See more stories at cdc.gov/hearher/.
Videos
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Birthing Justice: Every Woman Deserves a Beautiful Birth Story Giving birth is a battleground for too many Black women and their babies. Going behind the statistics, “Birthing Justice” places Black women at the center of the fight to fix a broken system for all women in this country. It focuses on the progress being made by those on the frontline of this fight and highlights solutions that can be replicated in communities across the country. Check out birthingjustice.com for additional information and resources.
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Black Maternal Health Disparities and Solutions In 2017, the World Health Organization found that even though maternal mortality rates were decreasing globally, the U.S. was one of two countries to experience a significant increase in its maternal mortality ratio. What this means is that women and other birthing people in the U.S. are "dying before, during, and after childbirth" at a rate higher than any developed nation in the world, with Black women and Black birthing persons 3 times more likely to die from pregnancy related complications than their white counterparts. In December, we took a deep dive into the issue of childbirth, disparities in maternal health outcomes, and the need for action. Listen to it here. The White House hosted its first ever Maternal Health Day of Action Summit on Dec 7, 2021 and in continuation of addressing the racial disparities in maternal health outcomes, announced that April 11th through April 17th is officially Black Maternal Health week. We speak with Raven Freeborn, Director of Policy, Organizing, and Partnership at Mamatoto Village, an organization creating career pathways in maternal health and providing accessible, reproductive support services for Black pregnant people and Black mothers.
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How the Pandemic Deepened Maternal Health Disparities for Black Women A new report by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that pregnancy related deaths for mothers rose in the first year of the pandemic. Black women continue to be disproportionately affected. We talked with Monica McLemore, associate professor of family health care nursing at the University of California, San Francisco about the report and solutions to improve Black maternal and child health care.
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What is Reproductive Justice?Maternal health experts Dr. Monica R. McLemore and Dr. Karen Scott explain the four main tenants of reproductive justice.
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What is the Black Maternal Health Momnibus? In the U.S., moms are dying at the highest rate in the developed world – and the rate is rising. The crisis is most severe for Black moms, who are dying at 3 to 4 times the rate of their white counterparts. In order to address the maternal health crisis in America, Congressional leaders have been fighting for critically important policy change like 12-month postpartum Medicaid coverage. To build on this effort, members of Congress have introduced the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021 to comprehensively address every dimension of the maternal health crisis in America. The Takeaway is joined by Professor Monica McLemore, Professor of Nursing, UC San Francisco about the Black Maternal Health Momnibus package and a conversation about the big picture of racial disparities within reproductive health care.
Podcasts
Articles
Background
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The Black Maternal Health CrisisPublished in a recent issue of The Bulletin: Official Magazine of the Santa Clara County Medical Association, this article discusses local impacts and efforts to reduce disparities in Black maternal and infant health.
Health information
Want to read more? Check out this list of resources compiled by the producer of the film Laboring with Hope.
Books
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Battling over Birth
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"Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis reveals hard truths- powerful findings on the role of racism, coercion, inadequate prenatal care, the pressures undermining breastfeeding and the lack of access to alternatives to a broken maternal health-care system as key threads of black women's birth experiences." -Kimberly Seals Allers, MS, author, The Big Letdown "This book clearly lays out the barriers facing Black families, but it also offers solutions. I think every professional who works with parents and babies of any color should read this book." -Sharon Muza, BS, CD(DONA), BDT(DONA), LCCE, FACCE, CLE "Battling over Birth is a critical and timely resource for understanding black women's birthing experiences in the United States, a country where black women's lives-and the lives they create-are at much greater risk of death and injury than those of non-black women ... By distilling the common and diverse threads from over 100 black women, the BWBJ researchers have woven a multi-faceted tapestry that reflects what black women view as important and central to optimal birth experiences. Their recommendations for improving care and outcomes are grounded in black women's authoritative knowledge. ... This wonderful, important, necessary research by and for black women points in the direction that black women think we should go to ensure they have safe, healthy, and satisfying birth experiences and outcomes. We need to listen and act." -Christine Morton, PhD, author, Birth Ambassadors: Doulas and the Re-Emergence of Woman-Supported Birth in America Black Women Birthing Justice is a collective of African-American, African, Caribbean and multiracial women who are committed to transforming birthing experiences for black women and transfolks. Our vision is that every pregnant person should have an empowering birthing experience, free of unnecessary medical interventions and forced separation from their child. Our goals are to educate, to document birth stories and to raise awareness about birthing alternatives. We aim to challenge human rights violations, rebuild confidence in our ability to give birth, and decrease disproportionate maternal and infant mortality.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RG961.C2 O63 2018ISBN: 9781946665119Publication Date: 2017-12-02 -
Birthing a Slave
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The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage. In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the health of enslaved women from puberty through the reproductive years, attempting to foster pregnancy, cure infertility, and resolve gynecological problems, including cancer. Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both the slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, emphasizing the power of roots and herbs and the critical roles of family and community, enslaved women struggled to take charge of their own health in a system that did not respect their social circumstances, customs, or values. Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. Birthing a Slave is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.
Call Number: Africana Center 5th Floor ; RG518.U5 S3 2009ISBN: 0674034929Publication Date: 2010-03-30 -
Birthing Black Mothers
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In Birthing Black Mothers Black feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the "Black mother" has become a powerful political category. "Mothering while Black" has become synonymous with crisis as well as a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, and support. Cast as suffering and traumatized by their proximity to Black death--especially through medical racism and state-sanctioned police violence--Black mothers are often rendered as one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism. In contrast, Nash examines Black mothers' self-representations and public performances of motherhood--including Black doulas and breastfeeding advocates alongside celebrities such as Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama--that are not rooted in loss. Through cultural critique and in-depth interviews, Nash acknowledges the complexities of Black motherhood outside its use as political currency. Throughout, Nash imagines a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of locating the precarity of Black life in women and instead invites readers to theorize, organize, and dream into being new modes of Black motherhood.
