceived as using pregnancy and childbirth as a scheme
Manipulation to manipulate the State into financing their lifestyle
Black Motherhood Leads to Imagined as the root cause of the overwhelmed prison
Overwhelmed Prison System system, as Black women are portrayed as poor mothers
who are unable or unwilling to maintain a two parent
household, thus leaving Black sons to run wild.
Table 12.2 Examples of relevant policies in the era of global capitalism in the electronic age
from 1975–1995
Influential Policies of the Global Era in the Characteristics of Influential Policies of the Global Era in
Electronic Age the Electronic Age
Post-Civil Rights Backlash to Civil Rights gains made by Blacks

Depo-Provera Medical trials Medical Trials of long-acting contraception on inner
city girls; dogs; and monkeys
Short Term Chemical Sterilization Introduction of long-acting injection and
implantation contraception
Weakening of Social Contract Welfare reform debate sees New Deal Reform
policies in danger
State Sponsored contraception State medical centers pay to insert long-acting
contraceptive devices-removal is not an option
War on Poverty Initiated national discussion of how to fix the
“problem” of the inner city-term is first coined by
Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964
War on Drugs Criminalization of drug addiction for Black
mothers/having drug affected babies-term is first
coined by Richard M. Nixon in 1971
organizing rises up around the issue. Black Consciousness and Black

Power organizations; historically dismissive of women’s issues even
begin to warn Black women of the dangers of forced and coercive
sterilization. A pamphlet is produced and widely circulated in 1968
with three articles debating the situation of black female reproductive

134 A Brand New Day
freedoms in the United States.7 The language of the pamphlet is clearly
one of alarm. There is a growing concern that black women are being
used in the fight for reproductive freedoms, but will be the victims of
its successes.
Eventually the monumental technological advances in the field of
reproductive technology, along with the legalization of contraception
in 1960; and the wide availability of the pill beginning in 1972; and the
decriminalization of abortion in 1973, replace this antiquated system of
forced sterilization.8 Long-acting contraception begins being distrib-
uted through state-funded facilities in urban centers, even before FDA
approval, including: intrauterine devices (both the traditional and cop-
per IUD); depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (Depo-Provera); proges-
tin levonorgestrel implants (Norplant); and more recently Ortho-Evra
(The Patch).9 New reproductive technologies also refine the previously
“reversible” surgical sterilization, ensuring the permanency of the
steril ization procedure.10
Early Methods of “Welfare Reform”
As discussed throughout this study, along with the advances in repro-

ductive rights in the 1970s comes a torrent of previously ignored steril-
ization abuses against Black women. Black women receiving welfare
benefits are subjected to horrific abuses at the hands of the system
designed to aid them in their times of need. The government agencies
have such power over the women’s private lives that they actually dic-
tate that women receiving benefits are legally mandated not to engage
in extramarital relationships with men. If they do, it is presumed that
he could assume responsibility for the woman and her child(ren), and
she will be discontinued from public assistance. If a woman is dis-
covered in a relationship with a man, then any efforts she makes to
consume services are tantamount to fraud in the eyes of the law. To that
end, beginning in the 1950s and lasting well into the 1980s, policies
implemented forcing welfare recipients, almost always Black female
recipients, to endure “midnight raids.”11 These raids force her “to allow
agents into her home at any time, day or night, to check for a man,
or she would jeopardize her welfare allotment.”12 These statutes exist
across the nation, in locations as varied as New York and Arizona. In
fact, Phoenix, Arizona, carries along reporters on their midnight raids,
dubbed “a ‘pre-dawn safari’ to emphasize the African connection.”13

Controlling Reproductive Policies 135
Included in economy-minded state and local welfare policies were
provisions for sterilization and for midnight raids on the homes of
unwed ADC mothers. Both provisions, of course, allowed for the
violation of the personal safety and physical integrity of the black
woman’s body.14
Child Welfare Industry
Along with an explosion of rhetoric that degrades Black women’s

sexuality and reproductive rights, the period from 1975 to 1995 sees
the implementation of an assault on Black motherhood as well. Black
women perceived as being in dire need of reform, see the contemporary
child welfare industry begin to take root. Black mothers are inundated
with claims of abuse and neglect. No longer allowed to resolve per-
sonal issues through private family intervention, Black women are ten
times more apt than White women to be turned in to authorities for
consuming drugs or alcohol during pregnancy. This even though there
is no discernable difference in the prevalence of substance abuse by
pregnant Black women than there is for White women.15 This period
sees Black women’s parenting become a punishable offense within the
social justice system.16 Before World War II less than a quarter of all
child welfare facilities admit Black children. More often than not a
parentless Black child is deemed a delinquency problem and thrown in
prison, rather than taken in by the state. Until a 1973 lawsuit demands
change, the child welfare system remains deeply segregated, typically
leaving Black families to resolve parenting concerns from within the
confines of extended relatives. Between 1980 and 1999 the number of
children within the child welfare system absolutely explodes placing
over half of a million youth in custody. And though Black children
make up less than one quarter of the national youth population, they
constitute a whopping 43 percent of children in care.17 In 1999, this is
238,560 Black children who have been removed from their parents’
custody and have been involuntarily placed in the home of a subsidized
guardian—someone who is paid to take care of them. This industry
continues to expand throughout this period and into the next, with
the racial and class demographics growing increasingly more and more
visible. Further, the implication that Blacks, particularly black women,
cannot or will not take care of their own children, will haunt Blacks
into the next millennium.


CH A P T E R T H I RT E E N
Vilifying Black Motherhood
The theory of the Black matriarchy discussed earlier leads into later
conceptualizations of a Black “underclass” that would persist into the
next millennium.1 William Julius Wilson, for instance, reaches back
to the Moynihan Report to argue a similar pathology, arguing that a
ghetto mentality quickly develops into a ghetto culture for this Black
underclass.2 Wilson’s analysis is socially damning. And were he not
so adamantly opposed to what he refers to as liberal researchers’ and
theorists’ perspectives on race/racism, one could very well perceive
his exploration of a so-called underclass as a contemporary revisioning
of Marx’s classic lumpen proletariat. Though he aggressively denies it,
Wilson’s theory of the underclass could be perceived as a reinterpre-
tation of Marx’s historic class analysis. This could have been readily
achieved by transfusing Marx’s class analysis with Frantz Fanon’s varia-
tion, which interweaves Marx’s theory with the ravaging impacts of
colonization along with contemporary critical race theory.
However, rather than presenting this analysis within this enduring
historical context, it is presented as further “proof ” that poor Blacks
are a detriment to the American way. The so-called underclass culture
described by Wilson includes: teen parenting, drug abuse, crime, poor
work ethic, et cetera. Capitalizing on these images, the United States
government, now backed by traditional sciences, social sciences, and
public opinion, devotes itself to a war on crime and a war on drugs. The
focus on the notion of the welfare queen, and the reinvigorated rhetoric
inciting fear of an explosion of Black reproduction, with oft invoked
media references to an epidemic of crack babies, is a direct attack on the
perennial Black matriarch. As a result, over the last forty years since: the
legalization of abortion; Civil Rights; and technological advancements

138 A Brand New Day
in birth control devices, Black women have continued to be at the
epicenter of a debate on immorality and irresponsibility.
Throughout the period, Black and White women continue to exist
within two different Americas. Reproductive technology for White
women means, “designer babies,” being able to have children later in
life; more opportunities to become a mother; and to have as many
children as science allows.3 While reproductive technology for Black
women in the United States is reduced to efforts to reduce perceived
fiscal and social burden. Thus leading Black reproductive technology
to explore methods to slow population growth through perfecting
birth control and sterilization procedures, so as to offset the financial
and social pressures caused by the welfare system.
Dorothy Roberts’ 1997 Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and
the Meaning of Liberty offers a historical, economic, and political analysis
of the history of regulating Black women’s reproduction in the United
States. Roberts also explores the welfare reform debate that occurs over
the decade before welfare reform becomes a reality. Within this analy-
sis Roberts draws an ongoing historical connection between Black
women’s reproduction and the U.S. political economy. Roberts states
that the late twentieth century sees “an explosion of propaganda and
policies that degrade Black women’s reproductive decisions.” 4 Roberts
further asserts that this “wave of reproductive regulation” is fundamen-
tally rooted in the historical pattern of subjugation and control of Black
women’s bodies and choices for the purposes of economic gain.5
Creating the Image of the Conniving

Welfare Queen (1996–2009)
As the nation watches poorer classes of Black America descend deeper

and deeper into poverty, drugs, and ghettoization, Black women are
treated as the scapegoat at every turn. Perceived as manipulative and
pathological in the early years of Civil Rights, she later becomes a
malicious blight on society. Seen as a drain on resources, she is imag-
ined to be so amoral and heartless that she would go so far as to have
an illegitimate child for the sake of garnering a larger welfare check.
This fear of abuses by the Black woman has been cited ad nauseam as a
justification for welfare “reforms”:
. . . women’s rights to reproductive freedom which to [the National

Welfare Rights Organization] meant their right to have children.
The stereotype of the welfare mother whose libido and fertility

Vilifying Black Motherhood 139
were out of control had potentially severe consequences for poor
black women during these years when the Pill and other devices
revolutionized birth control. In the nineteenth century, when
white men controlled black fecundity, they manipulated the
enslaved women’s childbearing to maximize their profits. Now,
there were many who thought it would better profit the nation if
they could limit the number of children poor black women had.6
No longer the ignorant savages of yesterday; Black women are envi-

sioned as savvy and manipulative products of generations of failing
Black women. This is a significant shift in the perception of Black
womanhood that is felt at every level of the Black community. With the
condemnation of Black women’s abilities to parent Black children; her
perceived ineffectuality in interpersonal relationships with Black men;
and her supposedly antagonistic nature; the belief that both Black men
and Black women would require even more regulation of both their
public and private behaviors becomes a plausible conclusion. With the
numbers of Black men being incarcerated growing exponentially, many
fingers point in judgment of the so-called failings of Black mothers and
wives, rather than at a system rife with institutionalized racism. Where
previous generations of white America had unsuccessfully attempted
to restrict and control Black reproduction, the current policy period
seeks to compel the Black woman to control Black reproduction herself
through coercive policies.
Punitive Response
In reviewing this policy period the negative social rhetoric surrounding Blacks
serves as the incentive needed to urge American society forward from the drive to
reform Blacks to the need to punish them. It is no accident that the vigorous
Table 13.1 Snapshot of social response to rhetoric campaigns in the era of global capitalism in
the electronic age (1996–2009)
Punitive Social Response Believe Black mothers need to be trained to be members of

society
Equates Black motherhood with welfare and various epidemics
Believes Black mothers must be forced off of welfare and made
to work as contributing members of society
Criminalizes Black motherhood

140 A Brand New Day
growth of the prison industrial complex begins in the period immedi-
ately following the final years of the Civil Rights movement, nor that
its growth coincides with a media blitz assaulting Black women and
the Black family. During this same period we see the explosion of a
booming prison industry that develops into the overpopulated prison
industrial complex that continues to increase its rolls at alarming rates
even today.
In a state of expansion for over thirty years, by midyear 2006 the
United States can claim that one in nine Black men between the ages
of twenty and thirty-four are currently behind bars in some fashion,
whether in local jails or federal prisons. As compared to only one in 106
White men over the age of eighteen incarcerated in the same period.
This same punitive agenda leads to one in one hundred Black women
between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine being held behind bars
as of midyear 2006, compared to only one in 355 White women also
aged thirty-five to thirty-nine who are incarcerated at midyear 2006.7
These statistics point to what Angela Davis contextualizes as a socially
constructed racialized fear of crime.8 She quite astutely asserts that, just as
the fears of communism had previously consumed the first half of the
twentieth century; a socially constructed war on crime has been meticu-
lously invented in its place. These fears have been driven by decades of
social rhetoric designed to instill fear, panic, and dread of Blackness in
White America. This rhetoric is so deeply ingrained, that though the
disparities are evident and the inhumanity clear the prison populations
continue to grow. While new technologies are constantly being revo-
lutionized: to fortify the prisons; add so-called security measures to the
streets; and to maintain control of ex-offenders; the nation continues to
passively allow the prison industry to make billions of dollars in profit.9
Beyond the tragedy of the growth of the prison industrial complex,
these efforts at punishing Blacks further include the development of
controlling reproductive and parenting policies and practices that con-
tinue to degrade Black women’s reproductive rights to this day.

CH A P T E R FOU RT E E N
Gettin’ Your Tubes Tied: Coercive

Policies of the electronic age are first controlling and then coercive in
the state’s efforts to manipulate Black reproduction. Table 14.1 illus-
trates the efforts to control Black reproduction as both a labor force and
as a reproductive force come in the form of the welfare reform debate.
After years of perfecting reproductive technology through testing con-
traceptives and procedures in poor; Black; and Latina(o) communities,
the state implements programming to subsidize long-acting birth con-
trol devices. Often, these devices place these women in dire medical
situations, as the state provides subsidized implantation; yet charges
exorbitant fees for the removal of the device. As a result, a significant
percentage of inner city and third world women are left at the mercy
of health care providers in state sponsored facilities. This sort of decep-
tive programming signals the state’s transition from covert methods of
controlling Black and other marginalized populations’ reproduction,
to efforts to actively coerce Black women into voluntarily sterilizing
themselves, either through permanent surgery or through long-acting
barrier and chemical sterilization procedures, such as the copper IUD,
Norplant, and Depo-Provera.
Grassroots Organizing for Reproductive Freedoms
Unsupported by White women’s liberation movements in the struggles

against these violations, Black women are forced to form organizations
of their own to help safeguard against sterilization of black women.1
Though Black and White women’s organizations make efforts to ban

142 A Brand New Day
Table 14.1 Examples of relevant policies in the era of global capitalism in the electronic age
(1996–2009)
Influential Policies of the Global Era Characteristics of Influential Policies of the Global Era in the
in the Electronic Age Electronic Age
Welfare Reform Period after initiation of welfare reform ushers in the

period after the dissolution of the Social Contract
State Sponsored Short Chemical Cash incentives for long-acting & permanent
Sterilization contraception
“No Child Left Behind” State sanctions policies to “save” inner city America—
euphemism for Black youth
State Sponsored Permanent Sterilization of Black mothers under 21 standard
Surgical Sterilization protocol
War on Poverty Criminalizes poverty as an exploitative effort to extort
money from the government
War on Drugs Continues to criminalize drug addiction for Black
mothers/having drug affected babies
together politically in the 1970s—their agendas are so disparate that

Black women remain leery of White women’s historic reproductive
rights struggles:
The failure of the abortion rights campaign to conduct a histor-

ical self evaluation led to a dangerously superficial appraisal of
Black people’s suspicious attitudes toward birth control in general.
Granted, when some Black people unhesitatingly equated birth
control with genocide, it did appear to be an exaggerated—even
paranoiac—reaction. Yet white abortion rights activists missed a
profound message, for underlying these cries of genocide were
important clues about the history of the birth control movement.
This movement, for example, had been known to advocate invol-
untary sterilization-a racist form of mass “birth control.”2
Welfare Reform in the Neoliberal Era
With the media so closely associating Black women with the frightful
drug and poverty “epidemics” sweeping the nation, the disdain for
Black reproduction reaches astounding new heights in the late 1980s,
as illustrated in table 14.2.3 The climate is ripe for a new approach to
welfare reform. This new assessment of an old issue moves beyond identi-
fying Black women as the problem and blaming Black women for their

Controlling Nature of Social Type of Policy Characteristics of

Reproductive Economy Response Controlling Reproductive
Policies in Age of 1975–1995 1975–1995 Policies in Age of Global
Global Capitalism Capitalism in the
in the Electronic Era Electronic era
Welfare Reform • Expansion Reformist Controlling • Begins to weaken the
Debate • Contraction • Heal Black policies strength of social
• Recession pathology • Force Black contract
• Hi technology women to pay • Stigmatizes people
• Low labor own way who receive Public
demand • Save Assistance
• Global labor government • “Midnight Raids”
force funds • Criminalizes dating
for single Black
mothers
Medical Trials of • Expansion Reformist Controlling • Test long-acting
Long-acting • Contraction • Heal Black protocols contraception in state
Contraception in • Recession pathology • Force Black facilities in urban
State-funded • Hi technology women to use centers that primarily
Facilities • Low labor contraception service poor Blacks.
demand • Save • Administer
• Global labor government contraception that has
force funds for yet to gain FDA
future children approval
• Practice drugs on
poor Blacks
State-sponsored • Expansion Reformist Controlling • Family cap
Long-term • Contraction • Heal Black protocols • Families leaving
Contraception • Recession pathology • Force Black welfare
• Hi technology women to use • Healthy marriage
• Low labor contraception initiatives
demand • Save • Responsible
• Global labor government Fatherhood initiatives
force funds for • Working for welfare
future children eligibility
• Parenting training
Growth of Child • Expansion Reformist Controlling • Explosion of Blacks in
Welfare Industry • Contraction • Heal Black protocols care
• Recession pathology • Force Black • Blacks 10 times more
• Hi technology women to use likely to be reported
• Low labor contraception • Criminalization of
demand • Save drug addicted parents.
• Global labor government • Forced parenting
force funds for Training
future children

144 A Brand New Day
reproduction. Instead, the state; reminiscent of the White man’s burden
of a century before; claims a responsibility to train Black women how
to become contributing members of society. This means she must be
taught to take financial responsibility for her own children and earn her
right to a public safety net, by working in the wage labor system. This
is of course ironic, as Black women have historically been significant
assets to the U.S. labor system, as both slave and wage laborers.
As a threat to illustrate how serious the state’s ultimatum truly is,
welfare recipients are suddenly dropped from the rolls of a number of
states across the nation at dramatic rates beginning in the early 1990s.4
The small percentage allowed to regain access to some form of ben-
efit assistance are now required to participate in degrading programs
such as earnfare; workfirst; and Wisconsin Works. Under such programs the
recipient is required to provide free labor to an employer as a means to
pay back the cost of the monthly food stamp allotment. Upon fulfilling
the debt, the employee or welfare recipient or involuntary indentured
servant, depending on one’s perspective, is free to earn more money,
providing it falls within the miniscule parameters of allowable income;
often less than $50 for up to thirty-five hours of work.
Beyond the attack on the “work-ethic” of welfare recipients, the state
also focuses on its “moral” concerns. The state finds common lifestyle
choices and social circumstances, such as: extra-marital cohabitation;
pre-marital sex; single motherhood; and teen pregnancy, as intolerable
abuses of the welfare system. As, such the U.S. government, with a
falsely righteous indignation, strips away the social contract meant to
support American families, leaving in its place radical policies that pro-
tect the ongoing interests of neoliberal America. Now instead of forced
sterilization, the state offers cash incentives to the same populations
previously documented as undesirable, paying them to take long-acting
birth control voluntarily. Black women with drug addictions are coerced
into permanent surgical and short term chemical sterilization as well as
long-acting birth control procedures through threats of imprisonment
and the loss of their children. Now, fully exploited and left no discern-
able sense of dignity or privacy, welfare recipients numbers begin to
decline dramatically.5
Current Status of Black Female Surgical

