Description
This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda — 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, their autonomy, and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize and even criminalize their lives. It gives readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new and socially transformative definition of "liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a Black feminist perspective.
The author combines innovative and radical thinking across racial theory, feminism, and law to produce a work that is both history and political treatise. By using the history of how American law—beginning with slavery—has treated the state's right to interfere with the Black woman's body, the author effectively makes the case for legal redress of the racist implications of current policy with regard to: 1) access to and coercive dispensing of birth control to poor Black women; 2) the criminalization of parenting by poor Black women who have used drugs; 3) the stigmatization and devaluation of poor Black mothers under new welfare provisions; and 4) the differential access to and disproportionate spending of social resources on reproductive technologies used by wealthy white couples to ensure genetically related offspring.
In the final chapter, the author argues that legal redress of the racism inherent in current American law and policy requires and should lead us to adopt a new standard and definition of liberal theories of "liberty" and "equality" based on the need for, and the positive role of, government in fostering social as well as individual justice.