Black Maternal Mortality in the US.

The global maternal mortality rate (MMR) has been trending downward, while the US MMR has been increasing. When the US MMR data is disaggregated by race, it becomes apparent that the burden of the MMR is carried by Black mamas. Controlling images of Black women were created during chattel slavery to justify the control and exploitation of their bodies for profit and power. These stereotypes persist to this day in the collective social consciousness, and these racist, classist images have permeated the interactions Black mamas have with others. This paper contextualizes the racial disparity by grounding itself in the role of the physician during chattel slavery and the orientation of physicians towards enslaved African mothers. This analysis will connect this legacy to the barriers and birth outcomes Black mamas have today and discuss community-based solutions that cultivate positive birth outcomes for Black mamas and babies

The Historical Role of Leviticus 25 in Naturalizing Anti-Black Racism

Leviticus 25:39–46 describes a two-tier model of slavery that distinguishes Israelites from foreign slaves. It requires that Israelites be indentured only temporarily while foreigners can be enslaved as chattel (permanent property). This model resembles the distinction between White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves in the American colonies. However, the biblical influence on these early modern practices has been obscured by the rarity of citations of Lev. 25:39–46 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about slavery. This article reviews the history of slavery from ancient Middle Eastern antiquity through the seventeenth century to show the unique degree to which early modern institutions resembled the biblical model. It then exposes widespread knowledge of Leviticus 25 in early modern political and economic debates. Demonstrating this awareness shows with high probability that colonial cultures presupposed the two-tier model of slavery in Leviticus 25:39–46 to naturalize and justify their different treatment of White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves

Black Suffering for/from Anti-trafficking Advocacy

This article analyses the images that Antislavery Usable Past creates to promote its cause of ‘making the antislavery past usable for contemporary abolition’. Drawing on collective memory studies, I discuss the political implications of how pasts are used for present issues. I argue that Antislavery Usable Past appropriates black suffering by reducing the memory and imagery of slavery to objects that are compatible with the anti-trafficking narrative, without regard for the ongoing black liberation struggle. I conclude by discussing the troubling trend of incorporating anti-trafficking exhibitions into institutions that preserve the history of slavery and abolition. Such inclusions redirect the history lessons of slavery away from understanding and addressing anti-blackness in the present and towards supporting advocacy campaigns articulated in the logics that underpinned racial chattel slavery in the first place

Liberation Chronicles: Reformulating Black Liberation in the Face of Persistent Oppression

Liberation movements for Black people have been prominent throughout American history. Chattel slavery and Jim Crow laws caused centuries of anti-black oppression. They continuously evolved into other anti-black structures – mass incarceration, predatory loan companies, and healthcare inequalities, to name a few – that require us to address these issues still today. The most recent Black liberation movement, Black Lives Matter, experienced a brief uptick in support after George Floyd’s murder but, overall, failed to address these issues. This thesis outlines three approaches to Black liberation in the U.S. to determine the most effective. First, drawing on Frederick Douglass’ autobiographies, I argue that liberation from chattel slavery emphasized the importance of education so that Black people could meaningfully participate in social and political life. Second, I argue that Martin Luther King Jr. espoused civil disobedience as the only viable path for Black liberation because it demonstrated Black people’s ability to engage in political resistance without threatening the foundations of liberalism on which this country was built. Moreover, turning to the Black Panther Party (BPP), I argue that Black liberation remains incomplete so long as it does not also combat capitalism. This thesis examines how the different contexts and periods required different strategies for resistance, which reveals to us the differing visions of Black liberation itself. Ultimately, I will argue that liberation is more effective than liberation in order to eradicate white supremacy once and for all

Surviving Separation: Examining the Impact of the Family Policing System on Black and Native Mothers from Texas and California

The child welfare system, more aptly known as the family policing system, operates using capitalist, racialized, and patriarchal logics. Under the guise of "child protection," it tears marginalized families apart through regulation, surveillance, punishment, and separation. It is rooted in histories of chattel slavery and colonialism that still affect Black and Native families today. Understanding the full impact of this system requires centering survivor testimonies of women who have endured family separation. This project pays special attention to the experiences of Black and Native mothers in Texas and California due to the disproportionate impact the family policing system has on these groups. My first task is to understand how the foundations of the family policing system lie in chattel slavery and colonialism, with the goal of establishing that the current iteration of the family policing system is the latest in centuries of systematic attacks on Black and Native families. Second, I feature survivor testimonies from two Black mothers in Texas and one Native mother from California to exhibit the real-life consequences the family policing system has on everyday mothers. Finally, I analyze their stories to place them in a larger sociopolitical context. Ultimately, based upon my research, I argue for the abolition of the family policing system.Plan II Honors Progra