Sterilization (1996–2009)
Beyond the devastating effects of welfare reform on Black women’s lives

and reproductive options, sterilization continues to disproportionately

Coercive Reproductive Policies 145
affect Black women’s reproduction, as illustrated in table 14.3. More
than one hundred years since the first eugenics-based sterilizations in
the United States, Black women continue to be the most inclined to
use permanent female surgical sterilization as their means of birth con-
trol, as is commonly advised by their community healthcare provid-
ers. By 2002, 17 percent, or 10.3 million, of women aged fifteen to
forty-four (who use contraception), receive permanent female surgical
sterilizations.6
According to a 2004 report from the National Center for Health
Statistics, up to 4 percent of women receiving female surgical steriliza-
tions are only between the ages of twenty to twenty-four years old.
Though ostensibly a relatively small number, 4 percent of the second
leading form of contraception is over 400,000 sterilizations performed
on women as young as 20 years old every year. Further, the 22 percent
or over 2.2 million women receiving the highest number of steriliza-
tions annually are Black; followed closely by Hispanic women, with
20 percent or over 2 million permanent surgical sterilizations per year.
Though Blacks and Hispanics of all races and genders combined only
constitute one quarter of the U.S. population, together they account for
nearly half of all female surgical sterilizations.7
For years little data had been collected that could address the extent to
which these sterilizations have been voluntary, coerced, and/or forced.
However, per the National Center for Health Statistics, as of 2002,
White non-Hispanic women, who have received a family planning
service in the past 12 months, experience the lowest rates of steriliza-
tion counseling and procedures from their health care providers. This
compared to Black women being counseled more than 1⅓ percent more
often than White women, and to Hispanic women, who experience
sterilization counseling at nearly twice the rate of White women.
Reminiscent of the early years of eugenic sterilization programs, the
overwhelming majority of women receiving surgical sterilizations have
little education. As over half of twenty-two- to twenty-four-year-old
women using female surgical sterilization, are not even high school
graduates. A vast number of women having surgical sterilizations are
living at or below the poverty line. And though the data do not cur-
rently offer the combined statistics of age, parity, educational attain-
ment, and race it is a valid assumption, based on the data that do exist
that the majority of women receiving female surgical sterilizations in
the United States are poorer Black women under the age of 24, with
little education.
Arguably, ongoing efforts to vilify and criminalize Black reproduc-
tion have proven somewhat successful as Black women themselves

Coercive Reproductive Policies Nature of Economy Social Response 1996–2009 Type of Policy Characteristics of Coercive Reproductive
in Age of Global Capitalism 1996–2009 Policies in Age of Global Capitalism in the
in the Electronic Era Electronic Era
Sterilization of Mothers • Expansion for wealthier

Conniving Black mothers Coercive Protocol • Standard to approach girls at statistically
Under 21 with Multiple • Contraction for poorerrequire Punitive response • To keep Black girls most vulnerable period-directly after
Children • Hi technology • Punish Black girls/women from having more childbirth
• Low labor demand for being sexually active children • No longer “reversible”
• Global labor force • Punish Black girls for • Save government funds • Procedure subsidized by the State
having multiple children for future children • Waive parental consent for girls under 18
Cash Incentives for • Expansion for wealthier Conniving Black mothers/ Coercive Policy • Standard within state-sponsored
Long-acting/permanent • Contraction for poorer girls require covert/ • To avoid new children institutions, i.e., foster care; board of
Contraception • Hi technology proactively punitive response in need of government health facilities; Medicaid services
• Low labor demand • Punish Black girls “crimes” funding • Attached to welfare benefits
• Global labor force not yet committed • Save government funds • Over 40% of female surgical
• Punish Black girls for being for future children sterilizations are on Black women.
sexually active
Welfare Reform • Expansion for wealthier Conniving Black mothers Coercive Act • Family cap
• Contraction for poorer require punitive response • To force poor off of
• Families leaving welfare
• Hi technology • Punish Black women for Public Assistance• Healthy marriage initiatives
• Low labor demand needing Public Assistance • Save government funds
• Responsible Fatherhood initiatives
• Global labor force • Working for welfare eligibility
• Parenting training
Expansion of Child • Expansion for wealthier Conniving Black mothers/ Coercive Policy • Increasing Numbers of Black youth
Welfare Industry • Contraction for poorer girls require covert/ • To avoid new children • Criminalization of drug addicted
• Hi technology proactively punitive response in need of government parents.
• Low labor demand • Punish Black girls “crimes” funding • Reduced efforts to return children home
• Global labor force not yet committed • Save government funds • Increased efforts to place for adoption
• Punish Black girls for being for future children and guardianship
sexually active • Privatization

are consenting to permanent surgical sterilizations at alarming rates.
Whether this trend is a result of coercive policies—that threaten wel-
fare eligibility, criminalize poor and drug-addicted mothers, or pay
cash incentives—or if this is simply Black women’s reproductive choice
is questionable given the historical and current climate of institutional
attacks on Black reproduction. Either way, sterilization remains the
number one method of contraception among Black women using con-
traceptive methods, with them receiving over one-fourth of surgical
sterilizations annually—up 10 percent since 1982.8
In trying to decipher the reason for such a large percentage of Black
and Hispanic women receiving surgical sterilizations; one might turn
to the state-sponsored healthcare providers which continue to employ
century-old policies and procedures that discourage nonwhite repro-
duction and encourage poor and “minority” sterilization. For instance
an organization called, Salud Chicago, offers a Web site with information
about Hispanic women receiving a tubal ligation procedure.9 The site
claims that though the procedure is considered permanent, 50–80 per-
cent of the time it can be successfully reversed. The site fails to state
that only 1–2 percent of women who have been sterilized are medi-
cally cleared to attempt a reversal.10 The site assures Hispanic women
that life changes that may impact their decision, such as remarriage or
divorce, should not be of concern as they can likely have the procedure
reversed. Only a passing reference is made to the necessity of hiring, a
costly and often difficult to find, tubal ligation reversal specialist.
Other similarly coercive and misleading abuses occur as well. In
many urban centers it is local policy to offer young women less than
twenty one years of age free tubal ligation services, if they have had
multiple children. Several studies have determined that women are
more inclined to regret having the procedure performed when they: are
under thirty years of age; have the procedure performed immediately
after childbirth; and when they are unmarried or in a relationship with
significant conf lict.11 Teenage mothers tend not to be married, nor in
stable relationships. Many state funded facilities consider it common
practice to offer sterilization procedures to these young women literally
moments after giving birth as a matter of economy and because they
may have some concern about the young girls exhibiting the respon-
sibility to return at a later date. Age is one of the most significant pre-
dictors of regret that has ever been researched.
Given all of these facts, it seems clear that the well-being of these
women of color is not paramount to this programming, if considered
at all. And though none of these policies claim specific focus on Black

148 A Brand New Day
or Latina women and girls, given their location and coded language
assigned them, they are clearly manifested as such. Again, reifying this
study’s assumption that reproductive freedom is not the same for all
women in the United States.
Child Welfare Industry
Eerily reminiscent of the prison industrial complex, the child welfare

industry disproportionately impacts Black youth and families. Like the
prison industry, the child welfare industry lays the blame of its rise, on
the Black family itself; with special consideration of the crisis of single
Black mothers. Having been considered the root of the pathology
of Blacks and the Black family for forty-five years, the child welfare
industry has taken up the cause to finally end the perceived crisis.
I am keenly aware of this industry as I spent five years working with
troubled youth in the child welfare system during the policy period
between 1996 and 2009. First I worked with runaways in California.
Then I worked with kids on probation and parole in Chicago. Some had
been in jail from the time they had been small children. Then I became
an emergency case manager for a prominent Chicago area child welfare
agency. The agency offered every service imaginable, they trained fos-
ter parents, they counseled children, they trained social workers—they
did it all. As an emergency worker, I was responsible for working with
youth whose home has been suddenly disrupted. Sometimes it is due to
having only just been taken away from their birth parents. Other times
it is because the foster parent they are assigned fails a home inspection.
And other times, actually, as heartbreaking as it is, the majority of the
time, the placement no longer wants the child.
I cannot count the number of times I rushed to work because the
office secretary had called and told me a foster parent had dumped a
child off at the front door of the agency when the doors opened. When
I’d arrive, the child would always be sitting, all of his or her worldly
belongings next to them in a trash bag, just waiting. Waiting for some-
one to take them to wherever they would sleep that night. I spent my
final year in the industry working as the case manager for a group
home for girls who themselves were current wards of the state, and had
children of their own in their care. The goal of the facility is to teach
the young girls how to parent, how to love, and how to take care of
themselves on their own. The girls all attended school and worked and
cared for their children with minimal assistance from the staff.

With a caseload that peaked at fifty-two, and changed every
ninety days, I worked with hundreds of families. Over five years, in
two states, three major cities, and countless suburbs, I only encoun-
tered three White families in the system—and these were the most
extreme cases that anyone in any of the facilities had ever witnessed.
One fifteen-year-old White client threw her one year old son off of a
third f loor back porch one Saturday afternoon because she had gone
off of her schizophrenia medication. Another White client would fall
into hysterics rather than be forced to have a supervised visit with his
mother, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, who often went off of her
meds, leaving the child in constant fear. This was contrary to my Black
clients, who often preferred their families with all their f laws to any
foster facility. I seldom experienced a Black family that had a history of
beating the children and I never once had a case against a Black family
that did not involve drugs and poverty.
In the years following welfare reform the private agencies that had
previously been used by the state to pick up a certain amount of over-
f low, were now to be employed as the full service provider. With this
push toward privatization the agency would begin to play both sides
of the fence, offering services to: the clients; that is, the children; the
foster parents; and the biological parents.
It was in this period that I learned the hard way that child welfare is a
business, not a service. I was working diligently to get a child returned
home, which according to the court is always the first plan of resolu-
tion. Both parents had attended every class; completed all their assigned
services; secured housing; done it all. They clearly loved each other and
their child and we all thought that we were progressing well. Until one
day my supervisor tells me I should start proceeding toward securing a
subsidized guardianship for the child in their current placement. I was
shocked and appalled. She had never mentioned this before. She knew
all too well how hard the family had been working and had no logical
reason to change the plans. I was later informed that due to budget cuts
and some high profile media snafus that implied poor performance, the
agency was in need of a financial boost. This boost would be earned by
obtaining the cash bonus it would receive when a long term guardian
was established for the child. This bonus would not be offered if the
child was returned home. The agency sought as many bonuses as pos-
sible during that 1998 fiscal year.
An entire industry has grown from the expansion of the business of
foster care in the 1980s and 1990s. And it is the children in the welfare
system—overwhelmingly Black—who have a price on their foreheads.

150 A Brand New Day
Emergency care youth are worth almost $300 per month by the year
2000; while treatment care youth (kids with physical and profound
psychological or emotional issues) are worth $355. The list of charges
and fees and stipends and bonuses goes on and on. Expanding well
beyond its youth in care numbers, the child welfare industry has staked
its claim as a business at every level. From: subsidized guardians; to
private agencies contracted by the state; to state oversight; to the court
systems; to substance abuse programs; to parenting class services; to
special education services and alternative schools; to adoptive parents—
there is money to be made on all sides.
Since 2006
Since 1997 an organization known as Project CRACK has paid 2,546

clients up to $500 each to be either surgically or chemically sterilized.12
According to their website, the mission of the program “is to reduce
the number of substance exposed births to zero.”13 In achieving this
goal they report considering all of the options. Per their own marketing
site, they even claim to have considered incarceration of potential par-
ents who are drug addicted and/or alcoholics. However, their website
further contends that in the end, the goal of the organization is most
“cost effective” and expeditiously achieved through sterilizing undesir-
able parents.14
Though not explicitly stated, with 99 percent of the program par-
ticipants being female, this program has clearly targeted women.15 And
though roughly only one third of their paid clients have been Black,
their adamant claims that they are not targeting African Americans
would at least appear valid, were the organization not so pointedly
named Project CRACK.16 Choosing to focus their sterilization efforts
on crack cocaine consumption, which has clearly been deemed a Black
problem; smacks of racism. Regardless of claims, through ad cam-
paigns; media exposure; and their website that the organization “targets
a behavior, not a racial demographic,” nearly three-fifths of their steril-
ized clients have been nonwhite—and at least half of them have been
Black.17 African Americans make up only approximately 12 percent of
the U.S. population, while Whites constitute a whopping 75 percent.
Further, among the approximately 6.3 million women of child bearing
age annually who require substance abuse treatment, only 7.8 percent
were African American between 2004 and 2006, while 10.7 percent of
women who were in need of substance abuse treatment between 2004

18
and 2006 were White. Given the national data and Project CRACK’S
own statistics, it seems evident that they are disproportionately servicing
Black communities and that it is no accident they have never called
themselves Project Crystal Meth or Project Oxycontin.19
Though they offer several temporary chemical contraceptive options,
Project CRACK is proudly responsible for permanently surgically ster-
ilizing nearly one thousand men and women since 1997, and they
continue to expand today. In fact at the time of this writing, the orga-
nization had established its services in 45 cities within 39 states across the
country, plus the District of Columbia, as well as an RV travelling cross
country, to promote their program. According to a local newspaper in
Harrisburg, PA,
A 30-foot RV covered with pictures of young women drinking

and doing drugs pulled into Harrisburg on Friday with a very clear
mission—give female drug addicts and alcoholics $300 if they will
get long-term birth control or undergo sterilization . . . The RV
itself if [sic] mainly a promotional vehicle. There is a picture of
a young girl drinking, another injecting drugs and there is the
image of an infant connected to medical tubes. On the back of
the RV, a sign reads, ‘She has her daddy’s eyes, and her mommy’s
addiction.’20
This mobile campaign seems to have proven very effective, as Project

CRACK added 446 paid clients to their records between 2007 and
2008 alone.
September 24, 2008—Louisiana state representative, John LaBruzzo
(R), member of the Committee on Health and Welfare, announces his
interest in pursuing research on a cash incentive program that will offer
$1,000 to poor women who elect to undergo permanent surgical steril-
ization. This same program would offer tax incentives to wealthier
families who opt to have babies.21 Reminiscent of April 30, 1991, when
the Shreveport Times reports that, then representative of LaBruzzo’s
current District 81, David Duke, had put forth a bill offering poorer
women an annual cash incentive to accept short term chemical steriliza-
tion, in the form of Norplant implantation.22 Unlike Duke, LaBruzzo
claims his interests in creating such a program are not at all race related.
Instead, he asserts that such a program is the only way to save us from
a future where our children are the minority forced to work, in order
to support the lazy masses, who suffer from a clear sense of entitlement
and refuse to take care of themselves.23

152 A Brand New Day
As it turns out—fortunately— by the time of this writing LaBruzzo
had decided against pursuing this particular sterilization program in
Louisiana. When asked why, he reports that upon further investiga-
tion, he had learned the state of Louisiana already offers free steriliza-
tion services to women receiving welfare benefits and feels that his
program would essentially duplicate the already available service. As
such, he does not feel that the program would be supported, financially
or otherwise. He further indicated that he has suffered some personal
moral and religious reservations. However, after discussing the matter
with his spiritual advisor, he still maintains that sterilization is a moral,
practical, and legitimate method of resolving the issue he refers to as
“generational welfare.”
Having abandoned the original sterilization idea, LaBruzzo con-
tends that something still needs to be done sooner rather than later as
“these people,” presumably Blacks, “start teaching children at a very
young age to start getting a check.”24 LaBruzzo was incredulous when
asked if his concerns were ultimately issues of poverty or issues of race.
He asserts that he will no longer bow to political correctness and that
he would state aloud what he believes we can all see. He went on to
proclaim that poorer Whites in rural Louisiana work hard to maintain
a two parent household and to convey appropriate morals and values to
their children. While these same morals, values, and work ethic, in his
estimation, do not exist in poorer Black urban communities. According
to LaBruzzo, the poorer Black and now, since Katrina, Latino popula-
tions in Louisiana, continue to grow in numbers and generate myriad
institutional problems, including: welfare fraud; young girls having
babies because, “they want to get a check”; welfare being an incentive
to keep having babies; failure of Black families to teach, “values morals
and a system of achieving”; and Blacks’ refusal to value education.
LaBruzzo reports that his assertions are clearly evidenced by the cur-
rent condition of urban Blacks in New Orleans. As such, though that
specific sterilization plan has been scrapped for the time being, he fur-
ther reports that he still has every intention of introducing as many as
five (5) pieces of legislation to address his concerns about Black women
on welfare in Louisiana. As representative to the nearly all-White dis-
trict 81, LaBruzzo asserts that he has heard from his constituency and
there is overwhelming support for him to take action.25
January 6, 2009—Ann Coulter releases, Guilty: Liberal Victims and
Their Assault on America. The professed purpose of the book is to expose
the ways in which some members of society portray themselves as
victims in order to access opportunities; while, according to Coulter,
actually victimizing the rest of America. To prove her point, Coulter

attacks Black politicians; Black actors; Black musicians; and the Black
proletariat. The release of the book, though cloaked in questionable
statistics and controversy, serves as an effort to sabotage the proud-
est moment in U.S. history to date—the inauguration of the nation’s
first Black president.26 Included within this text is a racist condemna-
tion of the new president. Claiming that she is critiquing political,
economic, and social issues, she in fact adds to the frenzy of nega-
tive social rhetoric about Blacks in the United States. Invoking every
fear middle class White America has ever held about successful Blacks
while simultaneously reifying every concern middle America has about
poorer struggling Blacks.
In one chapter of the book, “Victim of a Crime? Thank A Single
Mother”; Coulter highlights the social impacts of single motherhood.
In this discussion Coulter makes outright claims that single mothers
raise children who become the nation’s criminals—often even while
still juveniles. On a January 12, 2009 appearance on the talk show, The
View, Coulter insists her critique of single mothers is not a race-specific
assault. However, at best, the assertions of her book are misogynistic
and classist; and at worst, they are both misogynist; classist; and racist.
Her references to some people and single mothers who are the parents
of so-called criminals is typical of double speak employed to thinly
disguise overt racism. Coulter’s book only serves to breathe new life
into the old notion that the social crises: of the prison industrial com-
plex; sexual exploitation; drug addiction; and violent crimes, can all be
blamed on the failures of single Black mothers. As Black men occupy
the largest single population held in custody, and nearly half of the
more than one and a half million children with a father in prison are
Black; her reference to single mothers whose children end up in prison
clearly connotes Black women.27
Whether for political gain; for book sales; or in the supposed best
interest of Black women, the propaganda forwarded by the Ann
Coulter’s and the John LaBruzzo’s of this society only serve to mire
us deeper in the negative social rhetoric that has brought us to where
we are today. This social rhetoric has proven devastating to Blacks in
general, but specifically impact Black women.
Summary
In summary, the data show that Black labor becomes even less profit-
able in the latter years of the twentieth century, due to technological
advancements that exclude the unskilled worker and allow access to

154 A Brand New Day
a global labor force. The policy period between 1975 and 1995 sees
the nation experience cycles of expansion, contraction, and recession.
While the policy period between 1996 and 2009 sees expansion persist
for the wealthiest and contraction for the poorest. Technology contin-
ues to be at an all time high throughout both policy periods allowing
access to a global labor force. No longer in need of Black women’s
reproduction, the state harnesses new reproductive technologies, spon-
soring a number of programs that attempt to reform Black women and
control reproduction. These previously restrictive and controlling poli-
cies become proactively coercive, in the neoliberal period (1996–2009),
resulting in even stricter regulations on Black reproduction and leading
to shockingly high rates of female surgical sterilization among Black
women in the United States.

