Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
blackwomen
News Flash: Black Women Do Stuff Like Worry About Bills and Pray
01 week ago
When faced with earnest but confusing efforts like the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation’s survey and interviews with 800 black women, I find myself getting all Etta James, righteously nasty. Frankly, I’m sick of using my brain cells and laptop-worn vision to parse out the latest examination of the rare species Blackus Womanamina Americanus.
But I owe you more than sarcasm here. So let me lay out how this two-part series is framed. The first article, “Survey paints portrait of black women,” begins like this:
Rich or poor, educated or not, black women sometimes feel as though myths are stalking them like shadows, their lives reduced to a string of labels. The angry black woman. The strong black woman. The unfeeling black woman. The manless black woman.
“Black women haven’t really defined themselves,” says author Sophia Nelson, who urges her fellow sisters to take control of their image. “We were always defined as workhorses, strong. We carry the burdens, we carry the family. We don’t need. We don’t want.”
This is a nifty, irritating trick because it absolves the very institutions that have consistently denied or marginalized black women’s voices. While the article briefly covers underemployment, tokenism and the stereotype of the “welfare queen,” it doesn’t dig into structural racism past or present. We don’t get how and why reductive ideas of black womanhood have been created, manipulated and consistently sold by mass media. This is an article about black women and stereotypes that doesn’t mention pesky ills like slavery, Jim Crow, reproductive injustice and mass incarceration but name-checks “Basketball Wives.” Without proper context, the black women respondents become self-sacrificing victims who haven’t learned to define themselves, shadowboxing with mysterious ghosts.
In 2012, that tact is at best naive and at worst a damn lie. Black women have been defining ourselves since before Sojourner Truth made her infamous 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, black women tell, no scream, about our humanity, complexity, legacy, pride, sisterhood, spirituality, money problems, romantic desires, bone-deep sadness, moral conflicts, sexuality and joy. Some of us are dying for a “Sunday Kind of Love.” Some of us think we’re cute and “Cleva.” Some of us aren’t that damn deep. The problem isn’t that black women haven’t defined ourselves for ourselves. It’s that mainstream media DON’T LISTEN.
And when media don’t listen, they publish black-women centered surveys that compare our responses to those of white women, black men and white men, as if there are no other groups of people in this damn country who help shape our collective experiences. They ask by-the-numbers questions about fundamental aspects of human life through the lens of race without interrogating why one would even need to ask these questions.
For example, survey takers were asked if “being successful in a career” was “very important, somewhat important, not too important, not important at all or don’t know/refuse [to answer].” Sixty eight percent of black women said it was “very important.”
Asked the same question about being married, 40 percent of black women chose “very important”; 62 percent considered having children “very important”; and a whopping 74 percent found “living a religious life” very important. Additional news: 44 percent of black women consider being in a romantic relationship very important, 76 percent place a premium on “being respected by others,” 92 percent think it’s “very important” to be close with family, and 38 percent are “very worried” about not having enough money to pay bills.
What are we supposed to do with this information? That’s not a rhetorical question. I truly don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this, besides attempt to compare it to the existing portrait of black women as manless, unmarried, overly independent-but-broke, super churchy sistah monolith.
To be fair, there are some interesting questions and results embedded in this latest Blackus Womanamina Americanus report. For example, when asked if they were worried about themselves or a family member “getting HIV or AIDS, or not,” 19 percent of black women and 21 percent of Black men said they were “very worried” while only 2 percent of white women and 3 percent of white men had the same reaction. Sadly, there’s no further explanation.
And the questions about racism and sexism, which appear about two thirds into this long, racial- and gender-centered report are also worth checking out as is the second article and data set, “African American women see their own challenges mirrored in Michelle Obama’s.” I wish the Post had led with this texture and skipped the reductive, no-duh stuff. Personally speaking, I’m just too angry to start at square one.
Here’s How Deadly Breast Cancer is For Women of Color in the U.S.
03 months ago
While breast cancer is widely known as a particularly heartbreaking disease, reports have shown that the impacts on women of color, particularly African American women, are especially devastating. Black women are more likely to die from breast cancer than any other group of women. To address this concern, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) released three videos targeting black women as part of its outreach to women of color for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
In one video, breast cancer survivor Juanita Lyle tells her story. Lyle was first diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 32, and has had to battle the disease a total of three times, along with one bought of skin cancer. “You can imagine being young and having menopause, going through all of the things that are supposedly the ‘old woman’s disease’ is very debilitating,” Lyle says of her experience.