Pathways Toward Healing: The Presence of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome in Black Mother-Daughter Relationships

The United States was founded during and built through the use of American chattel slavery, a form of slavery which involved hypodescent, was usually lifelong, and was based on the concept of Black inferiority. Because of the circumstances of this country’s creation, the United States cannot exist separately from the long-term effects and legacy of enslavement, thus resulting in the condition of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS). PTSS is a theory founded by psychologist Dr. Joy DeGruy which posits that the long-term suffering of Africans and African-Americans under slavery, as well as ongoing anti-Black oppression has resulted in intergenerational trauma that exists in the present day. Because many of the symptoms of PTSS impact the relationships between Black mothers and their children, and because enslaved Black women faced abuse during slavery rooted in misogynoir, or gendered racism against Black women, my thesis presents research on the symptoms of PTSS that affect Black mother-daughter relationships in America, including but not limited to engagement in respectability politics, a culture of dissemblance, internalized misogynoir, and child abuse. Further, I identify methods of healing Black mother-daughter relationships, including establishing accountability networks, storytelling, prioritizing each other’s experiences, and committing to healthier methods of communication, problem solving, and parenting

Workers without Rights

In the United States the Civil Rights Movement emerging after World War II ended Jim Crow racism, with its legal segregation and stigmatization of black people. Yet black people, both in chattel slavery and under Jim Crow, had provided abundant labor subject to racist terror; they were workers who could be recruited for work others were unwilling to do. What was to replace this labor, which had been the source of so much wealth and power? Three federal initiatives helped to create new workers without rights: the welfare reform law of 1996 and the changes in immigration and crime law and policy both starting in the mid-1960s. These changes re-created vulnerable labor, disproportionately marked and stigmatized as black or Mexican. These workers create a central strength of U.S. imperialism: cheap food. Because workers without rights have an important function in a capitalist economy, a society where all workers can flourish is not capitalist but communist

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson and the Limits of Law

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson features a debate between an African American brother and sister over the ownership of a richly symbolic piano, a family heirloom that represents the Charles family’s slave heritage and its endurance through Reconstruction. Ownership questions like the one presented in The Piano Lesson can usually be resolved in the courts, but Wilson’s play suggests that the law might be unable to resolve property disputes so problematically entangled with the legacy of slavery. Wilson offers, instead, a non-legal resolution to the piano debate presented in his play

Peran Walk Free Foundation (Wff) dalam Mengatasi Modern Slavery di Mauritania

This research is a study of contemporary which discuss about the role of the Walk Free Foundation (WFF) in handling modern slavery in Mauritania. Slavery has been existed in Mauritania since European performed a trading contact with the African. Modern slavery is a condition of one person possessing or controlling another person in such as a way as to significantly deprive that person of their individual liberty, with the intention of exploiting that person through their use, management, profit, transfer or disposal. Modern slavery includes slavery, slavery-like practices (such as debt bondage, forced marriage and sale or exploitation of children), human trafficking and forced labour, and other practices described in key international treaties, voluntarily ratified by nearly every country in the world. The form of modern slavery in Mauritania is slavery based descent, also known as hereditary or chattel slavery, mean that slave status is inherited generation to generation and is deeply rooted in social castes and the wider social system. Many victims are the Black Moors (black African) came from both rural and urban areas. Actually, modern slavery not only occurs in Africa but also in other countries such as Asia and Europe. In this research, the author is using the group behavior analysis level which focused on the role of international organization. This research is using a pluralism perspective in international relations and organizational theory of Clive Archer. WFFs role in handling modern slavery in Mauritania by prevention program. In efforts to handle modern slavery in Mauritania, WFF faces some obstacles; the lack of public knowledge about the dangers of modern slavery, lack of resource capacity in Mauritania and lack of monitoring and evaluation of the Mauritanian government cause the victims of modern slavery increase from year to year.Keywords: slavery, modern slavery, Mauritania, walk free foundation (wff), global slavery index (gsi), walkfree movemenT

The Mask Strikes Back: Blackness as Aporia in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno

What is the American Gothic a reaction to? Whereas other thinkers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne locates the building blocks of the American Gothic in Puritan Christianity or Amerindian Genocide, I argue that Melville posits the genesis of chattel slavery and the construction of racial category as the repressed events that haunt the Americas and return uninvited. By using the Gothic motif of the living corpse, the famed writer of Moby-Dick addresses the social bereavement which Blackness comes to represent in the Americas. By looking for truth on the skin and flesh, the main characters of Moby-Dick and “Benito Cereno” represent the Enlightenment precept that truth can be arrested via observation and interpretation. Melville presents two Black characters as impasses in this project of interpretation: Moby-Dick’s drowned boy, Pip, and “Benito Cereno’s” undead leader, Babo