Call Number: Africana Center 5th Floor ; E185.86 .N35 2021ISBN: 9781478013501Publication Date: 2021-08-20 -
Birthing Justice
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The second edition of this pathbreaking, widely taught book offers six new chapters, on breastfeeding and Black infant health; Black birthing during COVID; Black doulas rethinking birthing practices; the recent buildup of a US national movement; childbirth in Zanzibar; and expanding the global movement for sexual and reproductive well-being. Other chapters are updated throughout. Birthing Justice puts Black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternal care system. It foregrounds Black women's agency in the birth justice movement. First published in 2016, Birthing Justice is a seminal text for those interested in maternal healthcare, reproductive justice, health equity, and intersectional racial justice, especially in courses on gender studies, Black studies, public health, and training programs for midwives and OB/GYNs. Additional resources and a reading group guide are available at www.blackwomenbirthingjustice.com.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RG964.G72 B57 2024ISBN: 9781032546001Publication Date: 2023-09-12 -
Birthing Justice
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There is a global crisis in maternal health care for black women. In the United States, black women are over three times more likely to perish from pregnancy-related complications than white women; their babies are half as likely to survive the first year. Many black women experience policing, coercion, and disempowerment during pregnancy and childbirth and are disconnected from alternative birthing traditions. This book places black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternity system and foregrounds black women's agency in the emerging birth justice movement. Mixing scholarly, activist, and personal perspectives, the book shows readers how they too can change lives, one birth at a time.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RG964.5.N4 B57 2015ISBN: 9781612058368Publication Date: 2015-10-02 -
Black Women and Public Health
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Black Women and Public Health creates an urgently needed interdisciplinary dialogue about issues of race, gender, and health. An enduring history of racism, sexism, and dehumanization of Black women's bodies has largely rendered the health needs of the Black community inaudible and invisible. Grounded in the lived experiences and expertise of Black women, this collection bridges gaps between researchers, practitioners, educators, and advocates. Black women's public health work is a regenerative practice--one that looks backward, inward, and forward to improve the quality of life for Black communities in the United States and beyond. The three dozen authors in this volume offer analysis, critique, and recommendations for overcoming longstanding and contemporary challenges to equity in public health practices.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RA564.86 .B533 2022ISBN: 1438487312Publication Date: 2022-03-01 -
Black Womens' Reproductive Health and Sexuality
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"Intended as a resource for public health professionals and others committed to improving the reproductive and sexual health outcomes for Black women in America, this book takes a holistic look at the many facets of the reproductive health and sexuality of Black women by providing the readers with a life course perspective as well as a historical context"--
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RG136.2 .B53 202ISBN: 9780875533407Publication Date: 2023-07-01 -
Health Equity
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"This book aims to advance health equity by providing a critical examination of selected factors that create, perpetuate, and exacerbate imbalances concerning unique experiences of African Americans in the United States"--
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RA448.5.B53 H43 2023ISBN: 9780875533285Publication Date: 2023-07-01 -
Just Health
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Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023 The author of the bestselling Just Medicine reveals how racial inequality undermines public health and how we can change it With the rise of the Movement for Black Lives and the feverish calls for Medicare for All, the public spotlight on racial inequality and access to healthcare has never been brighter. The rise of COVID-19 and its disproportionate effects on people of color has especially made clear how the color of one's skin is directly related to the quality of care (or lack thereof) a person receives, and the disastrous health outcomes Americans suffer as a result of racism and an unjust healthcare system. Timely and accessible, Just Health examines how deep structural racism embedded in the fabric of American society leads to worse health outcomes and lower life expectancy for people of color. By presenting evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, Dayna Bowen Matthew shows how racial inequality pervades American society and the multitude of ways that this undermines the health of minority populations. The author provides a clear path forward for overcoming these massive barriers to health and ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to be healthy. She encourages health providers to take a leading role in the fight to dismantle the structural inequities their patients face. A compelling and essential read, Just Health helps us to understand how racial inequality damages the health of our minority communities and explains what we can do to fight back.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RA563.M56 M28 2022ISBN: 9781479802661Publication Date: 2022-02-22 -
Killing the Black Body
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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.
Call Number: 7th Floor ; HQ766.5.U5 R58 1997ISBN: 9780679442264Publication Date: 1997-09-16 -
Medical Apartheid
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From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed,Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; R853.H8 W37 2006ISBN: 9780385509930Publication Date: 2007-01-09 -
Medicalized Motherhood
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The 1946 publication of Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care signaled the pervasive influence of expert 'medicalized motherhood' in mid-twentieth-century America. Throughout the previous two decades, pediatricians and women's magazines alike advised mothers of the importance of physicians' guidance for the everyday care of their children, and Spock's book popularized this advice, particularly among white, middle-class women. When Jacquelyn S. Litt interviewed African-American and Jewish women who raised their children in the 1930s and 1940s, she found that these women responded to experts' advice in ways uniquely shaped by their ethnicity, race, and class. For middle-class African-American and Jewish women, medicalization took place in ethnically/racially segregated networks and functioned as a collectively held strategy for social advance as much as a set of technical practices for raising healthy children. For poor, single African-American mothers, everyday networks offered limited access to medical institutions or mainstream norms. Medical discourse was largely controlled by white women and men, which left these women disempowered in medical institutions and marginal to dominant definitions of acceptable mothering. Litt's book is enriched with many narratives from the mothers themselves. Both the women's voices and her acute sociological research bring to light how medicalized motherhood, while not the single cause of difference and inequality among the women, was a site where they were produced.
Call Number: 7th Floor ; HQ759 .L57 2000ISBN: 0813527813Publication Date: 1999-12-15 -
The Pain Gap
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Explore real women's tales of healthcare trauma and medical misogyny with this meticulously researched, in-depth examination of the women's health crisis in America--and what we can do about it. When Anushay Hossain became pregnant in the US, she was so relieved. Growing up in Bangladesh in the 1980s, where the concept of women's healthcare hardly existed, she understood how lucky she was to access the best in the world. But she couldn't have been more wrong. Things started to go awry from the minute she stepped in the hospital, and after thirty hours of labor (two of which she spent pushing), Hossain's epidural slipped. Her pain was so severe that she ran a fever of 104 degrees, and as she shook and trembled uncontrollably, the doctors finally performed an emergency C-section. Giving birth in the richest country on earth, Hossain never imagined she could die in labor. But she almost did. The experience put her on a journey to explore, understand, and share how women--especially women of color--are dismissed to death by systemic sexism in American healthcare. Following in the footsteps of feminist manifestos such as The Feminine Mystique and Rage Becomes Her, The Pain Gap is an eye-opening and stirring call to arms that encourages women to flip their "hysteria complex" on its head and use it to revolutionize women's healthcare. This book tells the story of Hossain's experiences--from growing up in South Asia surrounded by staggering maternal mortality rates to lobbying for global health legislation on Capitol Hill to nearly becoming a statistic herself. Along the way, she realized that a little fury might be just what the doctor ordered. Meticulously researched and deeply reported, this book explores real women's traumatic experiences with America's healthcare system--and empowers everyone to use their experiences to bring about the healthcare revolution women need.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RA564.85 .H67 2021ISBN: 9781982177775Publication Date: 2021-10-26 -
The Political Determinants of Health
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How do policy and politics influence the social conditions that generate health outcomes? Reduced life expectancy, worsening health outcomes, health inequity, and declining health care options--these are now realities for most Americans. However, in a country of more than 325 million people, addressing everyone's issues is challenging. How can we effect beneficial change for everyone so we all can thrive? What is the great equalizer? In this book, Daniel E. Dawes argues that political determinants of health create the social drivers--including poor environmental conditions, inadequate transportation, unsafe neighborhoods, and lack of healthy food options--that affect all other dynamics of health. By understanding these determinants, their origins, and their impact on the equitable distribution of opportunities and resources, we will be better equipped to develop and implement actionable solutions to close the health gap. Dawes draws on his firsthand experience helping to shape major federal policies, including the Affordable Care Act, to describe the history of efforts to address the political determinants that have resulted in health inequities. Taking us further upstream to the underlying source of the causes of inequities, Dawes examines the political decisions that lead to our social conditions, makes the social determinants of health more accessible, and provides a playbook for how we can address them effectively. A thought-provoking and evocative account that considers both the policies we think of as "health policy" and those that we don't, The Political Determinants of Health provides a novel, multidisciplinary framework for addressing the systemic barriers preventing the United States from becoming the healthiest nation in the world.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RA425 .D385 2020ISBN: 1421437899Publication Date: 2020-03-24 -
Pregnant While Black
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A tragedy is unfolding all around us and is receiving well overdue attention. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy than their white peers. But Dr. Monique Rainford is working to better understand these disparities and do something about them. Pregnant While Black is a hopeful exploration of the issues pregnant Black women face in America.Within these pages, Dr. Rainford draws on over twenty years of experience working in obstetrics and gynecology to offer a primer on Black pregnancies and how to better care for them. She shares the successes and testimonies of Black women who have struggled during pregnancy and childbirth, anchoring the stories of these women with carefully researched facts. Despite medical advances over the last twenty years, for Black women, the overwhelming dangers of carrying and delivering children remain and it only seems to be getting worse. In Pregnant While Black, Rainford begins the work of "repairing the damage of the past" with an examination of the conditions that plague Black pregnancies. This important book carries the hopes and dreams of a generation looking to effect change, here and now.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RG962.5.B53 R35 2023ISBN: 9781506487618Publication Date: 2023-04-11 -
Sickening
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An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis--and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams--author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes' bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States. Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans.
