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Reproducing fear amid fears of reproduction: the Black maternal body in U.S. law, media, and policy

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Reproducing fear amid fears of reproduction: the Black maternal body in U.S. law, media, and policy

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REPRODUCING FEAR AMID FEARS OF REPRODUCTION:

THE BLACK MATERNAL BODY IN U.S. LAW, MEDIA, AND POLICY

by

Brittany Farr

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2016

Copyright 2016 Brittany Farr
ii
PREFACE

This dissertation is my attempt to make sense of my own family history. I imagine it won’t
be the last project I work on that tries to do that.

It took time and courage for me to figure out how to write about subjects that were closer
to home, and I want to thank my committee members – Sarah Banet-Weiser, Josh Kun,
Taj Frazier, Kara Keeling and Ralina Joseph – for their patience as I experimented with
how to do so. Especially Sarah, whose unwavering belief in my ability to meet the
challenge of writing a dissertation was invaluable during the many moments when I
doubted myself.

I have always been drawn to uncomfortable experiences, because I’m convinced that
nobody grows if they are comfortable all the time. But over the past six years, I have
shifted from writing about ‘uncomfortable objects’ like scenes of rape for example, to
writing about the subjects that make me uncomfortable, such as racism and the ways that
black women have been historically devalued, erased, and silenced. I would like to thank
my friends for accompanying me on this journey, and for hearing me out, asking
questions, and most importantly helping me be patient with the process. Katrina Pariera
and Evan Brody have been with me from day one of the PhD. Their friendship helped me
stay grounded and avoid the trap of taking all of this too seriously. I am especially
grateful to have been able to finish side by side with Evan. Our dissertation “support
group” with Lyndsey Beutin and Kevin Gotkin was a highlight of my weeks. Wendy
Ashley showed me how to find my voice and how to practice using it. Haley O’Neil
helped me get out of my own head and have fun – and has been a partner in ‘journeying’
toward something bigger.

Part of that journey has meant shifting from solely writing about subjects that make me
angry to attempting to focus my anger as a source of creative and critical energy. In part,
this is why my dissertation is not a dissertation about Tamir Rice or Michael Brown.
Instead I am attempting to better understand the historical visibility, exploitation, and
containment of the black maternal body as integral parts of the context that made Tamir
Rice and Michael Brown’s deaths possible. The violence done to black women is one of
the foundations that the United States is built upon and my hope is that my dissertation
contributes to our understanding of the history, legacy, and current iterations of this
violence. Chris Belcher, Dagmar van Engen, Diana Arterian, Stephanie Sparling
Williams, Allison Page, and Douglas Kearney all read my writing and talked through my
ideas in ways that have profoundly shaped this project. I met Allison at a point when
finishing seemed scary, impossible, and pointless – and she played a huge role in my
realization that none of those things were true. Stephanie showered me with her black girl
magic and inspired me with her dedication to her own work. Diana taught me to be
iii
kinder to myself when writing was hard. And Doug was the first person to read one of my
chapters – I trusted his opinion on my writing more than I trusted my own. And learned
that sometimes that is all you need.

In the process of writing “Reproducing Fear Amid Fears of Reproduction” I also decided
to attend law school in order to become a law professor. One of the main focuses of this
project is how race has mediated the ways that reproduction and families have been
differently valued in the United States. The law is an important part of this story. When
reading legal cases and judges’ opinions I learned that part of how laws get worked out
and cases get argued is based on scholarship being published in legal journals. I want to
be able to part of that conversation. I also want to know how students are being taught to
think about the law, and how they’re being taught to teach it and what kind of logic and
reason they’re using to explain the inequalities that exist in the United States. My family -
immediate, extended, biological and chosen - Beatrice, Andra, Jean, Donny, Kenny, Aunt
Joy, Eric, Claudia, Sabrina, Dwight, Tyler, Drew, Zora, Andre, Olivia, Dallas, Doug,
Nicole, E & K, Kathleen, Alicia, Alex, Dylan, Michael F., Veronica, Andrea, and Michael
- helped guide me to this decision. I would need another 200 pages to truly thank all of
them. My siblings Alex and Dylan inspired me with their courage. My father Michael
showed me you’re never too old to do something different. My mother never told me that
my dreams were silly, even when they were. Now that I have found one I really believe
in, it’s that much easier to go after it. Andrea Flores – my absolute best friend – made law
school sound fun. I’m going in part because I would follow her anywhere. And Michael
Dwyer who destroys me in all the best ways possible, helped me learn how to speak
louder and take up more space. Everything is less scary with him by my side.

B. A. F.

La Misión, June 29, 2016
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Introduction: The Visibility of Racial Fear and the Reproductive Legacy
of the Moynihan Report 1
Hypervisibility and Intersectionality: Black / Feminist Theories
of Governance and the Body 6
Embodied Fear: The Formative Power of Racial Fear 8
Intersectionality as a Strategy for Reading Representation 14
Discipline and the Economy of Racial Fear 16
The Biopolitics of Blackness: Fear and Sociology 19
Sociology, Biopolitics, and Blackness in the United States 20
Quantifying Reproduction, Containing Racial Difference 22
Governing the Reproductive Black Body: The Science of
Reproduction and the Legacy of Slavery 24
Governing Race and Reproduction after Slavery 26
Reproduction in The Negro Family: Black Women as
Hypervisible Problems 29
Critiques of the Moynihan Report 31
Black Women in the Moynihan Report 35
Chapter Breakdown 41

Chapter One: Entangled Kinship: Legislatively (Re)Defining
BiologicalReproduction 45
Historical Antecedents of Reproductive Technology 49
Protecting the White Family: Race Suicide and Forced
Sterilization 50
Whiteness’ Legislative Protection from Blackness:
Anti-Miscegenation and Partus Sequitur Ventrem 56
Artificial Insemination and In Vitro Fertilization: Fears of White
Reproductive Failure and Fantasies of Racial Purity 69
Protecting White Women, Protecting White Families 72
In Pursuit of Genetic Reproduction: Conflating Racial
and Genetic Similarity 77
Surrogacy: Redefining Motherhood 81
Old Fears Made Anew: Women’s Reproductive Labor
and Willfulness 83
Surrogate Labor: (Re)Commodifiying Wombs 84
Who Owns This Child?: Legislating Parental Will 89

v

Chapter Two: Obese and Undereducated: Producing and Governing
Crises in Black Social Reproduction 95
Moral Panics, State Interventions, and the Management of
Black Social Reproduction 100
Moral Panics as Ideological Struggle 105
Moral Panics about the Black Female Body 109
A Threat to America’s Future: Protecting “Our” Children from
Black Social Reproduction 114
The Figure of the “Innocent Child” in the History of
Disciplining Social Reproduction 120
Tropes of Black Social Pathology in Narratives about National
Security 127
Absent Black Fathers and Hapless/Helpless Black Mothers 128
Mapping and Making a Crisis: Visualizing Obesity and
Education Data 131
Haunting the Let’s Move Campaign: The Welfare Queen and
Childhood Obesity 136
Victims of Black Motherhood: Black Maternity and My
Brother’s Keeper 144

Chapter Three: Mothering While Black: Constructing the Black
Maternal Threat in U.S. Media 149
Biopolitics and Representation: Controlling Images within a
Society of Control 152
A Zero Sum Game: The Threat of the Rising Black Birth Rate 158
Reimagining Race Suicide: Black and White Birth Rates
in Opposition 161
Whiteness in Decline and Demographic Disorientation 167
From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Multiraciality as Racial Buffer 173
America’s Changing Face: Reproducing New Racial
Taxonomies 177
Attaching Bad Feelings to Black Mothers: Representing Black
Maternity as Trouble(d) 187
Racial Melodramas and Public Feelings about Black
Mothers 189
Generating Bad Feelings: Doing Motherhood in Public 195
Mothering Backward: Black Maternal Loss and
Punishment 200
Parenting in Opposition: Race Neutral Parenting and the
Privatization of Race 206

Conclusion: In the Space Between Whiteness and Blackness:
Exposing Fears of Black Reproductive Proximity 214

Bibliography 220
vi
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Nonwhite Illegitimacy Ratio 33

Figure 2: Percent of Negro Families with Female Head, by Region
and Area, 1960 37

Figure 3: One Third of Nonwhite Children Live in Broken Homes 37

Figure 4: Table 9: Percent of White and Nonwhite Children under 18
Not Living with Both Parents, United States, Urban and
Rural, 1960 38

Figure 5: Dropout Factories 132

Figure 6: Over a ten-year period, the number of states with 40 percent
or more of their young adults who were overweight or obese
went from 1 to 39 132

Figure 7: Brain Scans in Response to Sugar and Cocaine Use 134

Figure 8: Diagram of Failing Schools 135

Figure 9: Fourth Grade Math NAEP 2009 135

Figure 10: Declining Share 166

Figure 11: Majority Minorities: Population Projections 170

Figure 12: The New Face of America 179

Figure 13: The Changing Face of America: Interactive Gallery 181

Figure 14: Changing Faces 182

Figure 16: Life on Earth 186

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ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines representations of the black maternal body in U.S.
media, policy, and legislation, in order to ask two questions: How do these
representations associate black maternity with fear? And how do these racial fears
function as a form of governance in the United States?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National
Action serves as a starting point for examining the state’s participation in representing
black maternity as a frightening practice. Published as part of President Lyndon
Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Negro Family, known to many as the Moynihan Report,
infamously described a tangle of pathology within the black community that it attributed
to black matriarchy. The Moynihan Report canonized pre-existing fears of black
reproduction, leaving a legacy that can still be felt in U.S. laws, public policy
interventions, and popular culture.
To make sense of this legacy, this dissertation brings together black feminist
theorists’ interventions, and Foucault’s theories of governmentality in order to craft a
theoretical framework that situates black women’s hypervisibility as a technique of
governance as well evidence of its application. In order to excavate the connection
between the hypervisibility of the black maternal body and the circulation of racial fear,
each chapter examines a different representational sphere wherein black reproduction
functions as cause for concern. Chapter One asks how the legislation surrounding
reproductive technologies attempts to protect whiteness from the threat of black
reproductivity. Chapter Two investigates moral panics about social reproduction, and the
state’s resultant interventions, and shows how the figure of the bad black mother emerges
viii
in both. And Chapter Three analyzes news reports alongside film and television
representations in order to interrogate the kinds of narratives about black motherhood that
circulates throughout U.S. media. In pursuit of uncovering how fear, visibility and
governmentality are deeply intertwined, this dissertation approaches the relationship
between race, representation, and the body in ways that move beyond dichotomies of
good versus bad and popular versus political.

1
Introduction: The Visibility of Racial Fear and the Reproductive
Legacy of the Moynihan Report

Fears of the decline of whiteness and the “end of white America” have existed for
as long as white America itself has existed. Whether as concerns about slave revolts, or
as fears about race suicide put forward by President Theodore Roosevelt, there exists a
long and well-documented history of concerns about racial demographics in the United
States. In “Reproducing Fear Amid Fears of Reproduction: The Black Maternal Body in
U.S. Media, Policy, and Legislation,” I chart the history of some of these fears,
particularly as they relate to African-Americans. Throughout U.S. history public anxieties
about demographic changes have fundamentally been anxieties about changes to the
social order – a social order built on white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Fears
about the disruption of this social order have undergirded some of this country’s most
violent and repressive policies, laws, and popular culture – from Jim Crow segregation, to
films like Birth of a Nation, to the Japanese internment camps that existed during World
War II.
In this introduction and the chapters that follow, I offer another way of thinking
about the insidious power of racial fear. Each chapter interrogates a different iteration of
what this fear looks like and the ways its been naturalized and institutionalized – in
legislation, in public policy, and in media representations. Throughout, I center black
women in my analysis because the history of black women’s marginalization and
oppression is deeply intertwined with the development and persistence of racial fear in
the United States. As I wrote, however, I was surprised to find that the more I tried to

2
write about black women, the more it felt like I was writing about whiteness, masculinity,
and patriarchy. This entanglement speaks to the relationality of racial and gender
hierarchies, meaning that understandings of blackness and whiteness as well as
masculinity and femininity take shape in relation to one another. While the entanglement
of these relationships can be traced back to the earliest moment’s in the U.S.’s history, in
“Reproducing Fear Amid Fears of Reproduction” I use the 1965 Moynihan Report as a
cultural touchstone for understanding the ways in which categories of race and gender
and of legal, political, and popular forms of representation work in tandem to uphold a
social order rooted in whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case for
National Action as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. At the time of
its publication and in the decades since, the report has been heavily mediated, receiving
both praise and scorn for its representations of black families and black mothers. Written
by Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family, known to
many simply as the Moynihan Report, sought to explain why civil rights legislation
would not be enough to ensure African-Americans’ equality in the United States. In the
report, Moynihan simultaneously points to the structural and systemic reasons for
inequality and contends that the private world of black family life is one of the major
obstacles to black progress. Although he makes it clear that the government must make a
special effort to provide better opportunities for black Americans, for Moynihan “the
fundamental problem … is that of family structure” (1965). He argues that the primary
problem with black family structure is the overabundance of single mothers, the relative
success of black girls in comparison to black boys, and the high birth rates of poor blacks

3
in comparison to middle-class black and white Americans. The root of these problems,
Moynihan infamously declares, is the matriarchal structure of black families. For
Moynihan black matriarchy emasculates black men, and threatens the entire white
patriarchal social order. Throughout the report, black mothers serve as key indices of the
familial problem that Moynihan seeks to describe. And according to Moynihan, unless
the government can untangle the pathology this matriarchy causes, the country will be
“approaching a new crisis in race relations,” (1965).
1

The report canonized fears of black reproduction and these racial fears continue to
haunt legislation, public policy and media representations in the United States today.
Consequently, in this dissertation I rethink the Moynihan Report’s legacy through the
analytic of racial fear. Racial fear both governs the lives of individuals as well as
structures the conditions of possibility for the population. These fears are institutionalized
in our legal system and normalized via media representations. Across the chapters I
closely examine U.S. legislation, policy, and media, with an eye for the ways in which
these laws, policies, and representations perpetuate racial fears, how they institutionalize
them, and how they structure fear into the fabric of our everyday lives. Legislation, the
justice system, public policies, and the media all communicate to the American public
which threats are most worthy of being afraid of and which must be legislated against
most strongly. For example, differentially punitive drug laws enacted as part of the War
on Drugs reinforced beliefs about the danger and pathology of urban blackness and
poverty. Similarly, gang injunctions punish individuals and communities while
simultaneously communicating that certain kinds of socializing are more threatening and

1
Moynihan’s inflammatory language was one of the many causes for criticism, although several scholars
have pointed out that his rhetoric was an attempt to engage disinterested government officials.

4
worthy of fear. Laws and policy initiatives such as these inform popular representations,
and together these mechanisms educate Americans on how to feel about race.

“Reproducing Fear Amid Fears of Reproduction” both is and is not a dissertation
about the deaths of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and others. In the
following pages, I argue that we must understand the historical visibility, exploitation,
and containment of the black maternal body as integral parts of the context that made
their deaths possible. The violence done to black women is one of the foundations that
the United States is built upon and my hope is that this research contributes to a better
understanding of the history, legacy, and current iterations of this violence.
To that end, I ask how the Monyihan Report and its legacy of racial fear continue
to shape the governance of the U.S. population. In order to understand The Negro
Family’s legacy of racial fear, I bring together black studies and feminist theories of
hypervisibility and intersectionality, Foucault’s conceptualization of disciplinary power
and biopolitics, as well as Marxist engagements with reproduction and the body. I focus
on fears of blackness and the historical persistence of anti-blackness, in order to
interrogate why fears of a particular kind of racialized embodiment – the black maternal
body – have continued to get reworked and recirculated from the antebellum period
onward. Attending to the specificities of the history and consequences of fears of
blackness allows this dissertation to speak to what difference, the difference of blackness
makes in the power that fear has to shape the governance of the U.S. population.
2

2
As I will discuss in later chapters, these fears of blackness do intersect with and have consequences for
other kinds of racial embodiments in the United States. Unsurprisingly then, this project is deeply indebted
to the intersectional analyses of feminist theorists and critical race scholars. As Kimberlé Crenshaw writes
“the struggle over which differences matter and which do not is neither an abstract nor an insignificant

5
In each chapter, I read popular culture, politics, and the law alongside one another
in order to highlight the transmission of racial fear across these realms. Through a focus
on the transmission of ideas, feelings, and norms across representational spheres, I
highlight how popular racialized fears are formed and reinforced through this circulation.
Consequently, the objects I have chosen to analyze in each of the chapters is informed by
a privileging of popular opinion. In addition to the laws and public policies that I discuss,
my arguments are based upon a close reading of trade journals, popular fiction and
documentary films, television shows, as well as newspaper and magazine articles.
Furthermore, because I am invested in interrogating the naturalization and
institutionalization of these fears I pay close attention to the ways that “goodness” is
deployed in conjunction with representations that draw upon feelings of racial fear. For
example, for decades the U.S. government offered prison as a “good” solution to the
problem of frightening gang violence. Not only did this solution further criminalize and
punish racialized populations, it naturalized and institutionalized certain individuals as
worthy objects of fear. By following the transmission of ideas across all realms of
representation (popular, political, and legal) and attending to the interplay between what
is good and what is frightening, my analysis offers both a theory and a method for
thinking about the governing power of racial fear in the United States.

debate” (1991, p. 1265). The Moynihan Report clearly outlines which racial, gender, and social differences
matter most. In so doing Moynihan built upon a long history of racism and sexism, and in turn
institutionalized fears of black maternity and black reproductivity in a lasting way.

6

Hypervisibility and Intersectionality – Black / Feminist Theories of Governance and
the Body

The train is a doorway
bent into the shape
of a scale
- Audre Lorde, “Women on Trains,” 1991
3

No person or persons, shall be admitted to occupy seats
in coaches other than the ones assigned to them on account
of the race they belong to.
- Justice Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a white appearing mixed-race African American man, was
arrested after riding in a whites only car on a Louisiana train. During his trial, Plessy’s
lawyers asserted that the “mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him” (Plessy v.
Ferguson, 1896, p. 542). In spite of this, the court found that the legal distinction between
black and white Americans, “a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races”
still applied, and the court could not invent, or protect, a social equality that did not
already exist between the races (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, p. 544). For Homer Plessy, as
for many African Americans, trains, and public spaces in general, functioned as sites of
racial measurement and categorization. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court
ruling is one of many U.S. legal cases that exposes the state’s investment in the visual
economy of race, an economy that works to guard against the undoing of whiteness. This
visual economy relies upon the visibility of racial difference and uses these visible
differences to categorize and hierarchize racial bodies (Keeling, 2007; Mirzoeff, 2011;
Wiegman, 1995). The well-known Plessy v. Ferguson ruling legislated in favor of

3
Excerpted from “Women on Trains,” (Lorde, 2001).

7
“separate but equal” segregation and as a result further institutionalized race as a regime
of the visual.
4

In Plessy, the Supreme Court framed segregation as an issue of how best to
protect racial distinctions and equality in service of the public good. Protecting the public
good, meant protecting white institutions and white property value (C. I. Harris, 1993).
Anxieties about the effect of abolition on the white political order were bound up with
anxieties about the (in)ability to read the bodily truth of race.
5
An inability to read this
racial truth, as could have easily happened in Plessy, threatened the dominance and
inviolability of whiteness.
6
Plessy also demonstrates the intimate tie between fears of
blackness and anxieties about whiteness. These fears predate the Plessy ruling – early
fears of slave uprisings are one obvious precursor – and as I will discuss later, echoes of
these fears emerge in the 1965 Moynihan Report.
7
When Moynihan wrote of the Negro
problem in the preface to The Negro Family he described it as “the nation’s oldest and
most intransigent, and now its most dangerous social problem” (1965). He characterized
the problem as a threat to the liberal order in ways that resonate with the “corporeal
anxieties of the liberal order” that undergirded Plessy v. Ferguson (Hartman, 1997, p. 9).
The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling legitimated white fears that equality of the races
would lead to social instability. The Supreme Court mitigated this fear by determining

4
Even after the decision was reversed in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the visual economy
of race institutionalized by Plessy remained. Brown only overturned the doctrine of separate but equal, it
did not challenge legally distinguishing between races on the basis of racial visibility. If anything Brown
further institutionalized this visual economy.
5
As Saidiya Hartman writes in Scenes of Subjection, “Plessy exemplifies the corporeal anxieties of the
liberal order” (1997, p. 9).
6
As visual studies scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff demonstrates in The Right to Look, “the fear of undoing has
been the greatest motivator of visuality” (2011, p. 276). Visuality, or the structures of vision that shape how
individuals apprehend and produce reality, both produces and is produced by this visual economy of race.
7
Both Nicholas Mirzoeff in The Right to Look, and Simone Browne in Dark Matters, discuss how
visibility was used as a strategy to protect against potential slave revolts (Browne, 2015; Mirzoeff, 2011).

8
that although the government could guarantee legal equality between blacks and whites,
they could not legislate social equality between the races. In 1965, after the passage of
civil rights legislation that sought to do just that – ensure the social equality of all
American citizens – there emerged a new need to figure out how an imminent equality
between black and white Americans would not upend the white social order. In the
Moynihan Report, this anxiety takes the shape of concerns about the corrupting influence
of the proximity of pathological black families.
8
Although written under the aegis of
trying to solve racial inequality, the problem of black and white proximity emerges in the
Moynihan Report as it did in Plessy. Fears of blackness in the United States are often
fears about the proximity of blackness and whiteness– whether in terms of individual
bodies, in terms of access to rights, or in terms of general population numbers. In the next
section I explore the relationship between racial proximity, visibility, and fear in order to
point toward the ways that racial fear is able to function as an effective mechanism of
governance.
Embodied Fear: The Formative Power of Racial Fear

Three literary moments, each roughly thirty years apart, and each exploring the
feelings and consequences of racist fear felt while on a train, speak to the complex ways
that fear can shape embodiment, and ways of seeing, as well as how fear teaches
individuals the racial hierarchies that govern society. The earliest, and most well-known
of these moments takes place in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), in his
chapter on “The Lived Experience of the Black Man.” Shortly after his oft-cited “Look, a

8
Moynihan writes “it is immensely difficult for the stable half [of the black population] to escape from the
cultural influences of the unstable ones. The children of middle-class Negroes often as not must grow up in,
or next to the slums, an experience almost unknown to white middle-class children. They are therefore
constantly exposed to the pathology of the disturbed group” (1965, p. 29).

9
Negro!” passage, where a young white boy points at Fanon, Fanon continues to describe
the effects of this racialized visibility.
9
Fanon writes,
The body schema, attacked in several places, collapsed, giving way to an
epidermal racial schema…. In the train, instead of one seat, they left me two or
three. … I existed in triple: I was taking up room. I approached the Other … and
the Other, evasive, hostile, but not opaque, transparent and absent, vanished.
(p. 92, emphasis added)
Fanon describes how one’s racialization occurs in relation to fear: you learn
which bodies to be fearful of, you learn how to fear for your own racialized body, and
you learn how your body is itself an object of fear for those who do not share certain
bodily characteristics. Through his apprehension of others’ fear Fanon feels the weight of
racist history upon his own body, shaping and informing the way his body moves through
space.
10
In this way, racial fear acts as both an epistemology and an ontology; it
contributes to how we see and understand race as well as how we live it. Fanon’s
understanding and experience of his own body gave way in response to his racial
visibility. He describes his experience of being both Other and Othered in the language of
the visual.
The violence is not just the result of looking, but also about the feelings, and
history attached to those looks. While fear is not the only feeling that circulates in a
schema of racialized looking practices, it is often regarded as one of the most natural. In
Fear (2004), political theorist Corey Robin points out that many political thinkers and

9
As Amber Musser writes, “this scene and, indeed, much of Black Skin, White Masks, attests to the
violence that looking produces” (2014, p. 52).
10
Film scholar Kara Keeling asserts that the scene shows how “those sensations themselves exert
considerable pressure on the Black’s body, urging him to (re)act to the imposition of a ‘historico-racial
schema’ onto his ‘bodily schema’” (Keeling, 2003, p. 103).

10
sociologists regard fear as natural, apolitical and primal. Robin demonstrates, however,
that not only is fear political, its ability to masquerade as natural and apolitical is part of
its power. In a passage from “Eye to Eye,” Audre Lorde touches on the ways in which the
difference between a natural fear and a political one is often just a matter of perspective,
a difference in a way of seeing. As John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, “it is seeing
which establishes our place in the surrounding world” (1990, p. 1). Lorde’s essay “Eye to
Eye,” explores this relationship between one’s racial place in the world and feelings.
Though primarily focused on feelings of anger and hatred, in the following passage she
describes her encounter with a white woman’s horror. Lorde writes,
I do not see whatever terrible thing she is seeing on the seat between us –
probably a roach. But she had communicated her horror to me …. She stands with
a shudder and holds on to a strap in the speeding train. (2007, p. 147)
Through a series of looks and spaces left between bodies, the white woman on the train
communicated her fear of racial proximity to the young Audre Lorde. That Lorde
mistook the white woman’s response to Lorde’s black body as the response to a roach
suggests the affective resemblance between “natural” and “political” fears – on the
receiving end, they feel the same. It also speaks to fear’s close relationship to other
politically powerful feelings like disgust, anger, and hatred. Much like in Fanon’s
encounter on the train, in this episode, Audre Lorde is made aware of her own body as
“something very bad” (2007, p. 147). Unlike Fanon, however, she was aware of, yet
unable to comprehend, the source of the woman’s fear. The fear was communicated as a
space between their differently racialized bodies. This space, created silently, also renders
Lorde silent. She writes, “no word has been spoken. I’m afraid to say anything” (2007, p.

11
148). She sees and feels what is like to be visible as an object of fear and is silenced by it,
a silence that arrives with its own feelings of fear.
In Citizen (2014), Claudia Rankine brings together Fanon and Lorde’s insights
about the relationship between the visibility, silence and space, which are simultaneously
cause and effect of racial fear. Throughout Citizen, Rankine explores the corporeal effects
of the everyday experiences of racism. Citizen connects these commonplace racist
encounters to the macro structure of institutionalized racism. In one essay toward the end
of the collection, Rankine explores a moment when both white and black women become
aware of their bodies as raced and gendered in a scene on a train that bears many
similarities to Fanon’s train ride. Rankine writes,
The space next to the [black] man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly
rushing to fill. You step quickly over the woman’s fear, a fear she shares. You let
her have it …. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside,
within. (2014, p. 131)
In contrast to the experiences described by Fanon and Lorde, here the participant is not
the object of fear per se. While not the object of the white woman’s fear, she is
implicated in it. According to Rankine, one of her goals in Citizen was to think about “the
ways in which black bodies, and white bodies, and brown bodies reposition themselves
around each other” (Rankine & Lewis, 2014).
11
The essay quoted above was inspired by
an answer Rankine’s friend gave to the question “What’s a moment when you think about

11
Although Rankine does not explicitly engage with queer phenomenology in Citizen, her goals of
thinking about bodies repositioning themselves is very much in line with the way Sara Ahmed discuses
phenomenology in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology (2006). Ahmed
writes, “The attribution of feeling toward an object … moves the subject away from the object, creating
distance through the registering of proximity as a threat. Emotions involve such affective forms of
(re)orientation” (2006, p. 2). I have found Ahmed’s phenomenological language useful for thinking about
emotions and fear beyond a psychoanalytic framework.

12
yourself as a white woman relative to the black body?” The friend’s eventual response
was that it is when she sees a black man and the seat next to him is empty. To which
Rankine responded “Wait, I do that too” (Rankine & Lewis, 2014). The space next to the
black man’s body on the train makes the white woman’s racial fear legible to the other
passengers. By placing her body alongside the black man’s body, the subject of
Rankine’s essay is resisting this anti-black, fearful way of seeing. Her action does not
eradicate the woman’s fear, it simply allows the essay’s subject to step around it and
inhabit it. Whereas the child Audre Lorde did not understand what she was seeing, the
adult woman in Rankine’s passage expresses a fluency in the visual language of race and
fear. As with both Fanon and Lorde, this is a language of spaces and silences, where
blackenss becomes spectacularly visible.
In light of the history of Plessy v. Ferguson, and the history of segregation on
public transportation in general, it makes sense that these authors write about racially
charged encounters on trains.
12
After all it was “the threat of contagion and defilement
associated with blackness [that] necessitated these [separate-but-equal] statutes, which
aimed to protect and police whiteness” (Hartman, 1997, p. 186). In each passage, Fanon,
Lorde, and Rankine write about their encounters with white fears of loss, or contagion.
The space left between white and black bodies protects against this loss (or theft) and
contagion. Even though separate but equal statutes have been overturned, Fanon, Lorde
and Rankine demonstrate the ways that fears about the contagion and defilement Hartman
describes still persist. These three moments show how bodies caught within the flows of

12
As Nichoals Mirsoeff demonstrates in The Right to Look, the mechanisms of racialized looking bear
many similarities across different colonial contexts (2011). Consequently, though Fanon is describing the
fearful looks he received as a black man on a train in France, these visual hierarchies and their attendant
violence, resonate with those described by Lorde and Rankine in their train encounters in the United States
decades later.

13
racial fear experience these feelings as both a silence and a space. These feelings make
one aware of one’s own body, as well as creates a sense of transparency from being
subjected to the fearful gaze of others. In addition, encountering this fear causes
individuals to discipline their own bodies and the bodies of others. Fanon’s, Lorde’s and
Rankine’s writing point toward the ways that black populations are governed via
discourses of fear, which I will discuss in more depth later in the introduction. These
authors demonstrate how being seen as an object of fear renders subjects simultaneously
opaque, transparent, and absent.
This feeling of being simultaneously opaque, transparent, and absent is the
experience of hypervisibility about which many black/feminist theorists have written.
The problem of hypervisibility is marked by a simultaneous visual exploitation and
silencing. It is the experience of being seen but not heard. While black women’s bodies
are not the only ones subjected to hypervisibility in the United States, they have uniquely
circulated as canvasses for a wide range of ideological battles about capitalism,
citizenship, democracy, respectability, and pathology. As Daphne Brooks describes the
phenomenon of hypervisibility in Bodies in Dissent,
Black women’s bodies continue to bear the gross insult and burden of
spectacularly (representational) exploitation in transatlantic culture.
Systematically overdetermined and mythically configured …. Hegemonic
hermeneutics consistently render black women’s bodies as “infinitely
deconstructable ‘othered’ matter.” (2006, p. 7)
The term hypervisibility intervenes into a history of visual exploitation by articulating the
violence and erasure that certain kinds of visibility can generate. Within this history, the

14
black female body has been made into a spectacle and an abundance of interpretive
frameworks circulate in order to make sense of these spectacles.
The institution of slavery in the U.S. was built upon the publicness and spectacle
of black bodies (Brooks, 2006; Fleetwood, 2011; Hartman, 1997; Spillers, 2003).
13
This
history of spectacularization, taken in conjunction with the tradition within Western
visual culture of representing female bodies as passive objects of spectatorship leaves
black women particularly primed for representational exploitation (Berger, 1972).
Because there are an excessive amount of frameworks available for reading visible
blackness, an intersectional approach is necessary in order to expose the complexity of
the power relations at play.
Intersectionality as a Strategy for Reading Representation

Although there have been calls to retire intersectionality as a term, an
intersectional sensibility is necessary in order to account for the different valences of
representation and articulations of power that I consider in this dissertation.
Intersectionality remains a useful heuristic because it is not just that systems of
oppression like racism and sexism are interlocking, but systems and meanings of
representation intersect as well. Building on Gayatri Spivak’s arguments in “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” Kara Keeling describes how “cinema conflates the two senses of
representation and presents a proxy under the guise of a portrait” (2007, p. 43). In the
first connotation of the word, representation is a re-presentation, in the sense of an
aesthetic image. In the second sense, representation connotes a “speaking for” as occurs
in representative democracies for example. Within this second sense of representation,

13
Within US visual culture, it is not just blackness, however, that functions as spectacle, “the bodies of
people of color have long been fetishized and controlled” (Smith, 1998, p. 119).

15
representation serves as a proxy for the voice or subjectivity of someone else. As Keeling
writes “In the case of film and television, political agents (representatives) appear to be
simply aesthetic portraits (re-presentations)” (2007, p. 43). In other words, the political
and economic systems that structure daily life, and make media representations possible
in the first place, can operate unnoticed and unmarked when representations are
interpreted as a simple reflection of reality. Simply put, representations both produce and
reflect social relations.
14

The converse scenario occurs when the re-presentation of marginalized bodies in
film or on television is interpreted as evidence of a change in the structure of who gets
spoken for in U.S. politics. In these instances “the politics of representation is primarily a
politics of visibility” (Keeling, 2007, p. 44). The legal system, sociological research,
public policy initiatives, news reports, and fictional televisual narratives – all of which I
consider in this dissertation – each constitutes a kind of representation. Each of these
spheres conflate the two sense of representation to different degrees and in differing
ways, and each of these representations contribute to the hypervisibility of black bodies
in general and the black maternal body in particular. An intersectional approach to
representation points to how the different valences of representation intersect and overlap
with categories of difference and to what end.

14
As Stuart Hall writes in “New Ethnicities,” “scenarios of representation … [have] a formative, not
merely an expressive place in the constitution of social and political life” (1996, p. 444).

16

Discipline and the Economy of Racial Fear

Feelings were crucial to the violent spectacles that permeated both white and
black life during slavery in the United States.
15
Of these emotions, fear became the most
institutionalized in U.S. governmental practices. As Jody Armour writes in Negrophobia
and Reasonable Racism, white Americans’ fears of black bodies creates a de facto “black
tax,” which is “the price Black people pay in their encounters with Whites (and some
Blacks) because of Black stereotypes” (1997, p. 13). He uses the example of a white
woman being found innocent after shooting a black man in self-defense to highlight the
law’s willingness to see racial fear as a reasonable cause for action. Armour’s
conceptualization of the cost and effect of racism as a tax identifies the state’s complicity
and participation in the institutionalization of fears of blackness. I suggest that we
consider the black tax as a tax levied within an economy of racial fear.
16
The black tax, or
any similar racialized variants, are taxes that help institutions invested in whiteness. Just
as taxes collected by the Internal Revenue Service go toward governmental services that
protect and provide for American citizens, the collection of the “black tax” helps to
support the institutions that protect whiteness and add value to whiteness as property. In

15
In Scenes of Subjection (1997), Saidiya Hartman explains the role of feelings in the power dynamics of
chattel slavery and antebellum capitalism in the United States. Hartman writes,
The fashioning of blackness aroused pity and fear, desire and revulsion, and terror and pleasure.
And as we shall see, this ambivalent complex of feelings describes not only the emotional appeals
of the popular stage but also the spectacle of the auction block. (1997, p. 27, emphasis added)
Feelings about blackness played an integral role in the justification of violence against individual black
bodies, in the justification of chattel slavery as a capitalist system, and in the subordination of African-
Americans as a foundation of U.S. democratic governance (Hartman, 1997; Sharpe, 2010; L. Williams,
2002). This complex of feelings about blackness also circulated among popular discourse and state
sanctioned violence against black bodies.
16
Here, I am building on Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective economies. As described by Ahmed in her
article “Affective Economies” (2004), and her manuscript The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004),
affective economies are simultaneously social, material, and psychic. Ahmed notes that the circulation of
emotion shapes both individual and collective bodies and in so doing “emotions work as a form of capital”
(2004, p. 45).

17
this way, the economy of fear mediates the disciplining of individual bodies and the
management of the social body. The black tax, whose collection disciplines individual
black bodies, goes toward reinforcing the racial hierarchies of the social body.
The history of surveillance practices in the U.S. also offers an example of how an
economy of fear disciplines individual black bodies via laws and policies instituted in the
name of public safety and the public good. In Dark Matters (2015), Simone Browne
intervenes into surveillance studies by interrogating the ways in which historical
techniques of surveilling black bodies shapes contemporary surveillance practices. In one
of her case studies, Browne analyzes the history of lantern laws in colonial New York
City in order to excavate the way that black visibility operated as a kind of boundary
maintenance “intricately tied to knowing the black body, subjecting some to a high
visibility” (2015, p. 68). During the eighteenth century in colonial New York City,
multiple candlelight or lantern laws were enacted that required mixed-race, black, and
indigenous individuals travelling at night to carry illumination with them. These laws
were put into place by slave revolts, both real and imagined. These policies “made the lit
candle a supervisory device … and part of the legal framework that marked black, mixed-
race, and indigenous people, as security risks in need of supervision after dark” (Browne,
2015, p. 78). The visibility of the black body was meant to protect against the threat of a
black insurrection. Lantern laws sought to mitigate fears about blackness’ relation and
proximity to whiteness. These fears were about the need to contain the black body, as
well as the black population, in order to protect whiteness as a bodily property and the
white social order.
17
Browne’s discussion of these colonial lantern laws highlights some

17
I discuss these protections of whiteness as property as it relates to racial mixing in greater depth in the
next chapter.

18
of the ways in which fears of blackness were assuaged by laws that made the black body
more visible. These laws, and the resultant heightened visibility of blackness impacted
the daily lives and behavior of blacks living in colonial New York.
Browne’s analysis of lantern laws both aligns with and expands upon Foucault’s
argument about the role of visibility in the disciplinary regime of power. In his well-
known discussion of the panopticon and the internalized normalizing gaze in Discipline
and Punish (1975), Foucault points toward the imbrication of fear, visibility, and
disciplinary power. Rather than the fear of punishment and torture, and the public horror
of the spectacle of punishment that existed within the regime of sovereign power, the fear
associated with disciplinary power is closely related to being watched. Foucault uses the
metaphor of the panopticon to explain how visibility causes subjects to discipline their
behavior. In a panopticon prisoners are always potentially being watched by an unseen
guard in a central tower. The consequence is that one modifies one’s behavior because of
the fear of being watched. Describing the mechanisms of the panopticon, Foucault writes,
“the more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk
for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being
observed” (1995, p. 202). The panopticon is successful because it enables the
proliferation of fear via the imagined gazes of unseen observers. As I will discuss in the
next section on biopolitics, when this visibility occurs at the level of population, the fear
is more a fear of the state not seeing its subjects. Within the panoptic metaphor, the state
most closely occupies the position of the prison guard. The state’s fear is more a fear of
improperly calculating and managing risk. In either instance, however, both citizen and
state internalize and act on fears associated with visibility. What Armour and Browne’s

19
arguments make clear, however, is that the subject’s visibility to the state is mediated by
the subject’s racial identity.
As the authors I’ve referenced thus far make clear, racial fear makes black
subjects hypervisible in daily interactions, in the media, and in the eyes of the state. One
consequence of this is that the black body is more susceptible to the disciplinary regime
of power. As I discuss in the next section, the hypervisibility of black bodies (caused in
part by racial fear) also situates blackness as a greater target of biopolitical population
management. The result is a self-sustaining system wherein visibility leads to fear, and
the fear of black bodies leads to hypervisibility.

