Scholar Dorothy Roberts exposes effects of anti-Black mythmaking and calls for an end to the family policing system.
, even airtight statistics and rational argument aren’t sufficient to demythologize conceptions of Black women. I think the first step must be to understand the function these myths play in U.S. society. They aren’t just the random outgrowth of prejudiced feelings against Black women. The images are very specific and operate in a specific way to uphold specific aspects of U.S. racial capitalism and white supremacy.
I find a similar contradiction in the way the child welfare system weaponizes Black children against their mothers. The family policing system is built on the racist myth that Black mothers are incapable of caring properly for their children and don’t really love them. This lie about Black mothers is exemplified by the welfare queen, who supposedly had children just to get a welfare check and then spent all the money on herself.
These contradictions help to make it clear that there is an underlying purpose that makes the myths about Black mothers useful and resilient to evidence that discredits them. Recognizing their function to uphold racist capitalism and obscure the suffering it causes reveals the carceral logic that reconciles the contradictions. Recognizing how the myths function also shows that dispelling them must be connected to movements to end racial capitalism and white supremacy.
Today, Black women continue to work collectively to imagine and build ways to liberate their sexuality, childbearing and parenting. Black women developed the “reproductive justice” framework that includes the human right to have children and to raise them with dignity in a safe, healthy and supportive environment, along with the right not to have a child that dominates mainstream pro-choice advocacy.
Often, the myth of the dangerous Black mother is described in biological terms, as if Black women’s childbearing is both a biological threat and a social problem. The press reported, for example, that Black women who smoked crack cocaine were deprived of maternal instinct and gave birth to babies who were medically and socially irredeemable.
These racial adjustments reflect a failure to understand the meaning of race and its connection to racism and should be abolished for that reason alone. But a mounting number of studies are documenting the harms to Black patients from being denied care because of an adjusted diagnosis. For example, Black patients whose eGFR is adjusted upward to a healthier reading are less likely to be referred to specialized kidney care.
I think that your approach to framing the solution to the child welfare system and foster care in terms of abolitionism is crucial. I say this as your abolitionist approach overlaps with assumptions and energies underlying prison abolitionism. When I hear the term abolition, I also hear hope. I’m a bit more DuBoisian. I’m not hopeless, but unhopeful. I say this because I conceptualize anti-Black racism as recursive and consumptive. It can “eat” what we throw at it.
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