Roberts

Dorothy Roberts’s “Killing the Black Body,” perfectly highlights the common displays of racism, stereotypes, and patterns of discrimination against African American women. In this article she specifically targets the discrimination against child birth in African American women. It begins with the story of police officers looking to prosecute women who are smoking during pregnancy. Although it was a reasonable cause for prosecution, it clearly was targeted towards soon to be African American mothers. In fact, all but four dozen women arrested for prenatal crimes in Charleston were black. during this time police officials displayed one of the most basic displays of racism in which minorities, specifically African Americans, were targeted by the law without just cause. Roberts states that we are in “a midst of an explosion of rhetoric and policies that degrade Black women’s reproductive decisions” (3). The issue with African American women has always been overlooked. Racist policies have always suppressed the reproductive rights of African American women meanwhile many feminist groups fail to see this, and solely focus on diminishing male superiority. Roberts then describes some of the extreme policies and measures that have been proposed to prevent black women from their right to reproduction. One of the outrageous policies that was created was to distribute birth control to black communities to diminish poverty. Furthermore at one point black women were even going to be penalize for bearing a child in order to reform welfare in and cut off children born to welfare mothers. For some reason officials felt that “limiting black mother’s reproductive rights will solve all of America’s social problems” which clearly demonstrates our country’s racist agenda against black women. The difference in opinion of the birth of white and black children is massive. White childbirth is “thought to be a beneficial activity” however black reproduction, is treated as a form of degeneracy. Racists have been trying to hide their policies with desire to suppress the rights of minorities for years, and for a long time now, the rights of African American women have been neglected the most.