The Biopolitics of Blackness: Fear and Sociology
Whether via a black tax or via laws that demand the heightened visibility of the
black body, racial fear inspires legislative measures that work to discipline black
populations. The Moynihan Report epitomizes what this governmental response to fear
looks like when it occurs at the population, rather than the individual, level. At its heart,
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, is a biopolitical text. It seeks to
explain, optimize, and manage the reproduction of black life in the United States. In this
section I highlight the importance of sociology to biopolitical governance, and the
importance of both to the Moynihan Report. The history and shape of sociology as a
discipline informs the Moynihan Report and its legacy in two key ways. The discipline’s
emergence as a tool for explaining racial difference for the U.S. government in order to
mitigate racial fear, undergirds both the tone and method of Moynihan’s descriptions of
African American families. Secondly, and this grows from sociology’s investment in
quantifying and containing African American racial difference, is sociology’s focus on

20
reproduction. This interest in explaining reproduction builds on the discipline’s history of
attempting to understand the African American population post-Reconstruction, and
informs Moynihan’s focus on black mothers and black reproduction as causes and signs
of African American inequality.
Sociology, Biopolitics, and Blackness in the United States

As an academic discipline, sociology has a unique relationship with the discourse
of racial fear. Many early sociologists sought to quell the anxieties about African
American migration that emerged after Reconstruction. Quoting Anthony Giddens’
Modernity and Self Identity, Roderick Ferguson argues that American sociology “was
shaped from the start by a moral response to immediate national social problems – racial
and cultural concerns prominent among them” (Giddens in Ferguson, 2003, p. 19). Racial
fear was a driving force behind canonical U.S. sociology’s study of black life.
18
Fears of
racial disruptions motivated sociologists to study, quantify, and consequently contain the
racial difference that blackness symbolized. Sociological studies of this racial difference
helped to establish and reinforce blackness as fundamentally different from whiteness. As
Ferguson writes, “Sociology helped to establish African American corporeal difference
as the sign of a nonheteronormativity presumed to be fundamental to African American
culture” (2003, p. 21). From the outset, sociology linked African Americans’ visible
racial difference to differences in the norms of gender and sexuality upon which white
U.S. society was based.

18
Ferguson points out that although African American sociologists like W.E.B Du Bois, and E. Franklin
Frazier studied and wrote about African American life, their work remained marginal within the field of
sociology until the late twentieth century. Instead, within what he terms “canonical sociology,” the works
of white scholars, many of whom regarded black culture as inferior, deviant, and/or damaged, defined what
it meant to be African American for both the discipline of sociology and the U.S. government.

21
In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson builds upon Foucault’s arguments
about biopower and its reliance on the social scientific study of populations. Ferguson
writes, “canonical sociology would help transform observation into an epistemological
and ‘objective’ technique for the good of modern state power” (Ferguson, 2003, p. 77).
Thus, in the eyes of the state, sociological observations of blackness could, and did, serve
as the objective “truth” about blackness. In turn, these objective sociological “truths”
functioned as justification for state polices that disciplined and managed black bodies and
lives. For example, as Ferguson notes, sociological texts which described African
Americans as nonheteronormative helped to justify the exclusion of black Americans
from New Deal era policies (2003, p. 37). As scientific racism waned, sociological
explanations for the cultural inferiority of African Americans emerged as a way to justify
racism and inequality.
Sociological representations of blackness were not simply a byproduct of
sociology’s relationship with state power. Rather, as Roderick Ferguson argues, these
representations of the pathology and non-normativity of blackness were integral to the
field’s interaction with the United States’ discipline and regulation of its citizenry.
Ferguson writes, “As sociology positioned itself as part of the state’s reform agenda, its
production of racial knowledge about African Americans as nonheteronormative subjects
also mediated its relationship with the state” (2003, p. 76, emphasis added). Sociological
studies of African Americans helped to make sociology as a discipline valuable to the
state. The sociological mode of studying blackness, a mode that is grounded in anxieties
of blacks disrupting the white social order, mediated both the state’s governance of
African Americans and the state’s relationship to sociology as a discipline. Canonical

22
sociological studies of blackness, consequently, shaped how the U.S. government
conceived of African Americans as a problem to be managed in part by scripting
narratives of racial fear.
Quantifying Reproduction, Containing Racial Difference

These narratives of racial fears emerge in the Moynihan Report, and as I will
discuss later, they are present even when Moynihan references sociologists whose work
speaks back to the fearful narratives about black life put forward by canonical sociology.
Although Moynihan himself was not trained as a sociologist, he relied heavily on
sociological studies to support his claims about black families. The report’s inquiry into
the weakness of black family structure, and this weakness’s resultant effect on both the
black community and broader U.S. population, is an effort to “qualify, measure, appraise,
and hierarchize” black life in the United States (Foucault, 2013, p. 48). The report relies
heavily on the methods and analyses of sociology, particularly demographic analyses that
seek to make sense of statistics related to population growth – birth rates, death rates,
infant mortality rates, and so on. For sociology, biopolitics, and the Moynihan Report,
reproduction is a central concern. Regardless of whether Moynihan knew of the
discipline’s racial tensions, sociology’s history of representing African American culture
as fundamentally linked to their racial-sexual difference, are part of the context that made
Moynihan’s analysis possible and his findings legible. Moynihan was able to tap into
canonical sociology’s more established relationship to state power via the quantification
and representation of fears of blackness.
The sociological study of black reproduction and the state’s resultant attempts to
control it, depended upon a belief that sociology was a scientific study of the social,

23
meaning that like any other scientific endeavor, sociology could prove hypotheses, make
accurate predictions, and quantify the underlying causes of phenomenon. As Priscilla
Wald demonstrates in Contagious (2008), the concurrent development of public health
and sociology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States,
contributed to this belief in sociology’s scientific-ness. Both fields attempted to
understand the consequences of the increased urbanization that accompanied
industrialization and sought to minimize the biological, social, and moral contagion
caused by increased social contact. Wald and Ferguson both demonstrate that these early
sociologists understood themselves as creating a science of society. Their work relied
upon “a faith that understanding social process would lead to better control over them,
which in turn, would help policymakers and social reformers” (Wald, 2008, p. 129).
In the 1930s and ‘40s, for example, sociologists quantified assimilation and
stability in urban environments in terms of intimacy (Ferguson, 2003, pp. 32–33). In
order to protect against disruptive social changes, sociologists and New Deal reformers
sought to restore “responsible intimacy,” a goal that required “eradicating the
nonheteronormative formations that obstructed gender and sexual ideals held dear by
middle-class whites” (2003, p. 33). The eradication of irresponsible intimacy adhered to
an epidemiological logic wherein the germ cause of a disease could be isolated and
eradicated. Obviously this investment in responsible intimacy had consequences for
nonheteronormative subjects, an identification which included heterosexual black
women. Because, as Kara Keeling and others have shown, “‘denigrated femininity’ is the
only valence of femininity that can accrue to the black body and be made visible,” black
women’s reproductivity fell under the rubric of nonheteronormative intimacy (2007, p.

24
84). Consequently, black women who were in heterosexual marriages were subjected to
“relentless observation and regulation” in order to access New Deal policies such as Aid
to Dependent Children (Ferguson, 2003, p. 37). The observation, regulation, and
exclusion of the black mothers in the New Deal Era is but one example of the intersection
of sociological and state discourses in the governance of the reproductive black body.

Governing the Reproductive Black Body: The Science of Reproduction and the
Legacy of Slavery

Sociological studies of intimacy and New Deal policies are two examples of
mechanisms within what Foucault describes as governmentality: the discourses, which
both include and exceed those explicitly sanctioned by the state, which discipline the
bodies and govern the lives of a population. The reproductive body occupies a central
position within governmentality because it is situated at the intersection of both the
disciplines of the body and the regulation of life. This is one of the bases of Foucault’s
interest in the history of sexuality - its importance to both anatamo-politics (the
disciplines of the body) and bio-politics. In The History of Sexuality, he writes, “it [sex]
was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of
life … Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species”
(Foucault, 2013, p. 49). Although he does not use the term reproduction, his reference to
the continuation of the species makes it clear that the sex to which he is referring in this
specific instance is reproductive in nature. Here I extend Foucault’s arguments about
sexuality in The History of Sexuality to include reproduction. Although Foucault is
concerned with discourses of sex and sexuality, it is perhaps more accurate to say that

25
reproduction, rather than sex, is “at the juncture of the ‘body’ and the ‘population”
(Foucault, 2013, p. 50).
As the use of reproductive technologies and contraception has become more
widespread and unremarkable across the United States, the close coupling of sex and
reproduction has become undone. Even as contentious debates about abortion rights, birth
control, and sexual education continue to be waged, in general in the U.S., the injunction
against non-procreative sex has continued to lessen over time. Discourses of sex and
sexuality remain crucial to the management of life, but reproductive practices and
reproductive bodies that exceed the discourses of sex and sexuality described by Foucault
are also a primary target of state power. Foucault writes,
The mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to
proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or
its capacity for being used. Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the
future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality to
sexuality. (2013, p. 50)
Although Focuault does not really engage with race or gender in his exploration of
sexuality and power, in the U.S. concerns about sexuality and reproduction are always
already concerns about race and gender. And as Ann Laura Stoler demonstrates in Race
and the Education of Desire, “Foucault’s genealogy of bourgeois identity and its
biopolitics might also be traced through imperial maps of wider breadth that locate racial
thinking and notions of ‘whiteness’ as formative and formidable coordinates of them”
(1995, p. 16). Even though Foucault was not explicitly naming race in his theorizations of
sexuality and power, the colonial history of racism was foundational to the power

26
dynamics he described. In this next section, I make use of black/feminist theorists’
engagements with Marxism in order to excavate the ways that race and gender are
inscribed in Foucualt’s discussions of sexuality, reproduction and governance.
Governing Race and Reproduction after Slavery

Although in The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault addresses the role of capitalism in
the emergence of biopower, there is little discussion of slavery’s formative role in the
development of capitalism and governance in the United States (2010). In Habeas Viscus,
Alexander Weheliye turns to black feminist theory – primarily the writings of Hortense
Spillers and Sylvia Wynter – in order to rethink Foucauldian biopolitics in a way that
makes race and racism central, rather than incidental. Theorizations of the state’s power
to govern bodies and populations undertaken by black feminist theorists shows how
biopolitics’ “politicization of the biological always already represents a racializing
assemblage” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 12). Via the works of writers like Wynter and Spillers,
Weheliye highlights how race’s function as “a set of sociopolitical processes of
differentiation and hierarchization, which are projected onto the putatively biological
human body” aligns with the biopolitical imperative to classify, hierarchize, measure, and
qualify bodies in the service of managing and regulating the life of the population (2014,
p. 5). Hortense Spillers’ distinction between body and flesh, and Sylvia Wynter’s
genealogy of the category of “Man” both expose the centrality of blackness and gender to
the classification of certain bodies as nonhuman, subhuman, and human.
19
As Hortense

19
In her canonical essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers writes “I would make a distinction in
this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and
liberated subject-positions” (Spillers, 2003, p. 206). Throughout the essay, Spillers explores the
consequences of being made flesh for black women and black mothering. Sylvia Wynter undertakes a
similar project in her essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” which explores
“differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle” (Wynter, 2003, p. 261). For Wynter,

27
Spillers writes in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” slaves were “taken into account as
quantities” rather than people (2003, p. 215). If the reproduction of life is key to
biopolitics, how then is the reproduction of enslaved “quantities” accounted for, and to
what end? Black/feminist theorists’ approach to Marx’s discussion of reproduction and
capitalism can help to answer this question.
In Wayward Reproductions, Alys Eve Weinbaum demonstrates the ways in which
“race and reproduction are bound together within transatlantic modernity’s central
intellectual and political formations” (2004, p. 6). Weinbaum traces modernist theorists’
engagement with reproduction in order to highlight how theoretical conceptions of
reproduction – whether human, social, or capitalist – are interwoven with theories of race
and gender, both explicitly or implicitly. She refers to this relationship as the
race/reproduction bind, meaning that all modernist theories of reproduction are
necessarily also theories of race as well. Through this lens, we can see how Marx’s
discussion of reproduction in Capital, speaks to the ways that capitalist production
reinforces the differential valuation of racialized bodies. Marx writes in Capital
The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process
i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-
value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one
hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer. (1992, p. 724)
When read alongside Spillers’ argument in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” we can see
that the production of the “quantities” to which Spillers refers is also necessarily a

this struggle is between the western bourgeouis ideal of Man, which is she argues is overrepresented as an
ideal, and those left out of this category of idealized humanity. Though not identical, Wynter’s distinction
between “Man” and “Human”, echoes Spillers’ distinction between “body” and “flesh,” in that both
schemas attempt to account for the violence of (biopolitical) categorization enacted on the bodies left out of
the protected categories of citizenship or humanity that are used by the state in the governance of life.

28
process of reproduction. Even if, as Spillers asserts, black men and women were
ungendered and reduced to quantities by the arithmetic of the slave trade, the
reproduction of blackness was always key to slavery’s existence as a capitalist system.
The production of slaves as commodities necessitated the reproduction of enslaved
bodies.
In In The Break, Fred Moten similarly explores the latent discourse of race and
gender that exist within Marxist theories of reproduction. For Moten, when Marx writes
of commodity reproduction, because of the history of chattel slavery Marx is also
theorizing the relationship between capitalism, blackness, and maternity. Building upon
feminist theorist Leopoldina Fortunati’s feminist corrective to Marxism, Moten writes
“the commodity is contained within the individual. This presence of the commodity
within the individual is an effect of reproduction, a trace of maternity” (2003, p. 17).
There is a trace of maternity then within the bodies of all those deemed commodities
under slavery, meaning both men and women. Taken together, Moten, Spillers, Weheliye
and Weinbaum’s arguments about the history of slavery help to explain why concerns
about blackness in the United States are always already concerns about black
reproduction. The categorizing, qualifying and hierarchizing of black bodies that
facilitated slavery’s capital accumulation marked blackness as a racial identification
schematized in reproductive terms. In Western philosophy and culture, however, the
reproductive body is a female, maternal body.
20
What this means is that the black
maternal body is the archetype of blackness’ reproductive connotations.

20
As Susan Bordo writes in Unbearable Weight, “Western legal and medical practice concerning
reproduction in fact divides the world into human subjects (fetus and father) and “mere” bodies (pregnant
women) (2004, p. 14).

29
Reproduction in The Negro Family: Black Women as Hypervisible Problems

The Moynihan Report has been the subject of scorn, criticism, and praise since its
first circulation in 1965.
21
Its positive and negative reception comes from both sides of
the political spectrum. As Daniel Geary writes in Beyond Civil Rights (2015), in many
ways the report itself is an ambiguous and contradictory document. Because of this
complexity, the report defies any straightforward interpretation, which is why it has
served as an ideal gathering point for the ideological struggle over the place and meaning
of blackness in the United States. I follow Geary’s assertion that
the report’s ambiguity helped it become a crucial text in American political
culture, functioning like what cultural critic Raymond Williams termed a
“keyword,” a familiar term that articulates social ideals but is open to diverse and
conflicting interpretations. (2015, p. 6)
Geary deftly catalogues the conflicting interpretations of the report that have existed
since its initial publication. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter and this project to
review all of the critiques and analyses of the Moynihan report throughout its history, I
would like to address the primary, and most persistent, strains of critique of the report
before moving to a discussion of the (in)visibility, voice, and silence of black women and
the reproductive black body within the text itself. Critiques of the report’s latent sexism
and racism are the most pertinent for my exploration of the ways in which the report
constructs and represents black women and the reproductive black body as hypervisible
objects of concern.

21
Just since 2010 the report has been the subject of three books, several articles and a special issue in
Education Next and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Geary, 2015;
Greenbaum, 2015; Massey & Sampson, 2009; Mumford, 2012; J. T. Patterson, 2010; Peterson, 2015).

30
Before I address the report’s main areas of critique, let me first provide a brief
summary of its form and content. The report is divided into five chapters. The first two
chapters – “The Negro American Revolution” and “The Negro American Family” –
provide the reader with a brief history of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s,
and establishes the basic through line of Moynihan’s argument: African Americans will
not truly achieve equality unless the government takes steps to help strengthen their
family structure. Moynihan writes “at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro
society is the deterioration of the Negro family” (1965, p. 5). In the following two
chapters – “The Roots of the Problem” and “The Tangle of Pathology” – Moynihan
explains the causes and consequences of this weakened family structure. According to
Moynihan, slavery emasculated black men thus creating a legacy of black women being
empowered at the expense of, and to the detriment of, black men. He argues that the main
consequence of this imbalance of male and female power within black families has led to
the creation of a “tangle of pathology” in the black community that is powerful enough to
reproduce itself in perpetuity. In the final few pages of the report, Moynihan lays out
“The Case for National Action.” His primary recommendation is to empower black men
to reclaim their rightful place as patriarchs, which will in turn empower black families “to
raise and support its members as do other families” (1965, p. 47). Throughout the report,
Moynihan relies heavily on statistical graphs and charts and includes long quotations
from sociological and anthropological studies of black life. He does not analyze any of
the passages that he includes, and only provides one or two sentences before the
quotation to contextualize them. By allowing these quotations to serve as truths that need
no contextualization, he reinforces canonical sociology’s belief in its own objective truth.

31
Moynihan’s reliance on extended quotations from previously published texts assumes the
author’s expertise is self-evident, and that their authority is unquestionable.
Critiques of the Moynihan Report

Liberal criticisms of the Moynihan report generally occur on one or more of the
following four grounds: the inaccuracy of its data and methods of analysis; its
pathologization of poverty and/or blackness; its “blaming the victim” approach; and its
privileging and perpetuation of patriarchy. A diverse group of activists, scholars, and
politicians levied these kinds of critiques in the report’s early history, and these criticisms
have continued to be raised in the decades since. Each of these four modes of critiquing
the report interact, inform and build on one another. In addition, more recently the report
has begun to be criticized for the ways in which it contributed to the rapid growth of
incarceration in the United States. These arguments, which include among them The
Atlantic cover story written by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015), address the report as one part of
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s political legacy. Moynihan’s work in the Nixon
administration, his later more conservative writings, and his advice to Nixon on pursuing
a strategy of “benign neglect” toward black Americans, all contributed to the carceral
state that currently exists. Although important, these analyses of Daniel Patrick
Moynihan’s legacy are not my focus here because they extend beyond the impact of The
Negro Family in its own right.
In terms of the report’s data and analytical shortcomings, scholars frequently
point out the distortions in Moynihan’s descriptions of black life and his presumption of
causation due to correlation (Geary, 2015; Greenbaum, 2015). The most egregious case
of mistaking correlation for causation takes place when he asserts that the increase in

32
female-led households causes broken families and welfare dependency. Known as
“Moynihan’s Scissors” these statistics and its attendant claim “does not meet the
standards of empirical evidence, and does not confirm the elaborate theoretical
explanation he offered or justify the emphasis given it in the media” (Greenbaum, 2015,
p. 34). The ‘scissors’ are not the only inaccuracy in the report, however. There are
several places in the text where Moynihan uses quotes in ways that mischaracterize the
argument made in the source material.
22
This occurs most notably in his usage of E.
Franklin Frazier’s work. As Daniel Geary points out, “Moynihan adapted Frazier’s ideas
for his own ends” (2015, p. 59). In addition to his willingness to creatively adapt
Frazier’s arguments, Moynihan’s method and style of discussing the African American
community more easily lent themselves to confirming and perpetuating racist stereotypes
than Frazier’s. According to Geary, “Frazier’s case history method humanized his
subjects in a way Moynihan’s statistics did not. Frazier also emphasized the
heterogeneity of black family models” (2015, p. 60).
The tables and graphs included in the report also distort the extent of the problems
Moynihan describes. As Geary notes, the tables, graphs, and charts that are included in
the report help to bolster the impression that Moynihan is reporting inarguable facts, as
opposed to interpreting ambiguous statistical data. What Geary leaves out, however, is

22
For example, Moynihan cites Harvard psychologist Thomas Pettigrew’s work on black families as
evidence that black matriarchy is rooted in slavery. Pettrigrew’s quote, however, doesn’t actually use the
term matriarchy. As quoted in the report, Pettigrew writes “Since many slaveowners neither fostered
Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block, the slave
household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern” (Moynihan, 1965, p. 16).
Elsewhere, Moynihan misappropriates a quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead in order to serve his
larger argument about black cultural pathology. Moynihan quotes Mead’s assertion that “When the family
breaks down – as it does under slavery … this delicate line of transmission” between father and son is
broken, and men do not learn how to parent (p.17). For Mead, however, fatherhood is simply a function of
economic capacity, and is not a culturally inherited trait as Moynihan argues throughout the report.

33
the way in which the graphs in particular facilitate Moynihan’s ability to communicate a
sense of crisis. Graphs such as the one describing the rates of illegitimate births,
manipulate the data visualization in order to make the difference between white and black
reproduction and families appear as an unbreachable, and ever widening gulf.

Figure 1: “Nonwhite Illegitimacy Ratio”

The scale of the line graph above, which shows the rates of nonwhite versus white
illegitimate births between 1940 and 1963, is such that the gap between nonwhite and
white illegitimacy rates appears much wider than it actually is. The size of this gap in
illegitimate births is further underscored by the graph’s title “The nonwhite illegitimacy
ratio is 8 times the white ratio” (Moynihan, 1965, p. 8). This title would be less startling
had it mentioned either that the white illegitimacy rate was only 3 percent or the fact that
even Moynihan acknowledges that “there are limits to the dependability of these
statistics” (1965, p. 8). The report simultaneously acknowledges the paucity of statistics
about black American families, while placing faith in the accuracy of these statistics to

34
describe black life and the ability of social scientists to read the predictive truth of these
numbers.
Thirdly, the methodological differences between Moynihan and the authors that
he cites facilitated the report’s pathologization of blackness and poverty, contributing to
what many have identified as its “blaming the victim” approach. This critique, first levied
by William Ryan in an op-ed and then later in a book titled Blaming the Victim (1971)
criticized the report on the grounds that it blamed African Americans for causing their
own inequality. According to Ryan “victim-blaming is cloaked in kindness and concern,
and bears all the trappings and statistical furbelows of scientism; it is obscured by a
perfumed haze of humanitarianism” (1971, p. 6). Ryan critiqued the Moynihan Report
not only for the ways in which it claimed racial inequality was due to the problem of
African American families, but also for Moynihan’s tone while doing so. The atmosphere
of liberal concern which pervades the report masks the ways that Moynihan’s arguments
reinforce racist beliefs in black pathology. As Daniel Geary notes because of Ryan’s
critique, “blaming the victim” became “the phrase that became inextricably linked to the
Moynihan Report controversy” (2015, p. 96).
The last major area of criticism that the report receives is for the ways that it
invests in a patriarchal social order. Moynihan identifies matriarchy as the root cause of
the tangle of pathology, and proposes reinstating patriarchy within black families as the
only possible solution. In Moynihan’s words, the matriarchal structure of black families
“seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on
the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well” (1965, p.
29). Unsurprisingly there have been many feminist critiques of Moynihan’s suggestion

35
that a patriarchal family structure can solve the problem of racial inequality (Geary,
2015). Moynihan also advocated that young black men join the military in order to gain
“a world away from women, a world run by strong men of unquestioned authority” (p.
42).
Black Women in the Moynihan Report

Black women are hypervisible in the report in three ways: their voices are absent;
they are overdeterminedly identified as the cause of African American inequality; and the
effect of racism on their lives is minimized. Taken together these three factors produce
black women as an absent presence, represented only in terms of their reproductive
capacity and the harm that they cause to black men and consequently the black
community. Furthermore, Moynihan represents the harm caused by black matriarchy as
something that puts the broader U.S. society at risk of a race relations “crisis” as well.
In the early pages of the report, black women serve as the index for Moynihan’s tangle of
pathology. By the time he gets to the chapter on the tangle of pathology Moynihan has
established a firm rhetorical connection between weak or broken families, and female led
households. So when he says that the weakness of family structure is “at the center” of
the tangle of pathology, he is also making it clear that black mothers and the power of
black women are at the center of this tangle (1965, p. 30).
As discussed earlier, silence is one of the consequences of hypervisibility,
particular when caused by being the subject of racial fear. Moynihan reproduces this
effect within the report by describing black women as a cause of frightening social
problems and then leaving their voices nearly entirely absent from the text itself. In the
eighty-one pages of the report, Moynihan references the writings of only two black

36
women– Mary Diggs, a black professor at Hunter College, and Dorothy Height, the
leader of the National Council of Negro Women. Mary Diggs’ report is not quoted
directly and is only referred to in a single sentence. The quote from Dorothy Height is
only one sentence long and is pulled from a presidential report that quotes Height. This
means that the only two black female voices that are present are mediated and cited
secondhand. The point being, there is a nearly nonexistent engagement with the ideas and
writing of black women scholars and activists. The report’s treatment of black women as
merely objects of study, rather than theory producing subjects, performs a kind of
devaluation of black women’s voices and knowledge that is echoed in how black women
appear elsewhere in the text. When Moynihan conflates female headed households with
familial brokenness, he further devalues the bodies and lives of black women.
In order to prove there is a tangle of pathology in the black community, Moynihan
primarily relies on three different metrics: fertility rates, the number of families on
welfare, and the numbers of broken or female-led households (terms which he uses
interchangeably). In each instance black women are implicated as the causes of these
problems. This occurs primarily in Chapters Two and Three of the report – “The Negro
Family” and “The Roots of the Problem.” For example, in Chapter Three Moynihan
writes “The dimensions of the problems of Negro Americans are compounded by the
present extraordinary growth in Negro population” (1965, p. 25). A few paragraphs later
he suggest that black women are responsible for this extraordinary population growth,
when he states “Negro women not only have more children, but have them earlier” (1965,
p. 25). Nowhere is there a discussion of men’s role in either the extraordinary fertility

37
rates or in the number of young black women who are having “more children.”
Responsibility for the black fertility rate lies with black women alone.
Just as Moynihan holds black women responsible for black fertility rates, so too
are they the indices of broken families. On page 17, Moynihan offers a chart detailing the
percentages of black families that are led by women. On the following page is a bar graph
titled “One Third of Nonwhite Children Live in Broken Homes.” In spite of their
differing names, the chart and the graph were created using the same source data, the
1960 U.S. Census. The Census table upon which Moynihan’s chart and graph rely,
focuses on the “percent of white and nonwhite children under 18 not living with both
parents” (Moynihan, 1965, p. 65).

Figure 2: “Percent of Negro Families with Female Head, by Region and Area, 1960.” (Moynihan,
1965, p. 17)

38

Figure 3: “One Third of Nonwhite Children Live in Broken Homes.” (Moynihan, 1965, p. 18)

Figure 4: “Table 9: Percent of White and Nonwhite Children under 18 Not Living with Both
Parents, United States, Urban and Rural, 1960.”The original Census table upon which Moynihan
based his chart and graph. (Moynihan, 1965, p. 65)

Moynihan interpreted this data on children not living with both parents to mean that these
children are living in female headed households and broken homes. In the jump from the

39
Census data to Moynihan’s presentation of it, black women get interpreted as agents of
familial brokenness. Throughout the report he uses female-led households and broken
homes interchangeably, making it clear that any family structure outside the bounds of
heterosexual marriage are broken and in need of repair. Elsewhere Moynihan argues that
“the promise of the city has so far been denied the majority of Negro migrants and most
particularly the Negro family” because black families in the cities more often have
female headed households than those in the country (1965, p. 17). Not only are black
mothers indicators of familial brokenness, they also thwart the promise of urban
migration.
Because Moynihan uses black women as the index of whether or not a family is
broken, when he writes “the breakdown of the Negro family has led to a startling increase
in welfare dependency,” black women are clearly implicated as the cause of African
Americans’ reliance on welfare (1965, p. 12). As I mentioned earlier with respect to
“Moynihan’s Scissors,” Moynihan misreads the correlation between the number of
children with no father present in the home and the number of children on welfare as
proof that growing “family disintegration” is causing more black families to rely on
welfare (1965, p. 12). As Susan Greenbaum points out in Blaming the Poor, however,
this rise welfare enrollment occurred at the same time that welfare reforms loosened
eligibility requirements (2015, p. 33). In a later graph (the one to which Moynihan’s
Scissors refers) Moynihan argues that the fact that black welfare enrollment increased
after black male unemployment rates began to drop in 1962, proves the rootedness and
harmfulness of female led households. According to Moynihan’s logic a matriarchal,
single-parent structure (as evidenced by welfare enrollment numbers) had become so

40
entrenched in the black community that even the presence of black men with jobs could
not counteract its harmfulness. Black women have more children and at a younger age,
they lead broken homes, they thwart black urban migrants from benefitting from the
promise of the city, and they are welfare dependent regardless of black male
unemployment rates. This is the story Moynihan tells about black women before he even
names black matriarchy as the root of the tangle of pathology. At every turn, black
women are they hypervisible indices of black family pathology.
Black women’s hypervisibility is most evident on page 16 of the report, the
second page of the section in which Moynihan discusses “The Roots of the Problem.” In
the left column, Moynihan asserts that slavery led black families to be female-centered or
matrifocal, by way of quoting Harvard psychologist Thomas Pettigrew’s A Profile of the
Negro American (1964). On the other side of the page in the right column, Moynihan
erases black women’s experiences of segregation, racism, and violence under Jim Crow.
Moynihan writes,
When Jim Crow made its appearance towards the end of the 19
th
century, it may
be speculated that it was the Negro male who was most humiliated thereby; the
male was more likely to use public facilities, which rapidly became segregated
once the process began, and just as important, segregation, and the
submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than the female
personality. Keeping the Negro “in his place” can be translated as keeping the
Negro male in his place: the female was not a threat to anyone. (p. 16, emphasis
added)

41
According to Moynihan, it was men who were most humiliated by segregation because
they were more likely to be in public, thus erasing the history of black women’s labor in
the Untied States. As Patricia Hill Collins writes, black women’s “labor in agricultural
work and in domestic service exposed them to sexual harassment and rape at work and in
public places” (2005, pp. 64–65). In spite of this history, Moynihan argues that
segregation harmed black masculinity more than black femininity and even goes so far as
to suggest that segregation was not designed to target black women in the first place. In
actuality, Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and sexual violence threatened not just black
men, but black women as well (J. D. Hall, 1983). The writings of black feminist theorists
such as Hazel Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and others, address
the myriad ways that black women were constructed as a threat to the white social order
and disciplined because of it (Carby, 1992; Collins, 2005; Davis, 1983; Hooks, 1992).
It is more than a little ironic that in a report which casts black women as a threat
to both the black community and the nation, Moynihan claims that the black “female was
not a threat to anyone” (1965, p. 16). On this one page, Moynihan presents black women
as perpetuating racism and racial inequality by virtue of their relative power in
comparison to black men. By the time the report gets to “The Tangle of Pathology,”
wherein Moynihan infamously discusses black matriarchy, black women have been
clearly established as a site and source of dysfunction in the African American
community. Moynihan was hardly the first to pathologize the black female body. The
Moynihan Report did, however, canonize fears of black reproduction and the black
maternal body in lasting ways. In the chapters that follow I trace how this legacy of racial

42
fear emerges in U.S. legislation, public policy and media in ways that continue to render
the black maternal body as pathological and hypervisible.

Chapter Breakdown

In Chapter One “Entangled Kinship: Legislatively (Re)Defining Biological
Reproduction,” I examine how fears of motherhood’s riskiness motivated the state’s
legislative interventions into biological reproduction. I read the history of race suicide
discourse, the forced sterilization of poor white women, partus sequitur ventrem laws,
and anti-miscegenation statutes alongside one another as discursive precursors to the
legislation developed in the wake of assisted reproductive technologies. These early
histories reveal a longstanding state investment in protecting white property and white
patriarchy from the threat of black reproduction, and I argue should be considered
reproductive technologies in their own right. From there I turn to the more recent history
of assisted reproductive technologies and their associated legal cases in order to unpack
how the history of black women’s reproductive exploitation shaped the legal redefinition
of motherhood occasioned by the development of surrogacy technologies. This chapter
seeks to show how in these more recent legal cases, even when the black maternal body
is not present, the historical threat she has posed to the white family and the white social
order shapes the state’s willingness to legally protect and limit what constitutes biological
reproduction and parenthood itself.
In Chapter Two “Obese and Undereducated: Producing and Governing Crises in
Black Social Reproduction” I move from biological reproduction to social reproduction
and examine the racialized elements of two moral panics about social reproduction – the

43
childhood obesity crisis and the United States’ failing public schools. I focus on these
two moral panics and the Obama administrations public policy responses – Michelle
Obama’s Let’s Move Campaign and Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper – in order to
highlight how black motherhood is cast as dysfunctional and pathological in the
construction of, and response to, both crises. In addition, I chart how the neoliberal tenets
of privatization and personal responsibility – themselves nascent in the Moynihan Report
– function in these moral panics to place the burden of responsibility on individuals via
discourses of risk, riskiness, and choice. I demonstrate how the state disciplines,
manages, and regulates these crises of social reproduction via racialized discourses of
risk and choice in ways that reinforce the value of the patriarchal family unit and devalue
black motherhood.
In the final chapter, “Mothering While Black: Producing the Black Maternal
Threat in U.S. Media” I turn to media representations of black reproduction in order to
explore how black mothers are recast and reimagined as threats to the white social order.
I begin by focusing on recent news coverage of the United States’ demographic changes
and predictions that by 2042 the U.S. will a “majority-minority” nation. These news
stories, which characterize white and black reproduction as a zero sum game, create a
scenario wherein black mothers (as the only mothers whose children cannot be
incorporated into whiteness) are necessarily threatening to, and tragic for, whiteness.
From there, I examine the representational scripts about black reproduction and black
motherhood that exist within U.S. media in order to assess how the diversity of images of
black motherhood might still function as controlling images and a kind of biopolitical
governance. Ultimately this chapter argues that in spite of the multiple, and sometimes

44
contradictory representations of black motherhood the norms of whiteness, patriarchy,
and heterosexuality still remain reinforced.
Ultimately these chapters, and this dissertation seek to explore multiple iterations
of racial fear and make visible the ways in which this fear functions as a powerful
governing force in the United States. Whether in laws that define and delimit biological
reproduction, public policy initiatives designed to encourage better choices, or
representations of tragic black mothers in a soon-to-be non-white America, black
motherhood and black reproduction have continually been targets of this governance.

45
Chapter One : Entangled Kinship: Legislatively (Re)Defining Biological
Reproduction

In October 2014, a mix-up at a sperm bank made national headlines and sparked
public outrage. Jennifer Cramblett and Amanda Zinkon, a white lesbian couple in Ohio,
filed a suit against the Midwest Sperm Bank for wrongful birth and breach of warranty.
Cramblett and Zinkon requested sperm from a white donor, only to learn months into
their pregnancy that they were given an African-American donor’s sperm. Two years
after the birth of their mixed-race African American daughter, Cramblett and Zinkon
sued for damages as a result of the “pain, suffering, [and] emotional distress” caused by
the birth and care of their black daughter (Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank, 2014).
23

While there was widespread public criticism that the women would sue for wrongful
birth because of their daughter’s race, their case is just one of many fertility clinic racial
mix-ups, many of which receive public sympathy rather than outcry. For example, in
1990 Julia Skolnick sued a Manhattan fertility clinic after they failed to send her the
sperm of her late husband. Three years after giving birth to her daughter, Skolnick
claimed that her insemination “became a tragedy and her life a nightmare” (Sullivan,
1990). Similarly in March 2007 a married heterosexual couple sued a fertility clinic after
giving birth to a child that was darker than both of them. Genetic testing revealed the
child was not biologically related to her father. In the couple’s own words “while we love
Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we
look at her; it is simply impossible to ignore”(Associated Press, 2007). Tragedy, pain,

23
In October 2015 an Ohio judge dismissed Cramblett’s case and suggested she re-file her complaint as a
negligence suit.

46
and suffering – these are just some of the consequences of being forced to mother a black
child. In a sense these feelings are justified, after all, the families were given the wrong
sperm. As I will show in this chapter, however, this reproductive error is often only
visible when there is also a racial “mistake” overlaid on top of it.
Sperm banks and artificial insemination are not the only reproductive technology
causing bad feelings about racialized parenting. From its first introduction into national
consciousness, surrogacy has been rife with risk, protracted legal battles and public
declarations of heartache. In the United States, the lengthy Baby M custody case – which
stretched from 1986 to 1988 – was one of the first legal rulings on surrogacy and the first
national conversation about surrogacy. The lawsuit began in 1986 when Mary Beth
Whitehead refused to relinquish custody of the child she agreed to carry for William and
Elizabeth Stern. The Sterns ultimately won custody, but only after the New Jersey
Supreme Court ruled that motherhood cannot be voided in a contract. Mary Beth
Whitehead’s agreement to transfer her rights of motherhood to Elizabeth Stern was not
legally enforceable. Four years later, in 1990, California courts found motherhood could
be contractually determined when Anna Johnson, a black surrogate mother, similarly
fought for custody of the child she agreed to carry for an infertile couple. Unlike
Whitehead’s surrogacy, however, Johnson’s surrogacy was gestational, meaning that
Anna Johnson did not donate an egg and was therefore considered biologically unrelated
to the fetus. Whereas the courts ruled that Mary Beth Whitehead had parental rights and
the issue was in fact a custody battle, in the case of Anna Johnson, the courts determined
that Johnson had no parental rights because she had no genetic relation to the child.
According to the judge, Johnson was simply a nine-month “‘home’ for an embryo,” and

47
her claims to motherhood were “crazy-making” (Mydans, 1990). The case was framed as
nature versus nurture, where DNA and bloodlines stood in for nature, and gestating a
fetus became nurture. Instead of biology versus culture, nature versus nurture now pit the
invisible, but enduring, biological truth (DNA) against bodily biological functions
(pregnancy), which were now understood as ephemeral. What this means is certain
biological practices are less biologically significant when it comes to determining race
and genetic inheritance. Embodiment is superseded by genetic coding. This emphasis on
DNA and genetic inheritance contributes to what legal scholar Dorothy Roberts identifies
as a “new biopolitics of race” (2012). Within this new racial biopolitics, the belief in
DNA as biological truth allows for the creation of biotechnologies that have “redefined
race as a genetic reality” (D. Roberts, 2012, p. 286). Sperm banks that categorize sperm
donations by race ascribe to this belief that race is a genetic reality.
These reproductive technology legal disputes highlight two often implicit goals of
artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and surrogacy: the preservation and
uninterrupted continuation of racial bloodlines. Advancements in reproductive
technology like gestational surrogacy offer new opportunities to create genetically related
offspring, but not without risks. As the cases I mention demonstrate, although these
technologies can facilitate the reproduction of whiteness, human error allows for the
(re)introduction of blackness into the white family. In this chapter, I situate late twentieth
century attempts to manage blackness’s threat to white families within a history of
eugenic ideology and longstanding fears about motherhood. Reproductive technologies
like artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy, are profoundly informed
by a history of state sanctioned and state sponsored attempts to control women’s

48
reproductive choices. Fears of black mothers and of mothering a black child are integral
parts of this story. These discourses both precede the Moynihan report and are indebted
to the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan describes. Ultimately, these racialized fears
about maternal risks lead to the legal redefinition of motherhood and the legal refinement
of what it means to “own” a child, both of which take place in the wake of advances in
reproductive science.
24

The history that I lay out in the following sections explores the relationship
between black and white mothers and fathers in order to untangle how race and risk have
historically shaped definitions of parenting and the disciplining of maternity. While there
are many ways to tell the story of racialized parenting in the United States, I focus
specifically on four discursive and legislative histories: race suicide discourse; the forced
sterilization of white mothers during the early to mid-twentieth century; miscegenation
discourse; and partus sequitur ventrem laws. At different points in U.S. history these
discourses, laws, and practices helped to protect the white social order, either by
bolstering white patriarchy or encouraging and increasing the number of “good” white
children being born. By “good” I mean children whose class, race, and ability aligned
with the norms of middle-class, heterosexual whiteness. In the following two sections I
present this history thematically rather than chronologically. I do so in order to highlight
the ways that these discursive investments in whiteness, patriarchy, and the heterosexual
nuclear family (which often occurred at the expense of blackness, femininity and
alternative family structures) echo across U.S. history. These histories are not simply

24
In custody cases, lawyers and courts use the language of ownership when discussing which party
deserves custody of a child.