Call Number: Africana Center 5th Floor ; RA448.5.B53 P653 2021ISBN: 9781517911713Publication Date: 2021-08-17 -
The Turnaway Study
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"If you read only one book about democracy, The Turnaway Study should be it. Why? Because without the power to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy." --Gloria Steinem "Dr. Diana Greene Foster brings what is too often missing from the public debate around abortion: science, data, and the real-life experiences of people from diverse backgrounds... This should be required reading for every judge, member of Congress, and candidate for office--as well as anyone who hopes to better understand this complex and important issue." --Cecile Richards, cofounder of Supermajority, former president of Planned Parenthood, and author of Make Trouble A groundbreaking and illuminating look at the state of abortion access in America and the first long-term study of the consequences--emotional, physical, financial, professional, personal, and psychological--of receiving versus being denied an abortion on women's lives. What happens when a woman seeking an abortion is turned away? Diana Greene Foster, PhD, decided to find out. With a team of scientists--psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nursing scholars, and public health researchers--she set out to discover the effect of receiving versus being denied an abortion on women's lives. Over the course of a ten-year investigation that began in 2007, she and her team followed a thousand women from more than twenty states, some of whom received their abortions, some of whom were turned away. Now, for the first time, the results of this landmark study--the largest of its kind to examine women's experiences with abortion and unwanted pregnancy in the United States--have been gathered together in one place. Here Foster presents the emotional, physical, and socioeconomic outcomes for women who received their abortion and those who were denied. She analyzes the impact on their mental and physical health, their careers, their romantic lives, their professional aspirations, and even their existing and future children--and finds that women who received an abortion were almost always better off than women who were denied one. Interwoven with these findings are ten riveting first-person narratives by women who share their candid stories. As the debate about abortion rights intensifies, The Turnaway Study offers an in-depth examination of the real-world consequences for women of being denied abortions and provides evidence to refute the claim that abortion harms women. With brilliant synthesis and startling statistics--that thousands of American women are unable to access abortions; that 99% of women who receive an abortion do not regret it five years later--The Turnaway Study is a necessary and revelatory look at the impact of abortion access on people's lives.
Call Number: 7th Floor ; HQ767.5.U5 F67 2020ISBN: 9781982141561Publication Date: 2020-06-02 -
Under the Skin
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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST "A stunning exposé of why Black people in our society 'live sicker and die quicker'--an eye-opening game changer."--Oprah Daily From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation. In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore. Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to "live sicker and die quicker" compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.
Call Number: Ethnic Studies 5th Floor ; RA448.5.N4 V55 2022ISBN: 9780385544887Publication Date: 2022-06-14 -
Weathering
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Fusing science and social justice, renowned public health researcher Dr. Arline T. Geronimus offers an urgent, "monumental" book (Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning) exploring the ways in which systemic injustice erodes the health of marginalized people. America has woken up to what many of its citizenshave known for centuries and to what public health statistics have evidenced for decades: systemic injustice takes a physical, too often deadly, toll on Black, brown, working class and poor communities, and any group who experiences systemic cultural oppression or economic exploitation. Marginalized Americans are disproportionately more likely to suffer from chronic diseases and to die at much younger ages than their middle- and upper-class white counterparts. Black mothers die during childbirth at a rate three times higher than white mothers. White kids in high-poverty Appalachian regions have a healthy life expectancy of 50 years old, while the vast majority of US youth can expect to both survive and be able-bodied at 50, with decades of healthy life expectancy ahead of them. In the face of such clear inequity, we must ask ourselves why this is, and what we can we do. Dr. Arline T. Geronimus coined the term "weathering" to describe the effects of systemic oppression--including racism and classism--on the body. In Weathering, based on more than 30 years of research, she argues that health and aging have more to do with how society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves. She explains what happens to human bodies as they attempt to withstand and overcome the challenges and insults that society leverages at them, and details how this process ravages their health. And she proposes solutions. Until now, there has been little discussion about the insidious effects of social injustice on the body. Weathering shifts the paradigm, shining a light on the topic and offering a roadmap for hope.
Call Number: 8th Floor ; RA563.M56 G47 2023ISBN: 9780316257978Publication Date: 2023-03-28 -
Women, Race and Class
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"Longtime activist, author and political figure Angela Davis brings us this expose of the women's movement in the context of the fight for civil rights and working class issues. She uncovers a side of the fight for suffrage many of us have not heard: the intimate tie between the anti-slavery campaign and the struggle for women's suffrage. She shows how the racist and classist bias of some in the women's movement have divided its own membership. Davis' message is clear: If we ever want equality, we're gonna have to fight for it together."--Amazon.ca Dec. 2013.
Call Number: 7th Floor ; HT1521 .D38ISBN: 0394510399Publication Date: 1981-12-01
SJSU Only - Ebooks
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African American Midwifery in the South
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Starting at the turn of the century, most African American midwives in the South were gradually excluded from reproductive health care. Gertrude Fraser shows how physicians, public health personnel, and state legislators mounted a campaign ostensibly to improve maternal and infant health, especially in rural areas. They brought traditional midwives under the control of a supervisory body, and eventually eliminated them. In the writings and programs produced by these physicians and public health officials, Fraser finds a universe of ideas about race, gender, the relationship of medicine to society, and the status of the South in the national political and social economies. Fraser also studies this experience through dialogues of memory. She interviews members of a rural Virginia African American community that included not just retired midwives and their descendants, but anyone who lived through this transformation in medical care--especially the women who gave birth at home attended by a midwife. She compares these narrations to those in contemporary medical journals and public health materials, discovering contradictions and ambivalence: was the midwife a figure of shame or pride? How did one distance oneself from what was now considered "superstitious" or "backward" and at the same time acknowledge and show pride in the former unquestioned authority of these beliefs and practices? In an important contribution to African American studies and anthropology, African American Midwifery in the South brings new voices to the discourse on the hidden world of midwives and birthing.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0674037200Publication Date: 2009-07-01 -
An Autoethnography of African-American Motherhood
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This is the first full-length explicitly identified auto ethnographic text on African American motherhood. It shows the lived experiences of Black motherhood, when mothering is shaped by race, gender, and class, and mothers must navigate not only their own, but also their children's positions in society. Ferdinand takes an intimate look at her mothering strategies spanning ten years (from 2007 to 2017), preparing her daughter to traverse a racist and sexist society. It is a multi-generational text that blends the author's experience with that of her own mother, grandmother, and her daughter, to engage in a larger discussion of African American/Black mother/womanhood. It is grounded within Black Feminist Theory, which centers the experiences of Black women within the domains of intersecting oppressions. It is from a very personal position that Ferdinand provides a glimpse into the minutiae of mothering that reveal the everyday intricacies of Black women as mothers. It highlights specific strategies Black mothers use to combat discrimination and oppression, from teaching their children about the n-word to choosing positive representations of Black identity in movies, books, dolls, daycares, elementary schools, and even extra-curricular activities. It shows the impact that stereotypical manifestations of Black femininity have on Black women's experience of motherhood, and how this affects Black women and girls' understanding of themselves, especially their skin color, body shape, and hair texture. As an interdisciplinary text, this book will be reading for academics and students in a broad range of fields, including Education, African American Studies, Communication Studies, Women Studies, Psychology and Health Studies. It is also a handbook of lived experience for Black mothers, grandmothers, and daughters, and for all mothers, grandmothers, and daughters irrespective of color.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780367822897Publication Date: 2021-11-29 -
Babylost
by
The U.S. infant mortality rate is among the highest in the industrialized world, and Black babies are far more likely than white babies to die in their first year of life. Maternal mortality rates are also very high. Though the infant mortality rate overall has improved over the past century with public health interventions, racial disparities have not. Racism, poverty, lack of access to health care, and other causes of death have been identified, but not yet adequately addressed. The tragedy is twofold: it is undoubtedly tragic that babies die in their first year of life, and it is both tragic and unacceptable that most of these deaths are preventable. Despite the urgency of the problem, there has been little public discussion of infant loss. The question this book takes up is not why babies die; we already have many answers to this question. It is, rather, who cares that babies, mostly but not only Black and Native American babies, are dying before their first birthdays? More importantly, what are we willing to do about it? This book tracks social and cultural dimensions of infant death through 58 alphabetical entries, from Absence to ZIP Code. It centers women's loss and grief, while also drawing attention to dimensions of infant death not often examined. It is simultaneously a sociological study of infant death, an archive of loss and grief, and a clarion call for social change.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781978825963Publication Date: 2022-03-18 -