Further Readings
Abramovitz, Mimi. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the
Present, revised edition. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1996.
Albiston, Catherine. “The Social Meaning of the Norplant Condition: Constitutional
Considerations of Race, Class, and Gender.” In The Reproductive Rights Reader: Law,
Medicine, and the Construction of Motherhood, ed. Nancy Ehrenreich, pp. 275–287, New York:
New York University Press, 2008.
Anderson, Elijah. Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male (The City in the Twenty-first
Century). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Brinkley, Douglas. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf
Coast. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
Brown, Michael K. Race, Money, and the American Welfare State. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1999.
Cassidy, John. Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Its Money in the Internet Era. New York:
HarperCollins, 2002.
Chandra A. 1998. “Surgical Sterilization in the United States: Prevalence and Characteristics,
1965–95.” National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 23(20). http://www.cdc.gov/
reproductivehealth/WomensRH/PDF/sr23_20.pdf/.
Clarke, Richard. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York: Free Press,
2004.
Gordon L. “The Long Struggle for Reproductive Rights.” In Radical America 15: pp. 75–88,
1981.
Grown. Caren, Elissa Braunstein, and Anju Malhotra. Trading Women’s Health & Rights? Trade
Liberalization and Reproductive Health in Developing Economies. New York: Zed Books, 1997.
Holleran, Andrew. Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath. Philadelphia, PA: Da
Capo Press, 2008.
Hull, N.E.H. and Peter Charles Hoffer. Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in
American History (Landmark Law Cases and American Society). Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2001.
Joffe Carole. The Regulation of Sexuality. Health, Society, and Policy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
Jones, Jacqueline. American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1998.
Katz, Michael B. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1989.

156 A Brand New Day
Kindleberger, Charles P. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, fifth edition.
New York: Wiley, 2005.
Lawson Annette and Deborah L. Rhode (Eds.). The Politics of Pregnancy. Adolescent Sexuality and
Public Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Lewis, Oscar. “The Culture of Poverty.” Society 35(2): pp. 7–9, 2008.
McLaren, Angus. Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in
Past Times). Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.
Mink, Gwendolyn. Whose Welfare? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Noble, Charles. Welfare as We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State. New York:
Quadagno, Jill. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York:
Rif kin , Joel. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid For
Experience. New York,: Tarcher, 2001.
Roberts, Dorothy. “Making Reproduction a Crime.” In The Reproductive Rights Reader: Law,
Smith, Robert C. Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era: Now You See It, Now You Don’t. New York:
State University of New York Press, 1995.
The Pew Center on the States. “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008.” Washington, DC:
Pew Charitable Trusts, February 2008.
Tudge, Colin. The Impact of the Gene: From Mendel’s Peas to Designer Babies. New York: Hill and
Wang, 2002.
Williams, Lucy A. “The Ideology of Division: Behavior Modification Welfare Reform
Proposals.” In The Reproductive Rights Reader: Law, Medicine, and the Construction of Motherhood,
ed. Nancy Ehrenreich, pp. 288–295, New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York:
Vintage Books, 1997.
Woodward, Bob. Bush at War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
Woody, Bette. Black Women in the Workplace: Impacts of Structural Change in the Economy. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press,1992.
Zucchino, David. The Myth of the Welfare Queen. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

PA RT
5

Commodifying Black Reproduction

CH A P T E R F I F T E E N
Rationalizing Commodification
Though program names have changed and government language has

evolved the rights of citizens who have endured the harshest struggles
of American society continue to be attacked. Throughout history
Black women have often been relegated to the lowest economic and
social positions, as the State has made purposeful efforts to maintain
an economic and social divide between Black women and the rest of
American society.1 Weakened by poverty, drug addiction, lack of access
to education, and wealth-building opportunities, poorer Black women
remain the victims of sterilization abuse and other forms of neoliberal
oppressions.
And though a significant Black middle class has developed in the
United States, this does not negate the effectiveness of the determined
efforts of the State to rationalize its ongoing exploitation, restriction,
control, and manipulation of Black women. Consider the disgrace-
ful circumstances under which any such sterilization program, as
described in the previous chapter, could be implemented. Regardless
of who the organization targets: Whites; men; criminals—should it
matter? Wrenching away control of someone else’s most base right—to
reproduce—is misogynistic patriarchal tyranny and no matter how you
spin it, is fundamentally discriminatory at its core. To presume that
any one group within any given society should or even can determine
which among us is fit to reproduce; is absolutely appalling and would
never be tolerated in the reverse. Imagine, for a moment, a traveling
band of Black women, fed up with White society and all its f laws. Sick
of the: climbing divorce rate; teen pregnancies; sexually transmitted
diseases; drug and alcohol addiction; unemployment; homelessness;
and persistent poverty, they are determined to sterilize as many White

160 Commodifying Black Reproduction
women as possible. Or policies that would have White women so afraid
of being forcibly sterilized that they refuse to visit a doctor, no matter
how gravely ill. The nation would have never supported such drastic
and inhumane notions had they been devoted to higher class White
populations. Such things would be unheard of.
So why the double standard; why are Black women’s rights so cava-
lierly up for debate? Why do we think it is even worth consideration?
Why aren’t we all, Black; White; male; female, devastated by the prem-
ise? The answer is clearly exposed by the latent and overt stereotypes
that persist about Blacks and other nonwhite peoples that serve to mar-
ginalize certain populations. This social rhetoric succeeds in slandering
their character and reducing them to little more than social problems
and statistics. Thus, rationalizing the reduction of their humanity to
economic loss or profit. There is no other plausible reason that would
make such treatment viable.
At this point, it should go without saying that that such program-
ming must be fought and extinguished at all costs. However, the pres-
ence of such policy only offers one more example in a case study of
a much larger problem. And its termination, while meaningful and
necessary, will hardly suffice in resolving the longstanding deeply
ingrained pathology of American society. The real persistent crisis is
far greater than the simple act of ending these crimes against humanity,
for more critical lingering issues remain. Consider America’s reaction
to Nazi Germany. The legacy of the eugenics history discussed within
this volume lays the very foundation for the meticulous planning and
implementation of the tragic Nazi assault on humanity during World
War II.2 Was it enough to close the camps? To censure and condemn
the monsters who implemented the heinous crimes, and then look for-
ward in silence? No. There are entire university centers devoted to
the study of the Holocaust. The evidence of these events is enshrined
in museums around the world. This is done to face this tragic past; to
remember the victims and to honor the survivors; and to ensure that it
never happens again.
While the tragedies that have befallen Black America are enshrouded in
a conspicuous and deafening silence. This denial and dismissal of history
coupled with the ongoing rationalization of ongoing abuses reveals that
these crises evolve over time and continue. This research explores some
of these challenging and painful realities that have historically plagued
Black women and others which continue to persist today. Exploring
the role of media; government initiatives; and national sentiment, this
research contextualizes these histories within American culture.

CH A P T E R SI X T E E N
Justifying Commodification
In failing to examine historic and material forces that affect Black

women’s reproduction in the United States, much of the existing
research overlooks the fundamental elements of hegemonic control.
This text explores this level of domination by identifying ways in
which images of Black women’s reproduction are manipulated in order
to justify ongoing exploitation and repression of Black labor-biological,
reproductive, and manual. Then purposefully links the hegemonic reg-
ulation and dominance of each policy period to the status of the forces
of production that impact the political economy. This in turn, deter-
mines the role of Black reproduction in the United States. In making
these connections this research has provided a context for examining
policy as an expression of hegemonic control and media as a hegemonic
tool of oppression, revealing the ways in which Black women’s repro-
duction in the United States relates to tools, technology, and labor.1
Ideological Hegemony
In analyzing reproductive policy that disproportionately affects Black

women, this study examines the role of media image in the develop-
ment of policy. By exploring ongoing social rhetoric on Black women’s
reproduction in the United States, this study discovers that Marx’s
assertions about the various means by which the ruling class controls
the masses is valid. Marx contends that the ruling class must maintain
its power, not only through force, but through coercion and promo-
tion of a false consciousness as well. The acceptance and perpetuation
of this false consciousness reinforces the power of the ruling class and

even thrusts the oppressed classes into actively assisting in their own
exploitation.2
As mentioned throughout this study, Black women’s labor—produc-
tive, reproductive, and biological—has proven central to the develop-
ment and ongoing success of capitalism in the United States. But no
amount of labor has proven as critical as the role Black women have
played in their own domination as described by Antonio Gramsci’s
ideological hegemony:
In his doctrine of “hegemony,” Gramsci saw that the dominant

class did not have to rely solely on the coercive power of the State
or even its direct economic power to rule; rather, through its
hegemony, expressed in the civil society and the State, the ruled
could be persuaded to accept the system of beliefs of the ruling
class and to share its social, cultural, and moral values.3
Ironically this nation, so dependent on the varied strengths and talents

of Black women, has not only controlled her from her first days in
the United States, but has—through various apparatuses of the ruling
class—managed to actively engage her in her own oppressions.
Media
One of the most powerful apparatus employed to manipulate the masses

has historically been the media. There is a fundamental link between
media, of all types, and the capitalist owning class who are in turn the
dominating controllers of the State.4 For example, the major media in
the United States is owned by major corporations; some traceable to a
single capitalist mogul, consider Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is chair-
man, CEO, and founder of a major worldwide media conglomerate
that holds countless media assets worldwide. These holdings include
such varied media outlet as: HarperCollins publishing; The New York Post
and The Wall Street Journal newspapers; Fox News television network;
even Parents magazine.5 This is simply one example of the ways in
which mass media is owned and controlled by the interests of industry,
rather than the interests of the people. Several other prime examples
of this present themselves as well: Viacom owns CBS; General Electric
owns NBC; Disney owns ABC; and Time Warner owns controlling
interest in CNN.6 As such, the media cannot be trusted as an indepen-
dent source of information. Instead, as Marx argues, the media should

Justifying Commodification 163
be taken as the voice of the ruling class that must incessantly promote
its own interests. Unfortunately, however, due to an acceptance of pro-
paganda images in lieu of factual evidence, Americans do tend to rely
heavily on media to lead the way in forming public opinion:
The mass media encourages us to look up the economic ladder and
fantasize about and identify with the superrich, while unscrupu-
lous politicians encourage people to direct their blame and anger
toward people one or two rungs down the economic ladder. The
scapegoats for the polarized economy include women on welfare
and new immigrants.7
As a result, for all the generations of organizing and for all of the civil
rights gained, today—as one hundred years ago—Black women are
still being coerced into sterilizing themselves through cash incentives;
threats to welfare benefits; and pressure from health care facilities. Yet,
due to social rhetoric propagated by media, American society believes
that Black women need this manipulation. Therefore, instead of an
assault on humanity, the nation perceives itself as answering a call to
arms. As long as society continues to lack the collective class conscious-
ness to sift through the media images presented to the masses, this
hegemonic control will continue to be perpetuated and internalized.
Tools of Oppression
In serving as an apparatus of hegemonic control by the ruling class, the

media becomes a tool of oppression rather than the instrument of liber-
ation as it is touted. The support and acceptance of dominant negative
social rhetoric surrounding Black women’s reproduction perpetuates
the exploitation and oppression of Black women’s labor-reproductive,
productive, and biological.
These tools of oppression are disseminated through various media;
pseudoscientific “research,” and political stratagem employed by the
ruling class, creating images internalized by the masses,
. . . seems like a national campaign to “dumb us down.” Politicians

have become experts in squeezing the complexity out of issues
to produce compressed, thirteen-second sound bites. Think-tank
publicists bombard us with out-of-context snippets of information
sometimes called “factoids.” . . . [L]ittle fragments of data, broken

off from their original planetary moorings zinging merrily through
space . . . that’s very much how the mass media deliver information.
News outlets, every bit as much as advertising agencies, need to
trumpet their wares . . . 8
Film, television, radio, news, popular literature, political platforms,
popular research, and even our textbooks are subject to the political
and intellectual inf luence and control of the ruling class, as they alone
possess the economic strength to contribute so significantly to soci-
ety. These contentions are supported by the ongoing strength of the
White male elite in the United States, as the owners of mass media,
they control: production companies, newspapers, television stations,
and publishing firms. Beyond media inf luence, the power of the white
male elite is further evidenced as we continue to witness glaring racial
disparities in the United States’ education system. The lack of equal
education for all populations leads to the development of racial dis-
parities within scientific communities and among the political powers.
Given the history of the methods of control and ongoing strength of
the elite, this study can assume that the owners have specific agendas
that will not go ignored in a society where they maintain inordinate
control. Thus, indoctrination efforts exist in every facet of capitalist
society-entertainment, news, politics, education, and more.
False Consciousness
It is important to note here, that in the vein of Gramsci’s discussion

of ideological hegemony, this study does not contend that the cur-
rent viewpoint espoused by popular social rhetoric surrounding Black
women’s reproduction is an ongoing conscious effort to sabotage the
Black woman. Instead, this study proposes a far more complex argu-
ment. As a result of the dominant hegemony, the masses themselves
have taken up the creation of the images previously painted by the
elite, to control itself on behalf of its oppressors. The oppressed “exist in a
dialectical relationship to the oppressor, as his antithesis—that without
them the oppressor could not exist. . . .”9
As a result of the acceptance of this false consciousness, society—
comprised of workers of all levels—has labeled Black women as (a) sav-
age slaves; (b) needy surplus labor; (c) pathological matriarchs; (d) and
irresponsible welfare queens, depending on what society feels is needed
of Black women’s labor at the time. What society needs is based on

Justifying Commodification 165
the demands of the political economy, which is based on the modes
of production. With the working class so focused on the needs of the
economy, instead of class struggle and revolution, society sees insti-
tutionalized racism replaced with internalized racism. This concept
illustrated by Freire, asserts that, “because of their identification with
the oppressor, they [the oppressed] have no consciousness of themselves
as persons or as members of an oppressed class . . . the oppressed find in
the oppressor their model of ‘manhood.’10
The concept of Black women identifying with the oppressor in
regards to her reproduction is plainly illustrated by the current statistics
of Black women’s surgical sterilization. Just as eugenics ideology finally
begins to lose some credibility and legalized forced sterilizations ended,
ironically, Black women themselves began to embrace sterilization in
consistently high numbers. This absolute compliance of the masses
strengthens the oppressors hold on the collective society as well as on
the psyche of the Black woman. The “tranquility [of the oppressors]
rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and
how little they question it.”11


CH A P T E R SE V E N T E E N
Critiquing Commodification: Connecting to

Historical Womanism
Historical womanism has been developed as the theoretical base of

this study because this meta-analysis offers relevant investigation of
the following key elements of the analysis of Black women’s labor:
bureaucracy; institutionalized racism; the political economy; tools
and technology; Black women as a unique laboring class; the inter-
sections of oppressions that impact Black women; universality; plural-
ity; and consciousness, vision, and strategy.1 Though some elements
of this analysis have been developed specifically for the purposes of
this research, much of it is gleaned from previously existing theories,
including: historical materialism; womanism; Black feminism; critical
race theory; and material feminism. In synthesizing these related, but
at times disparate, perspectives and infusing key original approaches
specific to Black women’s labor, historical womanism emerges as a
meaningful theoretical perspective.
Historical womanist theory, like dialectical and historical material-
ism, offers an analysis of the structural role of the State. The theory
recognizes that, “the emergence of the state coincided with the emer-
gence of social classes and class struggles resulting from the transition
from a primitive communal to more advanced modes of production
when an economic surplus was first generated.”2 Historical womanist
theory, like critical race theory, further acknowledges the permanent
role of the State bureaucracy in regulating lives of the working classes
within a Capitalist structure.
Historical womanist theory, informed by dialectical and historical
materialism, acknowledges the role of the State in ruling the working

classes. The theory recognizes that under capitalism, as under all previ-
ous modes of production, except primitive communism, the State is an
instrument of the ruling class’ exploitation and domination. As such
this theory, like both dialectical and historical materialism and critical
race theory, acknowledges an institutionalized system of domination
established in the interests of the State for the purposes of regulating
working classes, that is, social, political, economic, educational, and
legal structures.
Historical womanism further links the commodification of Black
women’s various forms of labor to the status of the political economy in
the tradition of dialectical and historical materialism. Racist, misogy-
nist, and anti-labor ideologies fundamentally link Black women to the
ebb and f low of the capitalist economy. As such, adequate analysis of
Black women can only develop from analyses of the political economy.
Black women having entered the United States as instruments of pro-
duction, remain a bought, sold, and traded commodity, if no longer
literally, as a vital labor force in the U.S. capitalist system.
Historical womanism locates Black women’s labor within the con-
text of developing tools and technology. In examining the role of
Black women’s labor, the theory examines the effects of technological
advancement on Black women’s labor in the United States from slavery
to present, locating Black women’s reproduction as a key element of the
manipulable labor force within the capitalist structure.
As material feminism recognizes working class women as a unique
laboring class, historical womanism recognizes Black women as a distinct
laboring class. The exploitation and manipulation of Black women’s
labor has been unique from that of Black men and other non-Black labor.
This is primarily attributable to a history of exploitation and control that
has made Black women’s various forms of labor: productive; reproduc-
tive; and biological, vital to the success of U.S. capitalist structure.
When exploring any social phenomena impacting Black women,
adequate research cannot consist solely of a strict race analysis, or of
a strict gender interpretation. Instead, as asserted by intersectional
theory, research on Black women should include an analysis of the
complex interplay between race, class, gender, and sexual oppressions.
Further, no comprehensive analysis of Black women can exist without
an analysis of her historical relationship with racial; gender; economic;
and sexual oppressions.
As Blacks have historically been oppressed as both a race and as a
class the assumptions presumed within historical womanist theory are
theoretically universal, and in a sense, relevant to Blacks of all genders.