49
something the U.S. public and state move beyond; they recur, are reworked and
redeployed as part of a past “that is not yet past” (Sharpe, 2010, p. 26).

Historical Antecedents of Reproductive Technology

In the first section, I show how in order to protect the white family from decline,
the state afforded differential legal protections for white men and white women’s
reproductive autonomy. Courts protected white men’s reproductive freedom at the same
time that race suicide discourse and forced sterilization rulings treated white women as
too irresponsible to be trusted to reproduce whiteness. Marriage and forced sterilization
were the answers to this problem of white women’s reproductive irresponsibility. From
there, I move to the ways in which the state protected white families and thus the white
nation, from the reproduction of blackness via partus sequitur ventrem laws and anti-
miscegenation statutes. Observed before and after the end of slavery respectively, these
two sets of legal doctrines protected white property interests from claims that could be
made by multi-racial black children against their white fathers. Taken together these four
histories demonstrate the ways that white and black motherhood and fatherhood are
mutually constitutive identifications, meaning they only exist as distinct subjectivities in
relation to one another. The legal definition of motherhood and fatherhood in the United
States has always been racialized and has always been profoundly shaped by the
commonplace entanglement of white and black kinship during slavery. The Moynihan
Report’s critique of black families and black parenting is a now canonical version of this
story of interdependent kinship, one which powerfully shapes the courts’ and the public’s
ability to rethink the boundaries of motherhood, fatherhood, and family.

50
Protecting the White Family: Race Suicide and Forced Sterilization

The history of reproductive technology in the United States is bound up with a
historical investment in patriarchy and white demographic dominance. Fears of race
suicide, the practice of forced sterilizations, and the history of racial mixing and anti-
miscegenation statutes illuminate the racial and gender ideologies that undergird more
recent negotiations about the meaning of reproductive technologies. Although these
discourses and practices exceed what is colloquially considered reproductive technology,
their language and logic re-emerge and are reconfigured in the public debates incited by
artificial insemination and commercial surrogacy agreements. National conversations
about race suicide and the forced sterilization of white women mark beginnings, both
discursive and legislative, of a nationwide investment in the health and protection of
white fertility and reproduction. Protecting white fertility and reproduction necessarily
meant protecting white racial purity. In the next section I will address the ways that
understandings of racial mixture also helped to shore up ideas of a pure white race. Racial
mixing was not the only threat to white reproduction, however. In the early twentieth
century, white Americans who delayed or opted out of having white children were
regarded as abandoning their racial duties. The discourse of race suicide brought
reproduction into the public sphere via an anxious linking of white women’s work to a
threatened white future. One response to this public reproductive anxiety was to
legislatively intervene into the kinds of children being born in order to produce as many
healthy and fit families as possible. In this way, white motherhood was disciplined and
managed in the name of a biopolitical imperative to create and protect a healthy
population. The incitement to marriage and the sterilization of unfit mothers were

51
complementary techniques of managing white motherhood in the name of creating and
protecting the white population.
Most famously referenced by President Theodore Roosevelt, race suicide referred
to white Americans’ own participation in the decline of whiteness. Women’s presence in
the workforce was an important component of this threat to the nation’s racial future. In a
letter to Bessie and Marie Van Vorst, the authors of The Woman who Toils (1903),
Roosevelt decried white Americans having smaller families or forgoing parenthood
altogether, stating that it was tantamount to race suicide. In his letter, Roosevelt
commends the Van Voorsts’ exploration of the lives of women factory workers, but
points out that there is a “melancholy side” to the issue (1903, p. vii). What concerned
Roosevelt was his perception that working women’s desire for independence came at the
cost of “the practice of strong, racial qualities,” namely being good wives and mothers
(1903, p. vii). This letter received a significant amount of news coverage and introduced
the concept of “race suicide” into public discourse. The full text of Roosevelt’s letter was
republished in several newspapers across the country. The resultant public debate about
whether or not race suicide was imminent was the first time that white reproduction and
fertility rates were discussed as a matter of public concern in the United States.
25

For Roosevelt, those who avoid getting married and having children should be
considered “criminal[s] against the race and should be an object of contemptuous
abhorrence of all healthy people” (1903, p. vii). Roosevelt considered the prevention of
race suicide a duty of citizenship, a duty that could only be performed by white

25
Originally published as a series of magazine articles in Everybody’s Magazine, The Woman who Toils is
a chronicle of Marie and Bessie Van Vorst’s experiences impersonating female factory workers in several
different cities. Taken in conjunction, the book’s “muckraking” tone and Roosevelt’s preface about
working women and race suicide suggest that Progressive reformers’ attitudes toward working women was
less than hospitable (Keeran, 1977, pp. 549–550).

52
Americans. Although his concern was primarily about the role of white Americans in
race suicide, in the news coverage of the phenomenon, journalists focused on the
differential in birth rates between the white and black population. The national
conversation about race suicide was the first time after the Civil War that white women’s
economic and reproductive choices were rhetorically linked to black reproductivity and
the “fear that the colored population of the United States is increasing out of proportion
to the increase in the number of whites” (“Race Suicide Problem,” 1903). White
women’s decision and ability to bear children, black fecundity, and fears about the
security of white dominance were intertwined with one another in the public discourse
that emerged about race suicide. Roosevelt’s concerns about race suicide brought
reproduction into the public sphere and consequently “cultural observers felt sanctioned
to contribute to a new body of social thought” (MacNamara, 2014, p. 479). For the first
time in US history, Census figures were used to publically speculate on fertility rates, and
fertility rates became a primary indicator of the nation’s future (MacNamara, 2014).
This national investment in fertility was coupled with a desire to legislate which
kinds of children were being produced. Although sterilization may at first glance seem a
counter-intuitive response to fears of racial suicide, both the discourse about race suicide
and the practice of eugenicist sterilization reveal a consistent investment in the
reproduction of the healthy and fit white family and nation.
26
Much has been written on
the history of forced sterilization in the United States, and the ways in which this
incarnation of eugenicist ideology manifested differently in different local contexts

26
These discourses of fertility and sterilization appear decades later in the Baby M case, in the justification
of the Sterns’ desire for, and right to, surrogacy.

53
(Lombardo, 2010a; Pernick, 1996; Stern, 2005).
27
This variety can make it difficult to
broadly generalize about what forced sterilization looked like across the country. Men
and women of all races were sterilized under the rubric of eugenic fitness. Between the
years of 1927 and 1957, however, the majority of those sterilized were poor white
women. As Anna Stubblefield writes, these sterilizations took place in order to protect
elite whites from “white impurity” (2007, p. 163). Whiteness also needed protection from
ill-equipped white mothers.
Stubblefield uses the terms “off-white” and “tainted whiteness” to describe the
intersection of ethnicity, poverty, ability, and rurality that led some women to be deemed
unfit for motherhood by state institutions. Buck v. Bell (1927) is the most well-known of
these cases. In 1924, Virginia enacted a statute requiring the compulsory sterilization of
individuals at state run mental institutions who were “afflicted with an hereditary form of
insanity or imbecility” (Buck v. Bell, 1927, p. 207). Carrie Buck’s sterilization was meant
to be a test case to determine the legality of this statute (Lombardo, 2010b). In 1927, the
Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s decision to forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck. In its
majority opinion affirming Virginia’s right to sterilize the “feeble-minded,” Justice
Holmes infamously wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Buck v. Bell,
1927). As Dorothy Roberts writes, this ruling “gave eugenic theory the imprimatur of
constitutional law” (1998, p. 69).
The Buck v. Bell decision authorized the state’s right to curtail poor white
women’s reproductive autonomy and access to motherhood. These interventions took

27
For example, the recent critically acclaimed PBS documentary No Más Bebés (2015) tells the story of
the forced and nonconsensual sterilization of Mexican and Mexican American women in Los Angeles in
1975. As one reviewer writes the film presents this history “as a confluence of panic about overpopulation,
a gusher of federal funds for population-control studies and age-old prejudices about ethnicity, class and
poverty” (Hale, 2016).

54
place because “off-white” motherhood threatened the racial purity of the white family.
This history of eugenicist disciplining of white motherhood undergirds more recent
conversations about access to reproductive technologies.
28
As I will discuss later, late
twentieth, and early twenty-first century media scandals about reproductive technology
rework these eugenicist commitments to elite whiteness, and the protection of white
patriarchy from “tainted” white maternity. Reproductive technologies like artificial
insemination, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy create a scenario wherein these
historical concerns about unfit white mothers come into contact with fears about black
motherhood. Court rulings in more contemporary cases take place amid the friction
between these two racialized strands of maternal fear. With no direct legal precedent for
surrogacy, legal cases about sterilization became the legislative framework for making
sense of custody disputes in surrogacy cases. This sense-making largely hinges on a
determination of which parent’s right to procreate deserves the most legal protection.
The 1942 Skinner v. Oklahoma Supreme Court decision, in particular, ends up
being cited in the Baby M custody dispute as evidence that US citizens have a
constitutionally protected right to procreate. In Skinner v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court
ruled that laws mandating the sterilization of habitual criminals were unconstitutional if
these laws treated different kinds of criminals differently. Under Oklahoma law the state
had the right to subject “habitual offenders” to compulsory sterilization. Two armed
robbery convictions and a theft conviction qualified Jack. T. Skinner as a habitual
offender. Skinner v. Oklahoma challenged the legality of this statute on the grounds that
certain criminals and white collar crimes were not similarly punished. Ultimately, the

28
The passage of laws that restrict access to abortions, such as the 2013 Texas House Bill No. 2, similarly
seeks to legislatively limit women’s reproductive autonomy.

55
1942 Skinner v. Oklahoma ruling only provisionally banned involuntary sterilization; the
legality of sterilization in response to “feeblemindedness” has yet to be overturned.
The decision was not a prohibition of involuntary sterilization, but a prohibition
against unequal sterilization laws. As written in the majority opinion
while the state may protect itself from the demonstrably inheritable tendencies of
the individual, which are injurious to society, the most elementary notions of due
process would seem to require it to take appropriate steps to safeguard the liberty
of the individual. (Skinner v. Oklahoma, p. 546)
In other words, sterilization is a legal course of action to protect the state from inheritable
degeneracy so long as the state makes sure that these undesirable tendencies are in fact
inheritable. The good of the social body still supersedes bodily liberty as long as the state
can prove that individual body is a threat to society. The inheritability of degeneracy
remains a key component of whether or not one’s right to reproduce is constitutionally,
federally, and ultimately technologically, protected. Eugenicist discourse informs what
gets counted as degeneracy. Advocates of eugenicist ideology labeled white women and
African-Americans degenerate more frequently than they identified white men as bearers
of inheritable degeneracy (Gould, 1981).
The Skinner v. Oklahoma ruling also reveals that the constitutional right to create
genetically related offspring is fundamentally connected to marriage. According to the
majority opinion, “We are dealing here with legislation which involves one of the basic
civil rights of man. Marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and
survival of the race” (Skinner v. Oklahoma, p. 542, emphasis added). Marriage precedes
procreation in this formulation even though no aspect of the Skinner case was about

56
marriage. The majority opinion refers to one of the basic civil rights of man. And this one
right is a right to marriage and genetically related offspring. In other words, this
constitutionally protected right to procreate only makes sense within the framework of
marriage. Marriage is a precondition for this right and its federal protection. Decades
later, the availability of reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and surrogacy
will force the government to determine how far it must go in order to facilitate and
protect one’s right to create genetically related offspring. Because of the importance of
marriage to the protection of reproductive rights, and because the Moynihan report
establishes black women as pathologically unmarried, black women are at a legal
disadvantage when it comes to claiming access to this reproductive protection.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the legal protection for reproduction
derives from an injunction against sterilization. Rather than regarding the right to not be
sterilized as the contrapositive of being forcibly sterilized, having biologically related
offspring gets counterposed with forced sterilization. What this means is that when the
injunction against sterilization is used as a justification for the protection of reproduction,
the right to have genetically related offspring becomes more of a biopolitical imperative
than a protected decision. What gets retained in the contraposition of the right to not be
sterilized is the state’s active intervention into the reproductive process.
Whiteness’ Legislative Protection from Blackness: Anti-Miscegenation and Partus
Sequitur Ventrem

As the history of race suicide concerns and forced sterilization laws indicates, the
future of the nation and the future of whiteness were bound together via the patriarchal
white family unit. Failures of white parents and white genetics threatened this family
unit. The other significant threat came from outside of whiteness. Practices of forced

57
sterilization of white women and discourses about white fertility and race suicide were
primarily invested in the proliferation of whiteness. By contrast, fears about
miscegenation were preoccupied with blackness’s increasing proximity to whiteness both
spatially and in terms of citizenship rights. Forced sterilization and anti-miscegenation
laws were both attempts to contain the genetic threat to the purity of whiteness. As
Dorothy Roberts writes, “antimiscegenation laws were a eugenic measure” (1998, p. 71).
These laws became necessary after emancipation in order to protect whiteness from the
legacy of racial mixing that took place as part of slavery. During slavery, partus sequitur
ventrem – which dictated that children of enslaved women were enslaved – performed a
similar function to the later anti-miscegenation statutes. Both preserved white patriarchal
property interests. Anti-miscegenation and partus sequitur ventrem laws were, among
other things, legislative responses to white fears about the mutability of racial value.
These legislative investments in patriarchy, property and the white heterosexual family,
will ultimately inform rulings in surrogacy and artificial insemination cases.
In this section I continue to read an alternative archive in the history of
reproductive technology and turn to the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling,
the 1863 Miscegenation pamphlet, the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford Supreme Court ruling
along with the history of the rape and lynching of black men and women in order to
uncover a longer history of the shaping and regulating of black reproductive practices in
the United States. The interracial rape of black women by white men and the lynching of
black men accused of having sex with white women were two different kinds of
reproductive technologies. Both were widely performed practices enacted with the goal
of instituting targeted consequences on racialized reproduction; they reinforced a system

58
of racial and gender oppression, and protected the value of whiteness. Much like later
incarnations of reproductive technologies, such as artificial insemination, these earlier
sexually and racially violent practices had attendant legislation that justified and
protected their enactment - partus sequitur ventrem and anti-miscegenation statutes.
Although laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage existed during slavery,
emancipation made these laws all the more necessary for the protection of whiteness. As
scholars such as Annette Gordon-Reed (2002), Ian Haney-López (1996), Saidiya
Hartman (1997), and Dorothy Roberts (1998) have written, states created and enforced
anti-miscegenation laws in order to maintain a racial hierarchy that helped to protect the
purity and power of whiteness. After emancipation, fears of blacks gaining social and
economic equality were rampant (Hartman, 1997). In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya
Hartman explains that these fears about equality manifested as a preoccupation with
miscegenation that produced a “miscegenation crisis” (1997, p. 186). Miscegenation
became the locus of several strains of fear and anger felt among the white population. As
Hartman describes it,
miscegenation gave expression to the outrage that the bottom rail seemed to be on
top, anger at the assault on white ownership of property in black persons, fear that
whiteness as it had once existed was endangered or doomed, and indignation at
the prominence of the national government. (1997, p. 185, emphasis added)
Miscegenation symbolized an impending equality that devalued white property
ownership and the decline of white power and dominance. Prohibitions against inter-
racial marriage protected whiteness against this threat of equality. The expansion and
strengthening of anti-miscegenation laws that took place around the time of emancipation

59
were a legislative attempt to mitigate white fear and anger. Eugenicist discourse about
“blood and species” allowed these anti-miscegenation statutes “to seem completely
unrelated to the prejudicial ideas on which the demonization [of inter-racial sex and
marriage] was founded” (Lemire, 2009, p. 3). In Virginia, the Racial Integrity Act, which
expanded the prohibition against inter-racial relationships, was passed on the same day as
the Sterilization Act, March 20, 1924.
29
The simultaneous passage of these two acts
indicates the way that sterilization and anti-miscegenation were conceived as interrelated
strategies in the protection of whiteness.
Eugenicist rhetoric and anti-miscegenation laws naturalized intra-racial desire as a
biological instinct rather than social imperative (Lemire, 2009). The 1958 Virginia
Circuit Court ruling against Mildred and Richard Loving, which the Supreme Court
overturned in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling, displays this legislative investment in
the naturalness of intra-racial marriage and reproduction. According to the trial judge,
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he
placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his
arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he
separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix. (Loving v.
Virginia, 1967)
In a manner similar to the ruling in the Skinner case, which banned certain forms of
sterilization, in this 1958 ruling marriage and reproduction are conflated. According to
the ruling, racial separation is the natural course of things. In other words, inter-racial
marriage defies the natural order because the races should not mix. The law is not just a

29
The Racial Integrity Act was overturned in Loving v. Virginia, whereas the Sterilization Act would go on
to be the basis of the Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case.

60
prohibition on interracial marriages but a declaration of the unnaturalness of racially
mixed children. Even though Skinner v. Oklahoma established that marriage and
procreation are a fundamental human right protected by the constitution, within the
purview of miscegenation, no such right existed prior to Loving v. Virginia. Anti-
miscegenation statutes helped to naturalize the desire for racial purity and offered
legislative imperatives for the creation of children with uncontaminated racial bloodlines.
The fears of racial mixture that these laws safeguarded against are clearly outlined
in the 1863 pro-slavery pamphlet that introduced the term miscegenation into popular
discourse. Written by supporters of slavery, Miscegenation: The theory of the blending of
the races, applied to the American white man and Negro, purported to advocate racial
mixing. It was distributed to known abolitionists in an attempt to convince the general
public that abolitionists’ racial ideology was radical and untenable. According to the
pamphlet, the only solution to the Negro problem was to allow and encourage the
“mingling of races” (Croly, Hamilton & co., 1863 p. 65). Written as a satire, the
pamphlet’s authors are primarily concerned with “a general absorption of the black race
by the white” (Croly, Hamilton & co., 1863, p. 65). These are fears of racial
contamination. The concern is that blackness will intrude upon the white family, into the
white domestic sphere and whites will have no choice but to “share with him [the
African-American] our hearts and our home” (Croly, Hamilton & co., 1863, p. 65).
Although black men and women were equally prohibited from marrying white women
and men, the use of the masculine pronoun him, suggests that the chief concern is about
the intrusion of black masculinity into white homes. The primacy of black men and white
domesticity in these fears of miscegenation influenced how anti-miscegenation laws were

61
enforced. Unsurprisingly then, in 1892 Ida B. Wells observed that anti-miscegenation
laws were primarily enforced to prohibit black men’s relationships with white women
(Carby, 1985, p. 268). Many scholars have shown how these fears of miscegenation as a
violation of white women were used to justify the lynching of black men across the
country (Carby, 1985; Collins, 2005; J. D. Hall, 1983; Stabile, 2006). As Jacquelyn
Dowd Hall writes, “a black man did not literally have to attempt sexual assault for whites
to perceive some transgression of caste mores as a sexual threat” (1983, p. 334). The fear
was pervasive enough to read any black man as a potential threat to white women’s virtue
and the white social order.
Black women occupied a unique position within both the practice of inter-racial
sex and the fears of miscegenation. The Miscegenation pamphlet acknowledges the
frequency with which inter-racial reproduction took place as an unremarkable part of the
economy of slavery.
30
When it was “properly” performed during chattel slavery, inter-
racial reproduction was the enactment of a property relation. The rape of enslaved women
by white slave owners was an act of domination that produced more labor. It was a form
of gendered violence that doubly exploited black women’s labor – their reproductive
labor as mothers and their economic labor as white-owned property. The rape of enslaved
black women by white slave owners was a reproductive technology that strengthened
racial capitalism. Considering the rape of enslaved women by white men as a
reproductive technology, reads these acts of violence as deliberate attempts to create

30
According to the authors, Southern slaveholders have an “intimate communication, from birth to death,
with the colored race” (1863, p. 40). They continue, “It is a notorious fact, however, that, for three
generations back, the wealthy, educated, governing class of the South have mingled their blood with the
enslaved race” (1863, p. 41).

62
certain kinds of offspring and kinship relationships.
31
Technology is, at its most basic, the
application of knowledge in order to influence either human life, the environment, or
both.
32
The rape of enslaved women was a technique informed by the ideological
demands of an economy built on racialized and gendered exploitation. It was one of the
ways in which black “motherhood was critical to the reproduction of property, and [the]
black subjection” upon which slavery relied (Hartman, 1997, p. 98). The goal was to
increase property value and reinforce black oppression. As with later types of
reproductive technologies, there were laws that protected the “practitioner” of this
technology from the unwanted consequences of this violent exploitation of black
women’s labor. The doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem protected white slave owners
from any claims to paternal inheritance levied by the children of these rapes, as such
claims could have had the power to upend the racial and economic order.
In Latin the phrase partus sequitur ventrem means, “that which is brought forth
follows the womb,” meaning the child inherits the status of the mother. This law ensured
that the children of enslaved women were also slaves. Partus, which was derived from
Roman civil law, has been referenced in legal disputes on topics ranging from cattle, to
show dogs, to custody battles and of course, in cases involving enslaved African
Americans.
33
Following the womb is distinct from determining who owns the child,

31
Feminist and critical race scholars have written about the need to consider technology beyond just “the
tools of work and war” (Wajcman, 2010, p. 144).
31
Race and gender both produce and are produced by
technology (Balsamo, 1995; Chun, 2012; Haraway, 2004; D. Roberts, 2012; Weheliye, 2014).
32
I follow Alexander Weheliye’s use of the term technology in Habeas Viscus (2014). Weheliye uses the
term, “in the broadest sense as the application of knowledge to the practical aims of human life or to
changing and manipulating the human environment” (2014, p. 12).
33
As recently as 1991 partus was cited as justification for a child’s racial identification. The case regarded
whether a state court had jurisdiction in a custody dispute involving a Native American father, white
mother, and their mixed-race child. Citing partus the court determined that because the child’s mother was
white, the child was also white and consequently state courts were within their jurisdiction (Barbry v.
Dauzat, 1991).

63
however. In instances of interracial rape during slavery, the father owned the child and
the child inherited the mother’s enslavement. Enslavement was passed down
matrilineally. A child who inherited his mother’s slave status could make no claims on
his white father’s property. In general in the United States, the laws determining the
relationship between family and inheritance have primarily existed to protect the property
value of whiteness (C. I. Harris, 1993). As legal scholar Cheryl Harris demonstrates in
“Whiteness as Property,” the racial subordination of blacks and Native Americans relied
upon the double inheritability of whiteness (1993). Whiteness was inherited as a
biological race at the same time that the property value and relations of whiteness were
inherited. The purity of one’s blood ostensibly determined the biological fact, or truth of
one’s whiteness, and family inheritance laws protected the property value of whiteness.
Whiteness was, and continues to consist of two kinds of familial inheritance – the
inheritance of property combined with the inheritance of racial bloodlines.
Anti-miscegenation laws and the recognition of partus sequitur ventrem offered
legal protection for both forms of white inheritance. Whereas partus protected white
fathers from the claims of their black children, anti-miscegenation laws primarily
protected white women from mothering black children. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “If
miscegenation jurisprudence was instrumental in stabilizing white property, then women
and children – properly speaking, legitimate heirs – were its particular objects of
concern” (1997, p. 190). White women and children were considered the sole property of
white men. Anti-miscegenation laws protected white men’s familial ownership from the
threat of black men. Partus was similarly invested in the “rights of property that men
extended over women” (Hartman, 1997, p. 190). Anti-miscegenation statutes protected

64
white men’s rights to white women and children as property. Partus protected white
men’s property rights over the children of black women.
Perhaps the most well known partus citation occurs in the 1857 Dred Scott v.
Sandford Supreme Court case. The landmark Dred Scott ruling determined that African
Americans could not be citizens, and thus could not sue for their freedom in federal
courts. In the court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice Tanley wrote that as a slave,
He [Dred Scott] can have no legal rights; of course, not those of a husband and
father. And the same is true of his wife and children. The denial of his rights is the
denial of theirs. … [and their child] is not the fruit of that marriage, nor the child
of its father, but subject to the maxim, partus scquitur [sic] ventrem. (Dred Scott
v. Sandford, 1857, pp. 599–600)
This judgment demonstrates the “masculinism of the citizen-subject” (Hartman, 1997, p.
190). The denial of Scott’s rights was also a denial of the rights of his wife and children.
Although slaves were not truly recognized as citizens, and slave-marriages were not
recognized by law, the rights of women and children were contingent on the rights of
men. Even though Dred Scott’s marriage was not legally recognized because the courts
considered him a slave, his marriage was still used as legal justification for his wife and
child’s slave status. The father’s slave status determined the mother’s and the mother’s
determined the child’s. Partus ensured white slave owners obtained the maximum profit
from black women’s maternal labor. Both partus and anti-miscegenation laws regulated
black kinship relationships and maximized white men’s access to the capital benefits of
black and white women’s reproductive work. Over a century later, reproductive
technologies like artificial insemination and surrogacy will uncouple reproductive work

65
from biology and a common sense understanding of parental rights. This uncoupling
poses a legal challenge for determining parental ownership. In this context, the state’s
long history of legislating kinship and protecting patriarchy becomes an important legal
and ideological precedent.
Even the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling, which declared anti-
miscegenation statutes unconstitutional, harbors similarities with the anti-miscegenation
laws themselves. In the overturning of these laws, discourse about miscegenation
continued to be bound to the regulation of the black family and the protection of white
patriarchy. In Troubling the Family, Habiba Ibrahim reads the Loving ruling as part of a
set of “state initiatives to reinforce heterosexual marriage, and by extension the
heteronormative family, as private units that fortify national wellbeing” (2012, p. 44).
She points out that the 1967 ruling took place only two years after the Moynihan Report
was published and that both the Moynihan Report and Loving v. Virginia display a
similar commitment to patriarchy and similar concerns about the dangers of urban
blackness and urban black motherhood. When the Lovings were exiled from Virginia in
1955, they moved from their suburban Virginia home to urban Washington D.C. As
Ibrahim writes, within the context of the case, their banishment to Washington D.C. cast
the city as “a deviant and undesirable designation” (2012, p. 56). Loving v. Virginia
restored the Lovings to their safe, suburban, and implicitly white home. On the day of the
ruling, Richard Loving told reporters that their plan was to “go ahead and build a new
house” in their Virginia neighborhood (quoted in Wallenstein, 2002, p. 189). The
Lovings were safe from the isolation and financial difficulties they faced while living in
Washington D.C.

66
In contrast to the problems of the black urban ghettos described in the Moynihan
Report, Mildred Loving offered a vision of respectable black motherhood that relied upon
heteronormativity, marriage, color-blindness and distance from the city. In addition,
when reporters described Mildred Loving in news coverage of the case, she was often
described as a mixed-race African-American woman. According to several papers
Mildred Loving was “part Negro and part Indian” (“Couple ‘Overjoyed’ By Court
Decision,” 1967, “Inter-Race Marriages Defended,” 1967; King, 1967). When the
Moynihan Report and Loving v. Virginia case are read alongside one another,
The black mother— ostensibly an urban figure— becomes a symbolic marker of
how the inextricable link between blackness and urbanization translates into the
potential death of children and the nuclear family in general, which is the very
institution the state wants to preserve as a heteronormative, nonurban, and tacitly
white sign of social health. (Ibrahim, 2012, p. 62)
In other words, black women threaten the white familial order that serves as a founding
principle of the United States. Even though Mildred Loving is a black woman, the
discourse around her own racial identity and her marriage to a white man both work to
distance her from the urban black mother of the Moynihan Report. This distancing, in
turn, reifies the urban black mother as a symbol of risk and degeneracy. In each instance -
partus sequitur ventrem, anti-miscegenation laws, and even the overturning of anti-
miscegenation laws – marriage is linked to social health and social order. In the United
States, “marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very

67
existence and survival” (Skinner v. Oklahoma, 1967).
34
Throughout U.S. history, there
has been legislation protecting the institution of marriage from the myriad threats posed
by blackness.
Taken together, historical fears of race suicide, practices of forced sterilization,
the observance of partus sequitur ventrem, and the implementation of anti-miscegenation
laws both helped to simultaneously produce and manage two interrelated genres of
racialized fears about motherhood and maternity. Put simply, these fears are concerned
with the risks of white and black mothers disrupting whiteness, patriarchy, and
capitalism. Unsurprisingly, this disruptive potential differs by race. White women
threatened white racial purity and dominance either by not having enough children, or
having too many of the wrong type of children. As the history of race suicide discourse
demonstrates, white women’s work outside the home was threatening when it caused
women to have fewer children. According to this logic, women who chose to put their
jobs before their racial duties as wives and mothers put the entire nation at risk. As
Theodore Roosevelt put it, the entanglement of white women’s economic and
reproductive labor “should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence” (1903, p. vii).
White women’s work was not the sole threat to the reproduction of whiteness, however.
Poverty and intellectual disability, often understood as one and the same problem, also
threatened to undermine white racial purity. Concerns about race suicide and practices of
forced sterilization are only two of the ways in which the state sought to regulate and

34
The Loving v. Virginia opinion cited Skinner v. Oklahoma as evidence of the Court’s belief in the
importance of marriage. As discussed earlier, Skinner v. Oklahoma is the Supreme Court case that made the
certain instances of forced sterilization illegal.

68
protect white reproduction from white mothers.
35
White women were responsible for the
reproduction of the race, but could not be trusted to carry about this responsibility
properly.
Black mothers generated a different kind of fear. Anti-miscegenation laws
codified the logic of hypo-descent, otherwise known as the “one-drop rule.”
36

Consequently, unlike white women, black women could only ever bear black children.
Black women could not threaten to contaminate whiteness by having mixed-race children
because these children were legally regarded as black. Their threat to whiteness is via
taxing or overwhelming it, rather than contaminating it. During slavery “whites placed a
premium on slave fertility and took steps to increase it” (D. Roberts, 1998, p. 25). Whites
believed black women to be hyper-reproductive and this reproductive capacity was
beneficial for the slave economy. In the antebellum period the state did not recognize
black motherhood as an important social practice or protected legal entitlement. The
value of black motherhood was solely in its ability to increase the property value of slave
owners. Consequently, “genetic reproduction [was] not the elaboration of the life-
principle, but an extension of the boundaries of proliferating properties” (Spillers, 2003,
p. 220). Both white and black genetic reproduction increased the value of white property,
and whiteness as property. As Hortense Spillers convincingly argues, black kinship
relationships could not be recognized, because doing so would undermine white property

35
Between 1890 and 1950 there was a rise in the discourse of scientific motherhood, which is “the
insistence that women require expert scientific and medical advice to raise their children healthfully”
(Apple, 1995, p. 161). Women were increasingly taught to distrust their maternal instincts and rely solely
upon the advice of predominantly male doctors and experts. Within this discourse “women were both
responsible for their families and incapable of that responsibility” (Apple, 1995, p. 162).
36
According to the logic of hypo-descent, one black ancestor, no matter how many generations removed,
made one black. These racial identifications determined whether a marriage was intra or inter racial, and
thus legal.

69
relationships. Emancipation, however, restored black kinship relationships as legally
recognizable. As a result, black fertility was no longer an economic boon for white
America. When black women’s reproduction is not being used to advance white
patriarchal capitalism as it was during slavery, then it threatens to undo it. As described
by Moynihan, black matriarchy comes at a high social cost because black children burden
white society with their joblessness and criminal tendencies. Whether by not having
enough white children, having the wrong kinds of white children, or having too many
dangerous and burdensome black children, motherhood is risky. Strict legislative
attention is required in order to protect whiteness and patriarchy from motherhood’s
failures.

Artificial Insemination and In Vitro Fertilization : Fears of White Reproductive
Failure and Fantasies of Racial Purity

Advances in genetic science and its ensuing reproductive technologies have given
new life to the histories of racial hygiene and genetic bloodlines that I have discussed. In
Purity and Danger (2002), Mary Douglas demonstrates that ideas about hygiene and
taboo work in tandem to create the boundaries needed to maintain the social order. The
original 1966 text focuses primarily on the social power of taboo, but in her preface to the
2002 re-issue, Douglas writes “risk and taboo turn out to be equally engaged in protecting
a vision of the good community” (2002, p. xx). Ideas about what is risky or taboo provide
the social guidelines that preserve the status quo. The history of fears of race suicide,
forced sterilizations, and anti-miscegenation laws confirm Douglas’ argument about the
role of risk and taboo. Racial mixing and maternal “failures” both threatened to
destabilize the power of white patriarchy. Public discourse about motherhood and

70
marriage treated motherhood as risky and inter-racial marriages as taboo. Here, the good
community which Douglas describes, is white patriarchal society. This good community
was protected by managing the risks of motherhood and prohibiting inter-racial marriage.
Claiming whiteness in the United States has always been an issue of racial
hygiene. As Douglas writes, “dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative
movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment” (2002, p. 2). Blackness is
essentially disorder; it offends against order. According to Saidiya Hartman, after
emancipation, “the proximity of black and free necessarily incited fundamental changes
in the national fabric” (1997, p. 119). The proximity of blackness threatened white order.
Racial hygiene is a positive effort to fortify whiteness against the disorder of blackness.
Now that genetic science claims to be able to genetically identify and locate racial
markers, fantasies of racial purity are reanimated with more precision. The history of
artificial insemination’s popular acceptance in the United States, indicates a continued
desire for the racial hygiene of white patriarchal families. Jennifer Cramblett and
Amanda Zinkon’s complaint, which I opened this chapter with, illustrates this history of
pursuing white racial hygiene, as well as the limits of this discourse. As a technology,
artificial insemination uncoupled sex and procreation, thus forcing US courts to reassess
the family’s role in regulating sexual relationships and reproduction. In addition, much
like anti-miscegenation statutes did in the mid-nineteenth century, artificial insemination
masks the social imperative for racial purity behind biological discourse. Whereas the
emphasis in anti-miscegenation discourse was on blood and species, the discourse about
artificial insemination emphasized fertility and infertility. As Dorothy Roberts writes,
“these [reproductive] technologies … more often reinforce the status quo than challenge

71
it” (1998, p. 247). Artificial insemination’s public use and acceptance enabled notions of
family and racial purity to become even more deeply enmeshed. As I will discuss later,
Cramblett and Zinkon’s case indicates that the legal protection of racial hygiene does not
extend seamlessly to non-normative families, however. As unmarried lesbians, their
family structure is non-normative at several levels.
Race has always been an important factor in decisions about which donor sperm
to use in artificial insemination. Initially after World War II, its use was legally justified
because it facilitated married couples’ attempts to biologically reproduce. The use of
donor sperm ensured that the child was at least biologically related to the mother and
racially similar to both parents. The technology became legally and social acceptable
because it was consistent with the state’s investment in heterosexual marriage – it both
expanded white patriarchy and reproduced normative whiteness. Cramblett and Zinkon
did not use artificial insemination under the aegis of the institution of heterosexual
marriage, however. In the absence of heterosexual marriage, the racial commitments of
reproductive technology and of the discourse of family in general, appear more baldly
racist. The media spotlight on Cramblett and Zinkon’s case offers the opportunity to
interrogate the ways race is discussed and prioritized in many instances of reproductive
technology. In the next sections I use Cramblett and Zinkon’s 2014 legal complaint to
highlight how the popularization of artificial insemination in the United States reinforced
the white patriarchal order in post-WWII America. When surrogacy enters onto the
national stage in the 1980s, this social order will once again be challenged by the
lingering threat of black reproduction.

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What follows is not a complete history of the development and legislation
surrounding reproductive technologies in the United States. Instead I focus primarily on
the debates that emerged in response to three spectacular cases of assisted reproductive
technology use: Baby M in the late ‘80s; Johnson v. Calvert in the early ‘90s; and
Jennifer Cramblett’s 2014 complaint against Midwest Sperm Bank. These spectacular
cases are important because “the law is often on display as public spectacle” and these
spectacles have “become the dominant site in which the law functions” (C. I. Harris,
1995, p. 225). If, as Cheryl Harris argues, the law functions “as a kind of meta-narrative
about the appropriate sanctioned relations of power between groups and their individual
members” then the cases I consider in this section speak to the ways race and gender
mediate the power relations within a family unit (1995, p. 226). Disputes incited by the
use of artificial insemination or surrogacy force the courts to determine whether the
maternal or paternal tie is more powerful. These technologies also raise the question of
which aspect of that parental connection – race, marriage, genetics or embodiment – is
the most powerfully determining. These three cases – Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank;
Baby M; and Johnson v. Calvert – test different configurations of these bonds of
motherhood, fatherhood, and family. Ultimately the media coverage and legal discussion
surrounding these cases demonstrates how deeply imbricated race, motherhood, and
heterosexual marriage are in popular and political notions of family and its value to the
nation.
Protecting White Women, Protecting White Families

Artificial insemination was invented in the eighteenth century, but not widely
practiced until the 1930s, and not legalized in the United States until the 1960s (G.

73
Bernstein, 2002). Although birth control methods separated sex from procreation, it did
so in order to enable couples to have sex without having children. Artificial insemination,
on the other hand, allowed for reproduction without sex itself. Within the ideal of the
patriarchal nuclear family, sex and marriage are inextricably linked. As legal scholar
Martha Fineman describes it, the ideal family is a “sexual family” meaning that within
US family law “the adult sexual affiliation remains central” (1992, p. 663). The
presumption of a sexual relationship between husband and wife forms the basis of their
legal recognition as a family unit. Fineman points out that “the very existence of a sexual
relationship is what provides the basis for arguing that .. nontraditional unions should be
included within the formal legal category of family” (1992, p. 663). Separating sex from
reproduction challenges the meaning of family that legitimates that reproduction in the
first place. Artificial insemination creates two competing notions of family and its legal
recognition: one that is based in a sexual relationship, and one that serves as the
precondition for genetic procreation. Initial cases involving artificial insemination with
donor sperm in the 1940s “demonstrated the tension between the two incompatible
conceptions of the family” (G. Bernstein, 2002, p. 1068). Courts in different states
provided contradictory rulings on the legitimacy of children born via artificial
insemination with donor sperm.
37
Ultimately, however, U.S. courts came down on the
side of reproduction. By the late 1960s, several states ruled that children born via

37
For example, in the 1950s, the case of Doornbos v. Doornbos, ruled that a child born through artificial
insemination with donor sperm was legally born out of wedlock. The father had no legal rights or
obligation to the child. In 1963, a New York court ruled that although a child born via artificial
insemination with donor sperm is illegitmate this does not mean that “husband is free of obligation to
furnish support for the child” (Gursky v. Gursky, 1963, p. 1088). The father of the illegitimate child is not
free of his obligations to the child. His property is, however, protected from being inherited by his
genetically unrelated child. According to the majority opinion “The court does not pass upon any personal
rights, including property rights, that the child may have vis-a-vis the plaintiff husband” (Gursky v. Gursky,
1963, p. 1089).