Birthing a Slave
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The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage. In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the health of enslaved women from puberty through the reproductive years, attempting to foster pregnancy, cure infertility, and resolve gynecological problems, including cancer. Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both the slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, emphasizing the power of roots and herbs and the critical roles of family and community, enslaved women struggled to take charge of their own health in a system that did not respect their social circumstances, customs, or values. Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. Birthing a Slave is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0674034929Publication Date: 2010-03-30
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Birthing Black Mothers
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In Birthing Black Mothers Black feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the "Black mother" has become a powerful political category. "Mothering while Black" has become synonymous with crisis as well as a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, and support. Cast as suffering and traumatized by their proximity to Black death--especially through medical racism and state-sanctioned police violence--Black mothers are often rendered as one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism. In contrast, Nash examines Black mothers' self-representations and public performances of motherhood--including Black doulas and breastfeeding advocates alongside celebrities such as Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama--that are not rooted in loss. Through cultural critique and in-depth interviews, Nash acknowledges the complexities of Black motherhood outside its use as political currency. Throughout, Nash imagines a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of locating the precarity of Black life in women and instead invites readers to theorize, organize, and dream into being new modes of Black motherhood.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781478013501Publication Date: 2021-08-20
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Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier
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This book addresses the politics of global health and social justice issues around birth, focusing on dynamic communities that have chosen to speak truth to power by reforming dysfunctional health care systems or creating new ones outside the box. The chapters present models of childbirth at extreme ends of a spectrum--from the conflict zones and disaster areas of Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, and Indonesia, to high-risk tertiary care settings in China, Canada, Australia, and Turkey. Debunking notions about best care, the volume illustrates how human rights in health care are on a collision course with global capitalism and offers a number of specific solutions to this ever-increasing problem. This volume will be a valuable resource for scholars and students in anthropology, sociology, health, and midwifery, as well as for practitioners, policy makers, and organizations focused on birth or on social activism in any arena.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1000335534Publication Date: 2020-12-29 -
Birth Justice
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Reproductive injustice is an urgent global problem. We are faced with the increased criminalization of abortion, higher maternal and neonatal mortality rates for people of color, and more and more research addressing the structural nature of obstetric violence. In this collection of essays, the cause of reproductive injustice is understood as the institutionalized isolation of (potentially) pregnant people, making them vulnerable for bio- and necropolitical disciplination and control. The central thesis of this book is that reproductive justice must be achieved through a radical reappropriation of relationality in reproductive care to safeguard the access to knowledge and care needed for safe bodily self-determination. Through empirical research as well as decolonial, feminist, midwifery, and Black theory, reproductive justice is reimagined as abolitionist care, grounded in the abolition of authoritative obstetric institutions, state control of reproduction, and restrictive abortion laws in favor of community practices that are truly relational.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9789048562404Publication Date: 2024-12-10 -
Black and Blue: the Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism by "Black & Blue" is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today. "Black & Blue" penetrates the physician s private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry. Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies. The American medical establishment does not readily absorb either historical or current information about medical racism. For this reason, racial enlightenment will not reach medical schools until the current race-aversive curricula include new historical and sociological perspectives."
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781280116483Publication Date: 2012-01-01 -
Black Health in the South
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A collection of important essays on the health and well-being of African Americans in the southern United States. For African Americans in the southern United States, the social determinants of health are influenced by a unique history that encompasses hundreds of years of slavery, injustices during the Jim Crow era, the Great Migration, the civil rights era, and contemporary experiences like the Black Lives Matter movement. In Black Health in the South, editors Steven S. Coughlin, Lovoria B. Williams, and Tabia Henry Akintobi bring together essays on this important subject from top public health experts. Black activists, physicians, and communities continue to battle inequities and structural problems that include poverty, inadequate access to health care, incarceration, a lack of transportation, and food insecurity. As the result of redlining and other historical and contemporary injustices, African Americans are less likely to own a home or to have equity, which places them in danger of financial ruin if they experience an illness such as a heart attack, stroke, or cancer, for which they are often at greater risk due to many social and environmental factors. At the same time, African American communities display many strengths and are often very resilient against these structural inequities. The use of community coalitions is a valuable approach for addressing health disparities in African American communities, and improving the cultural competence of health care providers further reduces the effects of health disparities. With essays spanning topics from culturally appropriate health care to faith-based interventions and the role of research networks in addressing disparities, this collection is pivotal for understanding the health of African Americans in the South. Public health scholars have examined racial disparities in health in the United States broadly and in specific cities, but this is the first edited collection to focus on African Americans in the South both as a whole and as a distinct population.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781421445472Publication Date: 2023-03-21 -
Black Motherhood(s) Contours, Contexts and Considerations
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This book considers Black Motherhood through multiple and global lenses to engage the reader in an expanded reflection and to prompt further discourse on the intersection of race and gender within the construct of motherhood among Black women. With an aim to extend traditional treatments of Black motherhood that are often centered on a subordinated and struggling perspective, these essays address some of the hegemonic reality while also exploring nuance in experiences, less explored areas of subjugation, as well as pathways of resistance and resilience in spite of it. Largely focusing within domains such as narrative, identity, spirituality and sexuality, the book deftly explores black motherhood by incorporating varied arenas for discussion including: literary analysis, expressive arts, historical fiction, the African Diaspora, reproductive health, religion and social ecology.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1927335256Publication Date: 2015-10-01 -
Black Women's Mental Health
by
Creates a new framework for approaching Black women's wellness, by merging theory and practice with both personal narratives and public policy.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1438465815Publication Date: 2017-07-01 -
Black Women and Resilience
by
A critical examination of the health disparities and collective resilience of Black women in the United States. Black Women and Resilience brings together a wealth of qualitative and quantitative research to help foster broad understanding and advancement of Black women's collective health and wellbeing. Throughout, Kisha Braithwaite Holden, Camara Phyllis Jones, and their contributors use a health equity lens, maintaining that achieving health equity requires valuing all individuals and populations equally, recognizing and rectifying historical injustices, and providing resources according to need. Across four sections, scholars, practitioners, and community leaders address cultural narratives of Black womanhood; significant health issues affecting Black women; trauma, stressors, and strategies for healing; and advocacy for social justice and collective action. Multivocal and multidisciplinary, Black Women and Resilience models and invites exchange across sectors and specializations while consistently centering the experiences and contributions of Black women as catalysts for transformation.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781438494227Publication Date: 2024-10-02 -
Caring for Equality
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African Americans today continue to suffer disproportionately from heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. In Caring for Equality David McBride chronicles the struggle by African Americans and their white allies to improve poor black health conditions as well as inadequate medical care--caused by slavery, racism, and discrimination--since the arrival of African slaves in America. Black American health progress resulted from the steady influence of what David McBride calls the health equality ideal: the principle that health of black Americans could and should be equal to that of whites and other Americans. Including a timeline, selected primary sources, and an extensive bibliographic essay, McBride's book provides a superb starting point for students and readers who want to explore in greater depth this important and understudied topic in African American history.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1442260599Publication Date: 2018-08-24 -
A Guide to Providing LGBTQ+ Inclusive Reproductive Health Care
by
