Books › Killing the black body
Killing the black body
First published 1997 · 384 pages
An unflinching, foundational text that radically reshapes how you understand bodily autonomy and systemic power.
What it feels like
Reading this book is a profoundly sobering and galvanizing experience. It moves with a steady, deliberate pace, methodically dismantling long-held assumptions about bodily autonomy and feminist priorities. The prose is rigorous yet deeply accessible, blending the precision of legal scholarship with the righteous urgency of a manifesto. You are immersed in an atmosphere of heavy, illuminating truth-telling, where historical atrocities and modern policies are woven together into a devastatingly clear picture of systemic control. It demands your full attention, evoking a deep sense of indignation that ultimately transforms into a clarified, intersectional political consciousness. This is essential reading for anyone drawn to foundational texts that challenge the status quo and fundamentally alter the lens through which they view justice, race, and gender.
- Mood
- sobering
- indignant
- heavy
- illuminating
- Tone
- urgent
- authoritative
- unflinching
- righteous
- analytical
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- bodily autonomy · systemic racism · reproductive justice · intersectional feminism · historical trauma
- The writing
- Rigorous, lucid, and deeply persuasive, blending meticulous legal scholarship with passionate advocacy.
- The arc
- Moves from profound outrage at historical atrocities to a galvanized, clear-eyed demand for intersectional justice.
- Who it's for
- Readers seeking foundational texts in Black feminism and reproductive justice who appreciate rigorous, historically grounded analysis.
Content notes
- racism
- forced sterilization
- medical abuse
- slavery
- reproductive coercion
- eugenics
About the book
"The image of the 'Welfare Queen' still dominates white America's perceptions of Black women. It is an image that also continues to shape our government's policies concerning Black women's reproductive decisions. Proposed legislation to alleviate poverty focuses on plans to deny benefits to children born to welfare mothers and to require insertion of birth-control implants as a condition of receiving aid. Meanwhile a booming fertility industry serves primarily infertile white couples.... Roberts exposes America's systemic abuse of Black women's bodies, from slave masters' economic stake in bonded women's fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s. These abuses, Roberts argues, point not only to the degradation of Black motherhood but to the exclusion of Black women's reproductive needs from the feminist agenda."
Description from Open Library.
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