The NCI estimates
that 230,480 women are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer,
while 39,520 women will die from in it 2011. And while the percentage in
men is much smaller, 2,140 men will be diagnosed with breast cancer,
while 450 men will die from it this year. There are currently more than
2.6 million breast cancer survivors in the United States.
According to the NCI, nearly 27,000 African American women are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. And while they are less likely than white women to be diagnosed with breast cancer, they are more likely to die from it than any other race — and more likely to be diagnosed at an advanced stage.
What’s the blame for such striking racial disparities? Lack of medical coverage, unequal access to improved treatments, and barriers to early detection and screening, the NCI has noted. Across the board, the death rate for all cancers combined is 25 percent higher for African Americans than for whites.
Below is a look at just how deadly breast cancer is for women of color. For more information, visit the National Cancer Institute for more information.
Hey, Media: Don’t Lecture Black Women About Marriage
03 months ago
In 2008, Oprah dedicated a show to discuss why 70 percent of of black woman were single. It’s since been a topic that CNN, the New York Times and every black news magazine covers at least once a year. Some have even called the coverage a “media obsession with unmarried black women.” In an opinion piece for the The Guardian titled “Don’t lecture black women about marriage,” Racialicious’
Latoya Peterson says falling black marriage rates aren’t the result of
black women ‘being picky’, but of the complex politics of attraction.
Most recently, Stanford Law professor Ralph Richard Banks has been making the media round, from the Washington Post to The Economist, blaming black women for a supposed misfortune and chastising them on missing out on the wonders of marriage.
Peterson starts off by reminding us that in this day and age, it’s not just black woman re-evaluating marriage.
Here’s a snippet:
In times of slavery, black women did want to be married – but the main focus was on creating a stable family unit, official or otherwise. More contemporary battles over marriage revolve around the changing needs of citizens,
particularly those in same-sex relationships, or those with
non-traditional families. And who said marriage is still the ultimate
end goal?…
In their quest to sell books and make media appearances, they
bulldoze the individual nature of the mating game in the rush to
diagnose millions of people with the same problem. The truth is, there
are many reasons why people find themselves single. Sometimes, it’s
their own attitudes. But many other times, the timing just isn’t right,
their careers are too demanding, or they need to focus elsewhere. As a
black woman who has been in a committed relationship for five years,
nothing is more obvious to me than how random circumstance plays a major
role in many happy relationships. If I hadn’t missed a concert, I
wouldn’t know my boyfriend; if one of my friends hadn’t gone to Mali
with the Peace Corps, she would have never been on the same continent as
her now-husband; if another friend hadn’t missed her original train and
hadn’t been wearing a sweatshirt from her alma mater, she would have
never met the man she would marry.
Dating, love, and
marriage are far more complicated than self-proclaimed experts would
have us believe. Statistics can show all kinds of trends, but
ultimately, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (in a
relationship) is the province of each individual.
Black Women Object to TSA’s Airport Hair Pat Downs
05 months ago
Some black women who sport natural hairstyles are reporting receiving hair pat downs by the TSA agents at airports even after they’ve passed full body scans without setting off alarms.
Timery Shante Nance, who’s African-American says she doesn’t use chemicals or straighteners in her hair. “It’s just my natural texture, and I wear it in a normal-looking puff,” she told the New York Times.
Nance says she was humiliated when a Transportation Security Agency (TSA) official patted her hair in front of everyone, “as if I’d done something wrong.”
She asked the screener why her hair was searched while other passengers, including white women with ponytails or bushy hair, were simply waved through. “Is it just African-American women with natural hair who get the hair search?” she asked the agent.
Another African-American woman with naturally curly hair, Laura Adiele, was going through Seattle-Tacoma airport when she had her patted down. She had gone through a full body scan that had not set alarms.
In several interviews Adiele mentioned she felt the searches were racially motivated, reports the Times.
“All passengers are thoroughly screened coming through the screening checkpoint,” Kristin Lee, a T.S.A. spokeswoman told the Times. “Additional screening may be required for clothing, headgear or hair where prohibited items may be hidden,” she said.
Nance says she filed a complaint with the T.S.A. but has not heard back from the agency.
Students Push to Get Satoshi Kanazawa Fired in London
08 months ago
On Thursday, the University of London Union Senate, which represents 120,000 students, voted unanimously in favor of calling a campaign for the dismissal of evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. The London School of Economics professor made international headlines this week after publishing a scathing set of pseudoscientific bar graphs meant to prove how black women are “objectively and subjectively” less attractive than white, Asian and Native American women.
Kanazawa is currently on sabbatical, reports the BBC.
Our own Gender Matters columnist Akiba Solomon issued a brilliant takedown of Kanazawa’s work, and points to a fact that the ULU also makes clear: this isn’t an isolated incident. A press release issued by the group notes that Kanazawa’s previous work includes “Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?” and “What’s Wrong with Muslims?”, which estimates there to be “120 million potential suicide bombers worldwide.”
Before sharing a few personal anecdotes about black womens’ alleged ugliness, Solomon wrote about the true danger of Kanazawa’s research:
Most women I know have such stories, but what makes them real and dangerous rather than one-offs of bad luck or true indications of attractiveness is the legacy of racist pseudoscience like Kanazawa’s. His mess is overt and sloppy, so it’s easy to debunk. I’m worried about how the underpinnings of his ideas have transcended centuries and nations, and how there’s still a financial incentive for publishing them.
Change.org has also started a petition to fire Kanazawa from Psychology Today, which continues to publish his work.
Students in London are primarily concerned with his academic influence.
“Kanazawa deliberately manipulates fundings to justify racist ideology,” Sherelle Davids, anti-racism officer-elect of the LSE Students’ Union said in a press release. “As a Black woman I feel his conclusions are a direct attack on Black women everywhere who are not included in social ideas of beauty.”
Meanwhile, LSE administrators have said that Kanazawa’s views are “his own and do not in any way represent those of LSE as an institution.” In a statement obtained by the BBC, the university said, “the important principle of academic freedom means that authors have the right to publish their views — but it also gives others the freedom to disagree. We are conducting internal investigations into this matter.”
Some students at the institution aren’t buying it. ”We support free speech and academic freedom, but Kanazawa’s research fuels hate against ethnic and religious minorities promoted by neo-Nazi groups. Not only does he use LSE’s credentials to legitimize his ‘research’ but this jeapordises the academic credibility of the LSE,” said Amena Amer, a London School of Economics Education Officer.
Notably, the university also faced criticism earlier this year for its dealings with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Poor, Jobless, and Getting out the Vote
01 year ago
With nearly one in ten American workers unable to find a job, the unemployed are becoming their own political interest group. The AFL-CIO has launched a campaign to mobilize unemployed voters across the country, hoping to turn out the “jobless vote” this November and bolster pro-labor Democrats at the polls. But will the campaign actually reach out to the chronically unemployed, those who face entrenched employment barriers like concentrated urban poverty and gender discrimination?
Long-term unemployment is practically an institution in many communities of color, and the latest figures suggest that the crisis is increasingly stratified by gender as well as race. Women of color, as well as mothers who head families (essentially, single moms), are suffering their worst unemployment rates in years. Recently, Black and Latina women’s unemployment rates ticked up even as unemployment fell slightly among Black and Latino men.
Other research reveals low voter participation among the unemployed and low-income people generally. In 2008, only about half of those making less than $20,000 voted, compared with around 90 percent of those earning above $100,000. And a poll analysis by Nate Silver suggests that extraordinarily high voter apathy in Black America.
So we might conclude that voter turnout among unemployed people of color, especially women, will lag this November. But economic statistics alone don’t tell the whole story. Pew has uncovered an odd, and refreshing, breakthrough in the 2008 election:
The voter turnout rate among eligible black female voters increased 5.1 percentage points, from 63.7% in 2004 to 68.8% in 2008. Overall, among all racial, ethnic and gender groups, black women had the highest voter turnout rate in November’s election — a first.
So, 2008 brought a burst of voter action in a group that’s been economically marginalized throughout history, not to mention routinely smeared by the right’s racial venom. To the extent that voter turnout says anything about political engagement, Black women made themselves heard in 2008–perhaps regaining some of the political visibility they’d lost since the days of civil rights protests and the welfare rights movement.
As the AFL-CIO’s organizers (operating through the union’s grassroots arm, Working America) get ready to knock on doors and convince laid-off auto workers and disgruntled construction contractors that their vote might actually mean something, they ought to look closely at the less visible facets of the jobless voting bloc. The groups that were mobilized by Obama fever in 2008 will almost certainly be less enthusiastic this time around, but they may have just as much at stake in terms of holding legislators accountable for a foundering economy and political spinelessness in Congress. Meanwhile, the disintegration of ACORN’s vast mobilization network means there’s a vacuum in the traditional infrastructure for mobilizing voters in communities of color. If the AFL-CIO’s goal is to channel working people’s economic frustrations into the ballot box, they’ll find among women of color plenty of outrage waiting to be tapped.
Why is CNN Still So Concerned With Black Women’s Dating Lives?
01 year ago
Update @ 4:40 p.m.: San Francisco Examiner advice columnist Deborrah Cooper, who’s online column spurred the CNN segment, chimed in to the discussion over on ColorLines Facebook page with this rejoinder:
[T]he original piece was NOT written by anyone White or in the media, it was written by ME. The purpose was not to divide anyone but to get Black women to wake up and smell the stink of manipulative games and pimpery in the pulpit. The culprit is very much the Black church and the information being jammed down women’s throats of being patient, on their knees, of service to some pastor/minister and his church while she is simultaneously told to “stay hidden” and that “God will bring you your husband” and “he must be equally yoked” or some such nonsense.
Bottom line, millions of Black women that want very much to be married go home year after year alone.
If you don’t want to be married, this is not of concern to you. Likewise if you are married, this is not an issue for you to concern yourself with. However, if you are a single Black woman in a church with 2% males and most of them gay or in a 12 step program, you need to read the article and open your mind.
The Black Church: How Black Churches Keep African American Women Single and Lonely
*********************************************
CNN recently re-entered the discussion on black women’s dating lives. This time the story’s focused on what role, if any, the black church plays in why so many black women remain single. And this time black mothers aren’t to blame.
The article suggests that church-going black women translate the bible too literally and, in turn, maintain a devotion to “alpha male” figures like church pastors, which leaves them with much smaller dating pools to choose from.
Sounds ridiculous, right? But there’s more.
CNN traces the hatched theory to Deborrah Cooper, an advice columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. Liane Membis reports:
Cooper, a writer for the San Francisco Examiner, recently made claims on her blog SurvivingDating.com that predominantly black protestant churches, such as African Methodists, Pentecostal, and certain denominations of Evangelical and Baptist churches are the main reason black women are single. Cooper, who is black and says she is not strictly religious, argues that rigid beliefs constructed by the black church are blinding black women in their search for love.
[snip]
The traditional structure and dynamics of black churches, mostly led by black men, convey submissive attitudes to women, Cooper says, encouraging them to be patient — instead of getting up and going after what they want.
Latoya Peterson at Racialicious isn’t having it. She blasts the CNN piece for its incendiary headline, and for its accompanying video, she explains her detest:
I hate: The headline. Nothing raises my blood pressure faster than asking stupid questions like “Does the black church keep black women single?” We can’t buy quality national news coverage for so many critical stories, and now I know why – everyone has given up reporting on current events so we can keep flogging the single black women story.
I hate: The video. It opens with “The thing that is keeping black women single is black women! They don’t know themselves, they don’t know what they want, they are desperate…there are tons of issues, nothing to do with the church. Nothing.”
[snip]
I hate: This fake me out “oh noes patriarchy, but wait, evolutionary biology means women submit and men rebel” circular nonsense.
Read Latoya Peterson’s full take-down here.
CNN is certainly guilty of echoing the tired, Tyler Perry-esque refrain of looking directly to the black church to explain black women’s dating lives. But even within that context, the article never seems to answer its own question. If anything, it turns the question in on itself: the church makes black women’s standards “too high”, yet at the same time the church is teaching them to be subservient to men.
So we’ll throw it back out to our readers. Isn’t it time we just left this story alone?
Study Exposes Myths Behind ‘Marriage Promotion’ in Welfare Reform
01 year ago
by Michelle Chen
in blackwomen, children, Economy, families, marriage, On Gender, poverty, welfarereform
When lawmakers revamped public assistance in the mid-1990s, the objective was not only to end welfare as we knew it, but to regulate the poor out of existence. The lubricant in this new anti-welfare state was the philosophy that the poor could solve their own problems if they were just magically changed into good, straight nuclear families. But according to one study, welfare reform’s “marriage promotion” programs have not only had little impact on the plight of poor families, but also done a pretty lousy job of pressing impoverished couples into the right-wing mold of “family values.”