Critiquing Commodification 169
Rooted in the womanist ideology of universality, historical woman-
ist theory notes that just as Black women exist in a unique laboring
class, so do Black men. Emasculated within a patriarchal system, they
have historically held a unique space as a feared necessity. Like Black
women, Black men have suffered from various forms of exploitations
and oppressions for economic profit that have not been exclusive to
slave and wage labor. Promoted by social rhetoric designed to portray
Black men as everything from stud animal to the American pimp, in
the current neoliberal era, the American Black man has been caged like
a wild animal and exploited for profit, within the context of the prison
industrial complex. Dismissed as a gangster, yet, through the clever
application of ongoing racist and misogynist social rhetoric—that is,
ironically, even embraced by much of Black America—he is lauded as
the epitome of masculinity, in the most primal sense of the term. As
with Black women, given Black men’s historical relationship with the
political economy, the only manner in which to fully explore Black
men is to locate the research within the context of the intersections
of: labor; race; class; gender; and sexuality oppression and exploitation.
This; however, is not to imply that there should be a historical woman-
ist analysis of Black men’s labor. Instead, a theory should be created and
applied that offers an analysis specific to the Black male experience, as
historical womanism highlights Black women’s experiences.
Patricia Hill Collins asserts that Alice Walker’s womanism has
some roots in a nationalist tradition that privileges Black experiences
of oppression above any given White agenda—in this case feminism.
In response to this critique of womanism, historical womanist theory
asserts that each labor group has its own distinct class characterized
by that group’s unique history with the political economy. As such,
the historical womanist analysis of Black women’s relationship to the
economy is by no means a privileging of Black women’s labor experi-
ence above Black men or other laboring classes. Instead it is a theory
that highlights Black women as a labor class.
The final key element to historical womanist theory is informed
by perhaps the most significant element of dialectical and historical
materialism—resolution. Historical womanist theory, like historical
materialist theory, asserts that the only means by which to liberate Black
women from historical exploitation; restriction; control; and coercion
by the State is through the development of a collective consciousness of
their position as a distinct class; a re-visioning of an egalitarian system
free of racist, sexist, and classist oppressions; and collectively strategiz-
ing the reorganization of the structure.3

Given the elements of this theory described above, historical wom-
anism places Black women’s reproduction within the context of com-
modified labor. As such, historical womanism perceives the shifts in
Black reproduction as a response to shifts in the forces of production
that affect the capitalist superstructure throughout its various economic
stages, rather than as isolated phenomena that can be explained by
middle range analysis.4 Middle range theories don’t show how a prob-
lem fits into the broad conceptual framework of capitalism. In order
to wholly comprehend the problem of the commodification of Black
reproduction over a chosen period of time, one would have to look at
the system base of capitalism for adequate analysis of the problem.
Understanding that historical womanist theory assumes that capital-
ist structure is predicated upon competition and inequity, we see how
relevant this theory is to the long history of exploitation and abuse
borne by Black women in the United States.5 Marx recognizes the
economic system as the most essential element of a society’s foundation.
He claims this is illustrated by the economic structure’s inf luence over
society’s most substantial and valued institutions. The institution of
family, for instance, is a critical aspect of society as well as a profoundly
private structure. However it continually evolves depending upon the
needs of the ruling class.6 In a similar fashion, sexuality, in the form
of sexual norms; social attitudes; and reproductive policies, is dictated
considerably by the shifts in the demands of the political economy.7 As
the political economy is ruled by the forces of production, arguably, the
forces of production—at least to some extent—dictate social life. As
such, it is evident that the most appropriate framework for this analy-
sis is the historical womanist conceptualization. This research places
the ongoing commodification of Black women’s reproduction in the
United States within a historical context that considers the impact of
the economic structure.
As such, historical womanist theory locates Black women as a unique
laboring class within the capitalist structure. As the dialectical and his-
torical materialism from which historical womanism is born offers in
depth analysis of the political economy, the role of the State and ideology,
along with an analysis of social agency and revolutionary social change
that culminates in profound social and historical transformation.
This transformation will occur when the most oppressed classes
of the exploitative structure, that is, capitalism, demand a reorgani-
zation of the structure that considers the interests of these exploited
classes. Dialectical and historical materialism asserts this revolutionary

Critiquing Commodification 171
transformation occurs through a process of consciousness, vision, and
strategy.8
In becoming self aware of their shared social and political position as
a unique laboring class, Black women can achieve a sense of conscious-
ness. In determining a structure that will work in their best inter-
ests, rather than exploit, manipulate, and oppress them, Black women
will develop a vision of a society that they as a collective can support.
Formulating a plan that encourages Black women’s agency, accord-
ing to historical womanism, will be the strategy to revolutionize the
oppressive structure that exists and replace it with an egalitarian system
chosen by the people.
Thus, this historical womanist research advances a theory of Black
women’s reproduction that asserts four major points. First, that Black
women exist in a unique laboring class tapped for biological, repro-
ductive, and physical labor by the capitalist owning class. Second; that
racist, misogynist, and anti-labor ideologies fundamentally link Black
women’s reproduction to the ebb and f low of the capitalist economy.
Third; that racist and misogynist ideologies are employed as tools
to justify economic assaults on Black womanhood by the capitalist
owning class. And finally that, the U.S. mass media is employed as a
tool of oppression in its dissemination of social rhetoric that supports
reproductive policies that disproportionately affect Black women in the
United States.


CH A P T E R EIGH T E E N
Understanding Commodification
This chapter reiterates that there is a significant relationship between

key reproductive policies that have disproportionately affected Black
women in the United States and the status of the national economy.
The status of the nation’s need for Black labor has directly affected
the image promulgated by United States media and the State. Public
image and opinion of Black reproduction is shaped by state-sponsored
propaganda; which is determined by the needs of the economy and
disseminated by various forms of media, significantly impact on these
reproductive policies. This ever-changing narrative of the sexuality
and reproduction of Black women continues to “justify” the United
States’ policy decisions that assist in the ongoing commodification of
Black women’s reproduction.
In summary, the historical descriptive data have drawn important
links between the national economy and Black labor forces. This
research has examined Black women’s reproduction in the United
States in four policy periods dated: 1845–1865; 1929–1954; 1975–1995;
and 1996–2009. These periods occur over three economic eras: the
agricultural era (1619–1865), the industrial age (1896–1950), and the
era of global capitalism in the electronic age (1975–2009). Analysis
of the four policy stages, reproductive exploitation; forced steriliza-
tion; vilification of Black reproduction; and coercive contraception,
respectively, relates the shifts in the United States political economy
to the sociopolitical and economic conditions of Black women in the
United States.
The needs of the national economy during the policy period between
1845 and 1865 are clearly links to the passage of exploitative policies

as they relate to enslaved Black women in the United States. In this
period the U.S. economy is in a state of expansion with low technology
and high labor demand. Black reproduction is depended upon as the
primary source of labor.
The State has historically justified the commodification of this labor
source, with particular emphasis on various forms of media representa-
tions of Black women as savages needing their sexual energies chan-
neled. A pseudo-paternalistic social response develops justifying the
enslavement of Black women. As a result of this paternalistic social
climate and the reliance of the White owners on the institution of slav-
ery as a system of controlling a cheap manipulable labor force, exploit-
ative types of policies and protocols are developed that dehumanize the
Black mother and maximize the profits of the White owners.
The policy period between 1929 and 1954 reveals the extent to
which the status of the political economy impacts upon Black women’s
labor. In this period, the nation experiences economic moments of both
contraction and expansion. The period also undergoes an explosion of
technology, which is fundamental in leading to the obsolescence of
Black women’s labor—both productive and reproductive. Black repro-
duction is no longer directly linked to the forces of production, as it
had been during slavery. Black reproduction, previously encouraged
for profit, becomes problematized in the social consciousness. The new
demands of the industrial forces of production in the United States
render Black women’s labor superf luous and push Black women’s pro-
duction and reproduction to the periphery of society. Policies in this
period are restrictive. National efforts are implemented to maintain
distance from Blacks who are freely migrating across the country and
to stem concerns of Black overpopulation.
Black labor becomes even less profitable in the latter years of the
twentieth century, due to technological advancements that exclude the
unskilled worker and allow access to a global labor force. The policy
period between 1975 and 1995 sees the nation experience cycles of
expansion, contraction, and recession. While the policy period between
1996 and 2009 sees expansion persist for the wealthiest and increasing
contraction for the poorest. Technology continues to be at an all time
high throughout both policy periods allowing access to a global labor
force. Black women’s reproduction is manipulated and curbed when no
longer needed for labor.
Throughout this period and into the next, various efforts and initia-
tives are employed and endorsed by the state, in order to harnesses new
reproductive technologies. These efforts include sponsoring a number

Table 18.1 Commodification of Black reproduction
Policy Period Nature of Economy Social Rhetoric Social Response Types of Policies Affect on Black Women’s Reproduction
1845–1865 • Expansion Animalistic Paternalistic Exploitative • Raped

Slave Era • Low technology • Sexual • Tame savage laws and de • Mated like animals
• Hi labor demand savage behavior facto protocol to • Punished for not reproducing
• Black reproduction maximize profit • Forced to trade their biological reproduction for
is primary labor minimal incentives
source • Lose autonomy over their own offspring
• Worth is reduced to her reproductive capabilities
1930–1950 • Contraction Parasitic Separatist Restrictive laws • Criminalized for undesirable heredity, i.e., race,
Era of the • Expansion • Needy • Curtail danger of and policies to gender
Negro • Hi Technology Surplus overpopulation minimize • Criminalized for undesirable characteristics, i.e.,
Project • Surplus labor supply Labor and intermingling expenditure poverty, perceived intelligence, chastity
• Broad unskilled of races • Criminalized for undesirable status, i.e., race,
labor force woman
1975–1995 • Expansion Pathological Reformist Controlling • Subjected to State control of her sexuality and
Post–Civil • Contraction • Pathological • Heal sickness of policies to reproduction
Rights Era • Recession Matriarch Black women minimize • Sexuality is criminalized
• Hi technology expenditure • Endures medical trials and ensuing illnesses from
• Low labor demand test contraceptives
• Global labor force • Stigmatized for needing public assistance
• Stigmatized as lazy, conniving, and amoral
1996–2009 • Expansion for Conniving Punitive Coercive • Subjected to sterilization abuses
Welfare wealthier • Irresponsible • Punish policies to • Stigmatized as lazy, conniving, and amoral
Reform • Contraction for Welfare manipulative minimize • Stigmatized for needing public assistance
Era poorer Queen Black women expenditure • Left without a safety net
• Hi technology
• Low labor demand
• Global labor force

of programs that attempt to reform Black women and control reproduc-
tion. Previously restrictive and controlling policies become proactively
coercive. The latter part of the neoliberal period between 1996 and
2009, reveals even stricter regulations on Black reproduction. These
policies, procedures, and initiatives lead to shockingly high rates of
female surgical sterilization among Black women in the United States.
In restricting the reproductive freedom of Black women throughout
the final two policy periods, Black reproduction is increasingly vilified
and effectively criminalized.
Other than the period of forced reproduction for profit during the
reproductively exploitative slave era, the literature repeatedly points
to images of Black women’s reproduction as detrimental to the U.S.
political economy. History shows that regulatory reproductive policies
result in periods of negative social rhetoric related to Black women’s
reproduction in the United States. This negative social rhetoric is dis-
seminated when Black women’s labor becomes unnecessary for the suc-
cess of the U.S. political economy. As such, it is necessary to examine
the use of media as a tool to convey this message and to inf luence and
control the masses.
Further, there is an evident and ongoing historical trend toward
perfecting technological methods of controlling Black reproduction.
As such, in order to fully comprehend the commodification of Black
women’s labor, it is necessary to explore various ways in which repro-
ductive technologies have inf luenced reproductive policies that dispro-
portionately affect Black women. This analysis reveals that the tools
and technologies of each economic stage directly affect the status of
all laboring classes. Thus, impacting on Black women, who occupy a
position as a unique laboring class. A class which both, produces goods
and services for the capitalist class as well as reproduces the labor pool.
In sum, as outlined in table 18.1, there is a significant and ongoing
relationship between the needs of the United States political economy
and Black women’s reproduction. Social rhetoric significantly affects
reproductive policy and is directly impacted by the nature of the
economy.

Further Readings
Brown G.F. and E.H. Moskowitz. “Moral and Policy Issues in Long-Acting Contraception.”
In Annual Review of Public Health 18: pp. 379–400, 1997.
Byrd, Rudolph P. and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
Davis, Angela. “Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights.” In The Reproductive Rights
Reader: Law, Medicine, and the Construction of Motherhood, ed. Nancy Ehrenreich, pp. 86–93,
New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. “The Colonization of the Womb.” In The Reproductive Rights Reader: Law,
Gill, Stephen and David Law. “Global Hegemony and the Structural Power of Capital.” In
Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, ed. Stephen Gill, pp. 93–126.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Gordon Linda. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2007.
———. “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State.” In Women, the State, and Welfare,
ed. Linda Gordon, pp. 9–35. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
Myers, Nick J. Black Hearts: The Development of Black Sexuality in America. Victoria, Canada:
Trafford, 2006.
Staples, Robert. Exploring Black Sexuality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
Weitz, Rose. The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior. New York:


PA RT
Liberation
6


CH A P T E R N I N ET E E N
Finding Freedom
How can we prevent future reproductive policies from continuing to

satisfy historically racist and economically exploitative ideologies? We
have already begun to examine and compare the histories of Black
reproduction and Black labor demands in the United States, as well as
link these trends to social and economic shifts in the national economy.
However, many questions remain. How does the nation begin to link
the historical exploitation of Black women’s reproduction to her current
status? How can the people of the nation resist exploitative reproductive
policies? How do we reconceptualize Black women’s reproduction as a
human rights issue, rather than as a valid response to economic crises?
How can the nation envision itself surviving economic and social shifts
without exploiting Black labor?
We can begin to address these issues with the development of analyti-
cal knowledge of this theory on the commodification of Black women’s
reproduction in four steps. This first step is to develop a conceptualiza-
tion of regulatory reproductive policies that disproportionately affect
Black women’s reproduction, as racist and misogynist tools to carry
out economic attacks, rather than strictly institutionalized racism. The
second step is to socially locate Black women’s reproductive needs and
freedoms within the context of the ongoing broader struggle for repro-
ductive rights. The third step is to establish a firmer grasp of economic,
political, and social trends that vitally affect Black reproduction. And
the final step is to develop a public philosophy that links social rhetoric,
moral discourse, and political and economic changes to the develop-
ment of reproductive policy.

182 Liberation
The Future of Black Women in
the United States?
Fundamentally, how does one fully gauge the racism, misogyny, sys-
tematic discrimination, sexism, physical, psychosexual, emotional, and
psychological abuses of a people? Even in an effort such as this work,
that attempts to look back over four centuries of such exploitation,
subjugation, oppression, and suppression that have so impacted who,
not only African Americans, are today, but Black women living in
America, it is near impossible to explore every nuance of every policy,
every national moment, and each of its outcomes. That said, no task is
more urgent. In a society that has historically prided itself on indepen-
dence, patriotism, and justice for all, that finds itself embroiled once
again in a fundamental internal controversy over race relations when a
Black man runs for president.
Though Obama did actually win the election, we have seen the
basest foulest responses f lood our media outlets, both traditionally and
electronically. Television played a gargantuan role in the 2008 presiden-
tial election, whether through news programming, talk shows, or even
situation comedies. The Obama campaign spent more on advertising
than any other candidate in U.S. history. Perhaps to combat the social
rhetoric surrounding the Black man and the Black family so deeply
entrenched in our national psyche. But, just as the 2008 election year
saw nonviolent revolutionary action taken by the masses in the form of
a monumental upswing in political participation, including: voter reg-
istration; campaign volunteering; and monetary donations, there was
also a surge in new age nonviolent guerilla tactics meant to destroy the
resolve of this revolution. Internet blogs, mass text messages, mudsling-
ing commercials, talk radio, it came from all sides. Never have we seen
such a prime example of the significance of the media in this nation.
Black women have been instrumental in the ongoing struggles for
liberation, access, and autonomy. Imagined as angry, manipulative, and
emasculating, Black women have historically borne the brunt of the
so-called failings of Black society. Labeled everything from mammy
to welfare queen, Black women have scarcely been considered much
more than a problem when visioning our political landscape. As we
settle into the twenty-first century are we seeing the dawn of a new era
for Black women? As we proudly watched Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton vie for a presidency that had never before been within reach of
anyone nonwhite or non-male. Are we glimpsing the evolution of our

Finding Freedom 183
society? Never having been fully included in women’s movements and
equally relegated to a second tier among Black struggles, do we dare see
ourselves in these candidates? Do we have the audacity to hope for the
day when the woman running for president is not White or the Black
candidate is a woman? In imagining this future, there must be some
reevaluation of the impact of Black histories. With that perhaps there
can be a reinvigoration of Black consciousness that can assist in the
development of an inclusive re-visioning of a Black community that
can effectively strategize movement towards a more perfect nation.


Further Readings
Ertman, Martha, M. “What’s Wrong with a Parenthood Market? A New and Improved Theory
of Commodification.” In The Reproductive Rights Reader: Law, Medicine, and the Construction
of Motherhood, ed. Nancy Ehrenreich, pp. 299–307, New York: New York University
Press, 2008.
Fairclough, Adam. Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000. New York: Penguin
Books, 2002.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.
James, Joy. Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Sterling, Dorothy. Black Foremothers: Three Lives, second edition. New York: Feminist Press at
The City University of New York, 1988.
Wyatt, Gail. Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives. New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1997.