74
artificial insemination with donor sperm were legitimate, and their legal fathers were
obligated to support them.
38

Although court rulings in the 1960s declared these children legally legitimate
offspring, the tension between competing conceptions of the family was not completely
resolved. Cramblet and Zinkon’s 2014 complaint demonstrates how these differing
notions of family continue to be held in tension. In the case facts Cramblett and Zinkon’s
sexual relationship serves as the justification for their right to reproduce without sex. In
an effort to establish the legitimacy of their reproductive desire, the complaint
emphasizes both women’s vulnerability. The case facts state that the women opted for
artificial insemination because they both had been victims of sexual violence as children.
Historically, beliefs about white women’s need to be protected have justified patriarchal
marriage contracts as well as anti-miscegenation laws. This formulation is reworked in
their legal complaint; their vulnerability justifies reproduction via artificial insemination,
skipping marriage entirely. Here, Cramblett and Zinkon are protected by their use of
reproductive technology, rather than by their marriage to a man. This protection proves
incomplete, however. According to the complaint, their history with sexual violence
made it especially difficult for both women to hear the news that their decision about the
sperm donor had not been respected. Cramblett says the following about their decision to
use in vitro fertilization, “We would have to bring a male into our lives and when you
think of sperm, you think of sexual encounters and neither of us wanted to think of males
in our lives that way again” (Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank, 2014, p. 2). There are
many reasons the women could have given to explain their decision to use artificial

38
California’s 1968, People v. Sorenson was the first “direct acknowledgement of a non-genetic,
technologically constructed family relationship” (G. Bernstein, 2002, p. 1087).

75
insemination, the simplest of which being that they are lesbians. Instead they invoke their
history of sexual trauma.
This history performs two functions. First it reinforces the homophobic belief that
homosexuality is caused by sexual abuse in order to legitimate Cramblett and Zinkon’s
sexual relationship with one another in the eyes of the court. The implication is that
neither woman wants to disrupt the purity of their sexual relationship and homosexual
family unit by introducing heterosexual sex into the equation, even for the purpose of
procreation. Straight couples often justify their usage of reproductive technology by
claiming one of the partners’ infertility. For homosexual couples, their homosexuality is
the justification in and of itself. Rather than framing their homosexuality in terms of
desire or sexuality, Cramblett’s use of language makes it more explicitly a refusal of
heterosexual sex. The concern is about a man entering their lives. To put it differently,
the concern is about a male intrusion into their private, domestic sphere. When ultimately
the fertility clinic erroneously gives the women an African-American man’s sperm, in
effect an African-American man has violated their white femininity. And this is the
second consequence of using Cramblett and Zinkon’s history of sexual assault as
justification for their turn to artificial insemination. Sperm and the sexual male body
become one and the same, meaning that the unwanted sperm is analogous to the
unwanted sexual encounter. Tropes from well-worn narratives of black men raping white
women, once used to justify anti-miscegenation laws and their extra-legal enforcements,
now emerge in the case notes of a 2014 artificial insemination legal complaint.
39

39
Many scholars have already written about the consequences of this persistent myth of black male sexual
violence. Herman Gray demonstrates how George H.W. Bush was able to capitalize on Willie Horton’s
escape in 1988 and turn it into a campaign talking point on the need to be tough on crime. Horton’s escape,
and white fears of black rapists, helped Bush into the oval office (2004). Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill

76
By the eighth paragraph of the complaint, Cramblett and Zinknon are firmly
situated within a history of vulnerable and violated white women. As survivors of
childhood sexual assault, they are (white) women especially deserving of care and
protection. Cramblett and Zinkon turn to artificial insemination in order to maintain
control of their bodily autonomy. When they learn that they received sperm from an
African-American donor rather than the white donor they requested, they feel as though
All of the thought, care and planning that she [Jennifer] and Amanda had
undertaken to control their baby's parentage had been rendered meaningless. In
an instant, Jennifer's excitement and anticipation of her pregnancy was replaced
with anger, disappointment and fear. (Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank, 2014, p.
17, emphasis added)
Here, the thought of mothering a black child only generates bad feelings. The threat of
racial contamination has been realized, and the result is anger, disappointment, and fear.
Their sense of tragedy is not new. Dorothy Roberts points out that in the United States,
“the botched inseminations of white women are presented as tragedies” (1998, p. 271).
Presumably fertility clinics make intra-racial sperm donation mistakes as well. Infants
born via artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization are generally not genetically tested
after birth to ensure the proper genetic relation is present, however. So long as the baby is
the right color, no error is presumed to have occurred. Fertility clinic mistakes are
tragedies primarily because the white genetic tie racial tie between mother and child has
been broken.

Collins, bell hooks, and Linda Williams chart the way this “black rapist” circulates and recirculates in
popular culture (Collins, 2005; K. Crenshaw, 1993; Hooks, 1992; L. Williams, 2002).

77
In Pursuit of Genetic Reproduction: Conflating Racial and Genetic Similarity

Jennifer Cramblett’s sperm bank tragedy reveals the way that race and genetics
are commonly conflated in the use of artificial insemination. When choosing a sperm
donor, the two women chose who they believed was “a donor with genetic traits similar
to both of them” (Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank, 2014, p. 9). The donor’s hair, eye,
and skin color were how they determined the truth and proximity of their genetic relation
to one another. Because Jennifer Cramblett was the one carrying the child and donating
the egg, they chose a donor who was blonde, with blue eyes like Amanda Zinkon. As
described in the complaint, their efforts to control their baby’s parentage were primarily
efforts to determine the child’s hair, eye, and most importantly, skin color. The care and
planning they put in to control the baby’s parentage was care and planning about
aesthetic choices. All they knew about the mistaken donor in that “instant” shift from
excitement to anger, disappointment, and fear was that the unintended donor was
African-American. They knew that the aesthetic choices they had made for their baby had
not been honored, but at the time of the phone call there was no mention of whether the
two donors had any other physical, educational or career similarities to one another. The
expectant mothers interpreted the racial difference between the intended donor and the
actual donor as an absolute and insurmountable difference. The words used to describe
Cramblett’s reaction are telling: anger about the mistake and perceived violation,
disappointment in response to their child’s loss of whiteness, and fear of the unknown
blackness her child now inherited. Even though they still retained control of fifty percent
of the baby’s parentage, it was their loss of control of the sperm donor, which rendered

78
their efforts to determine parentage meaningless. Jennifer Cramblett’s own maternal
labor was erased.
This prioritization of paternal identity is consistent with the history of artificial
insemination. Prior to its widespread legal acceptance, doctors performing artificial
insemination with donor sperm would take certain measures to provide legal protection
for the child and parents. Because paternity tests did not yet exist, doctors would
sometimes mix the husband’s sperm in with the donor sperm in order to obscure who the
child was actually related to. In order to provide further protections, they would make
sure that the donor’s blood type and the husband’s blood type were the same, “making it
impossible to prove that the husband was not the father of the AID [artificial
insemination with donor sperm] child” (G. Bernstein, 2002, p. 1081). Children born via
artificial insemination with donor sperm were sometimes likened to the children of
adultery because they were not biologically related to their mother’s husband. As with
cases of adultery, if the “child were a different race or color from the husband,” the child
was deemed illegitimate (G. Bernstein, 2002, p. 1088). Racial similarity between husband
and child was an important component of the practice of artificial insemination with
donor sperm. In practice, it was a technology primarily used to increase the number of
white babies.
40

Cramblett and Zinkon are not alone in their conflation of race with profound
genetic difference. Nor are they alone in their feelings of loss after being denied a white
child. In the few other publicized cases of fertility clinic racial mix-ups, racial phenotype
is the signifier of genetic identity and biological truth. The racial importance of genetic

40
This is supported by the fact that the post World War II baby boom made artificial insemination more
socially acceptable, as infertility threatened to hamper white birth rates.

79
ties is hardly new. After all, “for centuries a paramount objective of American law and
social convention was keeping white bloodline free from Black contamination” (D.
Roberts, 1998, p. 268). Other parents of unintentionally multiracial children also express
pain at being forced to confront their child’s visible racial difference. As referenced in the
introduction to this chapter, one couple stated “while we love Baby Jessica as our own,
we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her; it is simply
impossible to ignore”(Associated Press, 2007). The appearance of racial inheritance is an
important component of family unity, and these fertility clinic errors cause blackness to
disrupt the familial order.
41
Cramblett and Zinkon’s case received more public criticism
than similar cases because the women were not both genetically related to the child.
Consequently, the majority of news outlets and blogs simply treated the woman’s legal
complaint as racist, ignoring the longer historical relationship of race, genetics, and
family planning. Without the protection of the institution of heterosexual marriage,
Cramblett and Zinkon’s desire for genetically related offspring, was read as racist, rather
than as family oriented. The two are not mutually exclusive, but the institution of
heterosexual marriage obscures the ways in which family and racial purity are often
intertwined. As lesbians, Cramblett and Zinkon, were already beyond the boundaries of
the idealized family and beyond white racial purity. Both women acknowledge the
challenge their homosexuality poses to their attempts to “fit in” within their own “all-
white community .. [and] all-white and often unconsciously insensitive, family”
(Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank, 2014, p. 6). As written in the complaint,

41
Some clinics go so far as to store sperm from donors of different races in different vaults in order to
prevent such mistakes from happening (Sullivan, 1990).

80
Despite her [Jennifer’s] family’s attempts to accept her homosexuality, they have
not been capable of truly embracing her for who she is. … Though compelled to
repress her individuality amongst family members. Payton’s [Jennifer’s mixed-
race daughter] differences are irrepressible. (Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank,
2014, pp, 6-7)
With a mixed-race African-American daughter, the women feel as though they cannot be
recuperated into normative whiteness.
In Cramblett and Zinkon’s case, and others like it, blackness disrupts the white
familial order in three major ways. Most immediately, it interrupts the inheritance of
whiteness. As mentioned earlier, whiteness is inherited as biological racial identity as
well as property value (C. I. Harris, 1993). For Cramblett and Zinkon, their daughter is
barred from accessing the social benefits of her mothers’ whiteness as a result of her
“irrepressible” difference (Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank, 2014 p. 7). Secondly, in
these fertility clinic mistakes, blackness intrudes on the bodily autonomy of the women
who end up mistakenly carrying mixed race children.
42
Their reproductive decisions are
“rendered meaningless” by their mixed-race African American offspring (Cramblett v.
Midwest Sperm Bank, 2014, p. 5). As with Crambeltt and Zinkon, this error is treated as a
tragic loss. Lastly, these racial errors make unwilling white mothers perform the
reproductive labor of black women; they must give birth to and mother a black child.
Surrogacy technology introduces the possibility for even greater overlap between white
and black women’s reproductive labor. As a reproductive technology, surrogacy
enhances the riskiness of motherhood’s ability to reproduce whiteness, and as a result

42
This bodily liberty is a constitutionally protected right, particularly when it comes to reproduction as the
1942 Skinner v. Oklahoma ruling made clear.

81
even more care must be taken to ensure the protection of the “good community” of white
patriarchal capitalism (Douglas, 2002, p. xx). As motherhood was redefined in the wake
of surrogacy disputes in the 1980s and ’90s, race and genetics became even more closely
intertwined and black reproduction and black women’s reproductive labor was devalued
in new ways.

Surrogacy: Redefining Motherhood

Surrogacy is the use of another woman’s womb to carry a fetus to term. While
some argue that the earliest recorded practices of surrogacy can be found in the Bible,
surrogacy as a contractually negotiated reproductive practice did not become common in
the United States until after the widespread acceptance and usage of artificial
insemination.
43
Initially, surrogacy offered the possibility of genetically related offspring
to married couples with a fertile husband and infertile wife. In traditional surrogacy
agreements, the couple would hire a surrogate who would then become impregnated, via
artificial insemination, with the husband’s sperm. The surrogate donated both an egg and
use of her womb to the couple. In the 1990s, reproductive science advanced enough to
make gestational surrogacy possible. Couples no longer needed to rely on the surrogate
mother’s egg donation. Physicians could either use the wife’s eggs, or the couple would
find an egg donor. Gestational surrogacy quickly became preferred over traditional
surrogacy. Eliminating the genetic tie between surrogate mother and child was seen to
simplify the question of who the child’s mother was.

43
The first highly publicized surrogacy case was the case of Baby M in 1985.

82
Two primary concerns emerged with the introduction of surrogacy in the United
States. The first was about the social and moral cost of surrogacy’s labor relationship.
Some feared that contracting and paying for motherhood would degrade family values,
and potentially violate the prohibition against slavery. Liberals and conservatives alike,
feared that surrogacy may threaten America’s founding principles. The second concern,
which grew from the first, revolved around how to determine parental ownership after
surrogacy uncoupled the link between pregnancy and motherhood. As I will discuss later,
the notion of reproductive willfulness became critical for determining which of the
child’s parents could claim ownership. While never explicitly named as such, both of
these concerns are preoccupied with protecting whiteness from associations with black
maternity and motherhood. Black women are central figures in the history of the
reproductive economy in the United States, a history that includes the denial of parental
ownership and the commodification of motherhood.
In this section, I turn to articles published in the American Bar Association
Journal to uncover and unpack how the legal community grappled with the challenges
surrogacy posed to motherhood and the implicitly white, nuclear family. The ABA
Journal is a trade magazine published by the American Bar Association, which sets
academic standards for law schools, accredits American law schools, and determines the
legal profession’s ethical codes. As such, it reports on all of the pressing legal debates. It
should come as no surprise then that surrogacy received a significant amount of coverage
in the journal. The articles on surrogacy in the ABA Journal provide an important archive
of how US lawyers were debating the ethics and legality of surrogacy as the practice
became more common. Because most surrogacy arrangements involve a contract between

83
the parents and the surrogate mother, these surrogacy debates within the legal community
influenced the evolution of surrogacy as a practice.
44

Old Fears Made Anew: Women’s Reproductive Labor and Willfulness

In the 1980s, the maternal body was center stage, as both white and black
pregnancies received increased public scrutiny. Public pregnancies, and racialized fears
about motherhood permeated national discourse, and set the tone for ensuing
conversations about the risks and rewards of surrogacy technology.
45
Once again, fears
about white women foregoing motherhood existed alongside concerns about black
women having too many children. These fears about white women’s reproductive lack
echoed nineteenth century concerns about race suicide. Both were tied to women’s role in
the workforce. As Susan Faludi writes in Backlash (2009) this moral panic about
professional women’s infertility was a cultural backlash to the feminist movement’s
educational and employment gains. According to Faludi, both the “media and medical
establishment … [were] convinced that the answer [to the question of infertility] was to
be found in the rising wealth and independence of a middle-class female population”
(2009, p. 45).
46
The feminist movement’s political gains posed a direct threat to
patriarchal dominance and the increased presence of women in the workforce came to
symbolize this threat. The media’s coverage of professional women’s supposed infertility

44
Although I only mention a few articles here, these articles were chosen as paradigmatic examples of the
tone found in the twenty-five articles I analyzed for this chapter.
45
I borrow the term public pregnancy from Anne Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body (1995).
Balsamo uses the term to describe the way in which media coverage of new reproductive technologies
spectacularized pregnancy. As Anne Balsamo writes, when pregnancy is a public affair, often “the womb
serves a metonym for the entire family body” (1995, p. 80).
46
Faludi points out that this preoccupation with the infertility of working women over thirty stood in stark
contrast to the actual infertility rates at the time. She writes, “the infertility rates of young black women
tripled between 1965 and 1982” (Faludi, 2009, p. 46). There was no public discussion of an infertility
epidemic in the black community, however.

84
epidemic suggested that these women threatened family values and white reproduction.
47

The arrival of reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and surrogacy, offered
timely solutions to the social problem of white women’s infertility.
At the same time that US media and medical professionals incited fear about
white women’s inability to become mothers, they were also devoting significant attention
to black women’s irresponsible propensity for motherhood. The infertile white
professional woman, and the pregnant black crack mother were both highly visible
symbols in public discourse about motherhood in the 1980s and ’90s. As Dorothy
Roberts writes, “The monstrous crack-smoking mother was added to the iconography of
depraved Black maternity, alongside the matriarch and the welfare queen. Crack gave
society one more reason to curb Black women’s fertility” (1998, p. 157). Like welfare
queens, crack mothers taxed the state by having children they were unable to care for.
Taken together these public fears about black and white mothers told a particular story
about the relationship between race, labor, and reproduction: white women’s work
impaired their ability to perform the reproductive labor expected of them; black women
resorted to reproductive labor in lieu of getting a job.
Surrogate Labor: (Re)Commodifying Wombs

The social and economic value of reproductive labor emerges as a primary
framework for how the ABA Journal frames the legality of surrogacy. The ABA
Journal’s discussions of surrogacy primarily focus on the enforceability of surrogacy
contracts. Often framed as a debate, the legal enforceability of surrogacy contracts comes

47
The wave of “backlash films” produced by Hollywood in the 1980s, visualized this threat in spectacular
ways. Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction epitomizes the career woman’s threat to white patriarchy
(Faludi, 2009).

85
down to which factor of surrogacy is legally the most important - the work performed by
the surrogate mother, or the nature of the service she provides for the contracting parents.
Are the parents simply paying the surrogate mother for a service they themselves cannot
perform, or are they paying her for a child? The answer is an important matter of
perspective, one informed by both the history of slavery and eugenics. Lawyers were
debating which constitutional right is more protected: the right to produce genetically
related offspring, or the right to equality, which made it illegal to buy and sell humans.
The Baby M custody battle in the late 1980s occasioned the first sustained
discussion of surrogacy’s legality in the ABA Journal. In 1985, William and Elizabeth
Stern contracted Mary Beth Whitehead to have a child for them in a traditional surrogacy
arrangement. After the birth of the child in 1986, Whitehead refused to relinquish custody
of the child (Baby M) to the Sterns, as previously agreed upon in the contract. A lengthy,
and highly publicized legal battle between Whitehead and the Sterns ensued. The June
1987
48
issue of the ABA Journal featured several articles about the Baby M case, and this
issue’s coverage is characteristic of the way the surrogacy debate is framed throughout
the journal’s coverage of surrogacy in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
49
In this “debate” the
question becomes whether surrogacy promotes family values or whether it is a kind of
genetic engineering that will create a breeder class of women. In one article, John
Robertson, a law professor at the University of Texas, claims that these contracts should
be enforced “because there is a constitutional right of infertile couples to reproduce by

48
These articles were published as the Baby M custody battle was taking place, before the Sterns were
awarded custody of ‘Baby M’ in the final New Jersey Supreme Court decision and before the ABA created
a model surrogacy statute. Consequently, the article demonstrates how the viewpoints on surrogacy were
getting hashed out within the legal sphere before any official laws were on the books in any of the 50 states.
49
For other similar articles see “Who is Mother? Genetic Donor, Not Surrogate” (Blodgett, 1986a);
“Surrogate Parent Rights” (Blodgett, 1986b); “Surrogate Contract OK’d” (Moss, 1987c); “Surrogacy
Setback” (Moss, 1988); “Surrogacy Contract Upheld” (Hansen, 1993).

86
noncoital means” (“Life, LIberty and Children,” 1987, p. 39). According to George
Annas, a law professor at Boston University, these contracts should not be enforced
because they are contracts for baby selling, which is against the law. These are two
separate issues and a false opposition. Family values are contrasted with eugenics as
though these two ideas have never coincided. In actuality, one side of the debate is a set
of values and the other is a set of practices. Consequently, readers are not being asked to
choose between two sets of values or practices so much as being asked to reconcile new
practices with longstanding values. As the history of forced sterilization and anti-
miscegenation statutes indicates, the family ideal and eugenic practices have coincided
more than once in US legislation
This issue also cites the lawyers for both the Sterns, the would-be parents, and
Whitehead, the surrogate mother. The Sterns’ attorney states, “What is the basis of our
nation? … Family. What is the goal for most people? Marriage, children, a home” (Moss,
1987b, p. 25). In contrast, Mary Beth Whitehead’s former attorney Alan Grossman
argues that family values are not enough to justify surrogacy. According to Grossman (as
quoted in the article), “‘A lot of thought has gone into what a beautiful idea surrogacy is
for infertile couples’ …. But, he asked, is it a beautiful idea for the child when he is
informed that his biological mother sold him?” (Moss, 1987b, p. 25). Neither lawyer
challenges the primacy of family, but Whitehead’s attorney suggests that introducing the
economy into the creation of the family degrades what the family means and stands for.
For him, the family at the basis of our nation cannot be the result of the buying and
selling of children. This perspective ignores the way in which the family and the
economy have always been intertwined in U.S. history. It similarly disregards the way in

87
which the buying and selling of black children in the antebellum South benefitted many
white families.
Within the ABA Journal’s coverage of the Baby M case, they include several
different quotes from attorneys that describes surrogacy as beautiful. The Sterns’ attorney
Gary Skoloff states that surrogacy has a “beautiful social purpose,” while Mary Beth
Whitehead’s former attorney points out that “a lot of thought has gone into what a
beautiful idea surrogacy is for an infertile couple” (Moss, 1987b). During the trial,
Skoloff argued that surrogacy allows women to make money “in a beautiful way instead
of working in a department store” (Andrews, 1987, p. 30).
50
The beauty of surrogacy is
crucial to Skoloff’s arguments in favor of the reproductive technology.
51
The beauty
attributed to the labor of surrogacy is a value in excess of the compensation these women
receive for their work. The use of the term beauty is a result of the precarious positioning
of pregnancy within the economic marketplace. Sociologist Arlie R. Hochschild points
out that even when commercial arrangements are not actually gift-giving exchanges, the
people participating in such transactions hold on to the gift metaphor because “when we
affirm symbols of the spirit of the gift, we affirm our attachment to – our
nonestrangement from – others, even those we meet in the market” (2013, p. 168).
Speaking of surrogacy as beautiful or as a gift enables those participating in commercial
surrogacy arrangements to protect the act of reproduction, and the family unit itself, from

50
This was in response to a New Jersey Supreme Court justice asking whether surrogacy exploits women.
In response to accusations that surrogacy is essentially baby selling, Skoloff stated, “No one would give
birth to a baby just for the money. … These women want to make a contribution in some way – to give the
most beautiful gift possible to a childless couple” (Blodgett, 1986b).
51
The phrases “beautiful social purpose,” and “beautiful idea” do not appear anywhere else in the history
of the ABA Journal, which has been published since 1915.
51
Skoloff did not invent the association between
motherhood and beauty; he is drawing on an older and longer tradition of idealizing motherhood and the
value of mothers. The beauty of the parent-child relationship is present in this ABA article from 1931.
Beauty in both instances refers to something special, unique, and most importantly, beyond monetary
value.

88
what is conventionally understood to be an impersonal and indifferent economic
marketplace. Choosing to carry another couple’s child has to be beautiful in order for it to
make sense. The beauty of the transaction distances it from comparisons to the
reproductive exploitation of slavery. This affect exists in excess of the economic
exchange.
52
According to this logic, women become surrogates for beautiful reasons, and
the money they are paid, which can never fully approximate the extent of the beauty, is
more symbolic than a literal evaluation of the value of this work and the child’s life.
53

The attribution of beauty to the work of surrogacy helps prevent the devaluation of white
reproductive labor, and by extension white reproduction itself.
Indeed much of the legal debate is preoccupied with the danger of commodifying
reproduction. In a study done by the New York State Senate Judiciary Committee, which
was contemporary with the Baby M debate, the primary concern was how to avoid the
“excessive commercialization” of surrogacy (Moss, 1987a, p. 25). The committee’s
proposition was that “the courts should only enforce contracts between a surrogate and a
couple, and only when a woman is medically certified as infertile” (Moss, 1987a, p. 25).
In other words surrogacy arrangements outside of the heterosexual family unit, and
beyond the discourse of infertility, are what become excessive. Gay couples, single
women, and women voluntarily opting out of pregnancy would threaten to degrade
family values with their use of surrogacy technology. Heterosexuality and infertility are
written into this proposition.

52
For more on the relationship between emotions and capitalism see The Cultural Politics of Emotion
(Ahmed, 2004); Authentic ™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (Banet-Weiser, 2012); The
Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Berlant, 2008).
53
As Viviana Zelizer writes in Economic Lives “Baby payments are a special category of money” (2013, p.
67). Money can have different social value and meaning depending on the context in which it is used, this
especially true of money spent in pursuit of reproduction.

89
White heteropatriarchal norms of family protect surrogacy contracts and the
arrangements that they represent from the degradation of family values that the
commercialization of childbearing might cause. The Sterns fell within these protections.
In addition, the surrogacy decision “had special significance” for William Stern; “Most of
his family had been destroyed in the Holocaust. As the family's only survivor, he very
much wanted to continue his bloodline” (Matter of Baby M., 1987, p. 413). Race and
bloodlines are at the heart of protecting or denying reproduction.
Who Owns This Child?: Legislating Parental Will

The ABA Journal was debating the legality of surrogacy years before it became a
national topic of conversation, however. In a 1984, ABA Journal article titled “The Stork
Market: The Law of the New Reproduction Technologies,” Lori Andrews, outlines the
new reproductive technologies and the legal difficulties surrounding them. Determining
paternity in assisted conception has been a legal challenge since artificial insemination
first became scientifically possible. As discussed earlier, in the 1950s women who
underwent artificial insemination with donor sperm with their husbands’ consent were
still considered adulterers and the children were regarded as illegitimate. Most of these
laws were eventually overturned by the time of Andrews’ writing, but a new conundrum
was created in its wake. According to Andrews, in eleven states “a man is not the legal
father if he furnishes sperm for artificial insemination”(1984, p. 53). Meaning that in
eleven states the father has no legal rights to his child in surrogacy cases. In the early
days of traditional surrogacy, the child had no legal father and no legal mother.
At the time of Andrews’ writing, laws linking parenthood, marriage, genetics, and
the womb were creating legal scenarios where the legal account of the situation did not

90
line up with the common sense understanding of who the parents should be. In the 1980s
and early ’90s, surrogacy regulations were ambiguous at best. As one Kentucky Circuit
Court judge put it “it is much like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole” (Andrews,
1984, p. 53). Laws become contradictory and vexed when trying to determine the proper
“one size fits all” relationship between marriage, the womb, reproductive privacy, and
inheritance. The two-page chart included in Andrews’ article, which maps out each
state’s statutes on reproductive technology, visually represents the legal complexities of
these relationships. All fifty states are included and there are five columns next to each
state. Three of these five columns concern laws prohibiting payment in connection with
reproduction.
54
This attention to the laws governing reproduction’s position in the
marketplace aligns with the fears of “excessive commercialization” discussed earlier
(Moss, 1987a, p. 25).
For some, the commercialization of surrogacy would necessitate the exploitation
of women’s reproductive labor. The exchange of money allows the reproductive labor
and economic labor of the surrogate mothers to become collapsed in much the same way
that these two meanings of labor were collapsed in the activities of enslaved women in
the antebellum period. This potential exploitation was one of two ways in which
surrogacy evoked the history of black women’s subjection under slavery. The second
involved the misalignment of parental ownership and parental inheritance. As discussed
earlier, children inherited their freedom from their mothers. Although enslaved women’s

54
The five columns are the following: restricting fetal research, governing artificial insemination,
prohibiting payment in connection with adoption, prohibiting the donation or selling of a live fetus/embryo
for experimentation, and prohibiting the selling of a fetus/embryo. Next to every state in each column is the
name of the state law that applies to that area of reproductive technology or transaction, as well as the year
in which the law was passed. Roe v. Wade is the only federal decision referenced in the entire article that is
applicable to the medical, legal, economic, and moral developments resultant from advances in
reproductive technology.

91
children inherited their enslavement, it was the white masters who owned the children.
The father owned the child, not the mother. After emancipation black women were able
to actually own their children. As Hortense Spillers puts it, they regained the right to
name their children (2003).
55
It is not until surrogacy agreements that fathers are able to
regain their legal advantage vis-à-vis child ownership. The echoing of slavery’s parental
inheritance versus parental ownership relationship threatens to blacken white
reproductive practices by “turn[ing] children into commodities”(“Surrogacy = Baby
Selling,” 1987, p. 38).
In 1993, a California Court determined that ultimately gestational surrogates have
no legal claims to the child they carry. The 1993 Johnson v. Calvert case set an important
legal precedent for gestational surrogacy and effectively ended all discussions of the
legality of surrogacy in the ABA Journal.
56
The case determined that gestational
surrogates are neither the child’s legal nor natural mother. One of the ways in which the
court justifies this decision is via the notion of the mental concept of the child. According
to the majority opinion, the Calverts deserve to be considered the child’s legal parents
because they – as compared to Anna Johnson, the surrogate – were the first to have the
mental concept of the child. The ruling states, “the mental concept of the child is a
controlling factor of its creation, and the originators of that concept merit full credit as
conceivers” (Johnson v. Calvert, 1993, p. 94). According to the California Supreme

55
The foster care system is an important exception here. While black mothers may generally have more
rights of ownership to their children than black fathers, in comparison to white mothers, black mothers are
much more likely to have the state intervene and remove their children. Here we see the state inhabiting the
position once filled by the slave-owner. In Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002) Dorothy
Roberts details the ways in which the US foster care system’s disruption of black families is informed by
the practice of splitting up black families during slavery. Even when we take the racism of the foster care
system into account however, in general mothers are more frequently able to claim ownership of their
children than fathers are.
56
Surrogacy was not mentioned in the ABA Journal until 2011 in an article about a gay couple suing their
surrogate for custody of the child they hired her to deliver.

92
Court, the child’s mother is the woman who first decided to have him or her, and who
first imagined the child in her mind.
In the end, motherhood is determined by reproductive willfulness. Yet,
historically, the U.S. legal system has regarded, and even defined, black Americans as
possessing less will than whites. Slave law justified enslavement by arguing that, in
contrast to whites, black Americans lacked the necessary will to care for themselves; in
effect they possessed antiwill (P. J. Williams, 1992, p. 219). As Patricia Williams writes
in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, “if ‘pure will’ or total control equals the perfect
white person, then impure will and total lack of control equals the perfect black person”
(1992, pp. 219–220). At a time when the media regularly represented black women’s
reproductive decision-making as both careless and devious, the idea that a court would
rule in favor of a single black woman’s maternal authority is essentially unthinkable.
Furthermore, as feminist theorist Val Hartouni points out, “In recuperating ‘natural
motherhood,’ the court authorizes and codifies as well as constructs against other
possible meanings, practices, or formations who and what will count as ‘mother’” (1997,
p. 81). Already regarded as pathological in the history of U.S. maternal discourse, black
mothers are consequently less deserving of “counting” as mothers.
Anna Johnson had no rights to the child because, “A woman who enters into a
gestational surrogacy arrangement is not exercising her own right to make procreative
choices” (Johnson v. Calvert, 1993, p. 100). She is participating in someone else’s
reproductive autonomy, but does not have any of her own in this instance. Ultimately, the
courts determined that the contracting of the surrogate’s labor superseded any concerns
that might arise from the fact that the labor being contracted is reproductive in nature.

93
This effectively ended the legal community’s debate about which constitutional right was
more strongly protected by the thirteenth and fourteenth amendment. The right to
privacy, which protects reproductive choices and one’s right to have genetically related
offspring, won out over the thirteenth amendment’s prohibition against slavery, and the
fourteenth’s right to equality. This does not mean that gestational surrogacy is equivalent
to slavery. What it does mean, is that one’s freedom to make reproductive choices,
whatever the context, is less constitutionally protected than one’s entitlement to have
genetically related children.
The absenting of the “reproductive-ness” from the surrogacy labor being
contracted took place at a moment when the United States was shifting from a market
economy to a market society. As Michael Sandel writes in What Money Can’t Buy, in a
market society “market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor … social
relations are made over in the image of the market” (2013, p. 21). Conceptualizing social
relations within purely economic terms makes it easier to obscure the ways that race and
gender structure these social relations. Treating the value of these social relations as
purely an economic value, one that can be compared in terms of dollar amounts, gives a
false appearance of equality. This creates a scenario where, for example, paying more or
less for a woman’s egg donation on the basis of her race is not read as racist, but as
economic. In actuality this is an economic transaction deeply indebted to the history of
racism and race in the U.S., a history that has differentially valued bodies on the basis of
race, gender, and ability. This new marketization of reproduction coincides with the new
biopolitics of race that I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Within the new
biopolitics of race, race is reinscribed as a biological difference that is written into DNA,

94
and genetic technologies are increasingly created to cater to our genetic racial identities
(D. Roberts, 2012). In both discourses, the biological truth of race and the value of
reproduction exists at the level of DNA and genetics. Racial hierarchies are perpetuated
under the auspices of preserving genetic relationships, and both the U.S. government and
reproductive technological industries, like sperm banks and surrogacy agencies, invest in
protecting and fostering genetic reproduction.

Ultimately, the question of determining motherhood (and to a lesser extent
fatherhood) in cases of assisted reproductive technology is a question of determining
reproductive value. The question becomes which social relationship is the most valued,
and thus the most important to protect, in the wake of the technological uncoupling of sex
and reproduction, pregnancy and ovum, and pregnancy and motherhood. The answer, at
every turn, is the marital relationship, the racial relationship, and the genetic relationship.
As the Cramblett and Zinkon case demonstrates, these three separate relationships often
become conflated and are used interchangeably to signify one another. Both the public
and the state privilege marriage, racial similarity and genetic inheritance as the most
valued components of the biological reproduction of the population. In the next chapter I
continue to focus on value and reproduction, shifting instead to an examination of the
way that the state assigns value in its disciplining and management of social
reproduction. If biological reproduction is primarily (though not exclusively) concerned
with the creation of individual family units, social reproduction focuses on the role of
these family units in (re)creating social institutions.

95
Chapter Two: Obese and Undereducated: Producing and Governing
Crises in Black Social Reproduction

On February 28, 2008, then presidential hopeful Barack Obama spoke to a
predominantly black audience in Beaumont, Texas on the importance of parenting and
nutrition to a child’s educational success.
1
In this particular campaign speech – which
was well received by the audience at the time of its delivery – Obama laid out his
proposed educational plan before launching into a lecture on the proper way to parent
children. His parenting lesson relied upon images of ignorant and negligent poor black
parents whose bad parenting inhibited their children’s ability to succeed. Obama stated,
It doesn’t matter how much money we [the government] put in [to education] if
parents don’t parent … It’s not good enough for you to say to your child do good
in school, and then when that child comes home, you’ve got the TV set on … you
don’t check their homework, there’s not a book in the house, you got the video
game playing. (BarackObama.com, 2008)
Later in the speech Obama continued,
I've got to talk about us a little bit …We can't keep on feeding our children junk
all day long, giving them no exercise. They are overweight by the time they are
four or five years old, and then we are surprised when they get sick. … I know
how hard it is to get kids to eat properly …But I also know that if folks letting our
children drink eight sodas a day, which some parents do, or, you know, eat a bag
of potato chips for lunch, or Popeye’s for breakfast….You can't do that. Children

1
With a population that is forty-seven percent African American, the small city of Beaumont in southern
Texas is majority black, and has just over twenty percent of its residents living below the poverty line.

96
have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in
school. (Obama quoted in Sweet, 2008)
Two years after Barack Obama gave this speech in Beaumont, First Lady Michelle
Obama began “Let’s Move,” a campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation.
Four years after that, President Obama launched “My Brother’s Keeper” an initiative to
provide better educational opportunities to boys and young men of color. Obama’s
campaign rhetoric and subsequent public policy initiatives demonstrate a commitment to
disciplining the choices of poor black Americans in order to empower them to transcend
poverty. As the history of the Moynihan Report has shown, the federal government’s
willingness to discipline and regulate black family life precedes the election of Barack
Obama. His continuation of disciplinary discourse and policies, however, indicates the
ideological power and persistence of ideas about the pathology of black parenting and the
threat it poses to the nation.
Parenting is a central component of social reproduction, a term which refers to the
practices and institutions that allow for the reproduction of life and the social body
beyond the act of birthing a child. In Chapter One, I focused primarily on the state’s
willingness to intervene into biological reproduction. Here, I shift my focus to the recent
attempts by the U.S. government to discipline and regulate the social reproduction of
blackness. In his Beaumont campaign speech, the soon-to-be President Obama gestures
toward two widespread moral panics about social reproduction in the U.S. public sphere:
the childhood obesity epidemic, and the failure of public schools to adequately educate
children. While moral panics have long been a part of how the state garners support of
interventions into social reproduction, these panics become all the more important in a

97
neoliberal era, wherein social welfare has been largely dismantled and discourses of
privatization and personal responsibility govern social, political, and economic life. In
this chapter, I situate the Moynihan Report as a nascent neoliberal text, one which
contains elements of the discourses of privatization and personal responsibility. These
discourses are the norm by the time twenty-first century moral panics about obesity and
failing public schools emerge.
Moynihan’s concern about the “tangle of pathology” at the heart of the black
community is a concern about the social reproduction of blackness. Moynihan wrote that
the purportedly matriarchal black family was out of step with the “arrangements of
society” that are organized around male leadership (1965, p. 29). He framed his concerns
about black family structure in terms of the black community’s ability to successfully and
productively co-exist with middle-class white society. The question of whether a
population can “establish themselves as stable, effective [family] units, living according
to patterns of American society in general” is fundamentally a question of whether the
population can socially reproduce the institutions of power the state needs in order to
function (Moynihan, 1965, p. 29). Moynihan’s focus on the family unit as a primary
cause of racial inequality, however, frames the costs and care of social reproduction as a
problem located in the private sphere.
The Moynihan Report informs contemporary governmental interventions into
social reproduction in two major ways. The first is through the ways that the report
characterizes single black motherhood as a problem, and the patriarchal family unit as a
solution. As I will show, the tension between single motherhood and patriarchal families
emerges in the moral panics about childhood obesity, and the United States’ failing

98
public schools, as well as the Obama administration’s public policy responses – Let’s
Move and My Brother’s Keeper. This resurgence of discourse about dysfunctional black
families reinforces a racial hierarchy wherein whiteness and blackness exist at opposite
ends. Secondly, Moynihan’s engagement with discourses of privatization and personal
responsibility as cause of African American inequality, get reworked and re-emerge in
the contemporary crises of, and interventions into, social reproduction as solutions to the
problems of obesity and failing public schools. This emphasis on private, personal
solutions is expressed via discourses of risk, riskiness and choice. Ultimately these
reworkings of Moynihan’s images and logic reinforce an ideology which privileges
blackness over whiteness, boys over girls, fatherhood over motherhood and heterosexual
marriage over other kinds of family structures.
In this chapter I analyze four public policy reports – Misson Readiness’ Too Fat
to Fight (2010), the White House’s Solving the Problem of Childhood Obesity within a
Generation (2010), the Council on Foreign Relations’ U.S. Education Reform and
National Security (2012), and the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper Task Force
Report to the President (2014) – alongside two feature length documentaries – Davis
Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman (2010) and Fed Up (2014) – in order to examine
how obesity and education circulate as moral panics and national security concerns in the
United States. In Too Fat to Fight, retired military generals argue that childhood obesity
is threatening the nation’s security, a proclamation that gets taken up in the White
House’s own report on the subject. Similarly both the Council on Foreign Relations and
White House reports on education treat America’s failing public schools as a serious
threat to the country’s military and economic future. These feelings of fear and

99
constructions of threat similarly emerge in both documentaries that I consider, both of
which premiered at Sundance Film Festival and had a subsequent theatrical release. In an
environment where the protection of social reproduction has largely been privatized, the
stakes must be very high in order to justify a state sponsored intervention into health and
education – two key areas of social reproduction. The textual objects that I consider in
this section – a mixture of government research, think tank reports, and documentary
films - speak to close interplay between state sponsored discourses and privately
produced media.
At the end of the chapter I turn toward the Obama administration’s official
responses to the obesity and education crises. Building on Avery Gordon’s notion of
haunting in Ghostly Matters (1997), I explore the ways in which the Let’s Move
campaign is haunted by the figure of the welfare queen. Even though Let’s Move
attempts to be race, class, and gender neutral in its discourse, that the figure of the
welfare queen remains salient and demonstrates that “what's been concealed is very much
alive and present” (A. Gordon, 1997, p. xvi). The focus on poverty and motherhood as
prime components of the spread of obesity, helps to make possible My Brother’s
Keeper’s exclusion of women and girls. My Brother’s Keeper’s exclusion of women and
girls contributes to the “violence of valuation” described by scholars like Lindon Barrett
(1999), and Lisa Cacho (2012). When juxtaposed to their irresponsible if well meaning
mothers, boys and young men of color become the deserving victims of governmental
intervention and support. The continued pathologization of single, black mothers enables
the U.S. government to recuperate the social value of black boys and young men (Cacho,
2012, p. 17). Although both public policy initiatives vary in terms of how directly they

100
identify black poverty, and black reproduction as problems to be solved, both campaigns
contribute to the symbolic colonization of black reproduction in general, and black
mothers in particular.
2

Moral Panics, State Interventions and the Management of Black Social
Reproduction

When Barack Obama admonished black parents for not parenting, he was
shaming them for their improper participation in the practices of social reproduction.
Based in a Marxist understanding of the need to reproduce the labor force – social
reproduction refers to the practices and institutions that (re)produce the citizens to be
governed. Parenting, education, and health, all fall under the rubric of social
reproduction.
3
The Moynihan Report itself was invested in social reproduction. Written
on the cusp of neoliberalism, the report contains elements of the neoliberal emphasis on
privatization and personal responsibility primarily in the way that it frames the causes of
inequality. What differs from more recent reports, which address challenges to social
reproduction, is where the Moynihan Report locates solutions to the problem. It identifies
black family structure, a private sphere problem, as one of the causes of African
American inequality, and advocates structural changes as a solution. Recent reports,
however, describe the solutions in the language of privatization, primarily via the

2
As defined by Molina-Guzmán, symbolic colonization is “the storytelling mechanism through which
ethnic and racial differences are hegemonically tamed and incorporated through the media” (Molina-
Guzmán, 2010, p. 9).
3
As described by Marx in Capital, “Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be
continuous …. When viewed, therefor, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant
renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction” (1992, p. 711).