This evidence-based guide brings together a wide range of information and practical tools for midwives, obstetricians, nurses, health visitors and birth workers, empowering them to provide safe and compassionate care throughout the reproductive journeys of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) people. This book may also be helpful to LGBTQ+ people in their own reproductive journeys. Throughout history, in cultures around the world, LGBTQ+ people have become pregnant, sought abortion care, miscarried, experienced infertility, given birth, and made decisions about infant feeding. Their reproductive journeys are increasingly visible, reflecting the changing social and legal recognition of sexual and gender minority people as parents. LGBTQ+ people require support during these significant life events which is appropriate, expert, and meets their needs. However, healthcare professionals and birth workers may not always be confident in working with these clients and may lack understanding of LGBTQ+ clients' experiences. There is also often insufficient attention paid to differences in the LGBTQ+ non-gestational parents' experiences. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book brings together up-to-date research findings from a range of fields including medicine, psychology, sociology, law and public health, to provide a knowledge base and tools to support clients at different stages of pregnancy and parenthood. The book follows the reproductive journey, moving from pre-conception and fertility research, through pregnancy and birth, to postnatal physical and mental healthcare. It also addresses termination care and perinatal loss. The chapters contain vignettes to personalise the issues discussed, highlights key practice recommendations, and suggestions for further reading. This is an essential guide for student midwives and medical students, as well as health visitors, midwives and obstetricians in practice.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781032305035Publication Date: 2025-03-11 -
Health Rights Are Civil Rights
by
Health Rights Are Civil Rights tells the story of the important place of health in struggles for social change in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Jenna M. Loyd describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women's movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to establish the principle that health is a right. For a time--with President Nixon, big business, and organized labor in agreement on national health insurance--even universal health care seemed a real possibility. Health Rights Are Civil Rights documents what many Los Angeles activists recognized: that militarization was in part responsible for the inequalities in American cities. This challenging new reading of suburban white flight explores how racial conflicts transpired across a Southland landscape shaped by defense spending. While the war in Vietnam constrained social spending, the New Right gained strength by seizing on the racialized and gendered politics of urban crisis to resist urban reinvestment and social programs. Recapturing a little-known current of the era's activism, Loyd uses an intersectional approach to show why this diverse group of activists believed that democratic health care and ending war making were essential to create cities of freedom, peace, and social justice--a vision that goes unanswered still today.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1452941440Publication Date: 2014-04-01 -
Hood Feminism
by
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The fights against hunger, homelessness, poverty, health disparities, poor schools, homophobia, transphobia, and domestic violence are feminist fights. Kendall offers a feminism rooted in the livelihood of everyday women." --Ibram X. Kendi,#1 New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, in The Atlantic "One of the most important books of the current moment."--Time "A rousing call to action... It should be required reading for everyone."--Gabrielle Union, author of We're Going to Need More Wine A potent and electrifying critique of today's feminist movement announcing a fresh new voice in black feminism Today's feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. All too often, however, the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. That feminists refuse to prioritize these issues has only exacerbated the age-old problem of both internecine discord and women who rebuff at carrying the title. Moreover, prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others? In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hyper sexualization, along with incisive commentary on reproductive rights, politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux. An unforgettable debut, Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780525560555Publication Date: 2020-02-25 -
Just Medicine
by
Offers an innovative plan to eliminate inequalities in American health care and save the lives they endanger Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities: the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system--and in Just Medicine Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients. Implicit bias is the single most important determinant of health and health care disparities. Because we have missed this fact, the money we spend on training providers to become culturally competent, expanding wellness education programs and community health centers, and even expanding access to health insurance will have only a modest effect on reducing health disparities. We will continue to utterly fail in the effort to eradicate health disparities unless we enact strong, evidence-based legal remedies that accurately address implicit and unintentional forms of discrimination, to replace the weak, tepid, and largely irrelevant legal remedies currently available. Our continued failure to fashion an effective response that purges the effects of implicit bias from American health care, Matthew argues, is unjust and morally untenable. In this book, she unites medical, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology research on implicit bias and health disparities with her own expertise in civil rights and constitutional law. In a time when the health of the entire nation is at risk, it is essential to confront the issues keeping the health care system from providing equal treatment to all.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781479896738Publication Date: 2015-12-11 -
Marginalized Mothers, Mothering from the Margins
by
This volume focuses on the ways in which mothers are marginalized based on intersecting identities, such as immigration status,race, class, disability, sexuality, and how these women mother from the margins.Divided into three sections, this collection brings forth the voices and experiences of mothers and highlights the institutions and laws that marginalize them. In the first section, mothers face barriers such as institutional constraints that block them from needed resources and the ability to mother as they see fit. In section two, contributors examine the borders of marginalized mothering - boundaries reflected through citizenship,walls, geography, dealings with intimate partners and welfare offices, or prison bars. Readings in this section highlight mothers' efforts to transcend, resist,or even just survive experiences with borders. The final section centers on mothers that explicitly adopt mothering strategies of resistance or explicitly use their status as mothers in their activism. Topics range from mothers who engage in milk sharing to mothers of color whom organize against police brutality.Throughout the volume, contributors demonstrate the striking resilience of these mothers, and their resistance in challenging the ideologies and institutions that marginalize them.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1787563995Publication Date: 2018-10-08 -
Medical Apartheid
by
Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge-a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government's notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers-and indeed the whole medical establishment-with such deep distrust. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780767915472Publication Date: 2008-01-08 -
Medical Bondage
by
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistulae repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage,/em> breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as "medical super bodies" highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies." Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780820351353Publication Date: 2017-11-30 -
Motherhood So White
by
The story every mother in America needs to read. As featured on NPR and the TODAY Show. All moms have to deal with choosing baby names, potty training, finding your village, and answering your kid's tough questions, but if you are raising a Black child, you have to deal with a lot more than that. Especially if you're a single Black mom... and adopting. Nefertiti Austin shares her story of starting a family through adoption as a single Black woman. In this unflinching account of her parenting journey, Nefertiti examines the history of adoption in the African American community, faces off against stereotypes of single Black moms, and confronts the reality of what it looks like to raise children of color and answer their questions about racism in modern-day America. Honest, vulnerable, and uplifting, Motherhood So White is a fantastic book for mothers who have read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, or other books about racism and want to see how these social issues play out in a very personal way for a single mom and her Black son. This great book club read explores social and cultural bias, gives a new perspective on a familiar experience, and sparks meaningful conversations about what it looks like for Black families in white America today.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1492679011Publication Date: 2019-09-20 -
Mothering While Black
by
Mothering While Black examines the complex lives of the African American middle class--in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children's "authentically black" identities. Sociologist Dawn Marie Dow shows how the frameworks typically used to research middle-class families focus on white mothers' experiences, inadequately capturing the experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers. These limitations become apparent when Dow considers how these mothers apply different parenting strategies for black boys and for black girls, and how they navigate different expectations about breadwinning and childrearing from the African American community. At the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, work, family, and culture,Mothering While Blacksheds light on the exclusion of African American middle-class mothers from the dominant cultural experience of middle-class motherhood. In doing so, it reveals the painful truth of the decisions that black mothers must make to ensure the safety, well-being, and future prospects of their children.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780520971776Publication Date: 2019-03-12 -
The Movement for Reproductive Justice