NOT E S
Introduction
1. For specific definition of the political economy, see Key Concepts and Definitions.
2. For further discussion on the enduring significance of labor roles for Blacks in America see
Cox, Caste Class and Race; for further discussion on the relationship of Blacks to the capitalist
structure see: Cox, Capitalism as a System.
3. For further conceptualization of the stages of capitalism highlighted within this research, see
Key Concepts and Definitions.
4. For specific definition of instrument of production, see Key Concepts and Definitions; as repro-
ductive labor has historically been a contentious term amongst various feminist factions, it is
imperative that it be defined specifically in terms of this research study. Historically repro-
ductive labor has been a reference to what is commonly known as “women’s work.” For the
purposes of this study, “reproductive labor includes activities such as purchasing household
goods, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothes, maintaining furnish-
ings and appliances, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults,
and maintaining kin and community ties” see Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work,”
405. As demonstrated in Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s definition, the physical action of biologi-
cal reproduction has been (seemingly) purposefully excluded, presumably to accentuate the
human-made gendered division of labor (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works); for further
conceptualization of the three types of Black women’s labor highlighted within this research,
see Key Concepts and Definitions.
5. For further conceptualization of policy as applied in this research, see Key Concepts and
Definitions.
6. For further conceptualization of social rhetoric highlighted within this research, see Key
Concepts and Definitions.
7. Please note that this particular volume focuses on the exploitation and abuse of Black wom-
en’s labor and reproduction; however, this is not to imply that other populations do not
experience similar and unique oppressions related to these issues. Throughout the text it will
be noted when appropriate that Latin; Native American; and poorer populations of various
genders and racial and ethnic backgrounds have experienced these and other oppressions.
However, this text will focus primarily on the experiences of Black women.
8. For further conceptualization of commodification within this research, see Key Concepts
and Definitions; for more literature with a historical, political, and economic analysis of
Black women in the United States, see: Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; Mies, Patriarchy and
Accumulation on a World Scale; Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie; Roberts, Killing the Black Body;
and Ross, African-American Women and Abortion.

188 Notes
9. For further discussion on Marx and Engels’ dialectical and historical materialism, see:
Fishman, Gomes, and Scott, “Materialism”; Marx and Engels, Selected Works; and Marx and
Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Also see part 1’s Further Readings.
10. Though this book does discuss the status of the political economy 2006–2009, the primary
focus of the data analysis will be on the previous eras ending in 2006. Given the profundity
of the economic contraction that exploded between 2006 and 2009, that some actually
deem an economic depression, more data analysis as well as hindsight would be required to
accurately explore its social impact.
11. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman.
12. For further discussion see Ross, African-American Women and Abortion; see also Hine and
Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope.
13. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman.
14. Although as you read this book you will discover that the period of legally sanctioned
forced sterilizations certainly began well before 1929 and continued into the 1980s, and for
some populations even persist today, please note that the decision to focus on this particular
time period (1929–1954) is due to the exceptionally virulent efforts aimed at specifically
sterilizing Blacks in this historical moment, as well as the status of the economy, as the
nation experiences economic: contraction, depression, and expansion during this twenty-
five year period; for further conceptualization of the forces of production, see Key Concepts
and Definitions.
15. For more information see Kline, Building a Better Race; see also Luker, Dubious Conceptions.
16. Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
17. For more information see Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime; see also Asbell, The Pill.
18. For more information see Solinger, Abortion Wars; see also Davis, Women, Race, & Class;
Roberts, Killing the Black Body; and Ross, African-American Women and Abortion.
19. For further discussion of the impacts of new technologies on the labor forced see Rif kin,
The End of Work; for further discussion of the relationship of capitalist development to the
obsolescence of a population, see Dickerson and Rousseau, “Black Senior Women and
Sexuality”; see also, Dickerson and Rousseau, Ageism through Omission.”
20. Hill, The Strengths of Black Families; cf. D.P. Moynihan, “The Negro Family.” A study com-
missioned by the United States government, conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor’s
Office of Policy Planning and Research. Known as The Moynihan Report, this study on
the status of Blacks in the United States argued that Blacks failed to thrive in the United
States and instead developing a pathology that bound them in a cycle of poverty that would
destroy the race.
21. For more on impact of derogatory stereotypes of Black mothers see: Roberts, Killing the
Black Body and Williams, The Constraint of Race.
22. For further conceptualization of neoliberalism, see Key Concepts and Definitions.
23. U.S. Government, National Center for Health Statistics, 2004, “Health, United States, 2004
with Chartbook on Trends in the Health of Americans,” In Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Survey of Family Growth. Hyattsville,
MD: National Center for Health Statistics.
One On Historical Womanist Theory

1. For further discussion see Kerlinger, Foundations of Behavioral Research.
2. For more information see unpublished dissertation, Nicole Rousseau, “A Historical
Materialist Analysis of the Commodification of Black Women’s Biological Reproduction
in the United States.”
3. For further conceptualization of modes of production, see Key Concepts and Definitions.

Notes 189
4. For further discussion see Marx, The Grundrisse and Fishman, Gomes, and Scott,
“Materialism.”
5. Quoted in Marx, The Grundrisse, 205–206.
6. For further conceptualization of means of production within this research, see Key Concepts
and Definitions; for further discussion of inequality and its role in capitalist structure, see
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
7. For further conceptualization of alienation within this research, see Key Concepts and
Definitions; for further discussion of the exploitation of the working class within capitalist
structure, see Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto; and Berberoglu, An Introduction to
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory.
8. Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social Theory; for further conceptu-
alization of the relations of production, see Key Concepts and Definitions.
9. Quoted in Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 9.
10. For further discussion on global village; globalization; and neoliberal era see: Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Kiely, The Clash of Globalisations; see also Rupert and Smith,
Historical Materialism and Globalisation. For further discussion see part 1’s Further Readings.
11. Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, 13.
15. Quoted in Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, 62.
16. Quoted in Berberoglu, An introduction to classical and contemporary social theory, 62–63;
for further discussion of Gramsci’s conceptualization of ideological hegemony see Morton,
Unravelling Gramsci.
17. For further discussion on class consciousness and revolution see: Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto; and Fishman, Gomes, and Scott, “Materialism.”
19. Quoted in Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 29
20. For further discussion see Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
21. Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social Theory.
22. Quoted in Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Sociology, 16.
23. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 25.
24. For further discussion see Sernau, Global Problems.
25. Sernau, Global Problems.
26. For further discussion on impact of capitalism on wage laborer, see Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto.
27. For further discussion on the capitalist exploitation of women in the working class, see
Kollontai, “Towards a History of the Working Women’s Movement in Russia.”
28. For further discussion see Kollontai, “Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle.”
29. For further discussion see Davis, Women, Race, & Class.
30. For further discussion see hooks, Ain’t I a Woman.
31. For further discussion of the exploitation of Black women’s reproductive labor see Roberts,
Killing the Black Body; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; Davis, “Surrogates and Outcast
Mothers.”
32. Although the works of significant theorists who do achieve this level of analysis, such as
Davis and hooks, make noteworthy contributions to the analysis of Black women and the
State, many of their works on the topic were published in the 1970s and 1980s and are no
longer current and now require considerable updating.
33. For more on the impact of the state on women’s bodies, see: Brewer et al., “Women
Confronting Terror”; Dickerson and Rousseau, “Black Senior Women and Sexuality”;
Dickerson and Rousseau, “Ageism through Omission.”

190 Notes
34. For more on Alice Walker’s conceptualization of womanism, see Walker, “Coming Apart”;
Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens; and Phillips, “Womanism: On Its Own.” For
interdisciplinary analyses of womanist perspective see Phillips, The Womanist Reader. Also
see part 1’s Further Readings.
35. Intersectionality theory is a term coined by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, it is now closely
associated Patricia Hill Collins’ conceptualization of Black feminism. For further discus-
sion of intersectionality theory see Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; for further discus-
sion of Black feminism, see Collins, Black Feminist Thought.
36. For further discussion of the links between Black feminism and womanism see Collins,
“What’s in a Name?”
37. For further discussion of womanism see Collins, “What’s in a Name?”
38. For further discussion of critical race theory and its relationship to dialectical and historical
materialism, see Edghill, “Historical Patterns of Institutional Diversity”; for further discus-
sion of critical race theory see, Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory; for more on critical race
theory see part 1’s Further Readings.
39. For further discussion on institutional racism see Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory.
40. For further discussion of U.S. Civil War see Conniff and Davis, Africans in the Americas.
41. Quoted in Collins and Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America, 107.
44. Quoted in Brewer et al., “Women Confronting Terror,” 102–103.
45. Quoted in Brewer et al., “Women Confronting Terror,” 104.
46. For further discussion of the role of Black woman as biological laborers see Davis,
“Surrogates and Outcast Mothers.”
47. Quoted in Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 196.
48. Quoted in Shulman, The Betrayal of Work, 69.
49. For further discussion see Shulman, The Betrayal of Work.
50. For further discussion see: hooks, Ain’t I a Woman; Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a
World Scale; and Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
51. Quoted in Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, 63.
Two On Historical Materialist Method

1. Quoted in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 18.
2. Quoted in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 18.
3. Quoted in Code, How Do We Know? 15.
4. Quoted in Goode and Hatt, Methods in Social Research, 314.
6. Quoted in Goode and Hatt, Methods in Social Research.
7. For further discussion see Barret, Women’s Oppression Today; Glenn, “Racial Ethnic
Women’s Labor”; and Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work.”
9. For further discussion see Neumann, Social Research Methods.
Three The Significance of Social Rhetoric

1. For further discussion of the role of the media in the initiation of the war on terror see
Kuypers, Bush’s War.

Notes 191
2. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) the Patriot Act passed October 26,
2001, offers unprecedented powers the Executive Branch of the U.S. government. The
Patriot Act allowed the government rights to the medical records; tax records; and school
records of American citizens. Reminiscent of the McCarthy period of the 1950s, it allowed
for the covert investigation of political and religious organizations and even allowed the
government to monitor book purchases and library loans! Under the auspices f the Patriot
Act, individuals have been detained for months with no charges filed and no access to
legal representation. These sweeping powers fundamentally threatened six Constitutional
amendments:
• First Amendment —Freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and the press.
• Fourth Amendment —Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
• Fifth Amendment —No person to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due
process of law.
• Sixth Amendment —Right to a speedy public trial by an impartial jury, right to be
informed of the facts of the accusation, right to confront witnesses and have the assistance
of counsel.
• Eighth Amendment —No excessive bail or cruel and unusual punishment shall be
imposed.
• Fourteenth Amendment —All persons (citizens and noncitizens) within the United
States are entitled to due process and the equal protection of the laws.
3. In 2004 the media began reporting a story of devastating abuse perpetrated by American
soldiers on prisoners in the Iraqi detention center, Abu Graib. The media released searing
photos that clearly show prisoners being physically, psychologically, and sexually tortured,
humiliated, and degraded. See part 1’s Further Readings for more on Abu Graib scandal and
government abuse of social rhetoric.
4. For further discussion on persuasion see, Aristotle, The Rhetoric, Book I [1354a].
5. Fred Hampton was a cutting edge African American activist assassinated by the FBI and a
team of Chicago police officers at the age of twenty one and all but forgotten by our history
books. Part of a dynamic nationwide team of young African Americans who were on the
ground fighting the battle against racism, inequality, and poverty, Hampton, along with
other prominent members of the Black Panther party, were relentlessly pursued by J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI as well as the local police. Though personally responsible for bringing a truce
to warring gangs in the Chicagoland area, setting up a Chicago branch of a program to feed
inner city children breakfast before school, and an active college student, the government’s
notorious counterintelligence program, commonly known as COINTELPRO, designated
Hampton as an enemy of the state. For this, he and his fellow activists endured an onslaught
of assaults that culminated in his and Mark Clark’s assassination. Mark Clark was twenty
two at the time of his assassination. For more on disinformation campaigns and government
abuse of social rhetoric, see part 1’s Further Readings.
6. For further discussion see: Dickerson and Rousseau, “Black Senior Women and Sexuality”;
7. Quote in Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 68.
8. For further discussion see Collins, Black Feminist Thought. For more on the impact of
social rhetoric on Black women see, Dickerson and Rousseau, “Black Senior Women and
Sexuality”; Dickerson and Rousseau, “Ageism through Omission.”
9. Quoted in Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 68.
10. Quoted in Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 69. For more on the impact of controlling pro-
paganda images of Black Women see, Dickerson and Rousseau, “Black Senior Women and
Sexuality”; Dickerson and Rousseau, “Ageism through Omission.”
11. Quoted in Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 69.

192 Notes
12. Quoted in Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie, 344. For more on the disparity between Black
and White women’s sexuality see, Dickerson and Rousseau, “Black Senior Women and
Sexuality”; Dickerson and Rousseau, “Ageism through Omission.
13. For further discussion see Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie. For more on racial disparities in
reproductive policies see Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Solinger, Pregnancy and Power; and
Solinger, Abortion Wars. Also see part 1’s Further Readings for more on the long struggle for
reproductive rights.
14. For further discussion see: Ross, African-American Women and Abortion; Dickerson, “Ethnic
Identity and Feminism; Dickerson and Rousseau, “Ageism through Omission.”
15. Quoted in Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, 71.
16. African women constituted only eleven of the 12,707 registered prostitutes in France in
1831. Quoted in Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, 71–72.
17. For further discussion of Reconstruction era social rhetoric surrounding Black women see
Lerner, Black Women, White America.
18. Quoted in White, Too Heavy a Load, 217.
20. See Moynihan, The Negro family for more on the “pathology” that was argued to have
been engrained by the Black single parent household, by Black mothers who, according to
the study, could neither discipline nor educate Black male children (how to successfully fit
into the role of an American man).
Four Becoming Instruments of Production

1. The American-Indian Wars, though punctuated by several well-known historically signifi-
cant battles, are generally considered to have been an ongoing struggle fought in a series of
skirmishes, conf licts, treaties, and policies between 1622 and 1898. See Nabokov, Native
American Testimony.
2. For more information on revolutionary period see Coffin and Stacey, Western Civilizations.
The revolutionary period began immediately following the French and Indian War—
1754–1763 (see Note 3). The Revolutionary War was 1775–1783.
3. Coffin and Stacey, Western Civilizations. Unpopular taxes were levied in the New World to
recoup some of the losses caused by the Seven Years War and to fund their protection. These
taxes, along with severe trade restrictions on American products passing through British
ports, were imposed without representation or consent by the colonists and were perceived
as an attack on the New World economy.
4. Stearns et al., World Civilizations. North America maintained an insignificant population,
only 3 million, compared to Latin America.
5. For more information on the experiences of Blacks in the diaspora see Conniff and Davis,
Africans in the Americas. By mid-eighteenth century 20.2% of the colonies were comprised of
people of African descent. According to census data, South Carolina actually had a majority
Black population at 60.9% in 1750, while Virginia was at nearly half, with 43.9% Black.
6. For further discussion on slavery in the colonies, see Conniff and Davis, Africans in the
Americas. Between the settlement at Jamestown, VA, in 1607 and approximately 1619, other
means of labor are exclusively employed by the colonists. However, the first recorded slav-
ery trafficking transaction of 1619 implies the growth of employing Africans for labor in the
Colonies.

Notes 193
7. See Stearns et al., World Civilizations. Not only were the numbers sparse in terms of a viable
labor force, settlers were often in search of religious freedom and/or financial success and
therefore did not seek agricultural work.
8. For further discussion see Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope.
9. Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope, 15.
10. See Conniff and Davis, Africans in the Americas. Survivors of the Middle Passage, that could
last anywhere from two weeks to more than twenty, experienced a degradation, the depths
of which are unimaginable. Stripped naked; systematically raped; psychological and physi-
cally abused; often sick from the unsanitary conditions; all the while confused about what
has happened to them and where they are even going. Only to arrive on foreign shores
surrounded by Whites who speak unintelligible words, to be treated with insurmountable
cruelty.
11. Quoted in hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 23.
12. Conniff and Davis, Africans in the Americas. Importing only 5% of Africans traded in the
Americas for slave labor, the Black population in the United States grows to be the largest
in the Americas. A little over a century into the slave trade, the majority of Blacks in the
United States are American-born.
17. For further discussion see Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory.
18. For further discussion see Lenin, The State and Revolution.
19. For further discussion see: Browne, Autobiography of a Female Slave; Bullough, Shelton, and
Slavin, The Subordinated Sex; Bynum, Unruly Women; and hooks, Ain’t I a Woman.
20. For further discussion see: hooks, Ain’t I a Woman; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl;
Reiss, The Showman and the Slave.
26. For further discussion of the impact of the severing of enslaved Black women’s sovereign
rights to her children see Davis, “Surrogates and Outcast Mothers.”
28. Quoted in hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 39; for further discussion of the coerced and forced
breeding of enslaved Black women see Davis, “Surrogates and Outcast Motehrs.”
29. For further discussion of forced breeding of enslaved Black women see hooks, Ain’t I a
Woman.
31. See Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope; for more on other slave revolts in the
US and in the Americas, see Conniff and Davis, Africans in the Americas.
32. For further discussion see Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope.
33. Quoted in Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope, 100.
34. For further discussion on enslaved Black women’s organized collective resistance see Hine
and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope.
37. Quoted in Ross, African-American Women and Abortion, 145.
38. For more information see Brodie, Contraception and Abortion.

194 Notes
Five Is This the White Man’s Burden—Or Ours?
1. For further discussion see Brewer et al., “Women Confronting Terror”; and Dickerson and
Rousseau, “Black Senior Women and Sexuality.”
2. The actual term “White Man’s Burden” is adapted from an 1899 Rudyard Kipling poem of
the same name, which discusses the role of the White race in civilized society; however, the
concept lived as long as enslaving of Black Africans had existed.
3. White man’s burden” ideology is furthered through myriad forms of media. Including
advertising: “The first step towards lightening The White Man’s Burden is through teach-
ing the virtues of cleanliness. Pears’ Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners
of the earth as civilization advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the
highest place—it is the ideal toilet soap.” Published on the inside front cover of the October
1899 issue of McClure’s Magazine. Public domain.
4. Quoted in Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond, 37; For further discussion see
Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; hooks, Ain’t I a Woman.
5. Quoted in Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 47.
9. For further discussion of silence around enslaved black women giving birth to biracial chil-
dren see Davis, “Surrogates and Outcast Mothers.”
Six Age Old Pimpin’: Exploitative

1. For further discussion of forced breeding of enslaved Black women see: hooks, Ain’t I a
Woman; Ross, “Black Women and Abortion”; and Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread
of Hope.
3. For further discussion of exclusionary laws see Gomes and Williams, From Exclusion to
Inclusion.
6. For further discussion of relationships between: enslaved Blacks; Indian laborers; and White
laborers, see Conniff and Davis, Africans in the Americas. In the generations between 1680
and 1720, when indentured servants and Indian laborers overlapped with the onset of Black
slave labor, often times Whites and Native Americans found themselves living and working
in similar conditions.
8. For further discussion on the legislating slavery in Colonial America, see Conniff and Davis,
Africans in the Americas. During the long, tedious, and arduous process of systematizing the
institution of slavery, it was established early that White’s could not legally be enslaved;
quoted in Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope, 16.
10. For further discussion see: Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope; Conniff and
Davis, Africans in the Americas.
11. For further discussion of the devastating impacts of slavery on motherhood, see: Hine and
Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope; hooks, Ain’t I a Woman.

