Book Review: Birthing Black Mothers

Abstract

One legacy of the era of Black Lives Matter (BLM)—beginning around the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, but arguably, with President Obama’s 2008 election—has been the way it highlights and provides language to identify structural racism or racialized crises, including excessive force by the police, weakened immune systems from exposure to chronic stress, infrastructural deficits that cause lead poisoning in public water systems, and medical racism. In Birthing Black Mothers, Jennifer Nash argues that if Black men symbolize the dead body, often murdered by police, then Black mothers capaciously symbolize racialized crises. Their association with crises makes them worthy of suffering. This is a shift from Black mothers’ historical designations as deviant and pathological during slavery and within welfare discourse. Seemingly, the shift from being viewed derisively to being viewed empathetically and, thus, worthy of political support, would benefit Black mothers. However, as Nash makes clear through deft and structured analyses, this is not the case. A primary consequence is that Black mothers’ association with the pain and grief of ongoing crises converts them into political currency for U.S. Left politicians and progressive institutions, where the mere mention of the conditions endangering Black mothers stands in for policy change and actual investment. For instance, in her chapter on hospitals and politicians heralding unpaid and unregulated Black doulas as the answer against Black maternal and infant mortality, Nash asks “how the state’s embrace of doulas’ fugitive and paraprofessional practices might actually stand as evidence of the state’s deep divestment in Black maternal health?” (91). Nash interrogates how and why resilience and trauma are necessary to make Black mothers legible as political subjects, making the book excellent for Black feminist scholars working in other fields, political theorists, cultural theorists, politicians, and Black feminist practitioners. She does this by showing how Black mothers are discursively locked to the genre of crisis. Nash draws upon Lauren Berlant to unpack how crisis as a genre, and not a state of being, markets pain and loss that overtly and surreptitiously puts bodies out of time and place. The genre of crisis, then, is a “relational tactic” (12) in which temporality indexes relationality. For Nash, BLM has emphasized black mothers’ positions as (potential) carriers and caretakers of Black infants, and thus, “more life.” As carriers of Black children, Black mothers represent the out-of-reach future in ways that Black men cannot; thus, Black mothers can stand in for slain Black men murdered suddenly and index the long-durée of structural racism that breaks the body down at the molecular level. Nash concludes, then, that Black mothers are, perhaps, the most symbolic of BLM as they are tied to destitute presents and potentially destitute futures. She illustrates her point by arguing how Black women’s breasts, typically viewed as pornographically excessive, becomes a “technology of Black life” in its association with breast milk. And Black doulas, typically viewed as the birthing companion to eccentric people, are now considered essential frontline workers, protecting Black mothers and babies from medicalized “violence.” Nash does illumine other ways Black women have differently positioned themselves to crisis that does not lock them to the “culturally authorized” affects of “grief, sorrow, [and] mourning” (9). Centered in the second half of the book, Nash follows the temporal, political, and aesthetic demands of crisis through a term she calls “Black maternal 1120671 SREXXX10.1177/23326492221120671Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Review book-review2022