Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant MortalityFatal Denial argues that over the past 150 years, US health authorities’ explanations of and interventions into Black infant mortality have been characterized by the "biopolitics of racial innocence," a term describing the institutionalized mechanisms in health care and policy that have at once obscured, enabled, and perpetuated systemic infanticide by blaming Black mothers and communities themselves. Following Black feminist scholarship demonstrating that the commodification and theft of Black women’s reproductive bodies, labors, and care is foundational to US racial capitalism, Annie Menzel posits that the polity has made Black infants vulnerable to preventable death. Drawing on key Black political thought and praxis around infant mortality—from W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell to Black midwives and birth workers—this work also tracks continued refusals to acknowledge this routinized reproductive violence, illuminating both a rich history of care and the possibility of more transformative futures. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Innocence and Infant Mortality | 43 |
2 Three Forms of Innocence in WEB Du Boiss Of the Passing of the FirstBorn | 100 |
Mary Church Terrell and the Reproduction of the White World | 136 |
4 The Midwifes Bag | 183 |
Other editions - View all
Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality Annie Menzel Limited preview - 2024 |
Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality Annie Menzel Limited preview - 2024 |
Common terms and phrases
African American African American Midwifery Anna Julia Cooper argues Awful Gladness biopolitics of racial Birth Justice Black Feminist Black infant mortality Black maternal Black midwives Black mothers Black women Bois's Burghardt's Carby century chapter child colonial color line Colored Woman cult of true Culture doulas Duke University Duke University Press Dye and Smith elegy enslaved environment epigenetic Fraser gender harms Healthy Baby Begins Hoffman human Indigenous Infant Death Jennie Joseph Jim Crow Journal Khalil Gibran labor loss Love and Infant lynching Mary Church Terrell Midwifery Muigai narration National necropolitical numbers Obstetric organizations Oxford University Press parents political pregnancy premature birth public health Race Traits racial capitalism racial innocence racism Reconstructing Womanhood Reproductive Justice settler sexual slave Slavery social Souls of Black sousveillance South statistics stress Studies Terrell's tion true babyhood true womanhood violence vulnerability W.E.B. Du Bois white infants white supremacist white women White World writes York