Notes 195
13. For further discussion see Solinger, Pregnancy and Power.
14. Quoted in Davis, “Unfinished Lecture on Liberation—II, 53.”
15. Quoted in Gomes and Williams, From Exclusion to Inclusion, 21.
16. For further discussion see Gomes and Williams, From Exclusion to Inclusion, 28.
Seven Labor in the Industrial Age
2. According to the 1860 U.S. Census, there were 3,933,587 slaves in the United States in
1860. Utilizing the method employed by the census to estimate population increase of slaves
(at 21.9% for every ten years), an estimated 4,278,169 slaves, could have been freed by 1863.
This number is excluding the expected increase in mortality rates due to the Civil War as
well as the number of elderly, children, and infirmed who would not join the labor force.
3. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, 170.
4. Statistics cited from Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. For further discussion of Black
women’s economic position in the years following Emancipation see Jones, Labor of Love,
Labor of Sorrow; for further discussion of the impact of the economy and social policy on
Black women’s reproduction see Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
5. Statistics on Black women’s labor cited from Christian, “Introduction”; for further dis-
cussion of Black women’s labor in early to mid-twentieth century see part 3’s Further
Readings.
6. For further discussion see Collins, Black Feminist Thought, Giddings, When and Where I
Enter; hooks, Ending Female Sexual Oppression.
Eight Becoming a Social Problem

1. Quoted in Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 145.
2. For more information of Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), see: The Image Archives,
“The American Eugenics Movement,” Dolan Springs DNA Learning Center at the Cold
Spring Harbor, Lab: http://webgiant.sdf1.org/carnivale/eugenics.html (accessed January
19, 2009); and Galton.org, “Francis Galton as Eugenicist,” http://galton.org/ (accessed
January 19, 2009).
3. For further discussion on the conception of Galtonian eugenics cf. Galton, Inquiries into
Human Faculty and Its Development. For further discussion of the history of eugenics and its
impact on racial inequality, see Ewan and Ewan, Typecasting.
4. For further discussion of the links between eugenics ideologies and compulsory steriliza-
tion programs see For further discussion of the links between eugenics ideologies and Nazi
Germany see: Allen, “The ideology of Elimination”; and Black, War Against the Weak.
5. Quoted in Kline, Building a Better Race, 2.
7. See Kline, Building a Better Race.
10. Quoted in Luker, Dubious Conceptions. 43.
13. Quoted in Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 213. For further discussion on famous eugenicists
and financial contributors to eugenics movement see Black, War Against the Weak.

196 Notes
14. See Marx, The Grundrisse.
15. Quoted in Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, 162.
17. Positive eugenics encourages the reproduction of the so-called superior of the human race;
while negative eugenics discourages the reproduction of the undesirables of the species. The
distinction is significant, as negative eugenics has historically been used as a stepping stone
towards scientific racism and genocide. For more on the history of eugenics see part 3’s
Further Readings.
18. Advertisers, carnivals, state fairs, schools, and more hold “fitter family” competitions, to
determine who the healthiest families are. Eugenical health is only considered a character-
istic of certain members of society.
19. Quoted in Coontz, The Way We Really Are, 39.
20. Dates are specified per the U.S. Census Bureau; the term baby boom is coined by a New York
Times columnist in 1951: Sylvia Porter, “Babies Equal Boom,” New York Times, May 4, 1951;
the years of the so-called baby boom vary depending on perspective; as some assert that
the era produced two distinct generations: Baby Boomers and Generation Jones. For more
on these differing perspectives see: Noveck. “Welcome Obama, Bye-Bye Boomers”; Alter,
“Twilight of the Baby Boom”; Wastell, “Generation Jones Comes of Age”; and Generation
Jones, “Homepage.”
21. As per the Postal Store. “Celebrate the Century. 1940s,” United States Post Office, http://
shop.usps.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10152&storeId=10
001&productId=16915&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=13382, (accessed September 14,
2008).
22. For more on the reimagining of the 1950s era see Coontz, The Way We Never Were.
24. For more on the changes on the invention of the nuclear family and the encouragement of
consumerism in the 1950s, see: Coontz, The Way We Never Were and Coontz, The Way We
Really Are.
27. For more on social; political; and economic distinctions between White middle class repro-
duction and Black reproduction in the postwar period, see Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie.
28. For further discussion of race riots see Christian, “Introduction”; and Massey and Denton,
American Apartheid.
29. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release: Employment Situation
Summary,” U.S. Department of Labor, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
by December 2008 the national unemployment rate had risen from 6.7% in November
2008 to 7.2% in December. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Local Area Unemployment
Statistics: Current Unemployment Rates for States and Historic Highs/Lows,” U.S.
Department of Labor, http://www.bls.gov/web/lauhsthl.htm, though some states are
quickly approaching it, no states have reached their individual unemployment peaks, nor
has the nation reached the 25% unemployment rate experienced at the height of the Great
Depression; these rates remain the highest the majority of these states have seen in twenty
five years or more. Over half of the states in the nation have unemployment rates above
6%; with some states, such as Rhode Island and Michigan above 9%. The national under-
employment rate is at 12.5%. For further discussion of the historical context of the 2008
recession see Kristina Cowan’s comment on “Unemployment during the Great Depression:
Are We Getting Close?” The Salary Reporter Blog, comment posted December 18, 2008,
http://blogs.payscale.com/salary_report_kris_cowan/2008/12/unemployment-during-
the-great-depression-are-we-getting-close.html (accessed January 12, 2009); the subprime
lending market is generally accepted as a significant factor in the late 2000s recession. It

Notes 197
is further commonly understood that the recipients of said loans are poorer working-class
and “minority” borrowers. Many media reports, too numerous to cite here, have openly
asserted that these types of people should never have been given loans in the first place and
that their loans are responsible for the housing market crisis; Note—I typically refrain from
the use of the term “minority”; as it is marginalizing and offensive. The term is utilized here
as a representation of the language employed within the media.
Nine Morons, Mental Defectives, Prostitutes, and
Dope Fiends: Restrictive Reproductive Policies
1. The Hayes-Tilden compromise also known as the Compromise of 1877 is a reference to
a political agreement between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes that decides the
hotly contested 1876 presidential election. In an effort to win the election, Rutherford B.
Hayes conceals an agreement with southern states to withdraw troops from the South if he
is elected. This ends federal initiatives to establish civil rights for Blacks in the South and
thus ends Reconstruction; for further discussion see: Gomes and Williams, From Exclusion
to Inclusion; and Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction.
2. Statistical information in Gomes and Williams, From Exclusion to Inclusion.
3. Quoted in Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 137. For further discussions on recon-
struction era, including differing views on the legacies of Reconstruction and the time
frame of the era see part 3’s Further Readings.
4. For further discussion on inequality and institutional exclusion see Gomes and Williams,
From Exclusion to Inclusion. Though it is true that Black political participation has signifi-
cantly suffered in the generations following Reconstruction, it should be noted that the
landmark 2008 presidential campaign sees record Black participation. Barack Obama’s vic-
tory sees the first Black man gain the democratic nomination and then successfully win
the presidency in U.S. history, 131 years after the end of Reconstruction; 143 years after
Emancipation; and 389 years after the first Blacks are sold at Jamestown.
5. See Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction; see also, Gomes and Williams, From Exclusion to
Inclusion.
7. Quoted in Gomes and Williams, From Exclusion to Inclusion, 24.
8. Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 146.
9. Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 146.
10. Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction.
11. See Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); for further discussion of Plessy v. Ferguson see
Rousseau, “Passing.”
12. For further discussion see Gomes and Williams, From Exclusion to Inclusion.
13. For further discussion of the Black migration and labor see Rif kin, The End of Work.
14. Quoted in Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 79–80.
15. For further discussion of the changes in Black labor with the onset of industrialization see
Rif kin, The End of Work.
16. Though compulsory sterilizations had begun twenty years before, the language cited here
is the language used by Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the landmark
decision Buck v. Bell that upholds eugenics-based compulsory sterilizations in the United
States in 1927. This Supreme Court decision will underscore thousands upon thousands
of compulsory sterilizations before the individual state laws are finally repealed. The final
compulsory sterilizations are performed well into the 1980s. For further discussion see:
Ewan and Ewan, Typecasting; and Black, War against the Weak.

198 Notes
17. Conceptualization of eugenics is illustrated through tree metaphor used as the logo at the
Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921. For image see, Image Archives of the
American Eugenics Movement, “Eugenics Tree,” Dolan Springs DNA Learning Center
at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, http://pirate.shu.edu/~vigorimi/genealogy/eugenics_tree.
htm (accessed January 13, 2009); Quotation cited by right of public domain.
18. For further discussion of the overt racism exhibited by eugenics organizations in the United
States see Black, War against the Weak.
19. Quoted in Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 214.
20. See Lombardo, “Eugenics Sterilization Laws.” For map that illustrates proliferation of
Eugenics-based sterilization laws in the United States in 1935, see, The Image Archives of
the American Eugenics Movement, “Eugenics Map,” Dolan Springs DNA Learning Center
at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, http://people.clarkson.edu/~postnl/HP201/Pictures%20
on%20Webpage/States%20with%20eugenics%20laws.jpg (accessed January 13, 2009).
21. For further discussion see Black, War against the Weak.
22. Quoted in Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, Appendix.
23. For further discussion see Davis, Women, Race, & Class.
24. Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 214.
25. For further discussion see Davis, Women, Race, & Class; Lombardo, “Eugenics Sterilization
Laws.”
26. For further discussion on impact of sterilization abuses on Latina women, see: Davis, Women,
Race, & Class; Briggs, Reproducing Empire; and Findlay and Gilbert, Imposing Decency.
27. See Davis, Women, Race, & Class.
28. See Davis, Women, Race, & Class.
29. For further discussion see Green, The Negro Project.
30. For further discussion on Black women as sexually deviants see: Giddings, When and Where
I Enter; Green, The Negro Project, Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus; Simson, The Afro-American
Female.
34. For further discussion of sterilization abuse against Black girls and women in the twentieth
century see Davis, Women, Race, & Class.
35. For further discussion of Margaret Sanger and her role in perpetuating coercive sterilization
programs see Davis, Women, Race, & Class.
36. Quoted in Asbell, The Pill, 326.
37. For further discussion see Green, The Negro Project.
38. For further discussion of Sanger’s views on exterminating Blacks see Davis, Women, Race &
Class; for further discussion of Sanger’s relationship to Black media see, Chesler, Woman of
Valor.
Ten Global Capitalism in the Electronic Age

1. For further discussion of the Great Migration and the labor pool see Rif kin, The End of
Work.
2. For further discussion of the varied impacts of technology on unskilled labor, see Rif kin,
The End of Work.
3. For further discussion of neoliberalism, see: Kiely, The Clash of Globalisations; see also,
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. For further discussion of the history of the U.S.
economy see part 4’s Further Readings.

Notes 199
4. For further discussion of neoliberalism and globalization, see: Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism; see also Rupert and Smith, Historical Materialism and Globalisation; see also,
Kiely, The Clash of Globalisations.
5. For further discussion of war on terror see part 4’s Further Readings.
6. For further discussion of the events of Hurricane Katrina see part 4’s Further Readings.
Eleven Pathologizing the Black Woman
2. For further discussion of so-called Black pathology see Moynihan, The Negro Family.
5. Quoted in Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime, 230.
6. Quoted in Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime, 230.
7. For further discussion see Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime.
8. Quoted in Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime, 230–231.
9. The Negro Project is a government funded program run by Margaret Sanger, cofounder of
Planned Parenthood, that encouraged rural Black women and men to be sterilized in.
13. For further discussion on the evolution of contraception see Asbell, The Pill; and Reagan,
When Abortion Was a Crime. For more on the histories of contraception and reproductive
rights in the United States see part 4’s Further Readings.
17. For more information see documentary film Chana Gazit (Producer, Director, and Writer),
The Pill.
18. For further discussion on the underclass see Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; for further dis-
cussion on the culture of poverty and the development of the underclass see part 4’s Further
Readings.
19. For further discussion of the impact of welfare and welfare reform on Black mothers, see:
Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie; Albelda and Withorn, Lost
Ground; and Neubeck, Welfare Racism; for more on the development of the child welfare
industry see: Reich, Fixing Families.
Twelve She’s Out of Control:

Controlling Reproductive Policies
4. These statistics are highly contestable, as though data was kept on the performed surger-
ies, as one might anticipate forced and coerced procedures are not recorded as such. There
is effectively no way to determine for certain how many people were forcibly sterilized
over the course of the twentieth century. For more information on statistics related to

200 Notes
court-mandated sterilizations see Roberts, Killing the Black Body; see also Chase, The Legacy
of Malthus. For more on eugenics philosophies; Malthusian theories; and compulsory steril-
ization programs, see part 4’s Further Readings.
5. Quoted in Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie, 57.
7. For full text see Women’s Liberation Movement: An On-line Archival Collection. “Poor
Black Women,” Special Collections Library, Duke University, http://scriptorium.lib.duke.
edu/wlm/poor/ (accessed January 13, 2009).
8. Oral contraceptives had been approved for other uses by the FDA in 1957. The same drug
is approved for contraceptive use in 1960; but not marketed as such until 1961. The use of
oral contraceptives does not become accessible to married women in every state until the
landmark legal case Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965; and remains inaccessible to all unmar-
ried women until after the groundbreaking Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972. See Griswold v.
Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965); and Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972); for further
information on the decriminalization of abortion see Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
9. Retrieved from Planned Parenthood Web site: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/pp2/
portal/medicalinfo/birthcontrol/.
10. For further discussion on contraception and population control see: Blank, Fertility
Control; David and Sanderson, “Rudimentary Contraceptive Methods”; and Diepenbrock,
Gynecology and Textuality.
11. For further discussion of abuses against women receiving welfare benefits, see: Solinger,
Wake Up Little Susie; and Neubeck, Welfare Racism.
15. For further discussion see Inciardi, Suratt, and Saum, Cocaine-Exposed Infants.
16. For further critical analysis of the child welfare industry see Roberts, Killing the Black Body;
and Roberts, Shattered Bonds.
17. Child welfare statistics cited from Roberts, Shattered Bonds.
Thirteen Vilifying Black Motherhood

1. For further critical analysis of the Black matriarchy thesis see Davis, “Ref lections on the
Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.”
2. For further discussion of the “underclass,” see: Massey and Denton, American Apartheid;
William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; see also, Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty.
For a variety of perspectives on the creation of the underclass in the United States see
part 4’s Further Readings.
3. Controversial genetic testing of fetuses that in the future may allow parents to screen out
undesirable traits. Geneticists could potentially bioengineer future generations made to
order, with parents choosing eye and hair color, sex, even possibly height, weight, sexual
orientation, and more. For more on genetic technologies see part 4’s Further Readings.
4. Quoted in Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 3.
5. Quoted in Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 3; For more information see also Brewer et al.,
“Women Confronting Terror.”
6. White, Too Heavy a Load, 237.
7. The cited statistics are taken from United States Department of Justice, “Prison and Jail
Inmates at Midyear 2006”; for more on historical incarceration trends and on 2008 incar-
ceration rates see part 4’s Further Readings.

Notes 201
8. For further discussion of the role of racism in the prison industrial complex, see Davis,
“Race and Criminalization.”
9. For further discussion of the significance of technology in the prison industrial complex,
see Davis, “Race and Criminalization.”
Fourteen Gettin’ Your Tubes Tied: Coercive
1. For further discussion see White, Too Heavy a Load.
2. Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 204.
3. For further discussion of the welfare reform debate, see: Roberts, Killing the Black Body; and
Albelda and Withorn, Lost Ground; and Neubeck, Welfare Racism. See also part 4’s Further
Readings.
4. For further discussion of welfare reform, see: Block et al., “The Compassion Gap in
American Poverty Policy”; and Corcoran et al., “How Welfare Reform Is Affecting
Women’s Work.”
5. For data on welfare participation see: Block et al., “The Compassion Gap in American
Poverty Policy”; and Corcoran et al., “How Welfare Reform Is Affecting Women’s
Work.”
6. Sterilization statistics are per the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention,
“National Survey of Family Growth.”
7. Sterilization statistics are per the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention,
“National Survey of Family Growth”; demographic statistics are per the 2004 U.S.
Census.
8. National Center for Health Statistics, “Use of Contraception.”
9. For full Web site see Dominic Marchiano, M.D., “Sterilization,” www.saludchicago.com
(accessed January 18, 2009).
10. For further discussion see: Grubb et al., “Regret after Decision to Have a Tubal
Sterilization”; and Wilcox, Chu, Eaker, Zeger, and Peterson, “Risk factors for Regret after
Tubal Sterilization.”
11. For further discussion of characteristics associated with remorse after sterilization proce-
dure, see: Grubb et al., “Regret after Decision to Have a Tubal Sterilization”; Allyn et al.,
“Presterilization Counseling and Women’s Regret about Having Been Sterilized”; and
Wilcox et al., “Risk Factors for Regret after Tubal Sterilization.”
12. Project C.R.A.C.K. (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) ; as of July 25, 2008, the
organization reports paying 2,546 clients for the following: long term chemical steriliza-
tion (approximately 42%) i.e., Depo-Provera; long term implantation devices (approxi-
mately 3%), i.e., Implanon and Norplant; contraceptive barriers (approximately 17%), i.e.,
Intrauterine Device (IUD); as well as permanent surgical sterilization (approximately 37%),
i.e., vasectomy and tubal ligation.
13. Quoted at www.projectprevention.org.
14. According to their Web site, Project Prevention, “Objectives,” Project Prevention, http://
www.projectprevention.org/cause/objectives.html:
. . . Project Prevention seeks to reduce the burden of this social problem on taxpay-
ers, trim down social worker caseloads, and alleviate from our clients the burden of
having children that will potentially be taken away. Unlike incarceration, Project
Prevention [is] extremely cost effective and does not punish the participants.
15. Approximately 1% of paid clients were male from 1997 to July 25, 2008. These 29 clients
all received permanent surgical sterilization—vasectomies.