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discourse of choice. As I will discuss, this shift occurs as a result of the rise of
neoliberalism and the attendant dismantling of the welfare state.
While the state has a vested economic interest in the social reproduction of all its
citizens, this investment looks different for different populations. The history I outline in
the previous chapter demonstrates some of the ways that the U.S. legal system values,
manages, and encourages white reproduction in comparison to black reproduction. This
differential state investment in reproduction extends beyond which babies are born, to
include how those children are raised. Historically, the U.S. government has instituted
programs to help ensure the successful social reproduction of its citizenry. New Deal
social democratic programs such as Aid to Dependent Children and the National Youth
Administration’s subsidies for education both sought to protect and foster the health and
education of American children.
4
As these kinds of programs expanded to benefit African
Americans, especially in the 1950s and ’60s, they were “fiercely attacked by
‘conservatives’ as efforts to expand the state and reduce the freedoms and prerogatives of
‘private’ economic, associational, and family life” (Duggan, 2003, p. 8). These early
attacks on social welfare programs for encroaching on private life are the beginnings of
the neoliberal era. Neoliberal policies, which begin to be implemented on a widespread
scale in the 1980s, ultimately led to the dismantling of the U.S.’s limited welfare state
and the deregulation of its economy.
5

4
Paula Fass points out that New Deal educational programs actually changed the public’s perception of the
role that the federal government (as opposed to local and state government) should play in education. She
writes “the New Deal provided a context in which a new view emerged of the role the federal government
could and should play in making education available for all” (1982, p. 48).
5
For more on the United States’ shift to neoliberalism and its economic and cultural consequences see
Sarah Banet-Wesier, Authentic™, (2012); Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? (2003); and David
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007).

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Although he is writing decades before the time period commonly marked as the
beginning of neoliberalism, Moynihan’s report contains kernels of the ethos of
privatization and personal responsibility, both of which are axioms of neoliberal
ideology.
6
In the last section of the report, Moynihan gives some general
recommendations for solving the “Negro problem.” He advises that
a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed
towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the
Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other
families. (Moynihan, 1965, p. 47).
As Lisa Duggan writes in The Twilight of Equality?, neoliberal rhetoric “promotes the
privatization of the costs of social reproduction, along with the care of human
dependency needs, through personal responsibility exercised in the family and civil
society” (Duggan, 2003, p. 14). The structural approach that Moynihan advocates, is in
service of enabling families to privately handle the problem of social reproduction.
The Moynihan Report does focus much more on structural issues and government
interventions than later neoliberal policy recommendations. One of the biggest
differences between the Moynihan Report and the two policy reports that I discuss later
in the chapter, is the prevalence of the discourse of choice as a solution to the problems of
inequality. Although Moynihan undoubtedly advocates private sphere solutions and
personal parental responsibility, the report does not frame the issue of African American
inequality as an issue of bad choices. In contrast, neoliberalism countered the “regulatory
practices of the state” via a “practical strategy that emphasized the liberty of consumer

6
Arguably this anticipates Moynihan’s later role as a political advisor in the Nixon administration,
where infamously advised Nixon to adopt a policy of benign neglect toward African-Americans
(Coates, 2015; Geary, 2015; Greenbaum, 2015).

103
choice, not only with respect to particular products but also with respect to lifestyles,
modes of expression, and a wide range of cultural practices” (Harvey, 2007, p. 42). As
Sarah Banet-Weiser demonstrates in Authentic™, as marketplace logic extends into all
spheres of life, so too has the principle of consumer choice (2012). Within the neoliberal
era “the consumer citizen is the central category of analysis for today’s advanced
capitalist culture. Individual freedoms are guaranteed not by the state or another
institution but by the freedom of the market and of trade” (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 44).
This means that freedom of choice is a primary barometer of equality, and state
interventions into social reproduction should take place only insofar as they enable an
equality and freedom of choice for consumer citizens.
The Mission Readiness, Council of Foreign Relations, and White House reports
on childhood obesity and education, exemplify this shift toward a discourse of choice.
For example, in Too Fat to Fight, the authors describe a successful intervention as one
that “took advantage of various opportunities to coach parents on ways to help their kids
make wiser choices outside of school” (Christeson, Taggart, Messner-Zidell, & Mission:
Readiness (U.S.), 2010, p. 6). In the White House Task Force report on childhood
obesity, the authors state that one of their five main goals is to “empower parents and
caregivers to make healthy choices” (Task Force on Childhood Obesity, 2010, p. 3).
Similarly in the Council on Foreign Relations’ U.S. Education Reform and National
Security report, one of the task force’s three policy recommendations is to “make
structural changes to provide students with good choices …. [because] enhanced choice
and competition … will fuel the innovation necessary to transform results” (2012, p. 5).
And lastly, when describing the educational obstacles facing boys and young men of

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color, the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force Report to the President states “individual
achievement is a result of a complex combination of many interdependent personal
choices, cultural and social factors and institutional influences” (Shelton & Johnson,
2014, p. 11). By contrast, nowhere in The Negro Family does Moynihan discuss the
problems facing black families in terms of limited choices.
The Moynihan Report was written just before the widespread emergence of
neoliberal ideology – its approach to the problem of African American social
reproduction straddles a social democratic approach and a more neoliberal strategy that
emphasizes personal responsibility alongside private sphere and private sector solutions.
Although the state’s approach to managing social reproduction has shifted toward
primarily advocating choice, personal responsibility and privately funded programs as
methods of governance, the way in which social problems are constructed as problems
has not significantly changed in the shift to neoliberal governmentality. Moral panics
remain an important way that state and media discourse interact in order to produce and
represent social problems. Moral panics, by definition shore up public support for state
action by generating and capitalizing on fears of social disruption. One reason The Negro
Family received as much attention as it did at the time of its publication, is that it tapped
into widespread fears of riots and social upheaval spawned by the civil rights movement.
7

If anything, the circulation of moral panics has only intensified as the media landscape
has changed in the intervening years since the report’s 1965 publication. In the next
section I discuss the relationship between moral panics and state intervention by
examining the history of moral panics about social reproduction that have centered on the

7
As Geary notes, although the report was written before the 1965 Watts riots, because it was made
publically available after the riots many interpreted its findings as the government’s official explanation for
the violence (2015).

105
bodies of black women. The history of the U.S. government’s stance toward managing
black women shows us how moral panics and public policy intersect in the service of
both disciplinary and biopolitical interests.
Moral Panics as Ideological Struggle

In the launch of the Let’s Move campaign, Michelle Obama describes childhood
obesity as “one of the most serious threats to their [children’s] future” (“Let’s Move
Kickoff, 2010). President Obama takes a similar tone in his announcement of My
Brother’s Keeper. Obama describes the challenges facing boys and young men of color as
“an issue of national importance” (2014). For him this is “ a moral issue for our country,”
and he declares that “we need to change the statistics – not just for the sake of the young
men and boys, but for the sake of America’s future” (Obama, 2014). The Obamas’
rhetoric establishes and reinforces obesity and education as problems that should concern
everyone.
8
As with many public policy initiatives, these launch speeches are meant to
heighten anxiety and fear, before offering solutions that the public can get behind. One
way in which they generate fear is by playing upon the fact that these issues – obesity and
failing public schools – already circulate as moral panics within the U.S. public sphere.
Engaging with the conventions of mass produced moral panics helps these public policy
initiatives make the social problems emotionally resonant for listeners. As Willem
Schinkel writes in “Governing Through Moral Panic,” “Articulating policy goals with
references to fear gives the goals a context of legitimacy, since communicated anxiety is
always experienced as real and honest by an observer” (2012, p. 296). By inciting fear

8
Although Obama describes My Brother’s Keeper as an initiative focusing generally on the disadvantages
facing boys and young men of color, all of the metrics he uses to describe these disadvantages in his launch
speech are about educational achievement and the public school system.

106
about childhood obesity and the challenges facing boys and young men of color in
schools, Michelle and Barack Obama legitimate the necessity of their interventions into
U.S. family life.
The term moral panic emerged in academic discourse in the 1960s and ’70s, at a
time when theorists were trying to describe and understand the media’s role in social
change. Although the term was first used by Marshal McLuhan in Understanding Media
(1964), criminologist Jock Young’s The Drugtakers (1971), sociologist Stanley Cohen’s
Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), and Stuart Hall and the British Centre for Cultural
Studies’ Policing the Crisis (1979), were the first works to use the term as an analytic for
making sense of the relationship between media, the social order and fears of difference.
As Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton write in their history of moral panic theory, the
studies of Young, Cohen, and I would add Hall,
show moral panics as acting on behalf of the dominant social order. They are a
means of orchestrating consent by actively intervening in the space of public
opinion and social consciousness through the use of highly emotive and rhetorical
language which has the effect of requiring that ‘something be done about it.’
(1995, p. 562)
Policing the Crisis differs from the works of Young and Cohen, in that it takes a more
Marxist cultural studies approach to understanding the power dynamics of moral panics.
McRobbie and Thornton point out that Hall and the British Center for Cultural Studies’
engagement with Marxist conceptions of ideology allows them to present a more nuanced
view of the media’s role in “the construction of meaning across the whole range of media
forms and institutions” (1995, p. 562). Regardless, these early studies advance the idea

107
that the media is distorting the facts in order to mitigate the threat of social deviance or
racial otherness. Young, Cohen and Hall’s conceptualization of moral panics still rings
true for the dynamics at play in the obesity and educational crises and Let’s Move and
My Brother’s Keeper as responses to these problems. The Obamas’ initiatives are the
“something” that is being done about the problems of childhood obesity and failing U.S.
public schools. Both the rhetoric of the initiatives, and the media’s representations of the
problems they seek to solve, employ emotional language that works to construct a public
agreement that obesity and education are serious problems that need governmental
intervention.
This public agreement that obesity and education are national problems is not
necessarily a distortion of reality in the way that Young, Cohen, and Hall et.al. describe.
In Policing Desire (1987), Simon Watney suggests that rather than thinking of moral
panics as a distortion of an objective reality, theorists shift their focus to the role of moral
panics in constructing the image of a collectively acknowledged reality. Because moral
panic theories attempt to explain the media’s role in spreading fear and justifying state
intervention, it makes sense that these theories adapt as the media landscape changes to
one where control takes place via the proliferation of representations of difference.
9
To
that end, I take up Watney’s argument that
We do not in fact witness the unfolding of discontinuous and discrete “moral
panics,” but rather the mobility of ideological confrontation across the entire field
of public representations, and in particular those handling and evaluating the
meanings of the human body. (1997, p. 42)

9
I am building on Herman Gray’s argument in “Subjec(ed) to recognition,” which I discuss more in-depth
in the following chapter, which analyzes news, television, and film representations of black reproduction.

108
Moral panics are an intensification of fears of social difference and exist at the forefront
of the cultural struggle over meaning making. What I am interested in here are the
ideological confrontations over the meaning of the reproductive black body, and the ways
in which moral panics about the social reproduction of blackness – whether they focus on
health or education – facilitates the state’s continued management of black reproductive
life.
In the context of Let’s Move and My Brother’s Keeper, and the childhood obesity
and educational crises more generally, narratives about the riskiness of black parental
practices persist across the discourse about these crises. In Policing the Crisis, Hall and
his colleagues write,
When ‘experts’ … perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk
‘with one voice’ … we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a
moral panic. (S. Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978, p. 16)
These sites where experts speak with one voice point toward the sites of ideological
confrontation that Watney describes. Moral panics about obesity and education, to which
Let’s Move and My Brother’s Keeper contribute, help construct a reality that continues to
devalue and pathologize black reproduction. These two particular panics are a struggle
over the meaning of reproduction in an increasingly multicultural country. They tell a
story about the importance of good parenting and good choices to the nation’s future. In
this story, parental choices and parenting styles are racialized - they exist on a racial
hierarchy that counterposes whiteness and blackness. Value in this parental discourse is
gendered as well, with fatherhood privileged over motherhood. Although mothers are
acknowledged as doing a lot of the parental labor, according to Barack Obama “nothing

109
can keep a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s
life” (2014). In the case of childhood obesity and failing public schools, experts are
speaking with one voice and identifying poor choices and irresponsible parenting as two
important causes of the problem.
Moral Panics about the Black Female Body
In the course of U.S. history there have been several moral panics with black
women at the center. As Wahneema Lubiano writes “black women function as the
narrative means by which the country can make up its mind yet again about a whole set
of issues” (1992, pp. 336–7). The cause for concern in these moral panics is often about
the shape or nature of the national body.

The national body – a term which refers both to
the literal bodies of the nation’s residents as well as the figurative body of the idealized
citizen – has been a contested terrain throughout U.S. history. For example, after
emancipation black citizenship was described as “a foreign appendage grafted onto the
national body” (Hartman, 1997, p. 165). In moral panics about the national body, the
body of the black woman functions as a source of disruption and corruption, and site of
contagion. In the moral panics about obesity and education, black mothers appear either
as a cause of their children’s obesity, or as single-mothers living in low-income areas
whose singleness and socioeconomic status are limiting their child’s educational
opportunities. This discourse represents black mothers as spreading the contagion of
obesity and contributing to an educational crisis, both acts that disrupt the nation’s ability
to compete on the global stage. These fears about black women’s role in the problems of
obesity and education are part of a longer history of moral panics about black women’s
unmarried status, mobility, and maternal decisions. Three figures in these historical

110
anxieties – the migrating black woman in the 1920s, the welfare queen in the 1970s and
onward, and the crack mother in the 1990s – continue to shape contemporary crises of,
and state interventions into, the social reproduction of blackness.

During the northern and urban migration that occurred after slavery, many of the
fears about the disruption of the social order collected on the bodies of black women. In
her essay “Policing the Black Body in an Urban Context” (1992) Hazel Carby describes
the kinds of threats migrating black women posed in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in the United States. Carby writes,
the migrating black woman could be variously situated as a threat to the progress
of the race; as a threat to the establishment of a respectable urban black middle
class; as a threat to congenial black and white middle-class relations; and as a
threat to the formation of black masculinity in an urban environment. (1992, p.
714).
The figure of the migrating black woman served multiple purposes; she was a threat on
several fronts. Her mobility, economic independence, and unmarried status,
simultaneously threatened black masculinity, the white social hierarchy, and the
geographic segregation of race and class. Consequently, this migrating black woman to
which Carby refers, was understood to be in need of policing and discipline by both black
and white agencies, institutions, and organizations. These women were thought to be
innately immoral and their illegal, unsavory, or threatening behavior was felt to be a
result of a natural pathology, rather than caused by their circumstances. This moral panic,

111
which was evident in the sociological literature and in the practices of institutions like the
Phyllis Wheatley Association, also manifested in novels from the time period.
10

The attention given to the threat posed by poor black women facilitated a shifting
of blame. Instead of the social instability of large scale migration at the turn of the
century being understood as a result of the economy and politics, the blame could be
placed on the bodies of migrating black women. One consequence of this moral panic
was that members of the emergent black bourgeoisie felt authorized to take whatever
steps necessary to encourage the “progress” of the race. This most often meant policing
the behavior of urban black women. It made the black middle class, and often, as in the
case of Jane Edna Hunter who founded the Working Girls’ Home Association (which
later became the Phyllis Wheatley Association), it was middle class black women who
were “nurturing” the immoral migrating black women toward a life of middle-class
respectability. While all black women were outside the boundaries of citizenship, this
marginality coalesced on the bodies of certain black women more than others, those
whose mobility and poverty made them most visibly other. Nearly one hundred years
later, the childhood obesity epidemic provides a context for a middle-class black woman,
First Lady Michelle Obama, to discipline the bodies and behavior of working-class black
mothers via the Let’s Move campaign.
Carby demonstrates the ways that the 1920s bourgeois ideology, which elicited
the moral panic about migrating black women, birthed a lasting framework for

10
Although Carby focuses her analysis on two such novels, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1928) and
Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), representations of dangerous, morally suspect black women
appeared in many novels of the era. Carby writes that in both Van Vecthen and McKay’s novels, urban
black women posed threats both to social mobility and “the wholesome black masculinity necessary for the
establishment of an acceptable black male citizenship in the American social order” (1992, p. 741).

112
understanding black women in the United States. Protecting the social order became
about surveilling and controlling the bodies of poor black women, rather than attempting
to find economic solutions for the circumstances of their vulnerability. A similar focus on
poor black women and the social order emerged during the 1970s and ’80s. The moral
panic drudged up by Ronald Reagan’s campaign talk of the welfare queen, and her toll on
the US economy facilitated the justification of policies of deregulation and privatization.
The welfare queen first appeared nationally in Reagan’s 1976 campaign speeches.
In these speeches, Reagan referenced a real woman in Chicago, Linda Taylor, whose use
of multiple identities to collect multiple welfare checks had earned her the moniker
welfare queen in the Chicago newspapers. Speaking on the need to reform welfare due to
rampant fraud among welfare recipients, Reagan claimed that the welfare queen “is
collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting dead husbands …. Her tax-free cash
income alone is over $150,000” (“'Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue,” 1976, p. 51). In
other words, the welfare queen profited at the expense of veterans and taxpayers.
The welfare queen’s narrative power relied upon the ideological work done by the
Moynihan Report. As a rhetorical symbol, the welfare queen was able to function as “the
synechdoche, the shortest possible shorthand, for the pathology of poor, urban, black
culture” because the Moynihan Report helped to make the pathologization of single black
mothers part of American common sense (Lubiano, 1992, p. 335). Much like the
migrating black women described by Carby, the myth of the welfare queen helped to
justify increased surveillance of black women, this time in the form of surveilling welfare
recipients in order to root out welfare fraud. Where the welfare queen differs, however, is
in her deviousness; she is not just immoral, but is also actively scheming to siphon money

113
from the U.S. government. As Dorothy Roberts describes, the message that the welfare
queen’s deviousness sends is as follows: “poor Black mothers do not simply procreate
irresponsibly; they purposely have more and more children to manipulate taxpayers into
giving them more money” (1998, p. 17). Discourse about the welfare queen represented
black reproduction as something economically costly to white middle-class taxpayers.
Her immorality and deviance justified the increased surveillance and regulation of black
women’s lives and reproductive practices.
The rhetorical power of the welfare queen lasted well beyond the ’70s and ’80s.
As Ange-Marie Hancock demonstrates in The Politics of Disgust, the image of the
scheming and undeserving black welfare mother had an outsized role in the welfare
reform legislation of the 1990s, policies which drastically cut the country’s remaining
welfare programs. Concurrent with the 1990s’ evocations of the welfare queen, were
similarly pathologizing images of crack-addicted black mothers. In Killing the Black
Body, Dorothy Roberts charts the emergence of the representational figure of the crack
addicted mother in the ’90s and exposes the ways in which these representations
facilitated the further criminalization of black motherhood. Roberts writes, “Having
whipped up a panic over crack exposure, the media next created the drama’s leading
characters – the pregnant addict and the crack baby, both irredeemable, both Black”
(1998, p. 156). Discourse about the crack epidemic and crack babies transformed
reproduction into an actual crime for many women, a disproportionate number of whom
were black. During the late ’80s and ’90s, women began to be charged with child
endangerment for using drugs while pregnant. Even though the rates of drug use occur
equally among black and white pregnant women, the majority of women prosecuted for

114
fetal abuse for their drug use are black women. As Roberts writes, “the prosecutions are
better understood as a way of punishing Black women for having babies rather than as a
way of protecting Black fetuses” (1998, p. 154). The prosecution of drug addicted black
pregnant women, and the media’s overblown representations of the mental and physical
deficiencies of crack babies continued the discourse of black reproduction costing white
Americans money. In this formulation, black children taxed the system, and white middle
class families paid the price. Representations found in films like Losing Isaiah, which I
discuss in the next chapter, further communicated this point. The figure of the
irresponsible crack-addicted mother joined the cast of representations of immoral and
deviant black mothers. These representations reinforce the idea that black mothers
deserve both harsh punishment and legislative intervention into their lives because they
cannot be trusted to make the right reproductive decisions. In the remainder of the
chapter, I examine the ways that these narratives continue to powerfully shape both the
government’s intervention into American families as well as discourse about the nation’s
future.

A Threat to America’s Future: Protecting “Our” Children from Black Social
Reproduction

America’s retired military leaders are alerting Congress to a threat to national security.
The basic fact is that too many young American men and women are too fat to fight….
Recruiters remember the recent past when they could not sign up enough young men and
women to meet the nation’s needs.

– pp. 2-3“Too Fat to Fight: Retired Military Leaders Want Junk Food Out of
America’s Schools,” Mission: Readiness (2010)

Why is K-12 public school education a national security issue? First, it is critical that
children in the United States be prepared for futures in a globalized world.… The

115
dominant power of the twenty-first century will depend on human capital. The failure to
produce that capital will undermine American security.

– p. xiii, “U.S. Education Reform and National Security,” Council on Foreign
Relations (2012)

These quotes, taken from two recent reports on childhood obesity and education, alert
readers to a threat to one of the United States’ most valuable resources – its children. The
reports are very clear, the fitness and aptitude of these child bodies – the nation’s human
capital - are essential to the United States’ future security. Although this contraction of
human capital is projected to affect everyone in the nation equally, the bodies which
serve as this rapidly diminishing resource are disproportionately black, brown, and poor.
These are the children who will serve in the military and whose racial otherness will
make them assets in the United States’ military operations in the Global South.
According to the logic of these reports then, the federal government must implement
nutritional regulations and educational policies in order to safeguard these resources.
Reports and initiatives on childhood obesity and education seek to make their bodies of
focus more socially valuable by improving either physical or mental fitness.
The physical and mental fitness of the national body has been a longstanding
concern of the U.S. government.
11
In one sense then, the moral panics around obesity and
failing public schools extend these earlier investments in fitness. Where these crises

11
As scholars such as Susan Bordo and Brian Turner have pointed out, the figure of the generic body
(meaning white, male, and heterosexual) as metaphor for the state and society can be traced back to Plato
and is found throughout Western political theory (Bordo, 2004; Turner, 2008). The prevalence of this
political metaphor, coupled with the importance of fit male bodies to military conscription creates a
scenario wherein the fit (white male) body easily stands in for a fit, strong, nation. This militarism also
creates scenarios wherein bodies that aren’t white or male can represent the nation. As Sarah Banet-Weiser
discusses in The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, during Wolrd War II, the Miss America pageant
functioned as a national symbolic where femininity “was constructed in explicitly nationalist terms” (1999,
p. 157). Consequently within the representational space of the pageant, the body of Miss America
functioned “both as a symbol of the national social body and as the individual liberal citizen” (Banet-
Weiser, 1999, p. 160).

116
differ, however is that unlike in previous decades, children and young adults of color are
explicitly incorporated in both the representations of these crises of fitness, and in the
governmental calls for action. Although it may be tempting to read this as a sign of racial
progress, the ways in which the reports about, representations of, and governmental
responses to these two moral panics rely upon racialized narratives reinforces racial
hierarchies via new categories of stigma and privilege. As I will show, and the above
quotes indicate, these new categories of stigma and privilege get communicated largely
through the figure of the child. As a rhetorical symbol, the figure of the child symbolizes
both the private space of family life and the public sphere of the nation’s future. As such,
this figure plays a powerful role in the deployment of discourses about blackness and the
resultant disciplining and regulation of black social reproduction.
As Brian Turner notes in “The Government of the Body”, concerns about the un-
fitness of soldiers around the beginning of the twentieth century “gave rise to the national
efficiency movement which was aimed at promoting discipline and health through
physical training, temperance, compulsory military service and the Boy Scout
association” (Turner, 2002, p. 191). Although Turner is writing about the British context,
the efficiency movement spanned multiple countries and the U.S. faced similar concerns
about the fitness of its soldiers, and took similar measures in response. For example, the
National School Lunch Act, which passed in 1946, was specifically framed in terms of
military fitness and national security.
12
Similarly, President Reagan’s 1983 report “A

12
The authors of “Too Fat to Fight,” mention this fact three separate times in their brief report. They write
that “military concerns about the fitness of our children not new” (Christeson, Taggart, Messner-Zidell, &
Mission: Readiness (U.S.), 2010, p. 1). Clearly, situating contemporary concerns about the childhood
obesity epidemic within a longer history of federal intervention, provides an important precedent for the
report’s nutritional recommendations. This history also simultaneously obscures the historical differences
between the causes and victims of malnutrition in the 1930s and ‘40s, and the causes of obesity today.

117
Nation at Risk,” which famously warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity,” situated public
education as a national security concern (United States & National Commission on
Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 8).
13
This report was itself indebted to annual reports
issued from 1939-1953 by the Federal Security Agency, which among other things,
linked the regulatory efforts of the Office of Education to national security (Cuéllar,
2009, p. 631).
14
Both Too Fat to Fight and U.S. Education Reform and National Security
demonstrate knowledge of this history and frame their recommendations as a
continuation of it.
Where the obesity and educational crises, differ from these earlier national
concerns are in the ways in which they enact a kind of multicultural neoliberal
governmentality. This governmentality mobilizes racialized narratives in ways that have
targeted consequences for bodies of color. These consequences emerge in Let’s Move
and My Brother’s Keeper via the ways that both initiatives attempt to reshape and rethink
the meanings attached to young bodies of color. In their attempts to do so, they imply that
mothers’ role in social reproduction is partly to blame for the negative associations
currently cathecting to these bodies. As scholars such as Herman Gray, Melani
McAlister, and Jodi Melamed have written, multicultural neoliberalism or racial
neoliberalism, preserves racial hierarchies while simultaneously celebrating racial or
cultural difference and diversity (Gray, 2013; McAlister, 2005; Melamed, 2006). The
consequence is that

13
The report also explicitly links education and military might. The authors write, “We have, in effect,
been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” (United States & National
Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 8). The report also states that military leaders are
spending millions of dollars on remedial educational programs for recruits.
14
As legal scholar (and California Supreme Court justice) Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar writes, “at nearly
every turn the FSA assumed responsibility connected to national security or framed its regulatory activities
as essentially the same” (Cuéllar, 2009, p. 631).

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privileged and stigmatized racial formations no longer mesh perfectly with a color
line. Instead, new categories of privilege and stigma determined by ideological,
economic, and cultural criteria overlay older, conventional racial categories, so
that traditionally recognized racial identities — black, Asian, white, or
Arab/Muslim—can now occupy both sides of the privilege/stigma opposition.
(Melamed, 2006, pp. 2–3)
Obesity and education are two such categories of privilege and stigma that become
overlaid on older racial categories. Stories about the dangers of obesity and a poor
education, and discourse that values good nutritional and educational choices, combines
with longstanding narratives that pathologize black social reproduction. The result is a
discourse that is able to both stigmatize and discipline black social reproduction and
successfully evade accusations of racism, because it does not stigmatize all black
reproduction. Those who make good choices for their children are able to avoid
stigmatization. Barack and Michelle Obama are black parents whose good parental
choices allow them to transcend black pathology. As I will discuss in the following
chapter, the discourse of racial transcendence allows whiteness to remain the racial norm
(Joseph, 2012). These “good choices” also authorize the Obamas’ disciplining of those
parents who are unable or unwilling to make the right kinds of reproductive decisions.
The rhetorical power of children as symbols of innocence and futurity play an important
role in the disciplinary discourse of the Obamas’ Let’s Move and My Brother’s Keeper
initiatives.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to catalogue all of the media representations
or public policy reports and initiatives that characterize obesity and education as crises.

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Instead I analyze two widely circulated reports, and two well-funded and critically
acclaimed documentaries that make obesity and education the subject of their critique.
These reports and films are paradigmatic examples of what representations of, and public
discourse about, the obesity and public education crises look and sound like in
mainstream U.S. media and politics. The films, Waiting for Superman (2010), and Fed
Up (2014) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and were later released in
theaters. Reviewers pointed out that both films situated their exposé style in relation to
the popular and influential documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.
15

Both documentaries have also been accused of manipulating statistics in order to generate
fear and anger about the problems that they represent. The two reports I consider, were
also published around the same time that the films came out. Rather than investigate the
ways in which the reports influenced the films or vice versa, what I am interested in here
is the pervasive discourse of choice across both films and reports, and the way in which
each of these texts relies upon familiar images and narratives about the pathology of
black family life and black social reproduction.
These texts work in tandem to symbolically colonize the reproductive black body;
they perpetuate beliefs about the weakness of black family structure and the dangers this
weakness poses to black children and the broader U.S. community. Furthermore, these
texts rhetorically discipline reproduction by proposing choice as a way avoiding obesity
and getting a good education, thus enabling families to transcend the tangle of pathology

15
Importantly, the director of An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim, also directed Waiting for
Superman. Additionally, producer Laurie Lennard produced both An Inconvenient Truth and Fed Up. With
the same director, comparisons between An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman were inevitable.
One reviewer writes, “Guggenheim's Waiting for 'Superman wants to do for public schools what his
previous documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, did for global warming: raise consciousness and motivate a
society that has good intentions but falls short when it comes to action” (Addiego, 2010, p. E8). In her LA
Weekly review of the Fed Up, critic Amy Nicholson writes that the film “is poised to be the Inconvenient
Truth of the health movement” (2014).

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of blackness. The result is a narrative that suggests that parents simply have to make good
choices in order to raise children who are more socially valuable. In this next section I
chart how the figure of the child is taken up in the obesity and education crises, the
disciplinary consequences of this rhetorical figure, and the role of race in both.
Representations of the risky and/or at risk black(ened) child relies upon the
pathologization of black social reproduction, and authorizes the state’s regulation of this
reproduction.
16

The Figure of The “Innocent Child” in the History of Disciplining Social Reproduction
The child in crisis is an oft used rhetorical symbol in U.S. political discourse,
generally appearing in crises about the nation’s future. As Lee Edelman highlights in No
Future, the figure of the child is a disciplinary one, and “the disciplinary image of the
‘innocent’ Child perform[s] its mandatory cultural labor of social reproduction” (2004, p.
19). Scholars such as Edelman, Robin Bernstein (2011), and Caroline Levander (2006)
point out that the rights of adult men and women are often restricted in the name of
protecting the imagined future of the innocent child. This rhetorical figure then becomes
a rallying point for state discipline in order to ensure the reproduction of society and its
values.
17
The child figures in both the obesity crisis and public education crisis in much

16
I borrow the term black(ened) from Daphne Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent (2006). Brooks writes about the
ways in which the white female stage performer Adah Isaacs Menken was “‘blackened at the root by her
profession and her professional choices” (2006, p. 11). Brooks writes, “newspaper representations of
Menken would work in interesting and significant ways to blacken Menken. … These press accounts …
demonstrate the ways that blackness operated as a distilled, free-floating trope that could easily get mapped
across unconventional bodies like Menken’s” (Brooks, 2006, p. 151). Brooks argues that the newspapers’
use of racial tropes and narratives allowed these representations to metaphorically associate Menken with
the primitiveness and pathological sexuality of blackness. In other words, narratives about blackness can
help affix blackness to nonblack bodies.
17
For example, in Sex Panics and the Punitive State (2011) Roger Lancaster describes the role “the Child”
played in sex panics that link homosexuality and sexual predators. In Killing the Black Body (1998),
Dorothy Roberts describes the ways that discourse about protecting children justified legislation that
criminalized black motherhood.

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the same way - vulnerable and in need of protection from their parents’ failures. What
differs are the reasons for these parental failures. In the obesity crisis, an abundance of
food choice and a scarcity of time leads many parents to make poor choices about
nutrition and exercise. When it comes to education, a failing public school system
prevents many parents from having any choice at all in their child’s education. Within
both crises even well-meaning parents are thwarted when faced with limited or
misleading choices.
The figure of the innocent, vulnerable, and threatened child appears in both Fed
Up, which tackles the sugar industry’s role in childhood obesity, and Waiting for
Superman, which addresses the public school system. In the film (and trailer) for Fed Up,
Dr. Harvey Kapp author of the best-selling parenting book The Happiest Baby on the
Block, emphatically states that “If a foreign nation were doing that to our children, we
would defend our families” (Soechtig, 2014). Elsewhere in the film, another expert
argues that “we’re toast as a country” if something drastic is not done about childhood
obesity (Soechtig, 2014). In effect Fed Up is a call to arms in the name of defending
innocent American children. The film suggests that widespread governmental
intervention is the only solution, because parents of these vulnerable children do not
know how to make good nutritional decisions for their kids. According to Fed Up, one of
the sugar industry’s biggest crimes is that they take advantage of “the people who are
least able to know what’s good for their health” (Bloomberg in Soechtig, 2014, emphasis
added). This quote, taken from an interview with former New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg encapsulates the way that the film represents the parents of the obese children
who serve as the movie’s main characters. These parents, all of them working or lower

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middle class, come across as well meaning, but inept. They claim they are trying to eat
healthy, but the audience sees that they keep inadvertently buying processed foods that
have a lot of added sugar. As one distraught dad puts it “I know you’re going to say I’m
putting him in harm’s way … but you don’t have no control over it” (Soechtig, 2014).
The film suggests that the parents are deserving of discipline because their children are in
need of protection.
Waiting for Superman is similarly replete with images of young children whose
desire for a better life is thwarted by failures that are beyond their control. In Fed Up, the
film represents the sugar industry as the primary villain and parents as unintentional
accomplices. Waiting for Superman casts teachers’ unions and politicians as the “bad
guys” whose personal interests prevent parents from being able to do what is best for
their children. Much like the parents in Fed Up, the parents in Waiting for Superman are
desperate to save their children and protect their futures. Even the children themselves
have internalized the cultural imperative to protect their future children, in turn protecting
social reproduction. When asked why he wants to go to college, Anthony – a fifth grader
and one of the film’s main characters - says “I want my kids to have better than what I
had” (Guggenheim, 2010). Although the interviewer sounds surprised that Anthony is
already concerned about the well being of his future children, this concern makes sense,
in a nation where adult citizenship is defined by its ability to protect the future citizenship
of children. In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant describes
this as a “familial politics of the national future” (1997, p. 1). This means that politics is a
family matter and the problems of the present are described in the future tense. Both
Waiting for Superman and Fed Up represent education and obesity in these terms. The

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films characterize present day problems as threats to the national future, and they
effectively do so by centering the films’ narratives on children. Children grappling with
the consequences of obesity or failing public schools serve as the main characters of both
movies. Consequently, the lives and struggles of these kids provide the emotional and
narrative arcs of both films.
Fed Up features confessional style videos, where each of the four main characters
candidly tells the audience how hard it is to be young and obese, and how they think their
obesity will impact their future. During one of these confessions Wesley, a young
African-American boy tells the camera “I’m trying to save my life and protect myself
from dying … I just want y’all to realize that y’all are killing yourselves. Cause I’ve
already realized it” (Soechtig, 2014). Wesley clearly believes that his future has already
been cut short because of his obesity. Similarly, Waiting for Superman begins and ends
with images of Anthony (also young and also black) alone in his bedroom. The children’s
vulnerability provides the emotional resonance for both films. Even though both directors
suggest that large scale governmental and corporate changes are needed, they do so by
making the matter a family issue, much like the Moynihan Report. Obesity and education
are directly affecting children, and these are urgent problems precisely because they are
about the nation’s future. State discipline and regulation are advocated as necessary steps
to protect these children’s vulnerable futures.
Although neither film discusses race or racism explicitly, these child-centered,
familial politics are distinctly racialized. It is no coincidence that both Waiting for
Superman and Fed Up feature young black boys who are concerned about their ability to
grow up in America. The rhetorical symbolism of children, narratives about obesity and

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failing public schools, and representations contrasting good with irresponsible parental
choices – each of these discursive formations relies upon a racial ideology that situates
blackness and whiteness as opposite poles of a hierarchical racial continuum. This
hierarchical racial ideology is largely communicated via constructions of risk.
Risky and at risk parents, children, and communities figure prominently in the
conversations about both childhood obesity and public education. Within these discourses
of risk – which cut across the films and the reports – whiteness is often put at-risk by
governmental failures or by risky racial others. For example, in Too Fat to Fight, the
authors highlight that
while low income and minority children are more likely to be overweight or
obese, they are by no means the only ones becoming overweight or obese in
America today. The problem impacts every classroom in the country. Obesity not
only reduces career opportunities in the military for young adults, it also shortens
lifespans, drives up health insurance costs, and may reduce civilian career
opportunities. (Christeson et al., 2010, p. 6, emphasis added)
The retired military leaders who authored this alarmist report challenge the common
sense notion that obesity is primarily a problem experienced by poor children and
children of color. Instead, they imply that obesity is cause for national concern because it
is not just affecting marginalized communities, it is impacting “every classroom in the
country,” including classrooms full of middle-class white kids. Invoking the classroom
also helps to connect the crisis to the government, because ostensibly many of those
classrooms are in state run public schools. When these children are not being put at risk
by governmental failures, they are instead at risk from racial others, either in the labor

125
market or on the battlefield. According to the Council on Foreign Relations “the
globalization of labor markets” poses an ever increasing risk to the ability of poorly
educated Americans to get a job (Council on Foreign Relations et al., 2012, p. 8). In the
case of obesity, “for military personnel the physical abilities of their colleagues can be
the difference between life and death” (Christeson et al., 2010, p. 3). The risks for white
children are multiple – they are at risk of losing employment to better educated global
others, or of having their lives put at risk by obese colleagues on the battlefield. And they
are at risk of becoming obese themselves.
White children are not the only ones “at-risk,” however. Elsewhere, black
children like Wesley or Anthony are “at-risk” of growing into risky young black men.
According to the U.S. Education and National Security report,
Nearly one in ten male high school dropouts is in jail or juvenile detention ….
These statistics represent real people— millions of people who leave school each
year with limited prospects and limited ability to contribute to society, and who
too often become burdens to the country. (Council on Foreign Relations et al.,
2012, p. 23, emphasis added)
The authors do not have to state that these “burdens to the country” are black men;
simply by invoking the prison system, which disproportionately incarcerates black men,
the authors are able to imply this risky population is black without necessarily naming
them as such. Either way, blackness is both at-risk and risky.
This preoccupation with risk and children, themselves symbols of the future and
futurity, make sense in a neoliberal society where mitigating risk and managing the future
go hand in hand.

