Mixed Race Studies

Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica

University of Pennsylvania Press
June 2017
328 Pages
6.00 x 9.00 in, 10 illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780812249187
Paperback ISBN: 9780812224603
eBook ISBN:

Sasha Turner, Associate Professor of History
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves’ reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women’s labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves’ interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners’ medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.

Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Contents

• Introduction. Transforming Bodies
• Chapter 1. Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition
• Chapter 2. “The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction
• Chapter 3. When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment
• Chapter 4. “Buckra Doctor No Do You No Good”: Struggles over Maternal Health Care
• Chapter 5. “Dead Before the Ninth Day”: Struggles over Neonatal Care
• Chapter 6. Mothers Know Best? Maternal Authority and Children’s Survival
• Chapter 7. Raising Hardworking Adults: Labor, Punishment, and Slave Childhood
• Conclusion. Transforming Slavery
• Notes
• Sources
• Index
• Acknowledgments

On Turning Black

The New York Times
2024-08-01

Esau McCaulley, Contributing Opinion Writer

During his interview before the National Association of Black Journalists this week, Donald Trump was asked if he would call upon his fellow Republicans to refrain from labeling Vice President Kamala Harris a “D.E.I. candidate” for the presidency. Rather than condemn his party’s increasingly troubling language on the topic, Mr. Trump took the opportunity to question Ms. Harris’s racial identity.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t.”

This is all clearly untrue. Ms. Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university, and she is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority. Her biographies and self-descriptions throughout her career have cited both her Black and Indian identities.

My wife is white, so we have multiracial children. Depending on the context, they can refer to themselves as Black or multiracial. When my children describe themselves using the latter term, they are acknowledging that their mother is a part of their story as well. Does Mr. Trump really expect interracial people to deny half of their families?…

Read the entire essay here.

The Trial of Mrs. Rhinelander

Kensington Books
2024-07-23
336 Pages
5.54 x 8.24 x 0.87 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781496737878
eBook ISBN: 9781496737885

Denny S. Bryce

Inspired by a real-life scandal that was shocking even for the tumultuous Roaring Twenties, this captivating novel tells the story of a pioneering Black journalist, a secret interracial marriage among the New York elite, and the sensational divorce case that ignited an explosive battle over race and class—and brought together three very different women fighting for justice, legitimacy, and the futures they risked everything to shape.

For readers of Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, a transporting work of fact-based historical fiction from Denny S. Bryce, bestselling author of Wild Women and the Blues, In the Face of the Sun, and Can’t We Be Friends: A Novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.

New York, 1924. Born to English immigrants who’ve built a comfortable life, idealistic Alice Jones longs for the kind of true love her mother and father have. She believes she’s found it with Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, the shy heir to his prominent white family’s real estate fortune. Alice too, is “white”, though she is vaguely aware of rumors that question her ancestry—gossip her parents dismiss. But when the lovers secretly wed, Kip’s parents threaten his inheritance unless he annuls the marriage.

Devastated but determined, Alice faces overwhelming odds both legally and in the merciless court of public opinion. But there is one person who can either help her—or shatter her hopes for good: Reporter Marvel Cunningham. The proud daughter of an accomplished Black family, Marvel lives to chronicle social change and the Harlem Renaissance’s fiery creativity.

At first, Marvel sees Alice’s case as a tabloid sensation generated by a self-hating woman who failed to “pass.” But the deeper she investigates, the more she will recognize just how much she and Alice have in common. For Rhinelander vs. Rhinelander will bring to light stunning truths that will force both women to confront who they are, and who they can be, in a world that is all too quick to judge.

Should Harris Talk Much About Her Racial Identity? Many Voters Say No.

The New York Times
2024-08-03

Jeremy W. Peters

Even as Trump plays up racial divisions, many Americans said they would rather not dwell on race or identity. “We can all see that you’re Black.”

“Obviously, we have eyes.”

That was the somewhat jaded response by Larhonda Marshall, a 42-year-old health care worker from Chicago, about all the attention being paid to Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.

As a Black woman herself, Ms. Marshall said that the symbolism of a Harris victory would surely be on her mind as she considers her vote for president. But it was not the most important factor at all, she said. And she wishes the Harris supporters who keep mentioning it would drop it.

“I’m tired of hearing it,” Ms. Marshall said. “That’s not an issue. I just want what’s best for the country.”

This week, after former President Donald J. Trump claimed falsely that Ms. Harris “happened to turn Black” only recently, the vice president did not attempt to clarify the obvious: that she has, in fact, been Black all her life…

Read the entire article here.