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15 - Black Infant Mortality: Continuities, Contestations and Care
- Edited by Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester, Sophie A. Jones, University of Strathclyde
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2022, pp 245-264
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- Chapter
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Summary
In 2018, Madison, Wisconsin – occupied Teejop, or Four Lakes in the Ho-Chunk language, where both of the authors live – became one of the newest sites of the Birthing Project USA, a network led by Black doulas and community advocates working to support Black infancy and maternity. Public health scholar and birth advocate Kathryn Hall-Trujillo founded The Birthing Project – which also claims the designation ‘the underground railroad for new life’ – in 1988 in response to high rates of Black infant mortality in her California community, and over the years it has operated in approximately a hundred sites nationwide and internationally. It entails one-on-one support for pregnant people from members of the same community, who help them navigate prenatal care, resources, postpartum wellness and the first years of motherhood. As anthropologist Dána-Ain Davis writes, ‘the project confronts the epidemiological crisis of Black infant mortality through the provision of maternal support to Black women’.
Not a one-size-fits-all model, Birthing Project sites ‘operat[e] from homes, churches … clinics, health departments and hospitals – any place where a group of ten women can commit to being conductors on The Underground Railroad for 18 months’, and centre the conditions, needs and visions particular to each site. While these grassroots efforts often do not have infrastructure or funding for formal evaluation, existing assessments demonstrate striking improvements in infant survival across multiple settings. In its Nashville site from 2003–8, participants’ infant mortality rate of zero was significantly better than that of their white counterparts locally and nationwide. As the Madison site exemplifies, the project continues to expand. Davis argues that the Birthing Project ‘follow[s] in the footsteps of health care organizers from the antebellum period through the twentieth century’, exemplifying ‘a form of resistance promulgated by Black women on behalf of Black women’. In its own self-designation as a contemporary underground railroad, the project frames racist reproductive health inequities as part of the ongoing legacy of slavery, and invokes a lineage of Black women's struggles for life and freedom.
The Madison Birthing Project Site
Given its prosperous and liberal image – often near the top of ‘best places to live’ in the United States – Madison might seem an unlikely place to begin a discussion of Black infant mortality as a manifestation of what Alys Weinbaum, extending Saidiya Hartman's pivotal formulation of the ‘afterlife of slavery’, terms ‘the afterlife of reproductive slavery’.
BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP AND THE RACIAL CONTRACT: The United States' Jus Soli Rule against the Global Regime of Citizenship1
- Annie Menzel
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- Journal:
- Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race / Volume 10 / Issue 1 / Spring 2013
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 June 2013, pp. 29-58
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- Article
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Since 1981, there has been a sea change in longstanding policies of jus soli, or birthright citizenship, reinforcing the global divide between affluent spaces of whiteness and impoverished spaces of nonwhiteness. I argue that these moves highlight the global system of citizenship as an increasingly consequential aspect of what Charles Mills terms the Racial Contract: the set of agreements, historically explicit and currently tacit, that divides the earth's peoples into full persons—Whites—and subpersons—nonwhites—such that the latter are constitutive outsiders to the political, moral, and epistemological norms that structure the White social world. Mills posits that the present phase of the Racial Contract disconnects present geographies of inequality from the violent history of the earlier phase that brought them into being, thereby moving them outside the realm of redress. I focus on formal citizenship as a central locus of such erasure, using the figuration of the undocumented mother in the controversy over U.S. birthright citizenship as a case study. I argue that the global regime of citizenship perpetuates White supremacy in two ways: first, through a Westphalian map of citizenship, and second, through gendered and raced neoliberal norms of citizenship. The alchemy between these two rationalities both entrenches and hides the violence of the Racial Contract. Building upon Mills' standpoint epistemology, I analyze arguments from both sides of a 1995 congressional hearing on birthright citizenship. I argue that the arguments opposing birthright citizenship exhibit what can be thought of as a White epistemology of citizenship, which relies upon a profound amnesia about the exclusionary and violent history of the global regime of citizenship.