As Foucault writes in Security, Territory, Population, security – itself a

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mechanism of neoliberal governance – “is simply a matter of maximizing the positive
elements… and of minimizing what is risky and inconvenient … while knowing that they
will never be completely suppressed” (2007, p. 19). This strategy of maximizing the
circulation of positive elements and of minimizing risk is a plan that “works on the future
… a future that is not exactly controllable, not precisely measured or measurable”
(Foucault, 2007, p. 20). Managing the future is a problem of minimizing risk, and of
reducing risk to an acceptable limit. Many scholars have detailed the ways that the United
States, and global capitalism more generally, operate as “risk societies” wherein new
risks are produced every day and risk is “a constitutive component of being and social
organization” (Miller, 2006, p. 305).
18
As Anita Harris writes in Future Girl, “The
concept of at-risk contains an implicit ideal of a good future. Failing to understand or
subscribe to this ideal means failing at the future entirely” (2003, p. 26). While Harris is
writing specifically about young girls who are labeled as “at-risk,” this notion of failing
at the future can be applied to children of all genders. Consequently, within the context of
obesity and public education, discourse about at-risk children accomplishes two things: it
helps to frame solutions to these different crises as moral dilemmas, and it reinforces the
association of at-risk children with a failure of social reproduction.
This is made easier by the fact that public health generally, and the obesity crisis
in particular, are already highly moralized discursive fields.
19
As Kathleen LeBesco
points out in her essay “Fat Panic and the New Morality,” “medicalizing or pathologizing

18
For more on the risk society, see U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992); U. Beck,
World at Risk (2013); A. Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility” (1999).
19
For more on the moral discourse of public health and the obesity epidemic see, Michael Gard and Jan
Wright, The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality, and Ideology (2005); Julie Guthman, Weighing In:
Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (2011); Chad Lavin, Eating Anxiety: The Perils of
Food Politics (2013).

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a condition can help to remove blame from the individual, but … extends the reach of
moralizing discourse” (2010, p. 76). Whether that condition is obesity, or education, the
consequence is a moral discourse that inflects a racialized ‘crisis.’ Discourse about the
obesity and educational crises builds upon the history of moral panics that I discussed
earlier. Much like the moral panics about migrating black women, welfare queens, and
crack moms, these contemporary crises rhetorically link blackness and immorality as well
as construct black poverty as a threat to the (white) social order.
20
Although this attention
paid to poor children, and black and brown children might to some extent challenge the
privileging of middle-class white children as representative of the nation, this attention
also demarcates poor, black, and brown kids as representatives of a future that has
already failed.

Tropes of Black Social Pathology in Narratives about National Security

There are two primary ways in which the representations of these two national
security crises rely upon tropes of black social pathology in order to communicate the
severity of these problems: the first is via representations of black family life that feature
single black mothers and their ‘at-risk’ black sons; and the second is through a visual
rhetoric of contagion, which is primarily communicated via maps. These maps suggest
that these crises are spreading epidemiologically across the country.
21
As I will discuss

20
These more recent categories of stigma and privilege do not always neatly align with pre-existing racial,
gender, and class hierarchies, after all, there are many representations of obese white children. The
categories of stigma and privilege created by the obesity and educational crises – obese vs. healthy,
undereducated vs. college-ready – do, however manage to conjure blackened images even when the
categories are used to describe white bodies.
21
For more on the history and theory of mapping epidemics see, Daniel Dorling, “Area Cartograms: Their
Use and Creation” (2011). In The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic

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later, these two visual and narrative tropes are also present in the discourse of Let’s Move
and My Brother’s Keeper.
Absent Black Fathers and Haplesss / Helpless Black Mothers

Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman opens with Anthony, a young black
fifth-grader in Washington, DC. Anthony sits on his bed and looks toward the camera;
the director asks Anthony to solve a simple math equation.
22
Anthony pauses, repeats the
question, and then thinks aloud to himself. As the audience hangs in the moment between
the question and its answer, it seems as though Anthony may get the question wrong.
When he eventually does answer the question correctly, the time it has taken him to
figure it out demonstrates the limitations of his education. Waiting for Superman begins
and ends with Anthony – the son of a dead drug addicted father, now being raised by his
grandmother. His presence at the story’s introduction and its narrative closure establishes
him as the film’s central character. The film suggests that Anthony is the archetypal
student that the U.S. educational system is failing – poor, black, and living in a
nontraditional family structure. Although Waiting for Superman neglects to substantively
engage with the way race and poverty impact a child’s educational access, the film still
manages to send a clear message about race in general, and blackness in particular. This
message is essentially a remixing of the main thesis of the Moynihan Report – the
educational gap between middle-class and poor families is widening and black boys are
the most at risk of being left behind. As Moynihan wrote, “the matriarchal pattern of so

Representation; Tom Koch, Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (2011); Joost Van Loon, “Epidemic
Space,” (2005) in Critical Public Health, 15(1), 39-52.
22
Guggenheim asks Anthony if he had four cookies and ate two of them, what portion of the cookies
would he have left. While solving the equation Anthony says, “You have to cross multiply … four …
two” (Guggenheim, 2010). After a moment, he triumphantly says “you ate 50% of your cookies.”

129
many Negro families reinforces itself over the generations. This process begins with
education” (1965, p. 31).
There are similarities between the ways Waiting for Superman represents
Anthony’s character and Fed Up represents Wesley a young black boy from Texas being
raised by his mother. Both boys appear to be caught in a “reinforcing” pattern of
pathology that is rooted in a seemingly matriarchal family structure. Both Wesley and
Anthony are being raised by overweight single black mothers who are well-meaning, but
largely ineffective.
23
Anthony’s grandmother states that she fears she cannot protect him
or provide the education he needs. In addition, she blames herself for her son’s
(Anthony’s father’s) drug use. Wesley’s mother similarly means well, but cannot get her
son to lose weight. The film shows her attempting to purchase healthy food and discipline
Wesley’s food choices, but in spite of these efforts Wesley continues to gain weight. At
different points both mothers express the fear that they are unable to control their sons’
influences or their sons’ eventual behavior. Although these are concerns expressed by
many of the other parents in the films, as single black mothers these fears carry a special
significance. These representations of their maternal anxieties reproduce associations
between black motherhood and child endangerment.
The riskiness of their maternal practices is reinforced by the noticeable absence of
a father figure in either home. As legal scholar Ann Cammett convincingly argues, as
icons of racialized parenting, the welfare queen and the deadbeat dad are corollaries of
one another. Cammett writes, “The image of the Deadbeat Dad also slowly emerged as a

23
Wesley’s mother never identifies herself as a single-mother, however because no father is ever shown or
discussed in any of Wesley or his mother’s scenes, they appear to be a single-parent household. It is
possible that Wesley’s father chose not to participate in the film. What is most important is that in the
world of the film Wesley is fatherless.

130
racialized trope: an uncaring Black father unwilling to pull his weight, often with
multiple families, who expects taxpayers to carry his burden” (2014, p. 238). Both Fed
Up and Waiting for Superman engage with this trope of the deadbeat dad. Waiting for
Superman uses Anthony’s father’s absence for emotional effect. The audience learns that
Anthony was held back in the second grade because he struggled in school after his dad
passed away. When Guggenheim presses Anthony to discuss how his father died,
Anthony reveals that he used drugs, and died of an overdose. In addition, the last shot of
the movie is Anthony laying on the bed in his new boarding school dorm room, sadly
looking at a photo of him and his (now absent) father. In Fed Up, Wesley is the only one
of the main characters who does not have both parents represented. Consequently there is
a stark contrast between the representations of the other caring and concerned fathers of
the film’s main characters, and the film’s silence about whether or not Wesley knows or
has a father, concerned or otherwise. Together the welfare queen and deadbeat dad serve
as the parental figures within the culturally familiar representation of the broken black
family – a symbol popularized by the Moynihan Report. As Cammett writes, “this
concept of a ‘broken’ family …is another powerful cultural narrative informing the social
construction of poor Black families …. [It] sets the stage for policy in the area of social
welfare” (2014, p. 237). Within the context of the films, both Anthony and Wesley exist
in broken black families, where the mothers are the heads of household struggling to do
what is best for their children. As I will discuss later, these images of single black
mothers, black broken families, and deadbeat black dads arise in the narratives put
forward by both the Let’s Move and My Brother’s Keeper campaigns.

131
Mapping and Making a Crisis: Visualizing Obesity and Education Data

It is not just the representations of individuals and families that reproduce tropes
of black social pathology, the ways in which the films and reports on the obesity crisis
represent the “facts” of the crises reinforce ideas about the pathology of black social
reproduction as well. In “Drawing Things Together,” Bruno Latour describes the power
of visual inscriptions like maps, charts, and graphs, to attach a feeling of both objectivity
and truth to scientific ideas (2011). He points out that “we can hardly think of what it is
to know something without indexes, bibliographies, dictionaries, papers with references,
tables, columns, photographs, peaks, spots, bands” (Latour, 2011, p. 68). Both films and
reports rely heavily on these visual inscriptions to communicate the science of the obesity
and educational problems in the United States.
24
These visual aids help bolster the
narrative they present about the causes and solutions to these two problems. These maps
simultaneously produce, represent, and disseminate the reality of these crises. To do so
they take specific statistics about body weight and test scores and transform them into
“the most significant, the only significant aspect of reality” (Latour, 2011, p. 71). These
visualizations evoke a sense of contagion, and suggest that the obesity and educational
problems are spreading epidemiologically across the country. The maps, “Drop-Out
Factories” and “States with 40% Obese Population or More,” which are taken from
Waiting for Superman and the Too Fat to Fight report respectively both visualize the
spread of social problems across the country. “Drop-Out Factories” does so via
animation, whereas “States with 40% Obese Population or More” uses color to indicate

24
Half the pages in Too Fat to Fight are charts and graphs, the same with the other report. A frequent
critique of Waiting for Superman is what many critics considered an over reliance on animation to visualize
the data. Fed Up is stylistically very similar in that regard, and features many animated data visualizations
to communicate statistics about sugar consumption and/or childhood obesity.

132
communicability and intensity.

Figure 5: “Dropout Factories.” Still from Waiting for “Superman” (Guggenheim, 2010).

Figure 6: “Over a ten-year period, the number of states with 40 percent or more of their young adults who
were overweight or obese went from 1 to 39” found in Too Fat to Fight (Christeson et al., 2010 p. 1).
According to the report, these maps are based on data from the CDC.

Each flag in “Drop-Out Factories” represents a school deemed to be a drop-out
factory and as the animation progresses more flags crop up across the country. No exact
definition of “drop-out factory” is given in the film, nor is there any other demographic
information provided about the schools represented by flags. As a result, the animated
map’s message is relatively simple: there are an overwhelming number of drop-out

133
factors and they are spreading quickly across the country.
The obesity map similarly communicates a rapid spread. In Fat Politics, J. Eric
Oliver points out that visualizing obesity data on a map was integral to its construction
and acceptance as an epidemic and public health crisis. Oliver writes “rather than simply
showing a trend, the maps conveyed something more urgent – a spreading infection”
(2006, p. 40).
25
The “States with 40% Obese Population or More” map conveys the
urgency of a spreading infection by using warmer colors to indicate greater rates of
obesity. Taken together, both maps suggest urgent crises in need of a solution.
Considering the demographics commonly understood to be impacted by the obesity and
educational crises – poor, black, and brown – these disease maps strengthen the link
between obesity, educational problems and a kind of racial contagion. These
contemporary fears of a racial contagion build upon earlier fears of racial contagion that
existed in the moral panics about single black women migrating and spreading across the
country, along with fears about the epidemiological spread of crack, crack mothers, and
crack babies throughout the nation’s cities.
In addition, the way in which Fed Up visually communicates sugar’s
addictiveness makes the obesity epidemic appear similar to an earlier crisis in the black
community, the crack epidemic. Fed Up argues that sugar is as addictive as an illegal
drug in order to argue for increased government regulation of the amount of sugar
available to consumers. One way in which they liken sugar to drugs is via images of brain
scans. According to the film’s voiceover, the following image shows how the human
brain lights up in response to sugar and in response to cocaine. In the film, experts assert

25
Additionally, as Chad Levin writes in Eating Anxiety, “the discourse of an obesity epidemic trades
in a fetishization of state borders and an assumption of interstate transmission” (Lavin, 2013, p. 84).

134
that the visual similarity between these two images suggests that sugar is equivalent to
cocaine in terms of addictiveness. The familiarity of narratives about the harmfulness of
drug addiction helps generate fear about sugar, and the childhood obesity epidemic in
general. Because black men and women were primary targets in the US war on drugs,
associations between obesity and drug-addiction will necessarily also associate obesity
with urban, black poverty.
26

Figure 7: “Brain Scans in Response to Sugar and Cocaine Use.” Still from Fed Up (Soechtig,
2014).

As Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, “the Reagan administration
launched a media offensive to justify the War on Drugs. Central to the media campaign
was an effort to sensationalize the emergence of crack-cocaine in inner city
neighborhoods” (2012, p. 49). Because of this history of the War on Drugs’ intentional
linkage of poor urban blackness with a rapidly spreading drug epidemic, Fed Up’s
likening of sugar to cocaine is necessarily racially charged. By linking sugar addiction
and cocaine addiction, Fed Up suggests that like the crack epidemic, the obesity epidemic
might also be a black problem.
And lastly, both Waiting for Superman and U.S. Education Reform and National

26
For more on the role of representations of blackness in the crack epidemic see Herman Gray, Watching
Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (2004).

135
Security rather uncritically reinforce racial hierarchies with the color choices of their data
visualizations. The image below, which is taken from Waiting for Superman, is meant to
be a diagram of failing schools.

Figure 8: “Diagram of Failing Schools.” Still from Waiting for “Superman” (Guggenheim, 2010).
The schools on the bottom, in the darkest brown segment are those that are failing the
most, the schools on the top of the hierarchy, in the lightest segment are those that are the
most successful. Because the film has no explicit sustained discussion of the role that
race plays in the failures of public education, visual iconography such as this one take on
added significance as one of the few messages about race. Similarly in the “Fourth Grade
Math NAEP,” map from the Council on Foreign Relations report, an orange-brown color
is used to indicate states with below average math results.

Figure 9: “Fourth Grade Math NAEP 2009” found in U.S. Education Reform and National
Security (Council on Foreign Relations et al., 2012, p. 20). Green indicates above average, yellow
indicates average, and the reddish-brown indicates below average.

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These diagrams, maps, and images communicate a racialized message about which
populations are most in need of biopolitical management. Visualizations such as these are
one way in which citizens are transformed into populations to be managed. And in this
transformation the categorization and hierarchization of social problems take on a racial
valence. They show a country where blackness continues to be a problem, and continues
to be situated at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Haunting the Let’s Move Campaign: The Welfare Queen and Childhood Obesity

In February 2013, First Lady Michelle Obama appeared in a sketch on Late Night
with Jimmy Fallon called “The Evolution of Mom Dancing.”
27
During the two minute
segment, Obama and Fallon (both dressed in in “mom clothes”, meaning clothes which
signify middle-class white motherhood) perform a series of different dances. Some of
these dances are recognizable, such as the electric slide, and others are made up, like the
“Go Shopping, Get Groceries.” About midway through the routine Obama and Fallon
perform a dance called “Where’s Your Father (Get Him Back Here).” In this moment,
clearly intended to be playful and goofy, Obama’s performance exceeds the routine’s
benign critique of maternal coolness. As First Lady Michelle Obama acts out angrily
looking for the father of her children, her performance cannot help but be haunted by the
most well-known representation of single black motherhood, the welfare queen.

27
This performance quickly went viral and is one of the most watched of Michelle Obama’s television
appearances, with nearly twenty-four million views on YouTube alone to date. According to the
announcer’s introduction, the routine was created “In honor of the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign, and
to encourage parents everywhere to get up and get moving with their kids” (The Tonight Show Starring
Jimmy Fallon, 2013).

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As Avery Gordon has argued in Ghostly Matters and elsewhere, haunting is often
the necessary counterpart to the condition of hypervisibility (1997). Gordon writes,
“Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and
their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done
with ... or when their oppressive nature is continuously denied” (2011, p. 2). The kinds of
quotidian hauntings that Gordon explores necessarily differ from the ways in which the
Let’s Move campaign is haunted by the welfare queen. The mechanisms of a White
House led public policy initiative are not quite the same setting as the “everyday”
experiences Gordon interrogates. What they share, however, is a narrative that refuses to
be repressed, or submerged despite intentions otherwise. For this reason, I use the term
haunting to describe the way in which the unnamed figure of the welfare queen ruptures
the narratives of the Let’s Move campaign. These narrative ruptures point toward the
ideologies of multicultural neoliberalism that animate the state’s investment in
disciplining black women and in putting the onus of social problems on private
individuals and private industry.
Although never explicitly evoked, the welfare queen informs the discourse around
childhood obesity epidemic in three key ways: in terms of treating obesity as a symptom
of the culture of poverty, in terms of placing blame on bad black mothers, and in terms of
framing childhood obesity as a national security threat. Since her first widespread
appearance in one of Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign speeches, the welfare queen has
become a visual and linguistic shorthand for the flaws of the welfare state and the
undeservingness of the poor. The figure of the welfare queen has played a primary role in
shifting the national conversation about black mothers from a conversation about their

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ineptitude and recklessness to a conversation about their deviousness and
“deserving[ness] of harsh discipline” (D. Roberts, 1998, p. 8). Which is to say, the
presence of the welfare queen suggests that discipline is necessary. This image of the
welfare queen is so much a part of U.S. common sense that any representation of black
motherhood is necessarily in conversation with the welfare queen, even if the
conversation is just to announce the welfare queen’s absence from said conversation.
It should come as no surprise then that both childhood obesity – which disproportionately
affects black girls – and the Let’s Move campaign to end childhood obesity– which is
stewarded by a black mother – are haunted by the figure of the welfare queen.

First popularized by Oscar Lewis’s Five Families (1959) and Michael
Harrington’s The Other America (1962), the culture of poverty theory argues that the
cultural adaptations to poverty can also perpetuate poverty and make it harder to escape.
28

In The Other America, Harrington suggests that food is an integral component of the
black culture of poverty in the United States, and writes that the food available in Harlem
“has the smell of poverty about it” (1994, p. 67). Sociological writings such as
Harrington’s, which link food, poverty, and race, are one of the reasons that in popular
discourse, poverty is both predictor and cause of obesity. Within discourse about the
symptoms and the causes of poverty, causes and effects often precede one other, creating
a chicken and egg scenario. Obesity is no exception. The belief that poverty causes
obesity is one of the most persistent cultural myths about obesity. Legislation that
regulates foods associated with poverty only reinforce this myth. The association between

28
Even though Moynihan claimed to have been unfamiliar with this theory when writing the report, both
works which advanced the idea of the culture of poverty and the Moynihan report argue that “structural
inequality caused the culture of poverty yet the family perpetuated it” (Geary, 2015, p. 162).

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poverty and obesity undergirds laws that disallow the usage of food stamps for
“unhealthy” foods. These health concerns have also been used to justify the passage of
“soda taxes” in several states. This kind of legislation reinforces beliefs about the poor’s
irresponsibility and lack of self control. In actual fact, the irresponsibility and ignorance
of poor people is not the cause of the obesity epidemic. Although the White House’s own
reports on childhood obesity do not support this “fact” about the relationship between
poverty and obesity, the emphases of the Let’s Move campaign line up with this common
sense understanding that poverty fosters obesity.
This linkage between poverty and obesity appears most clearly in two areas of the
campaign: in the its effort to eradicate food deserts and in its focus on federal school
lunch programs. In her announcement of the campaign’s goal to eradicate food deserts
within seven years, Obama states “tackling the goal of accessibility and affordability is
key to achieving the overall goal of solving childhood obesity in this generation”
(letsmove.gov). According to the Let’s Move website these food deserts exist in low-
income neighborhoods. In other words, poverty makes healthy food inaccessible and
unaffordable, consequently causing obesity. Importantly, the goal here is not to eradicate
poverty, just food deserts. This means that the goal is actually to eradicate poverty’s
ability to cause obesity. The campaign’s efforts to change the kinds of lunches provided
by the national school lunch program similarly suggests that poverty is a leading cause of
obesity. As written on the “Healthy Schools” page on the Let’s Move website “for many
children, food served at school may be the only food they regularly eat”
(letsmove.gov/healthy-schools). Let’s Move’s Healthy Schools initiative targets the
National School Lunch program and the National School breakfast programs – two

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federally funded programs designed to provide meals to low-income children. The
national school lunch program is one of the longest standing and least controversial social
welfare policies in the United States. Let’s Move’s focus on school lunches implicates
both poverty and welfare as causes of childhood obesity.
The welfare queen is also one of the most recognizable symbols of American
poverty and welfare. In the context of the childhood obesity epidemic, her poor judgment,
and selfishness become the cause of her child’s obesity. As a bad black mother, she is too
selfish to be appropriately concerned about the well-being of her children and
consequently she is making her children obese. Starting in the 1990s, there have been
several cases where the government has removed obese children from their parents’ care
because the child’s obesity is considered a life-threatening form of child neglect.
29
These
cases where obesity becomes child abuse are the limit cases of what the childhood
obesity epidemic looks like. The story of Jerri Gray is the most publicized of these recent
cases. Gray is a single black mother from South Carolina who in 2009 was arrested on
charges of child neglect. She lost custody of her fifteen-year-old son because she was
unable to help him lose weight. In news coverage of similar cases, reporters usually
withhold the names of the parents and child to protect their identity. Without protective
anonymity Gray became the most visible representation of the criminalization of
motherhood in the context of childhood obesity. For example, two USA Today articles,
“Is child obesity child abuse?” (Barnett, 2009) and “No Southern Comfort for Obesity”
(Person, 2009), use Gray’s case as a touchstone for speaking generally about whether or

29
For more on cases of child obesity being treated as child abuse see D.J. Jones, M. Gonzalez, D.S. Ward,
A.Vaughn, J.Emunah, L. Miller & M. Anton, “Should Childhood Obesity be an Issue for Child Protective
Services? (2014); D. Patel, “Super Sized Kids: Using the Law to Combat Morbid Obesity in Childhood”
(2005).

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not parents should be held accountable for their children’s weight. And in some ways
Gray operates as the foil to Michelle Obama’s responsible black motherhood. Jerri
Gray’s arrest is part of the genealogy of criminalizing black motherhood that I discussed
earlier. Comparisons between sugar and cocaine facilitate the extension of policies
implemented during the crack epidemic that criminalized black mothers and their
maternal choices.
The welfare queen’s last site of haunting is found in discourse that characterizes
childhood obesity as a national security threat, thus linking the obese child to earlier
conversations about welfare and the welfare queen as a threat to the nation’s security. In
government discussions about welfare in the 1980s, money spent on welfare for single
mothers was considered wasted money; it was money that was not being spent on the
military and the nation’s defense. In a speech given to the United States League of
Savings Associations on November 16, 1982, Reagan said “We must get the growth of
nondefense spending under control once and for all” (1982b). For Reagan, expensive
social welfare programs were the main cause of the federal government’s budget deficit,
and moreover, he believed these programs did not help unemployment or poverty rates.
Reagan also argued that jobs programs and economic spending intended to help the poor
in actuality caused the US military program to “deteriorate very badly” (1982).
30

According to Reagan, welfare programs weakened the military and did not actually solve
the problem of poverty.
In place of welfare, in this speech and elsewhere Reagan proposed (and
implemented) the deregulation of the economy, the introduction of new world markets,

30
Reagan’s discussion of defense spending was in response to a reporter’s request at The President’s News
Conference to “explain philosophically the basic cause.”

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and cuts to nondefense spending.
31
For Reagan, “our economic problem, regard to
budgets and all, would be minimal today if we were simply carrying on whit a defense
establishment that had been properly maintained” (Reagan, 1982a). Welfare programs
that in Reagan’s estimation did little to help the poor out of poverty, were contributing to
the economic problems to which Regan referred. In a nationwide radio address on the
family, Reagan claimed
there is no question that many well-intentioned Great Society-type programs
contributed to family breakups, welfare dependency, and a large increase in births
out of wedlock. In the 1970's the number of single mothers rose from 8 to 13
percent among whites and from 31 to a tragic 47 percent among blacks. Too
often their children grow up poor, malnourished, and lacking in motivation. It's a
path to social and health problems, low school performance, unemployment, and
delinquency (1983).
For Reagan, Great Society programs like welfare did not just fail to help blacks out of
poverty, these programs increased blacks’ poverty and pathology at great cost to the U.S.
government.
For the Reagan administration, the welfare queen threatened the nation’s security
because she used up limited financial resources. In the case of childhood obesity today,
obese children are unable to make their bodies available as national resources. In both
instances – the welfare queen and the obese child –the irresponsible spending and
consumption of black women function as threats to the nation’s health, and ultimately its
ability to defend itself. In the case of welfare this occurs through black women’s

31
Elsewhere in Reagan’s speech to the League of Savings Associations, Reagan stated “What the
unemployed need most is a broad-based economic recovery. We must seek out and develop new markets
around the world” (1982).

143
participation in the welfare system. For childhood obesity, black women’s dysfunctional
consumption is an improper consumption of food, which she passes on to her (now
obese) children.
The Let’s Move campaign attempts to rectify this. Michelle Obama frequently
mentions the fact that childhood obesity threatens the nation’s security. And nationalism
pervades the campaign’s efforts to discipline American children. For example, Beyoncé’s
2011,“Move Your Body” flash workout, created specifically for the campaign, ends with
Beyoncé instructing the listener to “wave the American flag.” The connection between
childhood obesity and military spending is further underscored by Obama’s self-
appointed title as “mom-in-chief.”
32
As a neologism, mom-in-chief rhetorically links
motherhood with militarism, and the importance of both motherhood and militarism in
the protection of the nation.
33
In addition, in the majority of her speeches about Let’s
Move, Michelle Obama stresses that childhood obesity is a national security risk.
However spectral her presence may be, the welfare queen’s national presence in the Let’s
Move campaign reinforces the differential valuation of parental practices. This valuation

32
In her tenure as First Lady, Michelle Obama has often asserted herself as “mom in chief.” This
description of has received a lot of attention from feminists, journalists, and political commentators alike.
For some the “momification” of Michelle Obama has been considered a political move to temper the threat
to American norms posed by having an ivy educated, high earning black woman as First Lady (Traister,
2008). Others, including many black feminist theorists, have argued that Obama’s privileging of
motherhood talks back to a tradition of black women as caretakers for other people’s children (Deborah K.
King, n.d.; Joseph, 2011; Ulysse, 2009). By putting her own children first, Obama resists being cast as
mammy, as the strong black mother beholden to America’s children. Michelle Obama’s “momism” should
also be considered as a part of the trend of female politicians identifying with maternalsim. Clearly
Michelle Obama’s public participation in discourses about motherhood both challenges and reinforces
many different stereotypes about women, motherhood and parenting.
33
Even if the goal of declaring herself mom-in-chief was to privilege her own children above the
American people, or to resist being cast as mammy, or as angry black lady, one of the results of
occupying this title is an alignment of Michelle Obama’s motherhood with Barack Obama’s status as
the leader of the US military. Barack and Michelle Obama are commander and mother in chief
respectively.

144
helps makes possible My Brother’s Keeper’s discursive focus on the male victims of
black motherhood.

Victims of Black Motherhood: Black Maternity and My Brother’s Keeper

In February 2014, President Barack Obama announced the launch of his My
Brother’s Keeper initiative. In Obama’s own words, the initiative is a “focused effort on
boys and young men of color who are having a particularly tough time” (2014). Framed
as a public-private partnership, My Brother’s Keeper seeks to give black and brown boys
and young men equal access to the opportunities of their peers. In this initial
announcement, Obama states that although the federal government is joining in to help
young boys and men, most of the responsibility actually lies with private industry, and
private citizens. As mentioned earlier, Obama states that “we can reform our criminal
justice system to make sure its not infected with bias, but nothing keeps a young man out
of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his life” (2014). In other words, the
state’s paternalism can only go but so far; it cannot stand in for the benefits of an active
father. Although Obama acknowledges the structural disadvantages facing boys of color,
he reaffirms the belief that a patriarchal family structure is a critical component of one’s
success or failure. This quote reveals My Brother’s Keeper’s broader commitments. The
initiative privileges strong families, ingenuity, and good choices as solutions to the
problem of racism. In this way, fatherhood and a patriarchal family structure get
reinforced as keys to success. The emphasis on fatherhood echoes the logic of the
Moynihan Report, which similarly touted the importance of a strong father for boys and
young men’s success. Moynihan argued that “Negro children without fathers flounder—

145
and fail” (1965, p. 35). In addition, the Moynihan Report advocated for the empowerment
of boys and men, even if the cost was disempowering girls and women.
34
For Moynihan,
as it seems for President Obama, “The boys have more frequently fallen behind at every
age level” (1965, p. 31). In a manner similar to the Moynihan Report, Obama’s
characterization of the challenges facing black and brown boys and young men puts
structural racism on equal footing with bad parenting. Throughout Obama’s
announcement, the message he delivers is this: The government will do its part to reduce
structural disadvantages, but the character problems of black and brown boys will be
solved privately.
The threat of single black motherhood, established over decades and reinforced
via the Let’s Move initiative and reports and representations on the obesity and public
education crises, allows in this instance for boys of color to be cast as deserving victims
and as a result, deserving objects, of public concern. Fatherhood and masculinity take
center stage in Obama’s announcement. In a rhetorical move that occurs throughout the
literature on My Brother’s Keeper, Obama states that boys and young men of color are
the most at risk and left behind population, and supports these statements with statistics
about boys and girls of color. Aware of this inconsistency between his claims and the
available data, Obama also calls for more data that focuses exclusively on boys and
young men of color to be collected by social science researches. Kimberlé Williams
Crenshaw points out that “exclusion of girls of color from data collection means that
there will be fewer “evidence based” interventions for girls — because there was no
interest in marshaling evidence to support interventions for them in the first place” (2014,

34
Moynihan writes “It may well be that these efforts [at equal Federal employment] have redounded
mostly to the benefit of Negro women, and may even have accentuated the comparative disadvantage of
Negro men” (1965, p. 33).

146
p. A23). The institutionalized exclusion of girls of color thus ensures that boys and young
men will always be the ones the most at risk, because they will be the only demographic
group with statistical data to support that claim. This insurance of riskiness is a double-
edged sword. The same data that characterizes black and brown boys and young men as
“at-risk” and thus deserving of public concern and governmental support, is the same data
that gets used to explain their “riskiness” to the general population and thus deserving of
containment and punitive policies.
The goal of My Brother’s Keeper is to transform these young black and brown
bodies from threatened and threatening, to economic resources and opportunities. And
the program’s success depends upon the American public’s ability to sympathize with
young men of color. The public’s ability to sympathize with young black men is in turn
reliant upon the pathologization of their mothers. Authors such as Lindon Barrett and
Lisa Cacho have interrogated the ways in which value is relational (Barrett, 1999; Cacho,
2012). Valuing one subjectivity, necessitates the devaluation of another, meaning there is
always some kind of violence inherent in the process of valuation. My Brother’s Keeper
demonstrates this point – its project of valuing the lives and opportunities of black and
brown boys and young men comes at the cost of devaluing their mothers’ choices. The
history of racialization in the United States is a history of “one racial group’s social value
…[being] contingent upon and made legible through the devaluation of an/other” (Cacho,
2012, p. 15).
35
As Lisa Cacho writes in Social Death, “recuperating social value requires
rejecting the other Other” (2012, p. 17). In the case of My Brother’s Keeper, single

35
Cacho explores this relational valuation and devaluation throughout Social Death (2012). The way in
which the term refugee was used to describe African-American residents of New Orleans, and then
subsequently rejected by those residents as an unfit designation because of their citizenship status, is a
particularly salient example of this dynamic.

147
mothers become the “other Other” for boys and young men of color. Even though My
Brother’s Keeper does not single out single black mothers, the U.S. media’s familiarity
with narratives about immoral, pathological single black mothers means that any public
consideration of the risks associated with single motherhood will be racialized as black. It
is worth noting that the value attached to black and brown boys and young men through
this program is also a precarious one; it extends only as far as these boys and young men
are able to emulate the norms of white, middle-class masculinity. As Moynihan described
it in his report, the goal is to enable black men to be equals to white men – meaning the
goal is to assimilate them within the norms of whiteness
36
. The application of social value
here is tenuous, and one can easily slip from “at-risk” to “risky.”
President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative clearly evokes the logic of the
Moynihan Report in the way that it focuses on the precarity of boys and young men of
color. In comparison, First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative to end
childhood obesity implicates black mothers through its resonances with the figure of the
welfare queen and other bad black mothers. In many ways Let’s Move and My Brother’s
Keeper are the obverse of one another in terms of how directly they engage with issues of
race, class, and gender. Whereas Let’s Move attempts to be race, gender, and class
neutral in its language, careful not to target any one demographic group more than the
other, My Brother’s Keeper’s discourse is race, class, and gender specific; it was
launched specifically to address the needs of poor black and brown boys and young men.
Whether implicitly or explicitly, both Let’s Move and My Brother’s Keeper mobilize

36
Moynihan writes “The term alienation may by now have been used in too many ways to retain a clear
meaning, but it will serve to sum up the equally numerous ways in which large numbers of Negro youth
appear to be withdrawing from society. One startling way in which this occurs is that the men are just not
there when the Census enumerator comes around” (1965, p. 43 emphasis added)

148
familiar stories about the riskiness of black motherhood, which contribute to public fears
about threats to American children and the national future. These concerns shore up
public support for the Obamas’ proposed interventions into social reproduction.

My Brother’s Keeper and Let’s Move respond to the impetus to “do something”
generated by the moral panics about childhood obesity and public education. Both
initiatives are invested in making as many bodies available for the reproduction of social
institutions such as the military, schools, and the economy. As governmental responses,
they attempt to mitigate the risk that certain raced, and gendered bodies pose to social
reproduction. Moynihan’s account of the patriarchal family’s role in preventing the
reproduction of pathology, along with historical fears about bad black mothers’ threat to
national security and the social order, emerge in various facets of both the moral panics
about childhood obesity and public education and the Let’s Move and My Brother’s
Keeper campaigns. These reproductive narratives are useful because they are able to
quickly and easily communicate ideas about which kinds of children, parents, and
families are most valued within the United States. Throughout these discourses,
narratives about black reproduction structure the bad black mother and the patriarchal
family in opposition to one another, as cause and solution to problems of social
reproduction.

149

Chapter Three: Mothering While Black: Constructing the Black
Maternal Threat In U.S. Media

It’s Mother’s Day in the fictional Litchfield Prison and the prison is having an
expanded visitation day for the incarcerated mothers to spend time with their children.
Sophia Burset, an incarcerated trans woman played by trans actress Laverne Cox, has a
breakthrough moment with her son Michael as the two sit outside and talk. Until this
point, Michael has sullenly rejected both Sophia’s gender transition and her attempts to
parent from behind bars. On Mother’s Day, Sophia manages to connect with him by
giving him advice on women “from former man to current man” (“Mother’s Day,” 2015).
Initially skeptical, her son asks if this advice is “from my second mom, or my used-to-be-
dad” (“Mother’s Day,” 2015). In this brief moment, Sophia simultaneously occupies the
position of bad black mother and absent black father.
1
Even while showing the audience a
complicated and touching moment between mother and son, Orange Is the New Black
invokes the powerful cultural narratives about black parents and black families found in
the Moynihan Report.
This Mother’s Day episode is the first episode of season three of Netflix’s
critically acclaimed Orange Is the New Black. Widely hailed for its diverse
representations of women in prison, the show often features characters and storylines
rarely seen on television dramas. The “Mother’s Day” episode epitomizes the diversity

1
In previous seasons the audience learns that Sophia was arrested for credit card fraud, a crime she
committed in order to pay for her gender transition. At multiple points throughout the series, we see that
Sophia’s ex-wife and son understand her behavior as selfish. Similarly, Sophia’s family members make it
clear that by transitioning she has turned her son into a stereotype – a young black boy without a father.
Orange is one of few shows to represent the ways that for trans women of color “state programs and law
enforcement are not the arbiters of justice, protection, and safety but are instead sponsors and sites of
violence” (Spade, 2015, p. 2). It represents the structural violence many trans women experience at the
same time that it perpetuates cultural mythologies about black parents.

150
for which Orange is celebrated. It features scenes of mothers of varying racial and class
backgrounds and with different degrees of maternal skill and investment, many of whom
challenge stereotypes about bad black mothers and good middle-class white mothers. The
representations of motherhood on Orange resist easy labels of “good” or “bad” and
simultaneously reinforce and defy stereotypes about blackness, poverty, and parenting. In
spite of its abundance of “good” representations – meaning those which defy oppressive
stereotypes – Orange still performs a kind of biopolitical management of blackness and
motherhood via the way in which it makes difference visible.
In the previous two chapters, I addressed how the legal system and public policy
initiatives manage the biological and social reproduction of blackness. In this chapter I
turn to the role that the media plays in the biopolitical management of black reproduction.
As Chapter Two demonstrates, even “realistic” representations such as those found in
documentaries and policy reports, reinforce and recirculate cultural scripts about black
motherhood and the family unit. For this reason, I consider fictional and real, (as well as
static and moving) representations alongside one another in order to excavate which
narratives of black reproductivity emerge across genres and across mediums. Based upon
an analysis of news, television, and film representations of black maternity and
mothering, I ask how the white, patriarchal, nuclear family norm still controls
representations of black reproduction in a media environment where diversity seems to be
everywhere. In spite of a proliferation of representational difference in the media, black
motherhood and mothering is still largely shown to be less valuable than other kinds of
parental relationships.

