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Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
Vintage
December 1998
384 pages
ISBN: 0679758690
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and
conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and
socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent
years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of the
impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare
"reform" on black women's--especially poor black
women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their
freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity
in a society whose white mainstream is determined to
demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its
readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a
radically new , and socially transformative, definition of
"liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a
black feminist perspective. The author is able to combine the most innovative and
radical thinking on several fronts--racial theory, feminist,
and legal--to produce a work that is at once history and
political treatise. By using the history of how American
law--beginning with slavery--has treated the issue of the
state's right to interfere with the black woman's body, the
author explosively and effectively makes the case for the
legal redress to the racist implications of current policy
with regards to 1) access to and coercive dispensing of
birth control to poor black women 2) the criminalization of
parenting by poor black women who have used drugs 3) the
stigmatization and devaluation of poor black mothers under
the new welfare provisions, and 4) the differential access
to and disproportionate spending of social resources on the
new reproductive technologies used by wealthy white couples
to insure genetically related offspring. The legal redress of the racism inherent in current
American law and policy in these matters, the author argues
in her last chapter, demands and should lead us to adopt a
new standard and definition of the liberal theory of
"liberty" and "equality" based on the need for, and the
positive role of government in fostering, social as well as
individual justice.
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