Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality (Volume 9) (Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century)

Menzel, Annie

ISBN 10: 0520297202 / ISBN 13: 9780520297203

Published by University of California Press, 2024

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 397469326

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality (Volume 9) (Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century)
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520297202
• ISBN 13: 9780520297203
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Fatal Denial argues that over the past 150 years, US health authorities’ explanations of and interventions into Black infant mortality have been characterized by the "biopolitics of racial innocence," a term describing the institutionalized mechanisms in health care and policy that have at once obscured, enabled, and perpetuated systemic infanticide by blaming Black mothers and communities themselves.

Following Black feminist scholarship demonstrating that the commodification and theft of Black women’s reproductive bodies, labors, and care is foundational to US racial capitalism, Annie Menzel posits that the polity has made Black infants vulnerable to preventable death. Drawing on key Black political thought and praxis around infant mortality—from W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell to Black midwives and birth workers—this work also tracks continued refusals to acknowledge this routinized reproductive violence, illuminating both a rich history of care and the possibility of more transformative futures. 

About the Author

Annie Menzel is a political theorist and former midwife. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.