151
The arguments in this chapter are based upon analyses of 17 films and television
shows, 94 news articles, 10 magazine articles and a report published by the Pew Research
Center.
2
These representations included were chosen because they highlight the
relationship between race and reproduction. Across these media representations, many of
which were created for different target audiences, I observed four closely related scripts
about black reproduction: The first is that black and white birth rates are represented as a
zero-sum game, meaning that an increase in black birth rates necessarily threatens the
white social order. This first script, which is found overwhelmingly in the news reports
on demographic changes, encompasses the other representational scripts I observed, each
of which reinforce the idea that black and white reproduction exist in tension with one
another. Second, is the positioning of multiracial Americans as a racial buffer between
the white and black population. Alternatively characterized as either honorary-white or
functionally black, these representations of multiraciality do little to challenge discourse
about the black-white racial hierarchy. Third, black mothers and mothering are shown to
be either tragic, disordered, or both, especially when the mothering takes place in the

2
As the most widely circulated news publications in the United States, the Los Angeles Times, New York
Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, served as the site of my primary research and primary archive
for my analysis of the contemporary coverage of demographic changes. A ProQuest search of the 5 most
widely circulated newspapers in the United States for articles with the terms census, demographics, and
either majority minority or minority majority turned up 377 results, all between the years 1982 and 2015,
when the search was conducted. This primary archive consists of 36 articles from the New York Times, The
Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, combined. The articles I have included from
The Atlantic, National Geographic, NPR, The National Journal, Newsweek, The New York Time Upfront,
Scholastic, Time, and US News and World Report were chosen because they clearly engaged with the
tropes and themes I found in this primary archive. I incorporated the Pew book The Next America, because
its data and analysis were frequently cited in the articles found in my primary archive. The late nineteenth
and early twentieth century news articles about Census data that I analyzed were found in The Los Angeles
Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The films and television shows analyzed were
chosen because they each feature a black mother in a significant speaking role. The films I analyze include:
Black or White (2015), Fed Up (2014), Frankie and Alice (2010), Fruitvale Station (2013), Home (2015),
Lila and Eve (2015), Losing Isaiah (1995), Mother and Child (2010) Waiting for Superman (2010). The
television shows are: Black-ish (2014), Empire (2015), Extant (2014), The Fosters (2013), Orange is the
New Black (2013), Rosemary’s Baby (2014), Scandal (2012), Black-ish (2014).

152
absence of a husband. And fourth, black and white parenting styles are represented as
dichotomous and oppositional parenting practices.
Taken together these four representational scripts manage blackness in two
primary ways. The first is by reinforcing whiteness as a cultural norm and orientation for
social institutions. Discussions of whether the category of whiteness will be expanded,
representations which use the white middle-class family as the gold standard for the ideal
family, and discourse about multiracialism that emphasizes racial transcendence and
color-blindness, all work to strengthen the normativity of whiteness and perpetuate the
ability of whiteness to function as a racially unmarked category. The second way in
which these representational scripts manage blackness is via scenes and images that
depict black parenting, and especially black mothering, as tragic or retrograde and
counter to white (purportedly race neutral) parenting. Either way, blackness is cast as the
racial identification that makes race a public matter, causes unpleasant feelings, and in
turn needs to be managed in order to safeguard the security of biological and social
reproduction.

Biopolitics and Representation: Controlling Images within a Society of Control

The Orange Is the New Black episode I opened with, demonstrates how the
“controlling images” described by Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (1990)
operate in a televisual environment where the proliferation of diverse images and
storylines has become a biopolitical technique unto itself. In this section I bring together
Collins’ discussion of controlling images with considerations of biopolitics and diversity
in order to theorize how representations of diversity function as a kind of biopolitical

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governance. First defined by Collins in Black Feminist Thought, controlling images are
recognizable stereotypes of black womanhood that perpetuate racist and sexist ideology
(2000). According to Collins, “these controlling images are designed to make racism,
sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal and
inevitable parts of everyday life” (2000, p. 69). She identifies figures like the mammy,
the jezebel, and the welfare queen as three (of many) controlling images of black women
that contributes to their oppression. While television shows and films certainly still take
advantage of these tropes of representing black women, there also exist many
representations of black women that challenge the ideological dominance of such images.
Orange is the New Black features many such representations. All kinds of mothers are
present in Litchfield or in Litchfield’s orbit, not just bad black mothers, welfare queens,
or crack moms. The show represents a diversity of kinds of mothers and mothering –
good, bad, unconventional, nonbiological and so on. These representations of
motherhood epitomize how visibility and diversity operate not simply as sites of control
or freedom but as a complex overlay of both, always and at the same time.
3

In the case of Orange, the show both provides roles for a diverse range of
actresses as well as offers viewers a look at the sanctioned violence that takes place
within prison. Undoubtedly, both these moves challenge the status quo with respect to the
kinds of stories and characters visible on television today. At the same time, however,
Orange offers little to no critique of why a prison might be filled with diversity in the first
place, and normalizes mass incarceration by using prison as a back-drop for comedic
moments. Orange challenges the inhumane practices that take place in prison by

3
As Wendy Chun writes in Control and Freedom, “power now operates through the coupling of control
and freedom. Although ideologies and practices of freedom and control are not new, the coupling of these
terms is uniquely tied to information technology and our current political situation” (2008, p. 1).

154
representing them, while simultaneously normalizing these practices by using them as
fodder for a fictional television dramedy. Although visibility now functions differently
than at the moment Collins was writing, her idea of controlling images remains useful for
thinking through the relationship of visibility and power to biopolitics. Images still have
the power to be controlling, but the mechanisms of control have multiplied. In addition to
broadcast networks and cable channels, streaming sites such as Netflix and Hulu also
provide original content. In addition, the falling costs of film technology and availability
of user produced content sites like YouTube, increase access to means of production and
distribution networks.
4
The consequence is that representations proliferate in the
contemporary U.S. media landscape.
In Dark Matters (2015), Simone Browne reads Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of
controlling images alongside a discussion of Foucault’s disciplinary power, suggesting a
generative link between black feminist theory and Foucault’s theorization of norms,
visibility and power. As I discussed in the introduction, many black feminist theorists
have written on the violence of visibility as it pertains to the black female body. With the
expansion of systems of surveillance and platforms for representation, the power and trap
of visibility for black women now impacts the wider population more generally (Browne,
2015; Fleetwood, 2011). For example, the dissolution of the boundary between public
work and private life that has taken place with the increase of entrepreneurialism, self
branding, and a freelance economy, requires a heightened visibility of U.S. workers in
ways that echo the kinds of visibility visited upon black women in the workplace (Banet-

4
As Banet-Weiser notes in Authentic™, although YouTube has been touted as a democratic media
platform where everyone’s voice can be heard, more often than not the videos and their comments reinforce
norms of race, class and gender. Writing on videos posted by girls and young women on the site, Banet-
Weiser points out that “for every radical statement there are many more that are shaped by a confluence of
commercial and sexual codes” (2012, p. 65).

155
Weiser, 2012; Collins, 2000).
5
This expansion of visibility and surveillance aligns with
Foucault’s discussion of visibility’s importance to mechanisms of social control
(Foucault, 1995). Expanding upon Focuault’s concept of the society of control, Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri write “the society of control might thus be characterized by an
intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity … this
control extends well outside the structured sties of social institutions through flexible and
fluctuating networks” (2013, p. 216).
6
This society of control facilitates the “production
and reproduction of life itself” – the primary objective of biopolitics (Hardt & Negri,
2013, p. 216). Hardt and Negri argue that this biopower operates primarily through
organizing the way people think, and the way people act; the goal of this control over
“brains” and “bodies” is to maximize the reproduction of life (2013, p. 216). Visibility
and representations are crucially important to the functioning of control and biopower in
the society of control for two reasons. First, because the society of control is an
intensification of the disciplinary regime, wherein normalizing power functions in large
part via imagined and internalized gazes, the importance of visibility is only intensified in
a society of control. And secondly, power and control are spread via the circulation of
representations across “flexible and fluctuating networks” (Hardt & Negri, 2013, p. 216).
Herman Gray takes up this second point in his essay “Subject(ed) to
Recognition,” in which he argues that media studies scholars must rethink visibility in

5
As Patricia Hill Collins writes in Black Feminist Thought “Whether the treatment of Black women on the
auction block, the voyeuristic treatment of Sarah Bartmann, or the portrayal of Black women within
contemporary pornography, objectifying Black women’s bodies has meant that members from more
powerful groups have all felt entitled to watch Black women. Surveillance now constitutes a major
mechanism of bureaucratic control. For example… within businesses, middle managers supervise Black
women clerical staff” (2000, p. 281)
6
Hardt and Negri point out that the idea of the society of control “remains implicit” in Focuault’s writings
and is actually more fully theorized in Deleuze’s commentary on Foucault (Hardt & Negri, 2013, p. 231).

156
light of the incorporation of civil rights era calls for visibility within neoliberal discourse.
As I mentioned in the introduction, a politics of visibility can mask the power relations
that make visibility possible. In addition, visibility in the twenty-first century United
States matters differently than it did in the 1950s and ’60s. The media industries have
changed such that viewers are now inundated with a proliferation of representation. In
addition, the corporations funding content creation understand audiences to be smaller
and more diverse than in previous eras (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Lotz, 2014). Diverse
representations make money, which means that for media institutions diversity is
incentivized. The result, Gray argues is that
the press for greater media visibility and recognition may constitute a form of
biopolitics. In the context of this emergent biopolitics, along with inscribing
techniques of self reliance and responsibility, claims for increased visibility and
greater representation will likely intensify normativities, managing through
difference in the name of diversity, market choice, and consumer sovereignty.
(2013, p. 792, emphasis added)
What this means is that the power of controlling images in the contemporary media
landscape lies in their ability to intensify norms and value certain embodiments over
others. Although Collins deftly points out the inaccuracies in the controlling images of
the mammy, welfare queen, black lady, jezebel, and hoochie, the mechanisms of control
in the twenty-first century operate through a proliferation of difference in addition to a
perpetuation of negative stereotypes – meaning all images of blackness are controlling
images. The way in which they are controlling, and to what end, are what concern me
here, rather than the fact of their existence. Rather than a decisive break between eras of

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representation and calls for visibility, our current moment is more a moment of
“both/and.” Representation is both necessary and oppressive, both liberatory and
controlling. Without representation we do not exist, yet with it we become objects of
neoliberal subjection.
7

The four representational scripts I identify inform and build upon one another.
Each of these scripts – black and white birth rates as a zero sum game; multiraciality as a
racial buffer; black mothers as sites and sources of tragedy; and black and white
parenting styles as mutually exclusive - are four intersecting and overlapping narratives
about black reproduction found in contemporary U.S. media. Taken together these
narratives intensify the white, middle-class, patriarchal, nuclear family as the norm and
construct and represent black maternity and motherhood as key to mitigating blackness’
threat to this norm. As Herman Gray suggests, one of the consequences of increased
visibility is that these representations of difference and diversity contribute to a
biopolitical management of blackness via intensified normativities. At the end of the day,
two of the norms that Moynihan held up as ideals for black families to strive for as a
solution to racism and inequality still dominate. The patriarchal nuclear family and white
middle-class mothering continue to be idealized within U.S. media culture.
I begin with news reports on demographic changes that rely on Census data – a
representation whose power comes from its assertion that it quantifies the “real” state of
race relations – before moving outward to address how photographs, fictional television
shows, and documentary and narrative features script the themes found in these news

7
Gray’s arguments are in concert with black feminist theorists’ interventions on black women’s
hypervisibility. Scholars such as Nicole Fleetwood (2011), Evelynn Hammonds (1997), bell hooks (1992),
Ralina Joseph (2012), and Kara Keeling (2007) among others have sought to unpack “how vision is
structured, and … explore how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it
constitutes subjects who see and speak in the world” (Hammonds, 1997, p. 152).

158
reports on the United States’ soon-to-be racial reality. In these news stories, journalists
both describe and attempt to make sense of the Census’ claim that the U.S. will be a
majority-minority country by 2042. As I will discuss shortly, the language and images in
these articles is markedly anxious. The subjunctive quality of these reports implies that a
narrative conflict is present even when the journalists do not necessarily describe it as
such. In general, the news coverage contrasts America’s mostly white present with its
imminent non-white future, thus suggesting a racial conflict that will need to be resolved.
This narrative of change, of a problem that arrives and gets resolved, mirrors the structure
of mainstream televisual storytelling. For this reason, I turn to film and television
narratives in the second half of the chapter in order to assess what story exists within
contemporary U.S. media – meaning print, television, and film – about the relationship
between black mothers and America’s racial problem.

A Zero Sum Game: The Threat of The Rising Black Birth Rate
“Fear is born,” or so says the tagline for the 2014 remake of Rosemary’s Baby.
Released as a two-part mini-series, the remake starred Afro-Latino actress Zoe Saldana as
Rosemary, the woman who unwittingly gives birth to the end of the world by carrying the
son of Satan. At the end of the film, much like in the original, Rosemary finds her
newborn son surrounded by Satanists. Unlike in the original, however, the audience sees
the face of Rosemary’s demonic son, and this time he has the face of a mixed-race
African-American boy, his blue eyes a marker of his evil parentage. The mini-series aired
amid a wave of news coverage linking non-white births to unprecedented social and

159
political changes. Both in real life and on television, the births of non-white babies were
bringing about the end of the (white) world.
Two years prior to the birth of this mixed-race son of Satan, demographers
declared that the United States was entering uncharted demographic territory. For the first
time in U.S. history, white babies were the minority of babies born.
8
In May 2012, the
census bureau reported that 50.4% of babies born in the United States were “born to
Latino, Asian, African American, and mixed race parents” (Trounson, 2012). This report
gave new life to news coverage of the “browning” of America, a reporting trend that
intensified in 2008 around the time of Barack Obama’s election. The election of a mixed-
race African American president indicated to many that there was a new racial order in
the United States, a claim supported by the Census Bureau’s 2008 population projections.
As the Wall Street Journal put it, these demographic numbers were “a new milepost on
America's inexorable journey toward greater diversity and a harbinger of the growing
political clout of nonwhites” (Witt, 2008, emphasis added). Journalists reported on these
demographic changes as both an inevitable and ominous phenomenon. Like it or not, the
United States was becoming more diverse. Since 2008, articles with titles like “Whites to
lose majority status in the U.S. by 2042” and “No need to fear a ‘no majority’ America”
have proliferated (Dougherty, 2008; Frey, 2015). These articles focus on the unavoidable
social changes that will take place as white birth rates are outpaced by non-white births.
The projected end of white America, which is set to occur in 2042, echoes post-
emancipation concerns about black birth rates and national demographics. Both these
post-emancipation news articles about demographic changes, and more recent coverage

8
According to Deadline, an online trade magazine for the film industry, NBC greenlit the Rosemary’s
Baby mini-series in December 2013, as the first in its “push in the longform arena” (Andreeva, 2013).

160
of demographics, rely almost exclusively on Census data for their observations and
arguments. The close relationship of print news media and the Census point toward a
longstanding relationship between biopolitical governance and media representation.
9

Newspapers’ reliance on census data in its racial reporting extends the census’s reach as a
“technology of disciplinary power that classifies, examines, and quantifies populations”
(Browne, 2015, p. 57). In all of these articles census data stands as an indisputable fact,
and its role as a method of population management remains uninterrogated. As Simone
Browne points out, however “racial nomenclature as a form of population management
was made official with the taking of the first federal census in 1790” (2015, p. 55). The
Census’s role in quantifying and forecasting the racial makeup of the country, and the
media’s circulation of Census language and predictions, positions both the media and the
Census as essential tools in the state’s biopolitical management of (racial) life.
In this section I examine both the discourse and visuality of these print media
engagements with black reproduction vis-à-vis Census data. My argument is based upon
an analysis of forty-five news articles on racial demographics and the Census published
between 1862 and 1905 along with forty-nine news articles and ten magazine articles on
changes in U.S. racial demographics that were published between 1990 and 2015. The
visual and linguistic conventions which I identify also extend beyond print media. When
these conventions appear in film and television narratives, they draw their discursive
power from the fact that they are commonly used tropes found in print reports on the
“reality” of the United States’ demographic situation, thus making the articles and reports

9
Margo Anderson demonstrates the importance of newspapers in the delivery of Census data to the public
in The American Census: A Social History (1988).

161
that I consider in this section centrally important to the ways that black maternity
circulates as a threat to white political power in U.S. media culture.
Reimagining Race Suicide: Black and White Birth Rates in Opposition

It has long been assumed that the United States would be a minority-majority
nation by mid-century, with the cultural and political ramifications already under
way. …Only now are some demographers realizing that we have missed a trend
that could accelerate that change, the decline in the number of white children and
white women of child-bearing age. (Warren, 2010, p. 21A, emphasis added)

More white Americans are dying than being born for the first time in modern
history …. The big driver … was a drop in white births. … There are fewer white
women of childbearing age – a trend unlikely to change. (Shah, 2013, p. A8,
emphasis added)

The above quotes are excerpted from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
respectively. In each of these articles and others like them, demographic changes are
described as unprecedented, monumental, and taking place faster than expected.
10
These
changes are due in no small part to the decline in white birth rates. Although these news
stories treat these changes as exceptional, this is not the first time that the United States
has undergone dramatic demographic shifts. The country is arguably in a perpetual state

10
A ProQuest search of the 5 most widely circulated newspapers in the United States for articles with the
terms census, demographics, and either majority minority or minority majority turned up 377 results, all
between the years 1982 and 2015, when the search was conducted. My analysis is based upon 36 articles
from the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, combined. As
well as articles from The Atlantic, National Geographic, The National Journal, Newsweek, The New York
Times Upfront, NPR, The Pew Research Center, Scholastic, Time, and US News and World Report. In total
49, articles were analyzed. All of the articles were published after 1990, 35 of them were published
between 2006 and 2015, and of those articles, 28 were published either in the LA Times, New York Times,
USA Today or Wall Street Journal. Also included in this analysis is a book published by Paul Taylor and
the Pew Research Center titled The Next America: Boomers, Millenials, and the Looming Generational
Showdown (2014). The book is not counted in the article number. I chose these articles for analysis based
upon a combination of length and whether the nation’s changing racial demographics was either the
primary focus or considered the primary cause of the issue or problem being discussed in the article.

162
of anxiety about whiteness’ decline.
11
One of the most important incarnations of this
white racial anxiety took place in the decades after the end of the Civil War.
Contemporary discussions of “unprecedented” racial change find their precursor in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when demographic changes were due to the
“addition” of black Americans to the body politic.
12
As the nation used the 1870 and
1890 Census data to try and quantify the effect of blacks’ citizenship status, the number
of white Americans as compared to the number of black Americans took on newfound
significance. As Saidiya Hartman observes, “without the illusion of ‘patriarchal ties’ [to
their white owners] … the African seemed only an outsider and thus a danger to the
social order” (1997, p. 165). During Reconstruction, fears about the possible decline of
the “native-born white” population, while important, were secondary to fears that the
black population would overtake the white population. In the 1880s, there was “the
perception of a discernible [white] ‘us’ encroached upon by black intruders” (Hartman,
1997, p. 165). The twenty-first century articles cited above express a similar fear of racial
encroachment and intrusion. Their tone indicates that these recent demographic changes
snuck up on an unsuspecting white populace. When we consider these contemporary
news reports together, they craft the following narrative: Demographers failed to observe
an important trend – the decline in white birth rates. Unfortunately there are too few
white mothers to reverse this drop in white fertility, and consequently the U.S. must now
face monumental social changes, the likes of which it has never dealt with before. This

11
Throughout U.S. history, the “possessive investment in whiteness” has mitigated this anxiety about
whiteness’ decline. As defined by George Lipsitz, the possessive investment in whiteness is a continual
investment in time, money, and energy in creating and maintaining laws and social policies that make
whiteness a “structured advantage” (Lipsitz, 2006, p. 106).
12
As mentioned in Chapter 2, Saidiya Hartman points out that the rhetoric used to describe these
population changes describe “black citizenship as a foreign appendage grafted onto the national body”
(1997, p. 165)

163
story of white anxiety is a familiar one, however. It bears many similarities to the
discourse of race suicide that proliferated in the U.S just over a century earlier.
In 1903 many newspapers published articles addressing the likelihood of blacks
eventually outnumbering whites in the future. These articles were a response to
Roosevelt’s declaration that race suicide was a national problem, which I discussed in
Chapter One. The majority of these articles used census data to assuage white fears about
black reproduction. To this day, census data continues to play an integral role in national
conversations about the racial order. A Washington Post article published on July 29,
1903 entitled “Race Problem Phase: Will the Negro Multiply So as to Outnumber
Whites,” exemplifies one of the ways in which census data was used to discuss race in
the early twentieth century (Patterson). The article uses this data to address what the
black birthrate might mean for the future of the United States. The author writes,
It will readily be seen that if the negro keeps up his present gait in the way of
adding to the population, and at the same time gradually becomes educated
enough to avoid deaths caused by mere filth and lack of proper attention, the
proportion between the blacks and the whites will be altered immediately for the
worse, and the aristocratic old cradle of the Confederacy will be turned over to the
race of original servants. (R. Patterson, 1903, p. 5)
The emphasis here is on birthrates and population percentages. An explicit link is made
between racial proportions and the social and political order. According to the author, if
the percentage of black Americans increases whatsoever in relation to the white
population, southern white political dominance will immediately end. Most articles

164
acknowledge that a growing black population is worth fearing, but they also argue that
these “proportional” population changes are unlikely to actually occur.
Only two months prior to the publication of the above article, The Washington
Post published an article with the following headline: “Race Suicide Problem: No Cause
for Alarm” (“Race Suicide Problem,” 1903). This particular article, like many of its kind,
catalogues the birth rates of native and foreign born white Americans throughout the
country. In the final paragraph the journalist suggests “there is consolation in the census
figures for those who fear that the colored population of the United States is increasing
out of proportion to the increase in the number of whites” (1903, p. E7). The consolation
comes in the form of the high mortality rate of black Americans, “especially among
Negro children” (1903, p. E7). When the high mortality rate of black adults and children
is taken into account, African American birth rates are lower than whites in every state
except for Mississippi. The journalist uses the deaths of black Americans, and especially
black children, to ease white fears about declining white political dominance.
The contemporary focus on birth rates is historically continuous with these early
twentieth century fears. Consider these headlines: “Recession Big Factor as Birthrate
Falls,” from the Wall Street Journal (Jordan, 2012); “Minority Report: New US Data
Shows More Ethnic Babies than White” found in Time,(Subramanian, 2012); “More
Whites Dying than Being Born,” in the WSJ (Shah, 2013); “Infant Data Show Historic
Shift in US Demographics: Children born to minority parents now majority of all births”
in the LA Times, (Trounson, 2012); “New Faces of Childhood: Census Shows Hispanic
and Asian Children Surging as Whites, Blacks Shrink” in the WSJ (Dougherty, 2011);
“White Women Influencing Shift to Minority Majority Nation” in the New York Times

165
(Warren, 2010). Each of these news stories foregrounds the role birth rates play in
demographic changes. As birth rates rise and fall, there are too many of some children
and not enough of others. In this way, these contemporary demographic anxieties harken
back to the concerns about white mothers not having enough (white) children that I
discussed in Chapter One.
An article published in the Wall Street Journal in 2008, titled “Whites to Lose
Majority Status by 2042,” illustrates the ways in which these news stories communicate
racial difference in the language of reproduction. In articles that focus on the decline in
white births, differential birth rates are the difference that makes a difference between
whites and other races. According to the article, the white baby-boomer population is in
decline, Hispanic growth “has come from births,” and the non-Hispanic black population
will increase “mostly because of birthrates” (Dougherty, 2008, p. A3). The primary
concern in these articles is whiteness’s projected contraction and decline. The way the
demographic data is visualized underscores this concern. The graph included in the
article is entitled “Declining Share” and is just a series of downward slanting horizontal
lines. It charts the projected white population percentage between 2008 and 2050. This
kind of data visualization is unable to communicate absolute numbers. It is possible that
this graph would look the same even if there were the same number of whites in 2050 as
in 2010. The only thing the graph communicates is a dramatic projected loss of white
power.

166

Figure 10: “Declining Share” graph, found in the Wall Street Journal article, “Whites to Lose
Majority Status in 2042, (Dougherty, 2008, p. A3).

At the time of the Wall Street Journal article’s publication there were no standard
visualization conventions used by the Census Bureau. The U.S. Census Bureau does not
feature many visualizations of its data, and only began making data visualizations
publically available on its website in July 2012. Since 2012, bar graphs and maps make
up the majority of visualizations available on the Census site.
13
When the Census Bureau
creates visualizations of demographic data similar to the data analyzed in the news
articles considered here, they primarily use story maps or interactive maps.
14
Which is to
say, the Wall Street Journal’s line graph, which is based upon the Brookings Institution’s
analysis of Census data, is not a current Census convention. Much like predicting the

13
Between July 2012 and December 2015, eleven of a total of eighty-nine data visualizations used line
graphs. Of these, five presented the data with just a line graph, and six used other kinds of data
visualizations in addition to the line graph. In general however, the census uses a map of the United States
as the basis and background of most of its data visualizations.
14
There is one somewhat similar graph, which was published on January 21, 2015, and is titled “Our
Changing Nation, Black Population in the US: 2000-2060.” It uses both a bar graph and a line graph to
illustrate the projected black population. The bar graph shows the population change in terms of millions of
people, and the line graph illustrates the change in the total population percentage. That this is the only
graph of its kind in the census’s visualization section demonstrates the Census Bureau’s continued concern
with black population growth, in spite of the fact that black reproduction is not actually driving population
change. This graph still provides more information than the one used in the Wall Street Journal in 2008.
Additionally, the projected black population change – from 12.9 % to 17.9% - is much less dramatic than
the decline of whiteness which is charted in the WSJ article, which shows a 20% decline in the white
population.

167
weather forecast, predicting demographic changes gets less accurate the further into the
future the predictions get. This unavoidable inaccuracy does not, however, prevent think
tanks like the Pew Research Center and the Brookings Institution (upon whose data
analysis most of these news articles rely) from making long-term demographic
predictions. To return to the graph included in the Wall Street Journal article, the use of a
line graph with a forty year timeline helps to conjure up a clear image of the decline of
whiteness. The visual rhetoric paints the picture of the inevitable plummeting of white
political power.
Whiteness in Decline: The Demographic Disorientation of Changing Racial Birth Rates

Both the graph and the article itself circle around a fear of the future loss of white
privilege. This article was published in the lead up to the 2008 presidential election, and
the article attributes Barack Obama’s appeal and success to these demographic changes.
The author writes “shifting demographics may change everything from local and national
elections to bilingual education and the rationale behind affirmative-action plans”
(Dougherty, 2008, p. A3). The Wall Street Journal pits the white population against a
monolithic non-white population. With phrases like “big changes,” “going into decline,
“stratify American politics,” and “the first group to tip” Dougherty produces a vision of
American politics divided simply along racial lines (2008, p. A3). Even generational
differences become obscured by racial differences. Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with
the Pew Hispanic Center is quoted as saying “‘You always get that generational shift, but
now there's a racial layer over it’” (Dougherty, 2008, p. A3). As far as the Wall Street
Journal is concerned, the racial layer supersedes the generational component. This stance
is not limited to the more conservative Wall Street Journal either.

168
More recently, in April 2014, the Pew Research Center released The Next
America.
15
This report focuses on what Pew researchers identify as the “looming
generational showdown” in the United States (Taylor, 2014, p. 17). According to Pew’s
description of the report, “the America of the near future will look nothing like the
America of the recent past” (“The Next America,” n.d.) Immigration, changing birth
rates, and an aging white population are cited as the leading causes of these changes. The
study claims “our immigrant stock … is projected to make up about 37% of our
population by mid-century, the highest share in our history” (Taylor, 2014, p. 70). The
Pew report does not explain how this projection is calculated. And while it is true that if
this projection is accurate 37% would be the largest percentage of immigrants in the
nation’s history, this statistic is less groundbreaking if you consider that in 1900, 34.5%
of the population were immigrants
16
. While Pew claims that large immigrant populations
in the United States are more the norm than the exception, their lengthy descriptions of
“our new American tapestry” suggests that the recent increase in immigration is
remarkable (Taylor, 2014, p. 89).
Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological approach to whiteness is helpful for explaining
why changing demographics are characterized as threatening in these news stories. Each
of these stories focuses on at least one of the following concerns - the impact on
implicitly white political institutions, and the meaning of whiteness as a category. The
power of whiteness lies in its ability to be the norm and operate as the unmarked central

15
Written by a senior research at Pew, Paul Taylor, the report actually begins with a quote from Daniel
Patrick Moynihan on the value of statistics. According to Taylor “We [Pew] call ourselves a “fact tank”
and we’re fond of the aphorism attributed to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: ‘Everyone is entitled to his
own opinions, but not his own facts” (2014, p. vii).
16
This “34.5%” statistic is included in the Pew report, but no discussion about the relatively small
difference between 34.5% and 37% exists.

169
category against which all other racial identifications are compared. The shrinking white
population challenges the normativity of whiteness because it makes it harder for white
bodies to “not have to face their whiteness” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 156). Facing whiteness,
meaning contemplating it as a racial category in its own right, makes it harder for
whiteness to go unnoticed.
To be noticeably racialized has always been a marginal position within U.S.
history. Building on the work of Frantz Fanon, Ahmed begins her phenomenology of
whiteness with those bodies that are excluded from the category. Starting with the
noticeably racialized body allows Ahmed to explore the consequences of having one’s
racial identity be visible. She finds that those left out of the comfort of whiteness are
necessarily disoriented by institutions that are oriented around whiteness. As Ahmed
writes “whiteness becomes a social and bodily orientation given that some bodies will be
more at home in a world that is orientated around whiteness” (2007, p. 160). These news
articles about the United States’ changing racial demographics express concern about the
disorientation of whiteness itself. As whites lose their majority status, political
institutions once oriented around whiteness may “shift,” “stratify,” and “tip” away from
whiteness (Dougherty, 2008). Reporters also suggest that the declining white population
will cause the definition of whiteness to change. In other words, there will soon be fewer
bodies embodying whiteness as it exists today, and this is “a transformation that is
occurring faster than anticipated” (Roberts, p. A1).
The fact that every major news publication in the United States featured an article
about the predicted demographic changes suggests that it is a change worthy of public
anxiety. After all, as the Wall Street Journal headline indicates, whites are “losing” their

170
“status as majority” (Dougherty, 2008, p. A3). Just one week after the above Wall Street
Journal article was published, The New York Times featured a cover story titled “A
Generation Away, Minorities May Become Majority in the US” (Roberts, 2008, p. A1).
Unlike the Wall Street Journal article, the Times feature focuses less on the political
ramifications of these demographic changes and more on the likelihood that the definition
of whiteness will be expanded. With fewer bodies embodying whiteness, the ability of
whiteness to cohere as an orientation is put in jeopardy.
The New York Times article includes four different visualizations of the
demographic data. Unlike the Wall Street Journal graph, the New York Times graph
charts the population changes in terms of absolute numbers rather than percentages.
Whereas the Wall Street Journal graph visualizes whiteness in decline, this graph
visualizes the encroachment of the “Other” on white Americans.

Figure 11: “Majority Minorities: Population Projections” graph, found in the New York Times
article “A Generation Away, Minorities May Become Majority in U.S.” (S. Roberts, 2008).

The result is that the line representing the “non-Hispanic white” population is a straight
line.
17
A thick, black, upward slanting diagonal line labeled “Other” bisects the faint
dotted line of whiteness in the year 2042. In this graph whiteness is stagnating, rather

17
The line is straight because the actual number of white Americans is estimated to remain at a constant
200 million between 2008 and 2050.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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than declining. Because the line representing the non-Hispanic white population is almost
completely horizontal it implies a lack of motion, whiteness is a constant. Here whiteness
is the norm against which the growth of the “Other” population is to be compared. But
because this “Other” line crosses the line of whiteness, what we see is that the norm of
whiteness is reached and exceeded by “Other” Americans. These graphs that visualize the
demographic data communicate a sense of inevitability with respect to whiteness’
decline. The pictorial reinforcement helps the demographic predications appear less
speculative. At the same time, the graphs help to conjure images of an imagined non-
white future. Their rhetorical function straddles the line between news images and public
health graphs. In About to Die, Barbie Zelizer examines the function of news images of
death and dying. Zelizer writes,
Coverage of unsettled events, then, turns to visuals when information is thought
most needed …. As often as not, these images push the “as if ” side of events—
the emotional, imagined, and contingent—as much as they reflect what transpires
on the ground. (2010, p. 17)
Although writing about photographic images, Zelizer’s point translates to the
demographic charts and graphs published in these different newspapers. The projected
end of white America is both an unsettled and unsettling event. Their “as if” component –
the projections of racial demographics into the future – pushes feelings of fear and
anxiety onto readers. The similarity between these charts and graphs and visualizations of
epidemiological data also helps to communicate a need for population management.
Although there may not be established conventions for visually representing Census data,
there are conventions for visualizing information on health and diseases. As Alan

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Peterson and Deborah Lupton write in The New Public Health, “epidemiology depends
upon comparisons usually expressed as ‘rates,’ taking into account changes over time and
between geographical areas or social categories” (1996, p. 31). Presenting demographic
changes in terms of rates visualized on graphs, associatively links these population shifts
to epidemiological outbreaks. Much like the field of epidemiology itself, these graphs and
articles perform both “regulatory and surveillance functions” (Petersen & Lupton, 1996,
p. 30).
Even though there are no explicit references to the need to manage the black
population, these news reports’ reliance on the conventions of public health and
demography make them part and parcel of the state’s biopolitical project. These charts
and statistics lend an air of facticity to largely speculative news reports. Ultimately their
emphasis is on the relational expansion and contraction of the white and non-white
population, more so than the expansion or contraction of the general U.S. population. The
racial categorization that takes place in the articles necessarily hierarchizes racial
identities. In addition, the consistency with which these reports compare whiteness to
“everything else” produces and reinforces whiteness as the demographic norm. In turn
white fertility rates and family practices continue to function as the standard to which all
others are compared. These charts are controlling images in the sense that they focus the
readers’ attention on the future loss of whiteness and obscure the hypothetical nature of
these statistical analyses. They help control the narrative about racial birth rates in a way
that heightens fears about the demise of the white social order.

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From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial – Multiraciality As Racial Buffer

Even as the category of whiteness expands to include those currently excluded, it
will never expand so far as to include blackness.
18
Blackness still remains less mutable
than other racial categorizations because whiteness is defined in relation to it. The news
coverage of demographic changes supports Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s thesis that the United
States is shifting away from a bi-racial order (defined primarily in terms of black and
white) and toward a tri-racial order, structured hierarchically into white, honorary white,
and collective black racial categories (2004). In this tri-racial America, which the articles
describe and Bonilla-Silva theorizes, the majority of the multiracial population will exist
in the honorary white population, and this category will “buffer” racial conflict between
whites and blacks (2004, p. 933). As the racial order shifts, two things remain constant,
whiteness remains at the top of the racial hierarchy and blackness at the bottom. This
honorary-white category is the least stable of the three, its boundaries shifting in time
with the political demands of the moment. Bonilla-Silva writes “the honorary white
strata, … is the product of the socio-political needs of whites to maintain white
supremacy” (2004, p. 942). As the Wall Street Journal describes it “the definition of
whiteness keeps shifting. Groups have been welcomed in or booted out; people opt out,
sue to get in or change their minds and jump back and forth” (Kronholz, 2008). The
boundaries of whiteness are permeable, but not as susceptible to individual whims as the
Wall Street Journal describes them to be. The importance of multiracial Americans to
this new tri-racial order gives increased import to motherhood as the “sign that facilitates
a smooth transition between races” (Joseph, 2012, p. 152). Mothers are still considered

18
In spite of all these demographic changes, black Americans are projected to still have higher infant
mortality rates and a lower life expectancy than the rest of the population.

174
primary caregivers, and as such mothers of multiracial children will be the ones
instructing their children on their multiracial embodiment. Proper maternal instruction
can facilitate the child’s access to honorary white status, and failures can lead children to
instead be functionally regarded as black.
19
As I will discuss in the following sections on
representations of racialized parenting, black and white parental practice takes on
heightened significance in a tri-racial order, wherein one’s behavior plays a role in one’s
ability access the privileges of honorary whiteness.
Consequently, multiracial reproduction occupies a unique position in these
demographic changes. Because of its perceived ability to dissolve racial boundaries and
difference, racial mixing is simultaneously disruptive, corruptive, and restorative. Within
the news coverage of demographic changes, magazine features and photography, and
fictional television dramas, multi-racialism is alternatingly treated as a valuable white
buffer and threatening white contaminant. In a New York Times Upfront article on “The
Changing Face of America,” the author suggests that whiteness may remain dominant in
spite of changing demographics because “with the upward trend in interethnic and
interracial marriages, ethnic and racial definitions may be different in 20 or 30 years from
what they are today” (Majerol, 2013, p. 9).
20
The incorporation of multiracial and
multiethnic Americans under the rubric of whiteness may protect white dominance from
the encroaching minority population. These changes still result, however, in a “country,
where fewer than half the residents will be whites of European ancestry, raising issues of

19
Critical race theorist Ian Haney-López uses the term functionally black to describe the way in which “in
terms of history, geography, oppressions, and dreams” some Mexican American activists in the 1960s
understood their racial identity and oppression as being aligned with blackness (I. Haney-López, 2003, p.
167).
20
The New York Times Upfront is an educational magazine published by The New York Times and
Scholastic, and distributed in high schools across the country.

175
national identity and cohesion” (Dougherty, 2009, p. 11). Even if the definition of
whiteness is expanded, the question remains whether it can cohere as a category, or racial
orientation, after such an expansion.
These feelings about reproduction cross-pollinate different genres and mediums.
For example, television shows like Rosemary’s Baby (2014) and Extant (2014) portray
multiracial reproduction with a similar mixture of fear and fascination. On Rosemary’s
Baby, Rosemary’s mixed-race son is the son of Satan. Although the Satanists who
facilitated his conception are excited by his birth, the implication is that he will bring
about the end of the world. Extant, which premiered on CBS a few months after
Rosemary’s Baby, tells the story of African American astronaut Molly Woods’ (Halle
Berry) nonconsensual impregnation with a human-alien hybrid. Ultimately the series
hinges on the question of whether human-alien hybrids will save humanity or lead to its
extinction.
Even though think tanks, newspapers, and even fictional television shows portray
multiracial births as a driving force of dramatic population changes, in actuality
multiraciality has a proportionally minimal effect on these changes. Immigration and
immigrant birth rates are having the biggest impact.
21
This emphasis on multiraciality
follows a decade of increased attention on multiracialism in the U.S. public sphere in the
1990s and early ’00s. During this time, multiracial Americans, particularly mixed-race
African-Americans, were increasingly represented in both the news media and popular
culture. Celebrities like Tiger Woods, Mariah Carey, Jessica Alba, Halle Berry, and
Alicia Keys, brought a new visibility to multi-racial blackness. Films and television

21
Although many Latino immigrants could ostensibly identify as multiracial, these individuals are not
counted in the multiracial population projections.

