Black Feminist Book Club #6: Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts

A timely and canonical read by a preeminent Black Feminist thinker.

There are few books that tell the truth about how reproductive justice and birthing justice affect the lives of women and gender expansive people. In many instances, these stories focus on access to abortion without engaging with the complex and nuanced ways that these issues shape the lives of vulnerable people, especially Black women. In Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts offers a comprehensive and compelling look at the myriad ways that reproduction and all the policies and narratives associated with it, shape the citizenship and public lives of Black women in the United States. In this critical text, Roberts connects race, gender, and reproduction to articulate how patriarchy, racism, and systemic oppression underly most aspects of reproductive justice today.

To begin, Roberts suggests that the negative treatment of Black women and our reproduction can be traced back to the era of slavery. Stereotypes of the Jezebel (the sexually promiscuous Black woman), and the Mammy (the asexual, unsexed, negligent, Black mother) lay the foundation for the concepts of the Matriarch (the unwed Black mother) who was at the heart of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. In this report, Moynihan formulated a theory that the underlying cause of poverty in Black communities was related to missing Black fathers and female-led households.

All of these misconceptions about Black women and our reproduction have led to the formation of the stereotype of the “welfare queen,” a mythological Black woman who not only has children out of wedlock but who also uses her reproduction to leech off of the United States government. Taken together, Roberts asserts, these images have dominated white-psyches as well as popular media. They have also marked Black children as a “new bio-underclass” that many people believe are useless “crack babies” with no real contribution to society.

Importantly, this book provides a comprehensive and thorough examination of the evolution of reproductive violence, surveillance, and control of Black women via birth control, forced sterilizations, Norplant implantations, incarceration of Black mothers, and welfare reform. In all, this book is an essential read and a masterclass on understanding how our present society has been intentionally shaped by stereotypes and narratives about Black women and birthing people such that many of these forms of violence and exploitations have been justified not only by the State but by individuals in mass society as well.

Next month’s book is The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw.