UCSD Professor Authors New Book "The Black Reproductive"

Speaker 1: 00:00 A new book called the black reproductive looks at black freedom and the dismantling of oppressive systems through the lens of black reproduction and black feminist theory. Sarah Clark Kaplan is associate professor of ethnic studies and critical gender studies at the university of California, San Diego. She is also co-founder of UCF black studies project and author of the black reproductive unfree labor and insurgent motherhood, professor Kaplan. Welcome. Speaker 2: 00:28 Thanks so much, Jay. Thanks for having me. Speaker 1: 00:31 So first, what was the inspiration for writing this book? Speaker 2: 00:36 Well, you know, this book for me, um, was a long-term labor of love and it actually came out of an attempt for me to understand the history of black women's reproduction that goes back to slavery. But to understand it not simply in the context that we so often hear about, which is, you know, the sort of levels of oppression and the ways in which coerced reproduction happened, but to understand it as a black feminist today, as a site of empowerment, of struggle of contestation and conflict, and to really rethink what it would mean to think about, about black politics in the context of black reproduction in black motherhood and the black Speaker 1: 01:26 Reproductive, you explore the ways slavery relied on the reproduction and other labors of unfree black women. And you make the case that nearly four centuries later black reproduction is still used to meet the demands of white supremacy, capitalism. And heteropatriarchy, uh, in what ways do you see this happening? Speaker 2: 01:46 Well, you know, I think we're all very aware on at least some anecdotal level of the centrality of black women's reproduction to us, slavery. You, as you know, the U S is the only slave system that after the end of the Atlantic slave trade continued to expand exponentially precisely because black women gave birth to children who also were by law automatically slaves. So we can really think about the ways in which every single aspect of a us economy, every aspect of us expansion, westward to grow cotton and other crops, all of that relied upon black women's in slave reproduction. But in the book, I try to go beyond those sort of practical and economic aspects to think about the ideologies and the cultural aspects. I think about things like how, the idea of the mammy or the idea that black women would automatically give up raising their own children in order to raise white people's children. Speaker 2: 02:48 How that idea is embedded in our notions of bad black mothers. I talk about how everything from the anxiety that black women during slavery, we're not enough children and therefore must be somehow they imagined killing their children to today's notion or the eighties notion that black women on welfare were having too many children and we're there for a draining the state. So I really argue that from the beginning of this country, onward, that whether it be slave mothers who were imagined to commit infanticide or welfare Queens, or hyper fertile black women in the south to today's ideas about baby mamas, black matriarchs or video Vixens, that these ideas about black women's reproduction are part of how we understand race and gender in the U S on every level. Speaker 1: 03:43 You know, when we talk about black reproduction, um, today we see sharp disparities in maternal and infant health care. What policies are you seeing that perpetuate black infant and maternal death rates and negative outcomes? Speaker 2: 03:58 You know, I think it's an interesting question because we can start at the level of policy. Absolutely. And we could talk about things like how hospitals, um, treat patients who come in through the ER, we could talk about the ways in which healthcare policy in this country, as we've been discussing at great length, discriminate against people who have, um, gig labor, less consistent jobs, difficulty accessing insurance, all of which we know that poor and working class black for black folk have a harder time doing, but I would like to talk even beyond policy to what I think are more core issues. We can talk about things like the idea that black women are still understood by doctors to be less likely to feel pain are still understood, to be more likely to exaggerate their medical condition and are understood to be less likely to be compliant patients. Speaker 2: 04:54 And so what we have when we, and these things, again, go back to slavery, they go back to the idea that our earliest reproductive medical technologies, the father of gynecology, Marion Sims practice his technologies, his early gynecological technologies on enslaved black women without anesthesia, because the notion was that these poor women who had had multiple children with rough outcomes that had caused, um, problems with their bodies, anatomical problems with their bodies, that they could be operated on without anesthesia, because they didn't feel pain. So if we think back to today, if we think about whether it's a poor black woman or whether it's Serena Williams, uh, we know that when black women show up and they weren't, in fact, any black person who was giving birth shows up and they say, I think there's something wrong. I think there's a problem. Or they show with less than ideal conditions that they're less likely to be taken seriously. They're less likely to be medicated. They're less likely to receive will interventions. And this is something that goes beyond policy. It goes to actually a retraining of doctors and medical institutions from the ground up. Speaker 1: 06:09 How can black women's reproduction be used to dismantle systems of oppression? Speaker 2: 06:16 Ah, great question. And this is something that I talk about in a few different ways. So, you know, I'm a literature scholar. So one of the things that I'm interested in are those very subtle, um, kinds of cultural interventions. I look at novels by people like Tony Morrison or Gail Jones or Barbara Chase, rebel, black feminist authors. And I look at how they invoke this idea of the black mother to really a black reproduction, to really force us, to rethink our ideas about freedom, about kinship, about property in ways that really call into question some of our existing assumptions about how we understand everything from family to work, to love to Kent. But I also want to give you a sort of more, two more specific examples. And one example I talk about at great length in the book, which is the story of Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's enslaved concubine, and who was later proven to have had up to five children by him, um, through DNA evidence in 2000. Speaker 2: 07:24 And I argue in the book that if we actually rethink the history of the United States, not through founding fathers or through women like Betsy Ross, but if we understand somebody like Sally Hemings, a 15 year old enslaved girl who became the concubine and long-term sexual partner of our founding father, who said that slavery was terrible as he owned 603 slaves, um, and said, miscegenation was going to destroy the U S then we actually have a different national origin story that in fact, our founding mother is Sally Hemings and that everything we want to understand about relations of race and intimacy of power and labor can be understood differently. And so that really requires us to challenge how we think about blackness. And anti-blackness in the context of white supremacy in the United States. Speaker 1: 08:29 I've been speaking with Sarah Clark Kaplan, associate professor of ethnic studies and critical gender studies at the university of California, San Diego. She is also co-founder of UCF black studies project and the author of the black reproductive unfree labor and insurgent motherhood, professor Kaplan. Thank you so much for joining us. Speaker 2: 08:50 Thank you so much, Jade. It's always a pleasure.