202 Notes
16. As of fall 2008, per their Web site, Project Prevention, “Home Page,” Project Prevention,
www.projectprevention.org, Project C.R.A.C.K. now refers to itself as Project Prevention:
Children Requiring a Caring Community. However, after more than a decade as Project
C.R.A.C.K., this change only appears on their Web site—all media references, documenta-
tion, and organizational propaganda still references Project CRACK.
17. As evidenced by FAQ #3 posted on their Web site, Project Prevention, “Frequently Asked
Questions,” Project Prevention, http://www.projectprevention.org/program/faqs.html:
3. Are you targeting blacks? It is racist, or at least ignorant, for someone to learn
about Project Prevention and assume that only black addicts (or minorities) will be
calling us. The reality is, not all drug addicts are black. Project Prevention targets a
behavior not a racial demographic.
18. Statistics are from Office of Applied Studies, “National Survey on Drug Use and Health
Report,” Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
19. Of Project CRACK’s 2,546 paid clients, 42.5% were Caucasian; 28.5% were African
American; 12.75% were Hispanic; and 16.25% were listed as other ethnic backgrounds.
This 16.25% listed as other is of particular interest. As a category already exists for “white,”
it is evident that the 16.25% “other” are nonwhite; changing the statistics significantly,
making nearly 60% of their clients People of Color.
20. According to WGAL out of Harrisburg, PA, “Group Offers Addicts Cash For Sterilization,”
July 13, 2007, http://www.wgal.com/news/13679726/detail.html (accessed September 26,
2008).
21. For further discussion of LaBruzzo’s tentative sterilization plan see: Waller, “LaBruzzo:
Sterilization Plan Fights Poverty.”; Webster, “Metairie Lawmaker Considers Bill to Fund
Sterilizations”; and Baram “Pol Suggests Paying Poor Women to Tie Tubes.”
22. David Duke, previous Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was the elected representative
of Metairie, LA, from 1989 to 1992. His bill was eventually defeated.
23. As per a telephone interview with the author that took place November 19, 2008; through-
out the interview, LaBruzzo made repeated references to “us,” “them,” and “these people.”
When questioned about who “these people” are, he scoffs, claiming this interviewer is
clear about who “they” are. It is this interviewer’s understanding that LaBruzzo attempts to
delineate between a working, middle, and upper class population, considered moderately to
extremely successful, by capitalistic standards and a poorer class, reliant on public assistance.
Though he insists that this is a purely economic division, his comments repeatedly reinforce
racial stereotypes.
24. During the November interview, LaBruzzo recounted tales of Black women on welfare,
colleagues of his had allegedly encountered. One woman supposedly claimed that she was
teaching her young daughter the welfare process because she was expected to get pregnant
soon and would therefore need the services. LaBruzzo also spoke at length of young girls
getting pregnant to help their families financially. He surmised that having a baby for
“people like us,” means reevaluating our budget, while having a baby for “these people,”
means an increase in household income. LaBruzzo insists that this potential increase of only
$50–$200 per month is enough incentive for girls and women to actually plan unwed teen
pregnancies and have babies strictly for the money.
25. According to LaBruzzo his district is “3 percent minority,” however, other statistics report
that District 81 is 85% White, rather than 97%.
26. Countless media sources have questioned the application of facts in Coulter’s works over
the years. For more on Ann Coulter’s misapplication of data and use of dubious statistical
sources in her writings see: Scherer and Secules, “Books: How Slippery Is Slander?”; see
also, Nyhan, comment on “Screed,”; for more on Ann Coulter’s denial of racist foundations
of Guilty cf.: Ann Coulter, comment on “Answering My Critics”; cf. The View.

Notes 203
27. Statistics cited from U.S. Department of Justice, “Prisoners at Midyear 2007”; and U.S.
Department of Justice, “Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children.”
Fifteen Rationalizing Commodification

1. For further discussion of Black middle class see Feagin and Sikes, Living With Racism; Frazier,
Black Bourgeoisie; and Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences. As the subject of this book is pri-
marily Black women’s labor, I have opted not to focus directly on the Black middle class,
but instead to examine the poorer and working class experience. I do, however, contend
that class status does not exclude the Black middle class from labor exploitation and abuse.
No manner of class, status, or power can overcome the forces of production; social rhetoric;
and reproductive policies that plague Black women of all classes.
2. For further discussion of the links between Nazi genocide programs and American eugenics
see: Allen, “The ideology of Elimination”; and Black, War against the Weak.
Sixteen Justifying Commodification

1. The term tool of oppression is both an homage and a reference to Audre Lorde’s sharp and
insightful analysis of the manipulation and control of Black women through assaults on
reproductive freedoms, i.e. lack of access to abortion and compulsory sterilization, being
employed as a tool of oppression against Black women. Lorde likened this abuse to rape.
Within this text the use of the term is specifically related to media, which I believe has
played a significant role in applying the tools of oppression referred to by Lorde. For further
discussion of Tools of Oppression concept, see Lorde, Sister Outsider.
2. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
3. Quoted in Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Sociology, 63.
4. For further discussion see Hack, Clash of the Titans.
5. For further discussion see Wolff, The Man Who Owns the News; and Greenwald and Kitty,
Outfoxed.
6. For more information see Collins and Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America.
7. Collins and Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America, 4
8. Quoted in Coontz, The Way We Really Are, 26–27.
9. Quoted in Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 31.
Seventeen Critiquing Commodification:

Connecting to Historical Womanism
1. The conceptualization of consciousness, vision, and strategy is well defined in Fishman, Gomes,
and Scott, “Materialism.” For further discussion of dialectical and historical materialist
theories, see Further Readings.
2. Quoted in Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, 15–16.
3. See Fishman, Gomes, and Scott, “Materialism.”

204 Notes
4. For specific definition of superstructure, see Key Concepts and Definitions.
5. For further discussion see Marx, Capital. For more on the impact of capitalism on Black
women’s sexuality see Dickerson and Rousseau, “Black Senior Women and Sexuality”;
6. For further discussion see Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life.
7. For more on the impact of social policy on private life, see: Dickerson and Rousseau, “Black
Senior Women and Sexuality”; Dickerson and Rousseau, “Ageism through Omission.”
8. For further discussion of consciousness, vision, and strategy, see Fishman, Gomes, and Scott,
“Materialism.”

K E Y CONC E P T S A N D
DE F I N I T ION S
This research utilizes several major theoretical concepts at various points of the
analysis. The following is a list of definitions of these theoretical terms and
concepts.
Alienation: As Marx contends that the system of capitalism dehuman-
izes the wage laborer; he further asserts that the wage laborer is alien-
ated from his/her very humanity by being forced to trade his/her labor
for survival, and in the process reduced to an instrument of production,
rather than an active member of the production process.
Commodification: This research conceptualizes commodification as
the process of objectifying and compartmentalizing a given variable, in
this case, Black women’s labor, for the purposes of maximizing profit.
Any element that is established as a means by which to gain money,
capital, or power through its exploitation, control, and/or manipulation
is commodified. This term does not solely reference making money. As,
once identified as a means to maximize profit, i.e., objectified as ownable
property that can be bought, sold, or traded, e.g., Black labor; the ele-
ment forever remains commodified—even if it loses economic value.
Labor: This research acknowledges three types of labor in reference
to Black women in the United States: Biological; Physical (or Manual);
and Reproductive.
Biological Labor. Reference to the act of propagation. By reproduc-
ing Blacks, Black women also reproduce a significant percentage of
the American wage labor pool.
Physical or Manual Labor. Reference to the dialectical and historical
materialist definition of “labor,” as the production of the worker—of

206 Key Concepts and Definitions
the subjugated class—forced to trade his/her productivity for sub-
sistence level pay (such as field labor and factory labor)—though in
the case of Black women in the United States, as an enslaved people
forced to work, their labor went uncompensated.
Reproductive Labor. Historically a reference to what is commonly
known as “women’s work.” For the purposes of this book, “repro-
ductive labor includes activities such as purchasing household goods,
preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothes, main-
taining furnishings and appliances, socializing children, providing
care and emotional support for adults, and maintaining kin and
community ties.”1 As demonstrated in Glenn’s definition, the physi-
cal action of biological reproduction has been (seemingly) purpose-
fully excluded, presumably to accentuate the human-made gendered
division of labor.2
Neoliberalism: A set of economic philosophies that favor as little
government as possible within a free market economy. Neoliberal
policies are pro-capitalist and favor deregulation/privatization poli-
cies. Neoliberalism fundamentally opposes government intervention.
Neoliberalism is reinvention of the liberal capitalism of early America,
and has re-emerged as a backlash to the brief period of New Deal
reform policies and bottom up popular movements that empower the
working classes and impact capitalist profit.
Policy: For the purposes of this research, the term policy is to be
loosely defined as both local, city, state, and federal legislation; as well
as common practice and procedure. For example, children born to
enslaved Black women are relegated to “follow the condition of the
mother” in Virginia in 1662. This is a clear legal policy instituted by
state government. An example of a more loosely defined policy of the
period would be the common practice of demanding more money for
the sale of women of childbearing age.
Political Economy: The social, political, and economic variables
related to the superstructure.
Production Elements:
Means of Production. The means by which production occurs, “the
land, forests, waters, mineral resources, raw materials, instruments of
production, production premises, means of transportation and com-
munication, etc.”3

Instrument of Production. The means by which products are cre-
ated—tools, technology, as well as human and animal labor.
Forces of Production. This term is a historical reference to the labor
process at the point of production, i.e. the factory, further defined by
Berberoglu, “Through time, humans created and developed tools,
skills, knowledge, and work habits—in short, the forces of production—
to an extent that permitted, for the first time, the accumulation of
surplus.”4 In short, the technology behind the production of goods
and services.
Relations of Production. “With the development of social classes and
class inequality, there emerged historically specific social relations of
production, or class relations, between those who produced surplus
and those who claimed ownership and control of that surplus of that
surplus (e.g., slaves vs. masters; serfs vs. landlords; wage laborers vs.
capitalists).”5
Modes of Production. “Marx and Engels pointed out that the forces
of production (including the labor process at the point of produc-
tion) and the social relations of production (class relations) together
constitute a society’s mode of production, or its social-economic foun-
dation, defined as the way in which a society’s wealth is produced
and distributed—in short, the social-economic system (e.g., slavery,
feudalism, capitalism).”6
Social Rhetoric: This term is a negative application of an externally
produced narrative concerning a population. Often this rhetorical nar-
rative is created with little to no input from members of the given
group, yet comes to define the group. More salient than a stereotype in
that it does not simply exaggerate specific fantastical characteristics of
the population, rather it is used to define, explain, and understand the
group. Typically not rooted in fact, but in justifying the mistreatment
of a population, social rhetoric is purposefully employed to control the
group it alludes to and to manipulate the masses it is directed toward.
As Aristotle critiqued the establishment of social rhetoric in a given
population, “The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emo-
tions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal
appeal to the man who is judging the case.” 7 Social rhetoric is dis-
seminated throughout society by various far reaching methods. Some
means of distribution include: educational institutions; music; televi-
sion; films; comic strips; novels; advertising; as well as oral traditions.

208 Key Concepts and Definitions
This social rhetoric can lead to an unearned national identity. This
identity is dynamic as it changes as the narrative does.
Stages of Capitalism in the United States:
Agricultural. From the 1500s to 1865, this stage is characterized by
the development of the southern plantation economy that exploited
Black (African) slave labor. Upon the dissolution of slavery in 1863,
and the consequent emancipation proclamation of 1865, the South—
and in turn the United States—struggled for over ten years to rebuild
the southern region and integrate Blacks into United States society
(Reconstruction) in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Industrial. The earliest stages of the Industrial era began in the last
decades of the Agricultural era, as the efforts to increase agricul-
tural production is a great incentive to technological advancement.
The efforts to increase agricultural production lead to the devel-
opment of Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin in 1793. Credited by some
historians as facilitating the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the
United States; according to the Smithsonian National Museum of
American History, Whitney’s Cotton Gin increases cotton produc-
tion from 187,000 pounds in 1793 to a staggering six million pounds
in 1795. Over the next few years Whitney continues to improve
upon his original design by incorporating the use of steam power.
The mechanization of cotton production in the South then leads to
the establishment of factories throughout New England in the early
1800s. The Industrial Age continues as technological advancement
leads to even more inventions over the next century, including: the
Mechanical Spinner, Power Loom, and the Cotton Picking machine.
The United States establishes itself as a world superpower during the
Industrial Age as the nation corners the market on various types of
production, including textiles and raw materials, such as rice, grain,
tobacco, and lumber and steel used to rebuild the infrastructure and
superstructure of Europe after the devastation of World War II.
Electronic. From the 1970s to the present, this stage is characterized
by the onset of the use of the computer chip for mass production.
“The global integration of the economy; the high technology revo-
lution; the downsizing of corporations, the government, and social
institutions; and deregulation and privatization. . . .”8
Superstructure. The superstructure is comprised of the State, eco-
nomic and political institutions, and the bureaucratic structures that

9
support them. “Once a class society emerges—in which the produc-
tion process is firmly established, a surplus is generated, and social
classes have developed—the relations of production (or class rela-
tions) become the decisive element defining the nature of the domi-
nant mode of production, which in turn gives rise to the political
superstructure, including first and foremost the State, as well as other
political and ideological institutions that serve the interests of the
propertied classes in society. Thus the superstructure arises from and
becomes a ref lection of the dominant mode of production, which
reinforces the existing social order . . .”10
Notes
1. Quoted in Glenn, “Racial Ethnic Women’s,” 405.

2. For further discussion see Marx and Engels, Selected Works.
3. Quoted in Stalin, History of the Communist Party, 32–33.
7. Quoted in Aristotle, The Rhetoric, Book I [1354a].
8. Quoted in Scott and Katz-Fishman, The South and the Black Radical Tradition, 74.
9. For further discussion see Berberoglu, An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social
Theory.


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I N DE X
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to tables.
abortion Bethune, Mary McCleod, 111

discouragement from, 111 Betrayal of Work (Shulman), 28
fear of industry, 111 birth control. See contraception
legalization of, 126, 134, 137 birth control movement, 110, 111,
limited access to, 96 126, 142
Planned Parenthood and, 108 Black Africans, 59, 60, 62, 69, 71, 79,
as resistance to forced breeding, 65, 80, 192n5, 192n6, 193n10, 193n12
66, 67 Black Codes, 104, 105
rights to, 142 Black families
Roe v. Wade, 47–48 child welfare industry and, 135,
African American women. See Black 148, 149
women interracial composition of, 80
“African-American Women and migration of, 105–6
Abortion” (Ross), 47–48, 66, 127 and Moynihan report, 51, 124, 137,
agricultural era 188n20, 192n20
end of, 89 and myth of Black matriarchy, 51, 137,
historical moments in, 55 200n1
policies of, 78 parenting in, 51, 128, 133
reproductive policies, 31, 36, 41, 77, social rhetoric about, 125, 140,
83, 173, 175 152, 182
Ain’t I A Woman (hooks), 48–49, 63 undermined by reproductive
American Dream, 99, 100, 101 policies, 118
American-Indian Wars, 57, 192n20 and unplanned pregnancies, 126, 151
American Revolution, 57, 192n3 welfare, 51, 125, 135, 143, 146,
Aristotle, 44 148, 149
Asbell, Bernard, 9 Black feminism, 6, 7, 13, 14, 25, 167
The Pill, 126 Black Feminist Thought (Collins), 46
Association of Black Sociologists, 3 Black Foremothers (Sterling), 49
Black matriarchy, 51, 137, 200n1
baby boom, 99–100, 101, 119, 196n20 See also Myth of Black Matriarchy

220 Index
Black men future of, 182–83
connections with Black women, perceived as harmful to own race,
23–24, 139 49–50
images of, 169 identifying with oppressor, 165
institutionalized punishment of, 139, lack of privacy, 134–35
140, 153 and motherhood, 23, 38, 81, 124, 129,
labor of, 168, 169 133, 135, 137–40, 144, 148, 153
and racial oppression, 24 perceived as pathological matriarchs,
separated from families, 51 10, 51–52, 124–25, 125, 128, 164
serve in WWII, 105 perceived as savages, 50, 70–72, 84,
social rhetoric about, 71, 125, 164, 174
169, 182 perceptions of morality of, 4, 10, 46,
structural emasculation of, 72, 169 61, 71, 73, 95, 106, 123, 138
Black Panther Party, 45, 49, 191n5 perceptions of emasculation by, 10, 51,
Blacks 124, 125, 169, 182
backlash against after slavery, 103, 104, rape/sexual assault of, 49, 61, 64,
197n4 71–72, 79–80, 82
conversion to Christianity, 74–75 reproductive freedoms of, 9–10, 48
dehumanization, 69 as scapegoats, 124
middle class, 49, 159, 203n1 sexuality of, 47, 48, 49
paternalistic attitudes towards, 74–75 social construction of, 50–52
problematization of, 102 social rhetoric about, 10, 46–47,
problematization of reproduction 70–72, 97, 124–25, 125, 128, 137–
of, 112 139
punitive action towards, 139–40 stereotypes of, 51–52
reformist response towards, 129–30 and substance abuse, 128–29, 135,
rights under Reconstruction, 104 150–51
as surplus labor force, 97, 98, 164 value of, 77–78, 125
as victims, 152–53 welfare, 10, 51, 52, 137, 138–39,
See also Black men; Black women 164, 182
Black Venus (Sharpley-Whiting), 48 Blair, Francis, P., Jr., 93–94
Black women bourgeoisie, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 32–33
as agricultural workers, 90, 98 Brewer, Rose
and Christianity, 60–61, 74–75 “Women Confronting Terror: Land,
civil liberties of, 124 Labor, and Our Bodies,” 27,
connections with Black men, 189n33, 190n44, 190n45,
23–24, 139 194n1, 200n5
dehumanization of, 38–39, 61, 63, 84, Brewer, Rose, Fishman, Walda Katz,
160, 174 Kuumba, M. Bahati, and
as domestic worker, 8, 22, 27, 60, 62, Rousseau, Nicole “Women
78, 90, 91, 98, 121 Confronting Terror: Land,
education of, 27, 28, 102, 145, Labor, and Our Bodies,” 27,
152, 164 189n33, 190n44, 190n45,
expectations of, 45–46, 90 194n1, 200n5
femininity of, 49, 51 Brodie, Janet Farrell

