Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality

Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality
ISBN-10
0520297199
ISBN-13
9780520297197
Category
Business & Economics
Pages
381
Language
English
Published
2024
Publisher
Univ of California Press
Author
Annie Menzel

Description

Fatal 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.

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