Mathematica Policy Research evaluated Building Strong Families, a flagship marriage-focused program operating in several states, and concluded that it’s been a flop, though the results differ intriguingly along racial lines. Overall, the program failed to increase couple’s likelihood of tying the knot, didn’t increase fidelity, “did not improve couples’ ability to manage their conflicts” and “had no effect on how likely couples were to experience intimate partner violence.”
But Joseph DiNorcia, Jr of SIECUS (h/t) argues on RH Reality Check that from the start, BSF was intended to serve not poor families, but a right-wing agenda:
Projects like BSF are futile because they promote specific values, rather than overall well-being. Their object is, in fact, not effectiveness. Instead, they seek the successful advancement of a particular moral agenda: heterosexual marriage.
Still, Mathematica (which has similarly debunked the myths behind abstinence-only sexuality education) said BSF has “improved the relationship quality of African American couples”:
It improved the relationship quality of couples in which both members were African American, leading to more support and affection, better conflict management, increased fidelity, and reductions in intimate partner violence. In contrast, BSF did not affect the relationship quality of couples who were not African American and actually increased the rate at which these couples broke up.
So BSF failed flunked on goal number one, promoting holy matrimony, and yet Black couples appear to benefit from the program’s counseling or educational services. Why not Latino or white couples, too? Is the relative impact of services particularly pronounced for Black couples because they’re starting from a point of greater disadvantage? Mathematica stresses that more research is needed to grasp the long-term outcomes, reasons for disparities, and the effect on children’s well-being.
In any case, before politicians hail BSF as a blessing for all those unfortunate Black “welfare moms,” they should divorce the goal of helping parents get along better from the far more complex question of whether these programs make sense as part of welfare.
At a time when conservatives have rabidly attacked the supposedly profligate welfare state, isn’t it strange that there’s always money for magical-thinking programs like Building Strong Families? Why do tightfisted lawmakers sink federal largess into unproven social engineering that peddles outmoded and often racist values, yet they can’t find money for schools, job creation, or child nutrition initiatives–programs that may do more to strengthen families and foster opportunity than exchanging vows ever could?
Yes, some Black couples enjoy greater stability as the result of federally sponsored social services. But where does that leave their families? Despite some progress in “relationship quality,” as measured by clinical surveys, Mathematica reports, “BSF did not have an effect on the relationship status of African American couples… At the time of the 15-month follow-up survey, African American couples in both research groups had similar rates of romantic involvement, co-residence, and marriage.” So apparently a happier relationship does not beget marriage, nor vice versa.
But what does Building Strong Families really build? The most salient finding measures the program in terms of the actual welfare of struggling households:
BSF also had no effect on family economic well-being. At the time of the survey, 51 percent of focal children in BSF families lived in poverty, compared with 52 percent of focal children in control group families, a difference that is not statistically significant … In addition, similar percentages of BSF and control group families were receiving TANF or food stamp benefits at follow-up, 56 and 55 percent respectively.
Translation: put a wedding ring on a poor mother, and she’s still poor. Washington’s obsession with marriage, which has continued under Obama in more subdued form, not only wastes money promoting conformity, but papers over structural deprivation, of which family instability is typically a symptom rather than a cause. Policymakers live under the fiction that government can build strong families in the absence of strong communities, in a socioeconomic hierarchy that erodes parent-child bonds and criminalizes poverty.
The real measure of family strength here is the fact that so many single parents today manage to do right by their kids despite overwhelming hardships. They survive, with or without the support of the politicians who try to reduce them to pawns in a culture war.
Is Essence Leaving Black Women Behind?
01 year ago
[UPDATE 7:43pm EST] Essence is firing back at the criticism it’s taking for hiring a new white fashion director. Today the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Angela Burt-Murray took to The Griot to side-step the controversy altogether, saying that while she’s also concerned about the lack of black women in fashion, there are other, more pressing issues covered in the magazine that simply don’t garner the same attention.
“When we reported on the increase in sex trafficking of young black girls in urban communities?,” Burt-Murray wrote. “Silence.”
Stay tuned.
……………………..
Looks like Essence has a big controversy brewing. The seminal black women’s magazine is set to announce a new fashion editor at its upcoming 40th anniversary. And guess what? Word is that she’s a white woman named Ellianna Placas, who’s previously worked at O and US Weekly.
Former Essence fashion editor Michaela Angela Davis tweeted the news Friday, writing: “It is with a heavy heavy heart I have learned that Essence magazine has engaged a white fashion director, this hurts, literally, spiritually.”