Index 221
Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth- and false consciousness, 161–62,
Century America, 66 164–65
Building a Better Race (Kline), 95 and ideological hegemony, 161–62
Burroughs, Nannie, 28 of labor, 72, 84, 170, 174, 176
Bush, George W., 102 media use in, 162–64
rationalization of, 159–60
capitalism of reproduction, 5, 11, 13, 14, 15, 22,
class struggle, 32–33 29, 31, 35, 36, 37, 70, 72
creation wage workers, 19–21, 28 of working class, 16, 20
dependent on Black labor, 15 contraception
dependent on reproduction, 14 cash incentives for, 144, 146
domination of state, 168 covert means of, 66
and slavery, 59–62 Depo-Provera, 115, 131, 133, 134, 141,
and wage workers, 19–21 201n12
See also global capitalism implantation, 141
children IUD, 127, 134, 141, 201n12
born into slavery, 63–64, 65, 80, 82 lack of, 51
crack babies, 10, 129, 137 legalization of, 134
excess number of, 52, 96, 109, 126, medical trials for, 143
138–39, 147 Norplant, 115, 134, 141, 151, 201n12
sexual exploitation of, 81–82, 108 oral contraceptives (Pill), 124,
and slave codes, 79, 80–81 127–28, 131, 134,
stereotypes of, 51, 75, 128 139, 200n8
child welfare industry and Planned Parenthood, 107, 108,
financial incentives for, 149–50 126–27
growth of, 11, 130, 135, 143, 146, 148 public opinion of, 111, 142
and White families, 149 state-sponsored, 143
Christian, Barbara technological advances in, 109,
“Introduction,” 49 137–38
Christianity and White women, 124
conversion to, 70, 74–75 See also reproduction policies;
lack of, 60–61 sterilization
slavery, 55, 62 Contraception and Abortion in
civil disobedience, 123 Nineteenth-Century
Civil Rights movement, 26, 45, 48, 84, America (Brodie), 66
101, 123, 137, 140 Coontz, Stephanie, 99, 100
class struggle, 17, 18, 32–33, 165, 167 Coulter, Ann
Clinton, Hillary, 24, 182 Guilty, 152–53, 202n26
Code, Lorraine, 33 crack babies, 10, 129, 137
Collins, Chuck, 27 crack cocaine, 128–29
Collins, Patricia Hill, 25, 169, 190n35 Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams,
Black Feminist Thought, 46 190n35
colonization, 57, 58, 59, 77, 78–79, 80, Critical race theory, 6, 7, 13, 14,
81, 192n5, 192n6, 193n7 25–26, 167
commodification Cult of true womanhood, 72–73

222 Index
Darwin, Charles false consciousness, 18, 61–62, 75,
Origin of Species, 93, 94 161–62, 164–65
Davis, Angela, 10, 21, 22, 96, 106, Fanon, Frantz, 49, 137
107–8, 140, 189n32 Fifteenth Amendment, 104
Women, Race & Class, 131–32 Firestone, Shulamith, 5
Dialectical and historical materialism Fishman, Walda Katz
assumptions of, 15–16, 19 “Women Confronting Terror: Land,
cost-effective labor, 58 Labor, and Our Bodies,” 27,
historical case study use, 35–37 189n33, 190n44, 190n45,
and historical womanist theory, 7 194n1, 200n5
ideological hegemony, 15, 16, 17–19, Foner, Eric, 93–94
161–62, 164 forces of production, 8, 15, 32, 37, 69,
limits of, 13, 26–29 70, 91, 118
Marx’s inf luence, 14–15 Freire, Paulo, 165
methodology of, 13, 31, 35 French and Indian War, 57
and revolution, 15, 17, 170–71
role of state, 15–16, 167 Galton, Francis, 94–95
technology, 15, 16 Gamble, Clarence, 111
dissent, 45, 131 Giddens, Anthony, 89
Donna Reed (television), 100 Giddings, Paula, 72–73, 104, 105–6, 110
Dubious Conceptions (Luker), 95–96 global capitalism
accessibility of, 120
Emancipation Proclamation, 26, and Black labor, 121
55, 84 in electronic age, 9, 115, 118
Engels, Friedrich, 6, 18, 20, 21 reproductive policies, 9, 14, 31, 32, 36,
eugenics 41, 143, 146, 173
advertiser inf luence in, 99, 196n18 and social rhetoric, 125, 129, 133, 139
basis of, 94–97 and technology, 16
and Latina women, 106, 107–9 Goode, William, 34–35, 36
and Margaret Sanger, 107–8 Gramsci, Antonio
and Native Americans, 106–8, 187n7 ideological hegemony, 16, 17–19,
and Nazi Germany, 160 162, 164
policies for sterilization, 8, 106–7, 131, Guilty (Coulter), 152–53, 202n26
145, 198n20
positive/negative eugenics, 95, 99, Hahn, George Michael, 104–5
196n17 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 132
and Puerto Rico, 108–9 Hampton, Fred, 45, 191n5
state-supported, 109 Hatt, Paul, 34–35, 36
statutes based on, 105–6 Hayes-Tilden compromise, 87, 103,
tree of life allegory, 106, 198n17 197n1
as valid science, 99, 106–7 hegemonic domination, 14, 17–19, 52
victims of, 107–8, 108–10 Hine, Darlene Clark, 8
See also Negro Project; sterilization historical case study, 35–36
Eugenics Commission of North Historical materialism. See Dialectical
Carolina, 110 and historical materialism

Index 223
Historical womanism controlled by state, 22, 94
methodology of, 6–7, 13–14, 29, 33, cost-effectiveness of, 58, 84
35, 167–71 demand shifts of, 4–5, 9, 20, 28,
hooks, bell, 8, 21, 22, 98, 125, 189n32 35, 181
Ain’t I A Woman, 48–49, 63 diminishing need for, 9, 10, 20, 89–90,
Hurricane Katrina, 120–21, 152 92, 93, 174, 176
exploitation of, 17, 18, 20, 26–27, 58,
ideological hegemony, 16, 17–19, 102, 135, 163, 181
161–62, 164 forms of, 5, 6, 22, 168
image of welfare queen, 10, 137, and globalization, 117, 121, 154
138–39, 164, 182 need for, 15, 38, 50, 58, 168, 173, 174
industrial period, 31–32, 36, 41, needy surplus labor, 50, 51,
87, 89, 173 97–98, 164
infanticide, 65–66, 67 and political economy, 36, 38, 40, 50,
instruments of production, 4, 8, 16, 37, 168, 174–76
70, 89, 90, 91, 98, 118, 187n4 profitability of, 9, 20, 117, 153–54, 174
Intersectionality theory, 25, 168, reform policies, 90–91, 97
190n35 religious doctrine and, 58
“Introduction” (Christian), 49 and reproduction, 9, 21, 22, 23, 27, 31,
Introduction to the Grundrisse (Marx), 15 84, 141, 161, 162, 171
source of power, 16, 32
Jim Crow segregation laws, 105, 109 and technology, 10, 20, 92, 98, 112,
Johnson, Charles S., 111 117–18, 168
Jones, Jacqueline unemployment, 20, 91, 92, 102, 107,
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 27–28 118, 119, 121, 159
and wages, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26–27, 28,
Killing the Black Body (Roberts), 138 51, 58, 89, 91, 91, 92, 144, 169
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 45 See also slavery
Kline, Wendy, 8 Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow ( Jones),
Building a Better Race, 95 27–28
Kollontai, Alexandra, 21–22 LaBruzzo, John, 151–52, 153, 202n23,
Ku Klux Klan, 104–5 202n24, 202n25
See also White supremacy Lasker, Mary, 111
Kuumba, M. Bahati Leave it to Beaver (television), 100
“Women Confronting Terror: Land, Lorde, Audre, 203n1
Labor, and Our Bodies,” 27, Luker, Kristin, 8
189n33, 190n44, 190n45, 194n1, Dubious Conceptions, 95–96
200n5
Marx, Karl
labor inf luence in dialectical and
advances in, 92 historical materialism, 6, 14–15,
and agricultural era, 8 17, 18
alienated by technology, 117–18, 121 instrument of production, 90
commodification of, 72, 84, 170, Introduction to the Grundrisse, 15
174, 176 media use, 162–63

224 Index
Marx, Karl—Continued Ozzie & Harriet (television), 100
theories of, 20, 21, 97–98, 137,
161, 170 paternalism, 39, 70, 74–75, 84
Material feminism, 6, 7, 13, 14, 21–23, Pathological Matriarch, 51–52, 124–25,
29, 167, 168 125, 128, 164
means of production, 16, 20, 37, 70, patriarchy, 24, 27, 60, 63, 77
91, 118 patriotism, 45
media Pill, The (Asbell), 126
coded language of, 102 Planned Parenthood Federation, 107,
conglomerate of, 162 108, 126–27, 199n9
as independent information source, Plessy v. Ferguson, 105
44–45, 162–63 political economy
inf luence of, 23, 182 agricultural era and, 70
persuasion methods, 44, 46 and Black women’s labor, 27, 29, 35,
public trust in, 44–45 36, 50, 138, 167, 168, 174
reliability of, 45–46 dominated by state, 14
stereotypes of Black women, 52, 71, global capitalism and, 118
84, 164, 174 impacts to, 161, 174
tool for oppression, 18–19, industrial era and, 91
163–64, 176 inf luence of, 6
Mies, Maria, 5 needs of, 4, 28, 31, 164–65, 170,
migration 173, 176
after WWII, 105–6 and reproduction, 138, 176
patterns, 93, 101–2, 112, 174 and slavery, 70
to urban cities, 9, 117 status of U.S. economy, 38,
misogyny, 5, 49, 91, 101, 125, 182 40, 188n10
modes of production, 14, 32, 165, 168 population bomb, 47, 99, 101, 123,
Moynihan Report, 51, 115, 124, 137, 125, 125
188n20, 192n20 positivist research, 33–35
Murdoch, Rupert, 162 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 111
Myth of Black Matriarchy, 51, 137, prison industrial complex, 10, 26, 45,
200n1 129, 133, 135, 140, 148, 153, 169
See also Black Matriarchy Project CRACK, 150–51, 201n12,
201n14, 202n16, 202n17, 202n19
NAACP, 126–27 proletariat, 16, 18, 20, 32–33, 137, 153
Native Americans, 58–59, 70, 80, 106,
107, 108, 194n6 racism, 5, 22, 25, 26, 27, 46, 63, 82, 91,
Nazi Germany, 160 105, 124, 125, 137, 139, 150, 153,
Negro problem, 101 165, 167, 182
Negro Project, 27, 109, 109–12, 112, and U.S. Constitution, 82, 84
126–27, 128, 175, 199n9 rape, 49, 61, 64, 71, 75, 78, 79, 82,
83, 175
Obama, Barack, 24, 153, 182, 197n4 Reagan, Leslie
objectivity, 33 When Abortion Was a Crime, 126
Origin of Species (Darwin), 93, 94 Reagan, Leslie J., 9

Index 225
Reconstruction, 8–9, 48, 49, 87, 94, legislation of, 95–96, 99
103–4, 130 regulation of, 22, 39–41, 47–48,
relations of production, 16, 32, 37, 70, 81–82, 118, 138
91, 93, 118 restricting, 40, 93, 176
reproduction support of, 99, 173
commodification of, 5, 11, 13–14, 15, See also eugenics; Negro Project;
22, 29, 31, 35, 36, 37, 70, 72 sterilization
criminalization of, 112, 145, 147, reproductive technologies, 15, 109,
173, 176 137–38, 141, 174, 176, 200n3
forced/coerced breeding, 8, 62–63, 78, Roberts, Dorothy, 5, 10
83 Killing the Black Body, 138
hegemonic control, 161, 164–65 Roe v. Wade, 48
as human rights issue, 181 Roosevelt, Theodore, 96
media inf luence on, 18–19, 138–39, Ross, Loretta J., 5, 8
163–64 “African-American Women and
necessary for labor force, 84, 161, Abortion,” 47–48, 66, 127
168, 174 Rousseau, Nicole
perceived as threat, 125–26 “Women Confronting Terror: Land,
and political economy, 138 Labor, and Our Bodies,” 27,
population bomb, 101, 123, 125, 125 189n33, 190n44, 190n45,
problematization of reproduction, 126, 194n1, 200n5
132
profitability of, 40, 77, 174 Salud Chicago, 147
rights of, 7 Sanger, Margaret, 107–8, 126
and role of state, 47, 173 Negro Project and, 110–11, 199n9
as social problem, 9, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, Separatist Social Response, 101–2
94, 98, 102, 112, 117, 142, 144, 174 September 11, 2001 attacks, 43, 120
social responses to, 39, 41, 129, 181 Sernau, Scott, 20
social rhetoric about, 10, 38–39, 50, sexism, 46, 48, 63, 182
94, 137, 173 sexual abuse, 49, 63, 71, 79, 81–82
and technology, 138, 176 See also rape
value of, 78 sexuality
vilification of, 40, 98, 99, 112, animalistic images, 8, 39
145–46, 173, 176 freedom, 9, 10, 47, 48
See also children; eugenics; Negro morality and, 4, 10, 46, 61, 71,
Project; reproduction policies; 73, 95, 106, 123, 138, 144
sterilization as savage, 50, 70–72, 84,
reproduction policies 164, 174
coercive, 40, 77, 106, 110, 139, 141, Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean
146, 147, 154, 175, 176 Black Venus, 48
controlling, 10, 40, 140, 141, 143, 154, Shulman, Beth
175, 176 Betrayal of Work, 28
exploitative, 5, 6, 8, 13, 40, 49, slave codes, 78, 79–81
50, 77, 83 slavery
ideologies of, 8, 181 and American-born Blacks, 59

226 Index
slavery—Continued double standard of, 15–160
of Black Africans, 59, 60 and Margaret Sanger, 107–8
Black women laborers, 60–62, 63 permanency of, 134
and capitalism, 59–62 policies for, 8, 95, 99, 106–7, 109, 131,
and Christianity, 61, 62 145, 147–48, 159
codes of, 79–81 political support for, 11, 151–52,
defined as, 78–79 202n23, 202n24, 202n25
end of, 89, 195n2 rates of, 10–11, 144–45, 146, 154
forced reproduction, 62–63, refusal of, 3–4
63–64, 69 statistics of, 145, 165
justification of, 69 victims of, 106, 108–10, 159
of Native Americans, 58–59 voluntary, 11, 141
necessary for agricultural See also eugenics; Negro Project;
industry, 57 reproduction
profitability of, 59, 69, 84, 174 Sterling, Dorothy
resistance to, 64–67 Black Foremothers, 49
sexual abuse during, 64, 70–72, 75 substance abuse, 118, 119, 128–29,
and U.S. Constitution, 82, 84 135, 150–51
social rhetoric
and Abu Grarib, 43–44, 191n3 technology
affects reproductive policy, 176 advancements in global economy, 16
angry Black woman myth, 5 alienates unskilled workers, 10,
animalistic images of Black 117–18, 121, 153–54
women, 8, 39 automates industry, 98, 117
and Aristotle, 44 decreases labor force, 20, 98, 174
develops Black woman image, 7, shifts in labor demand, 4, 10
46–47, 182 Thirteenth Amendment, 103
evidence reliability, 45–46 Thompson, Kathleen, 8
as hegemonic tool, 11, 18–19 Too Heavy a Load (White), 49–50
impacts U.S. economy, 176 tools of oppression, 18–19, 161, 163–64,
within media, 44, 45, 46, 182 171, 176, 203n1
outcomes of, 174
and Patriot Act, 43, 191n2 U.S. Constitution, 82, 84, 191n2
persuasion of, 46 U.S. economy
racialized fear of crime, 140 dependent on Black reproduction, 6,
and September 11, 2001 attacks, 43 173–74
trust in, 44–46 housing foreclosures, 102, 121
Solinger, Rickie, 5, 10 during the 1970s, 118–19
Wake Up Little Susie, 47, 132 during the 1980s, 119
sterilization during the 1990s, 119–20
cash incentives for, 150, 151–52, 163, during the 2000s, 120–21
201n12, 201n15 status of, 37–38, 196n29
compulsory/forced, 9, 22, 132–34,
173, 188n10, 197n16, 199n4 value-neutrality, 33
court-mandated, 106, 109, 112, 132 Vietnam War, 118–19

Index 227
Wake Up Little Susie (Solinger), 47, 132 White women
Walker, Alice, 23, 169 cult of true womanhood, 72–73
welfare system feminization of work, 22
and midnight raids, 134–35 post-WWII, 100–101
population growth and, 138 reproductive choices, 48, 96, 124, 131
reform of, 134, 141, 142, 143, 144, and reproductive technology, 138
146, 175 sexual freedom of, 9, 10, 47
regulation of private lives, 134 and slave codes, 79–80
social rhetoric about, 51–2 wages of, 91
threats to benefits, 163 Wilson, William Julius, 137
When Abortion Was a Crime Womanist theory, 6, 7, 13, 14, 23–24,
(Reagan), 126 167, 168–69, 169
White, Deborah, 124 Women, Race & Class (Davis), 131–32
Too Heavy a Load, 49–50 “Women Confronting Terror: Land,
White man’s burden, 69–70, 144, Labor, and Our Bodies” (Brewer,
194n2, 194n3 Fishman, Kuumba, Rousseau),
White slave owners 27, 189n33, 190n44, 190n45, 194n1,
alienated after slavery, 9, 94 200n5
assaults against women, 61, 64, women’s liberation movements, 123,
71–72, 75 141–42
maximized profits, 84
self-view of, 75 Yeskel, Felice, 27
White supremacy, 5, 74, 93, 104
See also Ku Klux Klan Zeitlin, Irving, 97–98

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Black Woman’s Burden

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Something of old forgotten queens

Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate,

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Part 1 Why Black Reproduction?

Part 2 Slavery Matters!

Part 3 Emancipated . . . Not Liberated

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Part 4 A Brand New Day

Part 5 Commodifying Black Reproduction

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

2.1 Method of Analysis—Status of Economic Stages 37

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

I would like to acknowledge so many who helped make first this

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Cover Art Photo By Laurin Rinder www.rinderart.com

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Why Black Reproduction?

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Reading this Book

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

On Historical Womanist Theory

The fundamental basis of scientific research is theory. A solid theory

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Why Rooted in Dialectical and

Some scholars analyze Black women’s reproduction in the United

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Assumptions of Dialectical and Historical Materialism

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

While Marx presents an analysis of the invention of the state as an

Therefore, if the subordinated class believes in: (a) the strength of

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

The concepts of consensual domination and false consciousness are par-

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and

Instead of banding together as a collective proletariat class, and taking

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

Keeping the key assumptions of dialectical and historical materialist

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in

The relationship between the owners of the means of production and

10.1057/9780230623941 - Black Woman's Burden, Nicole Rousseau