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2021 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine Shows how reproductive justice organizations' collaborative work across racial lines provides a compelling model for other groups to successfully influence change Patricia Zavella experienced firsthand the trials and judgments imposed on a working professional mother of color: her own commitment to academia was questioned during her pregnancy, as she was shamed for having children "too young." And when she finally achieved her professorship, she felt out of place as one of the few female faculty members with children. These experiences sparked Zavella's interest in the movement for reproductive justice. In this book, she draws on five years of ethnographic research to explore collaborations among women of color engaged in reproductive justice activism. While there are numerous organizations focused on reproductive justice, most are racially specific, such as the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum and Black Women for Wellness. Yet Zavella reveals that many of these organizations have built coalitions among themselves, sharing resources and supporting each other through different campaigns and struggles. While the coalitions are often regional--or even national--the organizations themselves remain racially or ethnically specific, presenting unique challenges and opportunities for the women involved. Zavella argues that these organizations provide a compelling model for negotiating across differences within constituencies. In the context of the war on women's reproductive rights and its disproportionate effect on women of color, and increased legal violence toward immigrants, and now incorporating an updated preface addressing the Dobbs decision which struck down Roe v. Wade, The Movement for Reproductive Justice demonstrates that a truly intersectional movement built on grassroots organizing, culture shift work, and policy advocating can offer visions of strength, resiliency, and dignity for all.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781479812707Publication Date: 2020 -
Necessary Conversations
by
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Necessary Conversations: Understanding Racism as a Barrier to Achieving Health Equity reflects the conviction that a true prioritization of health in our communities is impossible without a commitment to racial equity. Drawing on the pivotal social events of 2020 in America, it extends a powerful call to action based on a growing body of evidence that racism is the underlying cause of so many poor health outcomes. Contributors across health, education, law, and media further the longstanding work of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to create a "Culture of Health" by engaging in authentic discussions about the systems and structures that harm people of color and offering provocative ideas and strategies to inspire action. Necessary Conversations ultimately highlights the importance of building leadership and partnerships through those who are most affected in the community. It considers what it would take to overhaul institutions that treat people differently on the basis of race and recognizes that we all must share resources and join together to support the advancement of health and racial equity.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780197641477Publication Date: 2022-06-24 -
No Real Choice
by
In the United States, the "right to choose" an abortion is the law of the land. But what if a woman continues her pregnancy because she didn't really have a choice? What if state laws, federal policies, stigma, and a host of other obstacles push that choice out of her reach? Based on candid, in-depth interviews with women who considered but did not obtain an abortion,No Real Choice punctures the myth that American women have full autonomy over their reproductive choices. Focusing on the experiences of a predominantly Black and low-income group of women, sociologist Katrina Kimport finds that structural, cultural, and experiential factors can make choosing abortion impossible-especially for those who experience racism and class discrimination. From these conversations, we see the obstacles to "choice" these women face, such as bans on public insurance coverage of abortion and rampant antiabortion claims that abortion is harmful. Kimport's interviews reveal that even as activists fight to preserve Roe v. Wade, class and racial disparities have already curtailed many women's freedom of choice. No Real Choice analyzes both the structural obstacles to abortion and the cultural ideologies that try to persuade women not to choose abortion. Told with care and sensitivity,No Real Choice gives voice to women whose experiences are often overlooked in debates on abortion, illustrating how real reproductive choice is denied, for whom, and at what cost.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1978817924Publication Date: 2021-10-15 -
Our Black Sons Matter
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Our Black Sons Matter is a powerful collection of original essays, letters, and poems that addresses both the deep joys and the very real challenges of raising black boys today. From Trayvon Martin to Tamir Rice, the list of young black men who have suffered racial violence continues to grow. Young black people also deal with profound stereotypes and structural barriers. And yet, young black men are often paradoxically revered as icons of cultural cool. Our Black Sons Matter features contributions from women across the racial spectrum who are raising or have raised black sons--whether biologically their sons or not. The book courageously addresses painful trauma, challenges assumptions, and offers insights and hope through the deep bonds between mothers and their children. Both a collective testimony and a collective love letter, Our Black Sons Matter sends the message that black lives matter and speaks with the universal love of all mothers who fear for the lives of their children. Contributions by Jacki Lynn Baynks, Shelly Bell, Deborah Binkley-Jackson, Meta G. Carstarphen, LaMar Delandro, Gretchen Givens Generett, Jane Anna Gordon, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Susan Hadley, Carol E. Henderson, Dawn Herd-Clark, Elisheba Johnson, Heather Johnson, Newtona (Tina) Johnson, Jane Lazarre, Sara Lomax-Reese, Tracey McCants Lewis, Nicole McJamerson, Michele Moody-Adams, Elisha Oliver, Blanche Radford-Curry, Autumn Redcross, Tracey Reed Armant, Noliwe Rooks, T. Denean, Sharpley-Whiting, Treasure Shields Redmond, Sharyn Skeeter, Becky Thompson, Linda D. Tomlinson, Dyan Watson, Veronica T. Watson, Regina Sims Wright, Karsonya Wise Whitehead, and George Yancy.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1442269111Publication Date: 2016-10-17 -
The Practical Playbook III
by
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Since publishing The Practical Playbook II, there has been growing recognition of increased maternal deaths and poor maternal health outcomes disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous, People of Color in the United States. Practitioners are often unaware or unequipped to understand the inequities faced by historically marginalized populations in maternal health care. The Practical Playbook III is a guide for researchers, community activists, and advocates of maternal health offering practical tools and strategies to improve inequities in maternal health. This third edition aims to describe the need and opportunities for improving maternal health through multi-sector collaborations. It highlights examples of effective cross-sector partnerships that are making real improvements in health outcomes for maternal health populations and offers practical tools and strategies for practitioners working in this space. Other features include: · Examples of multidisciplinary partnerships that leverage new ideas and resources, including innovative approaches to gathering and using data· Policies and practices that are improving the health and well-being of birthing people and children across the country· Strategies for scaling up and sustaining successful coalitions and programs· Existing or promising tools and strategies to improve maternal health in the future The Practical Playbook III brings together voices of experience and authority to answer the most challenging questions in maternal health and provide concrete steps for maternal stakeholders to improve maternal health outcomes.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0197662986Publication Date: 2024-02-20 -
Racism
by
This important publication builds on the racial health equity work that public health advocates and others have been doing for decades. They have documented the existence of health inequities and have combatted health inequities stemming from racism. This book, which targets racism directly and includes the word squarely in its title, marks an important shift in the field's antiracism struggle for racial health equity. It is intended for use in a wide range of settings including health departments, schools, and in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors where public health professionals work. It will also benefit students still in training and will also serve as a practical reference text for courses and workshops. In this way, this book anticipates acting as a bridge connecting public health professionals, students, community members, as well as policymakers.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0875533035Publication Date: 2019-08-30 -
Radical Reproductive Justice
by
Practical tools and theoretical frameworks for understanding the fight for reproductive rights, from pregnancy to parenthood and beyond. Expanding the social justice discourse surrounding "reproductive rights" to include issues of environmental justice, incarceration, poverty, disability, and more, this crucial anthology explores the practical applications for activist thought on this ever-urgent issue. Radical Reproductive Justice assembles two decades' of work initiated by SisterSong Women of Color Health Collective, creators of the human rights-based "reproductive justice" framework to move beyond polarized pro-choice/pro-life debates. Rooted in Black feminism and built on intersecting identities, this revolutionary framework asserts a woman's right to have children, to not have children, and to parent and provide for the children they have. "The book is as revolutionary and revelatory as it is vast."--Rewire
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1558614370Publication Date: 2017-11-14 -
Reproducing Race
by
Reproducing Race, an ethnography of pregnancy and birth at a large New York City public hospital, explores the role of race in the medical setting. Khiara M. Bridges investigates how race--commonly seen as biological in the medical world--is socially constructed among women dependent on the public healthcare system for prenatal care and childbirth. Bridges argues that race carries powerful material consequences for these women even when it is not explicitly named, showing how they are marginalized by the practices and assumptions of the clinic staff. Deftly weaving ethnographic evidence into broader discussions of Medicaid and racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality, Bridges shines new light on the politics of healthcare for the poor, demonstrating how the "medicalization" of social problems reproduces racial stereotypes and governs the bodies of poor women of color.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0520949447Publication Date: 2011-03-18 -
Reproduction on the Reservation
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This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women's reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women's resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government's intrusion into Indigenous women's reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been -- and remain -- reproductive politics. By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1469653168Publication Date: 2019-10-21 -
Reproductive Injustice