The news led to a series of angry responses, most echoing Davis’ sentiments. Geneva S. Thompson writes in Clutch, an online fashion mag for young women of color, that “it felt like our Mom walked us hand in hand to the center of the biggest shopping mall in the state, turned around, and left us.”
Ouch. But Clutch isn’t alone. Many readers seem to take issue with the fact that Essence has long been seen as a hub for talented black fashion writers, editors and visionaries. Most seem to pinpoint their anger to the decade-old aquisition of Essence by media giant Time Warner, who also swooped up BET around the same time.
So is Essence‘s nod to mainstream white marketability in any way a step forward? Where readers fall along the debate may depend on what they think of the nation’s post-racial narrative.
Award-winning writer Joan Morgan jumped in the criticism, offering some historical perspective:
“This is about the fact that the publishing industry, particularly when it comes to mainstream women’s magazines remains just about as segregated in its hiring practices as it did in 1988.” Morgan told Clutch, referenced a 1988 Folio article about Blacks who are discouraged by the publishing industry’s laissez-faire attitude toward recruitment.
“When these same institutions (naming Conde Nast, Hachette and others) start to employ hiring practices that allow Black publishing professionals the same access to their publications, that’s when I can get all ‘Kumbaya’ about Essence‘s new fashion director.”
Demographics of Abortion: Race, Poverty and Choice
01 year ago
What kind of a woman gets an abortion these days? The Guttmacher Institute has released a report that tracks abortion rates across different demographic groups. One of the most stunning findings, particularly in light of the newhealth care reform legislation, is how abortion has become increasingly entwined with poverty.
According to Guttmacher, “The proportion of abortion patients who were poor increased by almost 60%—from 27% in 2000 to 42% in 2008.” As you might expect, the profile of the abortion patient is disproportionately poor, as well as disproportionately Black or Latina.
In the study, poor women’s “relative abortion rate was more than twice that of all women in 2008… and more than five times that of women at 200% or more of the poverty level.” In addition, Black and Latina women were significantly overrepresented, though no one racial group made up the majority. Generally, these proportions remained stable between 2000 and 2008. The “abortion index” rate of Black women appears to have moved somewhat closer to the national average.
It’s not easy to put those statistics in perspective after seeing how race has played into the anti-abortion agendas of lawmakers who evidently don’t think women of color are exploited enough when it comes to reproductive health.
Recently, the Georgia legislature tried to inject a civil-rights meme into a bill that would criminalize an attempt to “coerce” a woman into obtaining an abortion on the basis of race. The legislation cleverly hijacks the rhetoric of the reproductive justice movement to promote interference with the right to choose for all women, especially for poor women of color. (h/t Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Jodi Jacobson)
Catherine Davis, director of minority outreach for Georgia Right to Life, explained her organization’s interest in mixing identity politics with a reactionary ideology: “The black community is being targeted by abortionists,” she told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “The abortion industry wants us to believe that we have a greater need. Why should an abortion doctor be able to take a baby because it is black?”
The loaded conspiracy-theory language—in addition to totally ignoring the agency that Black women have struggled to assert over their bodies for generations—masks underlying failures of the health care system. In Black communities, economic disadvantage often overlaps with a lack of reproductive health and family-planning resources and a broken medical infrastructure, leaving many to face unintended pregnancy with few or no options.
In response to the media’s racialization of anti-abortion activism, Melissa Gilliam, a professor at the University of Chicago who chaired Guttmacher’s board of directors, explained in an op-ed that it’s not that Black women are being preyed upon by “abortionists,” but structural racism has eroded their choices and opportunities more globally–which in turn exacerbates historical tensions surrounding the suppression of black women’s reproductive freedom.
The root causes are manifold: a long history of discrimination; lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care; too few educational and professional opportunities; unequal access to safe, clean neighborhoods; and, for some African Americans, a lingering mistrust of the medical community.
There are no easy solutions to these complex challenges. Innovative strategies to reduce entrenched poverty, improve education, and broadly reform health care all will have to be part of the longer-term approach.
Compare that framework to the cruel argument that abortion rates can be “fixed” by restricting access to a basic component of reproductive health care, while punishing poor women of color in the process.
Now we know that the link between poverty and abortion is deepening, just as state lawmakers are pushing laws to limit access to abortion, and while some in Washington have worked to tighten abortion restrictions through health care reform. Maybe there’s a conspiracy at work here after all: a convergence of political agendas that quietly seek to maintain America’s medical apartheid.