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Winner, 2020 Senior Book Prize, given by the Association of Feminist Anthropology Winner, 2020 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, given by the Society for Medical Anthropology Honorable Mention, 2020 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, given by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology Finalist, 2020 PROSE Award in the Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology category, given by the Association of American Publishers A troubling study of the role that medical racism plays in the lives of black women who have given birth to premature and low birth weight infants Black women have higher rates of premature birth than other women in America. This cannot be simply explained by economic factors, with poorer women lacking resources or access to care. Even professional, middle-class black women are at a much higher risk of premature birth than low-income white women in the United States. Dána-Ain Davis looks into this phenomenon, placing racial differences in birth outcomes into a historical context, revealing that ideas about reproduction and race today have been influenced by the legacy of ideas which developed during the era of slavery. While poor and low-income black women are often the "mascots" of premature birth outcomes, this book focuses on professional black women, who are just as likely to give birth prematurely. Drawing on an impressive array of interviews with nearly fifty mothers, fathers, neonatologists, nurses, midwives, and reproductive justice advocates, Dána-Ain Davis argues that events leading up to an infant's arrival in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and the parents' experiences while they are in the NICU, reveal subtle but pernicious forms of racism that confound the perceived class dynamics that are frequently understood to be a central factor of premature birth. The book argues not only that medical racism persists and must be considered when examining adverse outcomes--as well as upsetting experiences for parents--but also that NICUs and life-saving technologies should not be the only strategies for improving the outcomes for black pregnant women and their babies. Davis makes the case for other avenues, such as community-based birthing projects, doulas, and midwives, that support women during pregnancy and labor are just as important and effective in avoiding premature births and mortality.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1479812277Publication Date: 2019-06-25 -
Reproductive Justice
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Reproductive Justice is a first-of-its-kind primer that provides a comprehensive yet succinct description of the field. Written by two legendary scholar-activists, Reproductive Justice introduces students to an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender politics. Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger put the lives and lived experience of women of color at the center of the book and use a human rights analysis to show how the discussion around reproductive justice differs significantly from the pro-choice/anti-abortion debates that have long dominated the headlines and mainstream political conflict. Arguing that reproductive justice is a political movement of reproductive rights and social justice, the authors illuminate, for example, the complex web of structural obstacles a low-income, physically disabled woman living in West Texas faces as she contemplates her sexual and reproductive intentions. In a period in which women's reproductive lives are imperiled, Reproductive Justice provides an essential guide to understanding and mobilizing around women's human rights in the twenty-first century. Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the Twenty-First Century publishes works that explore the contours and content of reproductive justice. The series will include primers intended for students and those new to reproductive justice as well as books of original research that will further knowledge and impact society. Learn more at www.ucpress.edu/go/reproductivejustice.
Call Number: Print & ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780520288188Publication Date: 2017-03-21 -
Reproductive Justice
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In Reproductive Justice, sociologist Barbara Gurr provides the first analysis of Native American women's reproductive healthcare and offers a sustained consideration of the movement for reproductive justice in the United States. The book examines the reproductive healthcare experiences on Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota--where Gurr herself lived for more than a year. Gurr paints an insightful portrait of the Indian Health Service (IHS) --the federal agency tasked with providing culturally appropriate, adequate healthcare to Native Americans--shedding much-needed light on Native American women's efforts to obtain prenatal care, access to contraception, abortion services, and access to care after sexual assault. Reproductive Justice goes beyond this local story to look more broadly at how race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, and nation inform the ways in which the government understands reproductive healthcare and organizes the delivery of this care. It reveals why the basic experience of reproductive healthcare for most Americans is so different--and better--than for Native American women in general, and women in reservation communities particularly. Finally, Gurr outlines the strengths that these communities can bring to the creation of their own reproductive justice, and considers the role of IHS in fostering these strengths as it moves forward in partnership with Native nations. Reproductive Justice offers a respectful and informed analysis of the stories Native American women have to tell about their bodies, their lives, and their communities.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0813564700Publication Date: 2014-12-09 -
Reproductive Racism
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Population is a dangerous political category. It is not separable from the racist and class-based valorisation and devaluation of different lives. From global contraceptive implant programmes to right wing anti-immigration discourses, demographic interpretations of multiple current crises legitimise the states' grip on childbearing and mobility. The results are complex dimensions of reproductive racism and restrictive border regimes. Meanwhile, global social inequalities and racial capitalist extractivism stay out of the game. The book analyses how demographic knowledge production and states' grip to the variable of population intertwine. It introduces the concept of the Malthusian matrix in order to understand how class-selective and racist hierarchies within population narratives are combined with gendered policies of reproductive bodies and behaviours. Several chapters explore current reproductive racism, establishing a hierarchy between the birth of desirable and undesirable people. An upward redistributive family policy in Germany is promoting births within the privileged middle classes. And international population programs revive targets in order to increase the use of long-acting contraceptives in the Global South, within a market-oriented setting of Big Pharma promotion. Reproductive racism is also effective in migration policy strategies: narratives about "migrant birth rates" circulate among ultra-right forces as well as seemingly apolitical demographic policy consultancy. The last sections discuss state-theoretical approaches and the intersectional feminist concept of reproductive justice in order to provide tools for critique and resistance.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781839985874Publication Date: 2023-07-04 -
Reproductive Rights As Human Rights
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Reveals both the promise and the pitfalls associated with a human rights approach to the women of color-focused reproductive rights activism of SisterSong How did reproductive justice--defined as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent--become recognized as a human rights issue? In Reproductive Rights as Human Rights, Zakiya Luna highlights the often-forgotten activism of women of color who are largely responsible for creating what we now know as the modern-day reproductive justice movement. Focusing on SisterSong, an intersectional reproductive justice organization, Luna shows how, and why, women of color mobilized around reproductive rights in the domestic arena. She examines their key role in re-framing reproductive rights as human rights, raising this set of issues as a priority in the United States, a country hostile to the concept of human rights at home. An indispensable read, Reproductive Rights as Human Rights provides a much-needed intersectional perspective on the modern-day reproductive justice movement.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781479852024Publication Date: 2020-09-01 -
Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired
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Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired moves beyond the depiction of African Americans as mere recipients of aid or as victims of neglect and highlights the ways black health activists created public health programs and influenced public policy at every opportunity. Smith also sheds new light on the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment by situating it within the context of black public health activity, reminding us that public health work had oppressive as well as progressive consequences.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0812214498Publication Date: 1995-08-01 -
Sickening
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An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis--and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams--author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes' bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States. Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781517911713Publication Date: 2021-08-17
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So We Can Know
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In this brave and devastatingly beautiful anthology, the illustrious poet and editor Aracelis Girmay gathers complex and intimate pieces that illuminate the nuances of personal and collective histories, analyses, practices, and choices surrounding pregnancy. Featuring the brilliant voices of writers such as Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, and more, this book is a lighthouse--a tool and companion--for those navigating pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, birth, loss, grief, and love. In So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth, pieces range from essays to poems to interviews, with a broad entanglement of various themes, from many different perspectives including Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and more. At a time when people are becoming more and more limited in their choices surrounding pregnancy and abortion, this record is increasingly urgent and indispensable.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1642598399Publication Date: 2023-02-07 -
Struggles for Reproductive Justice in the Era of Anti-Genderism and Religious Fundamentalism
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This open access book engages with the concept of reproductive justice by exploring case studies of struggles around abortion in the context of rising anti-genderism, religious fundamentalism, and ethno-nationalism. Based on rich qualitative data offering in-depth analyses from different geographical, political and cultural contexts, the book explores how reproductive justice is understood, contested and given meaning. Chapters further develop the Black feminist concept of reproductive justice in a critical dialogue with postcolonial theory and explore the strength of transnational feminist practices. This book thus offers a fresh approach to the issue of abortion by engaging with contemporary political and cultural processes, and it expands the narrow notions of women's rights, particularly notions of property rights over bodies, towards an analysis of the political economy of social reproduction and how it affects bodies that can be pregnant. This volume will be of interest to scholars with interests in reproductive justice, anti-gender politics, and religious fundamentalism.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9783031312595Publication Date: 2023-06-30 -
Torn Apart
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An award-winning scholar exposesthe foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a "family policing system" that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families andplacedin foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment. The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing,Torn Apartargues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1541675444Publication Date: 2022-04-05 -
The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health
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An unapologetic exploration of the Black mental health crisis--and a comprehensive road map to getting the care you deserve in an unequal system. We can't deny it any longer: there is a Black mental health crisis in our world today. Black people die at disproportionately high rates due to chronic illness, suffer from poverty, under-education, and the effects of racism. This book is an exploration of Black mental health in today's world, the forces that have undermined mental health progress for African Americans, and what needs to happen for African Americans to heal psychological distress, find community, and undo years of stigma and marginalization in order to access effective mental health care. In The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health, psychologist and African American mental health expert Rheeda Walker offers important information on the mental health crisis in the Black community, how to combat stigma, spot potential mental illness, how to practice emotional wellness, and how to get the best care possible in system steeped in racial bias. This breakthrough book will help you: Recognize mental and emotional health problems Understand the myriad ways in which these problems impact overall health and quality of life and relationships Develop psychological tools to neutralize ongoing stressors and live more fully Navigate a mental health care system that is unequal It's past time to take Black mental health seriously. Whether you suffer yourself, have a loved one who needs help, or are a mental health professional working with the Black community, this book is an essential and much-needed resource.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781684034154Publication Date: 2020-05-01 -
Under the Skin
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A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR*"A stunning exposé of why Black people in our society 'live sicker and die quicker'--an eye-opening game changer."--Oprah Daily From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation. In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore. Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to "live sicker and die quicker" compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.
Call Number: Print & ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780385544887Publication Date: 2022-06-14
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Unequal Health
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Racial disparities in health and life expectancy are public health problems that have existed since before the US became a country and affect all American's lives. On average, Black Americans have poorer overall health than White Americans and receive lower quality healthcare. This volume presents research from a broad range of academic disciplines, personal narratives, and historical sources to explain the origins of anti-Black racism and describe specific ways in which it threatens both Black Americans' health and the quality of their medical care. Using their own research and public policy expertise, the authors analyze the critical roles of individual and systemic racial bias in these racial health disparities and their consequence for all Americans. They also identify current viable interventions that can reduce current racial health disparities. Unequal Health is invaluable to professionals who study health disparities and lay people who are concerned about them.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 1316519481Publication Date: 2023-09-21 -
Viral Justice
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From the author of Race After Technology, an inspiring vision of how we can build a more just world--one small change at a time "A true gift to our movements for justice."--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day. Vividly recounting her personal experiences and those of her family, Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects. She recounts her father's premature death, illuminating the devastating impact of the chronic stress of racism, but she also introduces us to community organizers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing. Through her brother's experience with the criminal justice system, we see the trauma caused by policing practices and mass imprisonment, but we also witness family members finding strength as they come together to demand justice for their loved ones. And while her own challenges as a young mother reveal the vast inequities of our healthcare system, Benjamin also describes how the support of doulas and midwives can keep Black mothers and babies alive and well. Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0691222894Publication Date: 2022-10-11 -
Weathering
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Fusing science and social justice, renowned public health researcher Dr. Arline T. Geronimus offers an urgent, "monumental" book (Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning) exploring the ways in which systemic injustice erodes the health of marginalized people. America has woken up to what many of its citizenshave known for centuries and to what public health statistics have evidenced for decades: systemic injustice takes a physical, too often deadly, toll on Black, brown, working class and poor communities, and any group who experiences systemic cultural oppression or economic exploitation. Marginalized Americans are disproportionately more likely to suffer from chronic diseases and to die at much younger ages than their middle- and upper-class white counterparts. Black mothers die during childbirth at a rate three times higher than white mothers. White kids in high-poverty Appalachian regions have a healthy life expectancy of 50 years old, while the vast majority of US youth can expect to both survive and be able-bodied at 50, with decades of healthy life expectancy ahead of them. In the face of such clear inequity, we must ask ourselves why this is, and what we can we do. Dr. Arline T. Geronimus coined the term "weathering" to describe the effects of systemic oppression--including racism and classism--on the body. In Weathering, based on more than 30 years of research, she argues that health and aging have more to do with how society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves. She explains what happens to human bodies as they attempt to withstand and overcome the challenges and insults that society leverages at them, and details how this process ravages their health. And she proposes solutions. Until now, there has been little discussion about the insidious effects of social injustice on the body. Weathering shifts the paradigm, shining a light on the topic and offering a roadmap for hope.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780316257978Publication Date: 2023-03-28
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Women, Race and Class
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From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women's liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. "Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard."--The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women's rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger's racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 0394713516Publication Date: 1983-02-12 -
Young Black Women and Health Inequities in the United States
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This important book not only highlights the high rates of morbidity and mortality among young black women in the US, but also provides a lens through which the reasons behind such health disparities can be understood. The book outlines the main direct causes of illness and premature death among young black women, from physical illnesses such as heart disease, cancer and stroke, to psychological conditions such as depression. But throughout each chapter the reasons behind these issues are discussed, including exposure to racial discrimination, exposure to psychosocial stressors, poverty, lack of access to health care, unemployment, and lack of education. A concluding chapter asks what mechanisms can address the stark health inequalities faced by young black women in the US so that rates of morbidity and mortality can be reduced. A timely and insightful account of an enduring issue within American society, this book will interest researchers and students across public health, race and gender studies and the sociology of health, as well as policy makers.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9781003835318Publication Date: 2024-02-01 -
Youth Organizing for Reproductive Justice
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A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2025 This helpful how-to guide introduces the practices, history, and politics of youth movements for justice in the United States Grounded in the struggles and worldmaking of queer and trans youth and people of color, Youth Organizing for Reproductive Justice shows us how all youth organizing is reproductive justice as young people resist systems of oppression that limit bodily autonomy and self-determination. Through case studies, activist spotlights, and organizing "how-tos," this book provides a powerful tool for understanding the interconnected struggles at the center of youth activism. From the school-to-prison pipeline to transgender youth's access to gender-affirming care to support for pregnant and parenting teens, Chris Barcelos shows that reproductive justice inspires political organizing across a range of issues. This book will help mobilize scholars, activists, policy makers, reproductive justice nonprofit workers, and youth organizers toward collective liberation.
Call Number: ebook (SJSU log-in required)ISBN: 9780520390096Publication Date: 2025-03-04
Government and NGO Reports
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Listening to Mothers in CaliforniaListening to Mothers in California is a statewide, population-based survey of women who gave birth in 2016. Led by the National Partnership for Women and Families, the project was funded by CHCF and the Yellow Chair Foundation. Includes issue briefs about the experiences of Asian & Pacific Islander, Black, and Latina birthing people.
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From Initiative to ImpactFinal report of the HRSA Enhancing Maternal Health Initiative.