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shows like Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), The Matrix (1999), Dark Angel (2000), Pitch
Black (2000), Underworld (2003), and The L Word (2004), among others, featured story
lines that dealt with mixed-race or hybrid identities, and most often starred actors who
identified as multiracial. In the news, multiracial visibility took place primarily in
coverage of the multiracial movement of the 1990s and the struggle to create a multiracial
option on the 2000 Census.
22

Scholars such as Jared Sexton (2008), Ralina Joseph (2012), and Kimberly
DaCosta (2007) have discussed the ways in which many advocates within the multiracial
movement were driven by a desire to transcend or move past the problem of race. As
Joseph writes in Transcending Blackness, “celebrating mixed-race is a way to value
whiteness over blackness and still safely engage with people of color” (2012, p. 26). In
the 1990s, many of the advocacy efforts geared toward changing the way the Census
accounted for race, embodied this valuation of whiteness over blackness. Conservative
politicians co-opted the more liberal goals of inclusion of the multiracial movement, and
used it as an opportunity to minimize the government’s ability to see the race of its
citizens. As Jared Sexton points out, both the conservative desire to use multiracialism as
a means to do away with the problem of race, and the liberal goal of multiracial visibility
share a “structure of feeling” and “an overarching unity of purpose” (2008, p. 48).
23
Both
are committed to a disavowal of, and distancing from, blackness as racial category. While

22
As described on the Project RACE website, the multiracial movement “advocates for multiracial
children, teens, and adults so they may have the option of marking their entire heritage on forms that
require racial and ethnic identification. We, our children, or our grandchildren have been denied the
opportunity to indicate all of our races on a variety of forms” (“About Us”). Project RACE, whose slogan is
“Reclassify all our children equally” was one of the two major advocacy organizations that testified before
Congress on behalf of multiracial classfication in anticipation of the 2000 Census.
23
I discuss structures of feeling, a term first used by Raymond Williams, in more depth later in this
chapter.

177
the celebration of multiracialism might indicate a new era of racial inclusion, the
recognition of multiracial Americans provides a buffer between whiteness and blackness
that can ease white anxieties about blackness’ proximity.
24
Although the face of America
might be changing, these changes can still be oriented around whiteness.
America’s Changing Face: Reproducing New Racial Taxonomies

Although the language and charts included in many of these articles cast white
and black reproduction as constantly in tension with one another, not all the coverage of
demographic changes does so. In articles that talk about the face of America the emphasis
is on racial mixture rather than competing birth rates. Although the nature of the images
may be different, these “face of America” narratives result in the intensification of the
same norms of whiteness and patriarchal nuclear families. In addition because these
articles frequently feature photographs, they invoke a different discursive history of racial
classification and hierarchization that has been used as a technique of racial governance.
Much like mug shots or government issued ID photos, these images of multiracial faces
participate in what disabilities studies scholar Ellen Samuels refers to as “fantasies of
identification” (2014). These fantasies seek to identify and categorize potentially
disruptive bodies in order to make them known and thus less dangerous. Samuels argues
that these narratives of identification

24
Kimberly DaCosta does argues that Barack Obama has caused mixed race individuals to transition from
being “seen as out of place in American culture … [to being] depicted as fully belonging to this period in
history” (DaCosta, 2009, p. 8). This post-Obama period of history is itself frequently characterized as one
that is out of place in the longer history of the United States, however. As the Pew Research Center
describes it in their book on demographic changes “These shifts have left no realm of society untouched”
(Taylor, 2014, p. 4).

178
combine a certain wistful desire to know and understand certain identities with a
persistent and often violent imposition of identity upon people whose subjectivity
is overruled by a homogenizing, bureaucratic imperative. (2014, p. 3)
Samuels describes one way that representations of diversity and difference coincide with
the state’s biopolitical goals. These images are able to homogenize difference, thus
transforming the multiple iterations of racial mixture into a more homogeneous, and thus
more manageable multiracial category.
25

The National Geographic, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Wall
Street Journal and The Pew Research Center are among the sources to report on the
changing face of America.
26
Whereas in the 1980s and early ’90s journalists frequently
reported on the “browning of America,” now demographic changes are often described in
term’s of America’s changing face. Rhetoric about America’s new or changing face
became more widespread after Time magazine’s 1993 special issue on immigration,
which featured a cover story on “The New Face of America.” The issue’s cover image
was the computer generated face of a multiracial woman that Time argued was a preview
of America’s racial future. As Lauren Berlant writes, this special issue and its focus on
multiracial reproduction and citizenship,
Installs the future citizen, not in a family that has come from somewhere else, but
in a couple form begotten by a desire to reproduce in private; that is to say, in a

25
To a certain degree, photographs of multiracial individuals do open up more space for the disruption of
the norm of whiteness than the charts and graphs discussed earlier. In spite of this, the individual quality of
the photographs coincides nicely with neoliberal ideology’s privileging of the individual. Furthermore,
these images still rely upon a black-white paradigm and a firmly entrenched racial visual economy wherein
different visual signifiers of race are valued differently.
26
PBS also aired a four-part series in 2010 titled Faces of America hosted by the well-known African
American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., which featured Gates uncovering the ethnic and racial
history of twelve famous Americans. As Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White write “Faces of America
offered the truth of race as informatics commodity and as a prize more for its viewers than its subjects”
(Nakamura & Chow-White, 2012, p. 3).

179
postpolitical domain of privacy authorized by national culture and law. (1997, p.
203)
Time, is preoccupied with what the future will look like and its political implications, but
rather than discuss the history of where recent immigrants have come from, they frame
population changes in reproductive terms.

Figure 12: “The New Face of America,” Time Magazine, Nov. 18, 1993. Cover Credit:
Photographs for Time by Ted Thai.

These reproductive terms are themselves more private and apolitical. Reproduction takes
place in the private sphere and is protected by privacy laws. Immigration may be
browning America, but reproduction is giving the United States a new face, and this face
is young, beautiful, female, and mostly white. As Sarah Banet-Weiser writes in The Most
Beautiful Girl in the World, effectively “the editors of the magazine … assured their
public that any conflicts or potential crises were again subverted through feminine
representation” (1999, p. 168). This is a racially nonthreatening face, ready to be
assimilated into whiteness. Twenty years later, U.S. publications are still displaying and
analyzing the face of multiracial reproduction. The difference, however, is that these
faces are not computer generated. These are the future faces Time imagined in 1993. The

180
future is already here, but it looks more phenotypically black than the postwhite “national
fantasy” put forward by Time (Berlant, 1997, p. 201).
National Geographic’s October 2013 feature, “The Changing Face of America,”
is a paradigmatic example of the more recent journalistic focus on the multiracial face.
According to the article “we are a country where race is no longer so black or white”
(Funderburg, 2013).
27
The article asserts that the United States has already moved past a
bi-racial, black-white racial order before moving to its actual focus, the optics of
honorary whiteness in an America with a tri-racial stratification. “The Changing Face of
America” features the art photography of Martin Schoeller, a portrait artist who, in his
own words, “like[s] building catalogs of faces that invite[s] people to compare them”
(Martin Schoeller, 2013). The article discusses racial mixing and the “intrigue” of its
visual signification; opening with the question “what is it about the faces on these pages
that we find so intriguing?” (Funderburg, 2013). When you click on each photograph to
enlarge it, you can learn the subject’s age, place of residence, how they self-identify, as
well as which Census boxes they check. Both aesthetic and classificatory, this photo
project allows readers to participate in “the visible economy of race, an economy of parts
that enables the viewer to ascertain the subject’s rightful place in a racial chain of being”
(Wiegman, 1995, p. 21). Not unlike a casta painting, this catalog of faces invites viewers

27
In April 2012, Los Angeles Magazine had a special issue for the twenty year anniversary of the L.A.
Riots, which featured similar multiracial imagery on its cover. The issue was published with three different
covers, and each featured a portrait photograph of the face of a “real” mixed-race Angeleno. Underneath
the magazine title and on top of their faces were words describing their particular racial mixture. The
headings read: “I am Latina/ I am Black / I am L.A.”; “I am Asian/ I am White/ I am L.A.”; “I am Black/ I
am White/ I am L.A.” (“I Am L.A.,” 2012). The subheading for all three versions of the cover was the
same: “20 years after the riots the city has a different complexion. So what does race mean anymore?
Everything” (“I Am L.A.,” 2012). Much like the Time cover, and the National Geographic feature, these
covers seek to make the mixed race body legible. They hold up the interracial face as evidence of progress
and a symbol of the racial future.

181
to locate racial difference in differing facial features.
28
There are twenty-five interactive
photographs displayed in a five-by-five grid. Of these twenty-five images, eleven
participants are multi-racial African Americans. The image layout, and the captions with
racial and ethnic identifications encourages comparison.

Figure 13: “The Changing Face of America: Interactive Gallery” found on
nationalgeographic.om. Published October 2013. Photo Credit: Martin Schoeller

Schoeller is transparent about his desire to facilitate these comparisons, and the text of
the article encourages racial comparisons as well. As the article’s author writes, “a study
of brain activity … showed that subjects register race in about one-tenth of a second,
even before they discern gender. … We assign meaning in the blink of an eye”
(Funderburg, 2013). In other words, the visible economy of race is scientifically proven
and consequently naturalized as a fact of life. Readers do not have to feel guilty about
attempting to locate, or fix, the racial identity of the photographic subjects.

28
Writing on the social function of casta paintings in 18
th
century Mexico, Magali Carrera argues “there is
a continuing production of casta paintings through the [18
th
] century, at the same time as the mixed-blooded
people are disappearing in general from social apperception. … The visual strategy of surveillance is not
just about looking; rather, it constructs the very object of its observation: hybrid bodies, that is, people of
mixed blood” (Carrera, 2003, p. xvii). Schoeller’s photographs similarly construct the multiracial body and
subjects it to racialized surveillance.

182
The way in which Schoeller’s photographs enhance each subject’s eyes,
underscores the importance of light and vision to racial taxonomies.
29
As Richard Dyer
writes in White, “we live in a light culture” (1997, p. 106). As Dyer explains it, there is an
epistemology of light, wherein light is associated with both knowledge and power. The
invention of photography and film, both of which are technologies of light, helped to
make this light-based way of knowing a kind of visual common-sense. The epistemology
of light is important here, because it structures how we perceive and privilege race.
Within photography, the “criteria of proper whiteness … are expressed in terms of
degrees of translucence” (Dyer, 1997, p. 113). Whiteness is made photographically
visible to the extent that light is able to shine through the photographic subject (Dyer,
1997, p. 115).

Figure 14: “Changing Faces” found in National Geographic’s “The Changing Face of America,”
published Oct. 2013. Original caption reads: “Picture of two modern American multi-racial
boys”(Funderburg, 2013). Photo Credit: Martin Schoeller

Schoeller’s distinctive photographic style uses large banks of light to create noticeable
eye lights in his portraits. This gives the subject’s eyes a reflective, almost glowing
quality. Within the epistemology of light, this technique implicitly highlights the
subject’s whiteness. It gives their eyes a more transparent quality and creates a feeling

29
Schoeller has built a career on taking close-up portraits that in some way resemble mug shots.

183
that light is emanating from within the subjects. As Dyer writes “those who can let the
light through … those are the people who should rule and inherit the earth” (Dyer, 1997,
p. 121).
30
The history of photography supports Dyer’s assertion that “white radiance” is
contrasted with the opacity of the class and racial differences that exclude subjects from
the privileges of whiteness.
Schoeller’s photographic style both emphasizes whiteness and makes racial
differences more visible, particularly those differences signified by eye color. This
comparative gesture is intentional on Schoeller’s part. In an interview about his
photographic style with National Geographic he states,
it enables the viewer to look at eyes in a different way. It’s not just eyes of a
person, it’s like … how are eyes different? You can study different eyes. You can
study different lips. (Martin Schoeller, 2013)
Eyes, lips, and noses are physical features commonly associated with racial difference. In
the context of an article on multiracialism and the changing racial order, this artistic
attempt to encourage viewers to identify and study racial difference perpetuates the idea
that the body is “the origin of racial truth” (Wiegman, 1995, p. 28). As Robin Wiegman
argues in American Anatomies, visually identifying the body’s racial truth is a key
component of “Western economies of visibility,” which are also always visual economies
of race (1995, p. 6). This emphasis on eye color is also taken up in Rosemary’s Baby and
Extant, particularly in the scenes that are meant to communicate the dangerous quality of
the children’s parentage.
31
In Rosemary’s Baby, when Rosemary first sees her son she

30
This is also supported by the fact that Schoeller is most well know for using this style of portraiture to
photograph celebrities and politicians.
31
Elsewhere we see references to the body as a site of racial truth on shows like Black-ish, and The
Fosters in moments when the multiracial black characters assert their blackness with reference to their

184
exclaims “What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with his eyes” (Rosemary’s Baby,
2014). The infant has bright, glowing blue-eyes. Their brightness looks artificial and
resembles the brightness of the eyes of Martin Schoeller’s photographic subjects. Halle
Berry’s character on Extant, has a similarly frightening encounter with her own half-
human son, whose eyes also glow unnaturally.

The apocalyptic tenor of Extant and Rosemary’s Baby echoes the tone of much of
the news coverage of the United States’ demographic changes. On these shows, racial
fear becomes coded as fear of the alien other. While this is hardly a new theme for
science fiction, both Extant and Rosemary’s Baby represent this frightening alien-ness via
well-known signifiers of mixed-race identity.
32
In the representations found on Extant
and Rosemary’s Baby, black women are the ones who bear and raise children whose
racial mixture is so dangerous that it might end the world. When white women give birth
to these children, they die in childbirth.
33
Both main characters non-consensually become
surrogate mothers for dangerous mixed-race African American boys. On Extant, Molly
Woods’ son Ahdu rapidly ages and begins having sex with human women. Every woman
he has sex with becomes pregnant and ultimately dies while giving birth to a human-alien
hybrid child. Ahdu’s quest to create a population of human-alien hybrids leads to the
death of many human women, the majority of whom are played by white actresses. In

identifiably black body parts. In the pilot episode of Black-ish, the main character André Johnson suggests
that his mixed-race wife Bow is not “really black.” Bow responds “If I’m not really black, can somebody
please tell my hair and my ass” (“Pilot,” 2014).
32
Science fiction books, films, and television shows frequently address cultural fears of racial
contamination. This typically occurs metaphorically with storylines involving aliens, monsters, cyborgs, or
robots. See Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (Nama, 2008); “Dark City: White Flight
and the Urban Science Fiction Film in Postwar America” (Avila, 2001); “Horses in Blackface: Visualizing
Race as Species Difference in Planet of the Apes” (McHugh, 2000); Planet of the Apes as American Myth
(Greene, 1996).
33
Both the films Mother and Child (García, 2010) and Black or White (Binder, 2015) also feature white
mothers who die giving birth to their multiracial African American children.

185
contrast to the dead, white, human women, the hybrid population consists primarily of
multiracial African-Americans. They are all descendants of African American Molly
Woods. The hybrids’ rapid population growth and the reproductive threat they pose to
implicitly white human women soon becomes cause for governmental concern and
intervention. Yet again, black men threaten vulnerable white women and the costs of
giving birth to black children are exceedingly tragic. On Extant, hybrid reproduction
closely mirrors fears about the reproduction of blackness.
The show’s discourse about quantifying and managing the hybrid threat
resembles the way in which the United States’ recent demographic changes have been
characterized and represented. These rhetorical parallels are clearest during the scene in
which the head of the Global Security Commission, Tobias Shepherd uncovers the extent
of the hybrid threat. In the scene, Shepherd communicates with a threat assessment
computer program about how to deal with the rapidly growing hybrid population. The
computerized voice informs Shepherd that unless a deadly, hybrid-specific virus is
released, “In 6.5 months, the homo sapiens genome will be diluted to a point that an
extinction event is inevitable” (“You Say You Want an Evolution,” 2015). As the
computer program warns Shepherd of humanity’s imminent extinction, it displays a
population graph on the computer screen in order to underscore its point. The graph
shows a general upward trend in the hybrid population in comparison to a downward
slope of the human population. Where the two lines approach one another is marked in
red and labeled “Extinction Imminent.”

186

Figure 15: “Life on Earth” found in Extant, Season 2, Episode 6, (“You Say You Want an
Evolution,” 2015).

This pseudo-scientific representation of humanity’s imminent extinction is visually
similar to the graphs on the United States’ demographic changes that I analyzed earlier.
In those graphs the New York Times and Wall Street Journal show the rise in the U.S.’s
non-white population as a contraction of whiteness’ dominance and power. Graphs of this
sort have proliferated in reports on demographic changes since 2008. Consequently, in
the four seconds of Extant that this fictional graph fills the screen, the show is able to
associatively link the fictional threat of human extinction, to the “real world problem” of
white decline. On Extant, racial difference gets coded as alien difference, which then is
ultimately still represented as racial difference. And this racial-cum-alien-cum-racial
difference is threatening the existence of white humanity. Race becomes a metaphor for
itself, and black mothers are at the center of this not-quite metonymic apocalypse.
Ultimately, the media’s focus on birth rates and racial phenotype relies upon and
perpetuates a belief in a biological conception of racial identity and racial inheritance.
These representations of rising black birth rates situate black motherhood as a biological
threat to whiteness. As I discuss in the following two sections, fictional representations
also show black motherhood and mothering as a social threat to whiteness via narratives
about the tragedy and pathology of black parenting. In these narratives, black mothers

187
play a pivotal role in teaching their children (im)proper racial feelings, feelings which
will determine their ability to perform the colorblind ethos required of honorary
whiteness. Even in a tri-racial order with a multiracial buffer between whiteness and
blackness, black maternity remains biologically and socially risky for the white
patriarchal state.

Attaching Bad Feelings to Black Mothers: Representing Black Maternity as
Trouble(d)

Representations of black mothering as fraught, tragic, and disordered are not
exclusive to science fiction narratives. Film and television dramas and comedies engage
with these tropes as well. As I will discuss, there is a longer history of representing grief
ridden black mothers in U.S. news, literature, and televisual media. In one of the earliest
autobiographical representations of black motherhood in the United States, Harriet
Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs writes that enslaved motherhood
comes “with peculiar sorrows” because her children “may all be torn from her” (2000, p.
18). Although I do not want to reify black motherhood as necessarily tragic and mired in
loss, the long representational history of tragic black motherhood makes the grief-ridden
black mother a powerful controlling image even in a representational landscape where
there are joyful images of black mothers. In addition, there is a closely related genre of
writing wherein black authors instruct younger family members on the violent realities
of race and racism. These include works like James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time
(1963), Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Racism Explained to My Daughter (1988), Douglas
Kearney’s Patter (2014), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015).
Taken together, these representations of tragic black motherhood and texts that relate

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how black parents teach their children to navigate racism contributes to what I will
discuss in the next section – the representation of black and white parenting styles as
mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed strategies. In this section, however, I focus
specifically on black maternity and motherhood and the structure of feeling about black
motherhood that cross-pollinates both politics and popular culture, one which frames
black motherhood as a public problem in need of a solution. On Extant and Rosemary’s
Baby, black mothers are sources of fear and grief. Extant in particular, portrays a
growing non-white population as frightening, echoing the tenor of many conversations
about the United States’ demographic changes. Elsewhere, in films like Mother and
Child (2010), Fruitvale Station (2013), and Lila and Eve (2015) and on television shows
such as The Fosters (2013), and Orange is the New Black (2013), black maternity and
mothers are represented as grief-ridden as well as sites and sources of trauma.
In this section, I trace three discourses that shape public feelings about black
motherhood and chart where these public feelings emerge in films and television shows.
The discourses are as follows: melodramas of racial suffering, associations of good
mothers with the private sphere, and African Americans as sources of dysfunctional
racial thinking. These public feelings about black motherhood also help to make possible
the representational scripts that I named in the opening of the chapter, which portray
black and white reproductive practices as existing in tension with one another. Whether
as affective blockage points, women caught mothering in public, or the source of racially
backwards feelings, representations of black mothers align their maternal behavior with
discourses of dysfunction, pathology, and tragedy. Public feelings about race and
motherhood work together to situate both bad mothers and black mothers as those who

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do their maternal labor in public. Informed by Raymond Williams’ notion of structures
of feeling,
34
as well as theorizations of melodrama and affect, much like affective
economies, the concept of public feelings refers to the way in which emotions circulate
in the public sphere, and in effect belong to the public as much as they belong to any one
individual.
35
These public feelings are often the root or justification of political action;
they flow across and between popular media and public policy. As political theorist
Ange-Marie Hancock demonstrates in The Politics of Disgust (2004), the public feelings
generated by representations of black motherhood have been used to justify welfare
reform in both Democratic and Republican administrations. The political value of these
public feelings indicates the way in which “emotions work as a form of capital” (Ahmed,
2004, p. 45). As I discuss in the introduction, Sara Ahmed uses the term “affective
economies” to describe the ways feelings move, attach, and reattach themselves to
different signs and objects. Within these affective economies, “the subject is simply one
nodal point … rather than its origin and destination” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 46). Ahmed’s
theorization helps to explain why these public feelings may seem to have a life of their
own. As they move between subjects, objects, and moments, public feelings gain a
cultural value that exceeds any one discrete affective expression.
Racial Melodramas and Public Feelings about Black Mothers

The United States in the 21
st
century exists in an age of melodrama, wherein the
use of melodramatic political discourse is one of the most effective ways of garnering

34
As Williams defines it, a structure of feeling is a “social experience in solution” (1977, p. 132).
Structures of feeling are nascent ideologies, or belief systems that have not yet fully “precipitated” into
well-defined tropes, types, and generic conventions (p. 133).
35
Scholars such as Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Lisa Duggan, and Ann Cvetkovich have been working
collectively since 2001 to theorize the mechanisms and impact of public feelings (Cvetkovich, 2007)

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the public’s support for political action. As described by Elisabeth Anker, melodramatic
political discourse “solicits affective states of astonishment, sorrow, and pathos through
the scenes it shows of persecuted citizens”(2014, p. 2). These scenes of persecution and
resultant feelings of shock, sorrow, and grief help to authorize the state’s use of violence.
The mechanisms of melodramatic political discourse rely upon the pre-existing
relationship between public culture, public feeling, and the state. As Lauren Berlant
argues in “The Subject of True Feeling”, the state is beholden to the “feeling-based
opinions” of public culture (2001, p. 51). The public recognition of the painful feelings
of subaltern groups prioritizes “interpersonal identification and empathy” at the expense
of considering solutions to structural inequality and violence (Berlant, 2001, p. 54). The
result is the mistaken “sense that changes in feeling, even on a mass scale, amount to
substantial social change” (Berlant, 2001, p. 54).
36
Both Berlant and Anker identify a
cultural desire to make feelings visible and give them recognition.
37
This recognition of
feeling, particularly bad feelings like sorrow and grief, often stands in for the structural
changes that might eliminate said feelings in the first place. This affective recognition
also allows the state to occupy the position of victim.
Anker’s argument’s about melodrama and the state are especially apt here,
because she interrogates the power of public feelings in a post-9/11 environment. The
U.S. is in a perpetual war on terror, a war whose name itself indicates that the threat is
also a threat to the ways its citizenry is able to feel. In this visual and moral-economy,

36
I follow Lauren Berlant’s caution against too easily embracing representations that authenticate pain and
suffering, because “national sentimentality is too often a defensive response by people who identify with
privilege yet fear they will be exposed as immoral by their tacit sanction of a particular structural violence
that benefits them (2001, pp. 83–4).
37
Wendy Brown interrogates the recognition of feelings of woundedness in States of Injury (1995). For
Brown, this quest for recognition, common to identity politics, can hinder the democratic processes that
might prevent such wounding in the first place.

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the suffering of citizens comes from an elsewhere, rather than from the state itself. Anker
points out that scenes of spectacular suffering eclipse the everyday suffering caused by
things like institutionalized racism. The suffering which is most visible and legible in
this kind of affective economy, is one which also speaks to the state’s ability to suffer.
The racial and gender dynamics of these affective economies are what make
possible the collapsing of individual suffering with the state’s victimization. Scholars
such as Saidiya Hartman (1997), Christina Sharpe (2010), Rebecca Wanzo (2009), and
Linda Willams (2002) have investigated the ways in which race and gender influence the
circulation and recognition of feelings in the public sphere. These scholars in particular,
highlight how slavery’s legacy dictates which feelings get recognized, valued, and given
voice in U.S. political culture. As Saidiya Hartman writes, being a commodity meant that
enslaved bodies were “vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and
values” (1997, p. 21). Neither slave owners, nor the U.S. government needed to
recognize the feelings or subjectivity of the enslaved. From the outset, white feelings
have been privileged and black feelings rendered illegible.
In Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharpe traces the inheritances of this history of
subjection. She points out that although black bodies are no longer explicitly white
property, “modern subjects are post-slavery subjects fully constituted by the discursive
codes of slavery and post-slavery” (2010, p. 3). These discursive codes cannot escape
slavery’s history of intimate violence. Feelings were an integral part of this history
because they “repudiated and corrected the violence legitimated by law” (Hartman,
1997, p. 92). The violence of slavery was morally justified by discourse about a master’s
benevolent interest in the wellbeing of his slaves. Furthermore, a slaves own feelings

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about her subjection were legally nonexistent and morally irrelevant. The public
recognition of white feelings, particularly white affection for enslaved blacks, helped to
keep the violent structure of slavery firmly in place.
This unequal recognition and valuation of feelings made the rape of enslaved
women unrecognizable as an act of violence. Slavery’s affective economy had direct
consequences on black women’s ability to consent to pregnancy and motherhood.
Although all enslaved men and women were vulnerable to the violent whims of white
feelings, for enslaved women these violations had reproductive overtones.
Unsurprisingly then, black women have been important figures in the affective
economies of the United States’ racial melodramas.
As defined by film scholar Linda Williams, these “melodramas of black and
white” establish the virtue of white Americans via either the “extreme suffering of the
extreme villainy of the black male body” (2002, p. 308). For Williams, these
melodramas, which are staged in the theater, film, television, and politics, explore the
fraught relationship between black men, white women, and white men. While this
triangulation is undeniably important in the history of American racism, it largely
overlooks the role played by black women in these racial melodramas. Williams
reproduces the hypervisibility of black women in her analysis. In both the melodramas of
black and white, and Linda Williams’ analysis of them, black women exist as an absent
presence, as bodies that are seen and not heard. Counter to what Williams suggests,
black women’s bodies have been integral to the history of racialization for both white
and black Americans, and black women’s suffering has fundamentally shaped US
national culture (Hartman, 1997; Moten, 2003; Sharpe, 2010; Wanzo, 2009). Surely

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Aunt Hester, Mamie Bradley, Elizabeth Eckford, and Rosa Parks, can and should be
understood as participants in the melodramatic racial sense-making of United States
history. Black women’s maternal suffering has been a particularly important part of this
history.
Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Bradley is one of the more well-known of these
figures. By allowing her son’s mutilated face to be photographed and published, Bradley
“demand[ed] that her son’s face be seen, be shown, that his death and her mourning be
performed” (Moten, 2003, p. 198). Her public mourning of her lynched fourteen-year-
old son Emmett, helped galvanize the civil rights movement in 1955. Although Mamie
Bradley’s public performance of grief and mourning aided the civil rights movement,
there are many instances where public black maternity functions instead as an “affective
blockage point” and black mothers are consequently disciplined by the state (Ahmed,
2010, p. 68). Bodies that function as blockage points disturb public comfort by voicing
their grievances. As Sara Ahmed writes in The Promise of Happiness (2010), many
bodies – who she identifies as feminists, black women, migrants, and queers - are always
already understood as affective blockages. These people’s “bad feelings” can block the
way to other people’s happiness. Ahmed points out that it does not matter if the bad
feelings are caused by something like structural racism, voicing these feelings and
interrupting (an implicitly white) “someone else’s” happiness makes one an affective
blockage point. The history of the reproductive exploitation of black women, coupled
with many images of grieving and/or tragic black mothers often situates black
motherhood in a similar position. In other words, black maternity often does not sit
comfortably within the public sphere.

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There are many recent representations of black motherhood as an affective
blockage point in film and on television. In general these representations exist on a
spectrum, with mothers represented as an out of touch source of humor on one end, and
those shown as dangerous sites of trauma on the other. On the popular ABC sitcom
Black-ish (2014), for example, the main character’s mother Ruby frequently interrupts
the family’s conversations or daily routines to voice outrageous opinions on race in
America. Even on the series’ more serious episode about police brutality, Ruby’s
privileging of blackness and belief in institutionalized racism served as comic relief. As
the parents Bow and Dre debated how best to teach their children about racism and
inequality, Ruby eagerly riot-proofed the house. The episode ends with a shot of Ruby
guarding the home after having spray painted “Black Owned” on the family’s garage
door (“Hope,” 2016). Her experience with racially charged violence, and her resultant
precautions are largely shown to be overblown and funny. Elsewhere in the series, Ruby
can frequently be heard saying “Save me Black Jesus” or criticizing her daughter in-law
Bow, a mixed-race African American woman, for not being black enough. Ruby’s
embrace of blackness is meant to be humorous, and her outspoken opinions on how best
to raise black children function as a frequent source of tension for the show’s main
characters – her son Dre and his wife Bow.
Characters like Vee on Orange is the New Black (2013) exist on the other end of
the spectrum. Vee was the main antagonist of the show’s second season, and used her
position as the de facto mother of the group of black women in order to violently seize
control of the prison’s illicit economy. In comparison to Red, the “mother” of the white
inmates, Vee only mothered the women in her care when it helped her to manipulate

195
them. She also exacerbated bad feelings between the black women and their fellow
inmates in order to heighten a racial tension she could capitalize on in order to gain
power. At the end of season two, Vee suffers one of the show’s most unrealistic and
violent deaths when she is run over by a car.
As if to intentionally underscore the connection between Vee and bad black
mothers who block “good feelings,” in promotional posters for the show’s second
season, Vee was featured wearing a chain link fence as a crown with the title “Queen
Vee” overlaid on her image. The poster explicitly evoked images of the iconic bad public
black mother, the welfare queen. Other black mothers who publically express their
feelings about race and motherhood in ways that negatively affect the characters around
them include Cookie Lyons on Empire (2015), Olivia Pope’s mother on Scandal (2012),
Octavia Spencer’s character Rowena in Kevin Costner’s film Black or White (2015), and
Viola Davis’s character Lila in the film Lila and Eve (2015). The narratives often work
to contain these mothers’ affective disruptions either through humor, violence, or a
combination of the two. As I discuss in the next section, these feelings about black
mothers are closely connected to the historical relationship of motherhood and the public
sphere in the United States.
Generating Bad Feelings: Doing Motherhood In Public

In the contemporary United States, motherhood is an experience that straddles the
divide between the public and private sphere. This separation between public and private
mothering can be broadly schematized as follows: Good mothers keep their mothering
and maternal decisions to the private sphere, unfit mothers, on the other hand, mother in
public and make their maternal failures a matter of public concern. This division

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between good private mothers and bad public mothers occurs along predictable racial
and class lines. Several of the ‘controlling images’ Patricia Hill Collins outlines are
public black mothers. Writing on the mammy – the idealized deferential black domestic
worker who cares for white children – Collins argues that the “Mammy is the public face
that Whites expect Black women to assume for them” (2000, p. 73). Collins points out
that the power of the image of the mammy, as with many of these controlling images of
black mothers, takes places via its place in a binary opposition with white motherhood.
In this instance the mammy is counterposed with the “cult of true womanhood,” wherein
white women must deny their sexuality (Collins, 2000, p. 74). For the mammy, no denial
is necessary as she is represented as asexual.
Controlling images such as the mammy “control” both by naturalizing the
inequalities they represent and by attaching certain feelings to certain kinds of black
motherhood. The mammy casts black mothers who forgo their own maternal labor to
care for white families as “good,” and “safe” because they uphold the white social order.
These associations allow middle-class white mothers in heterosexual marriages (along
with white parenting) to remain the norm and the ideal. The implicitly black welfare
queen also exists in a binary opposition with the implicitly white middle-class mother. In
this opposition, mothers like the welfare queen who rely on public assistance in order to
parent are irresponsible and immoral and those middle-class white mothers who mother
in private, are good (Cammett, 2014; Collins, 2000; Hancock, 2004; D. Roberts, 1998;
Spillers, 2003).
Good mothering was not always a private affair, however. Moral motherhood was
once a civic duty, a public form of citizenship that white, middle-class women could

197
enact. Rebecca Jo Plant defines this discourse of moral motherhood as maternalism, “an
outlook that defined motherhood as both a familial and a civic act [which] enabled white,
middle-class women to exert a morally charged influence within the public and private
realms” (2010, p. 7). This Victorian maternalism declined steeply after World War I,
however. And, as Plant writes, by the time World War II ended “the image of the all-
American mother [would never again] be such an effective symbol of the values and
virtues of the republic itself” (2010, p. 58). White motherhood had once publically
symbolized the nation, but the mother as symbol of “virtuous nation,” waned as women
began to advocate for their rights (Plant, 2010, p. 2). Instead, the moral authority of
mothers “increasingly came to be associated with the coercive powers of the state”
(Plant, 2010, p. 9). The more that women tried to use their maternal authority to agitate
for suffrage, reproductive rights, and economic independence, the more that discourse
about motherhood described motherhood as private experience rather than public duty.
38

One consequence of this shift from a discourse of admirable public maternalism
to a discourse of private mothering is that for those mothers whose maternal decisions or
maternal status were part of the public sphere, their mothering was pathologized. As the
discourse of maternalism declined and virtuous, white, middle-class motherhood receded
to the private sphere, the only mothers who still remained publically visible, were black
and/or working class mothers. Black women caring for white children, and poor women
reliant upon Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) were the women left
publically performing maternal labor.

38
Instead of the maternalism of the Victorian era, we are now in an era of “‘fetal motherhood,’ in which
the mother follows the condition of the fetus, [which] has taken over the representational space of public
dignity and value that used to be reserved as a utopian promise for women” (Berlant, 1997, p. 84).

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In many ways, to be a black mother is to do race in public. Discourses about the
mammy, pathological black matriarchy, and the welfare queen work to make black
motherhood an issue of mothering in public or mothering the public.
39
Because of this
publicness, thinking about black motherhood, necessarily makes race a matter of public
concern. Patricia Hill Collins points out the tautology of this relationship between
blackness, bad mothers and the public sphere in Black Sexual Politics - bad black
mothers are bad because they are black mothers (2005). In this discourse black mothers
are bad for two main reasons, their femininity and their reliance on public assistance.
Black mothers are perceived as “inappropriately feminine because they reject the gender
ideology associated with the American ideal” (Collins, 2005, p. 131). In addition,welfare
mothers’ receipt of government benefits puts their maternal decisions up for public
scrutiny, and the public rarely expresses positive feelings about welfare spending.
40

Whatever the formulation, black mothers are making their motherhood public, and the
inappropriateness of this publicity elicits unpleasant feelings.
41

Halle Berry’s maternal failure and recuperation in Losing Isaiah (1995) illustrates
the ways in which public black motherhood and bad black motherhood are represented as
one and the same problem to be solved. As Patricia Hill Collins points out,
representations like Losing Isaiah “contributed to a punitive climate” which
disproportionately punished black women for their reproductive choices (2005, p. 131).

39
As Micki McElya points out in Clinging to Mammy, discourse about black matriarchy did not necessitate
an erasure of the mammy figure. These discourses could be used to describe the same woman, because “the
beloved mammy could slip into the negative role of matriarch simply by leaving the white home and family
to take care of her own” (McElya, 2007, p. 257).
40
As Dorothy Roberts writes “public relief for single mothers is structured to permit bureaucratic
supervision of clients in order to determine their eligibility based on both means- and morals-testing” (D.
Roberts, 1998, p. 226).
41
This public quality elicits what Ange-Marie Hancock terms a politics of disgust, “an emotion-laden
response to long-standing beliefs about single poor African American mothers” (Hancock, 2004, p. 9).

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Released in the wake of national conversations about crack mothers and crack babies,
Losing Isaiah tells the story of Khaila Richards (Halle Berry), a crack addicted mother
who abandons her baby Isaiah next to a dumpster while she gets high. The baby is then
adopted by white social worker, Margaret Lewin (Jessica Lange) and becomes a part of
Margaret’s white nuclear family. Years later, when Khaila gets clean and learns her baby
is still alive, she sues the Lewins for custody of her son and ultimately wins. Isaiah does
not adjust well to living with his black birth mother, however, and the film ends with a
scene of Khaila and Margaret co-parenting the child. The film’s courtroom scenes and
representations of maternal abandonment, grief, and redemption get reworked in many of
the more recent televisual narratives of black maternity I consider here.
At the film’s outset, Khaila is portrayed as a spectacularly bad black mother.
42
In
spite of her failures, Khaila is still able to win custody of her son by proving the
authenticity of her maternal grief in court. Khaila’s maternal redemption is traumatic for
both the white Lewin family and the young black Isaiah, however. In the judge’s ruling,
she says that although returning Isaiah to Khaila “may cause some initial trauma,”
Isaiah’s return is in his best interest (Gyllenhaal, 1995). Representations of black
motherhood as traumatic, like those found in Losing Isaiah, coincide with legislation and

42
As defined by Patricia Hill Collins in Black Sexual Politics, bad black mothers are “those who are
abusive (extremely bitchy) and/or who neglect their children either in utero or afterward …. They are often
single mothers … and they rely on the state to support their children” (Collins, 2005, p. 131). The film
communicates her irresponsibility and unsuitability for motherhood via scenes of Khaila living in an
abandoned house, using drugs, abandoning her baby, and ultimately being arrested and incarcerated. As
Sandra Lee Patton writes in BirthMarks (2000), in Losing Isaiah “Black women are represented as drug
addicted and poor, and thus ‘fit’ as breeders but ‘unfit’ as mothers” (p. 133). Jessica Lange’s character
Margaret emphasizes this point in a bathroom confrontation with Khaila, during which she says “any
animal can give birth. That doesn’t make it a mother” (Gyllenhaal, 1995). Though Margaret loves baby
Isaiah, she regards his natural mother as incapable of the proper maternal attachments.

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punitive public policies that treat it as such.
43
If racial reproduction is a zero-sum game
then black motherhood is inherently tragic, because it implies a loss of whiteness.
Mothering Backward: Black Maternal Loss and Punishment

Televisual narratives of maternal theft and loss – where black mothers’ children
are either taken, stolen, or murdered – reinforce this association of black motherhood
with tragedy and grief. In addition, scenes of maternal censure – wherein a black mother
harshly, and sometimes violently, disciplines her adult child, most often as a result of the
son or daughter’s reproductive or parenting decisions – further contribute to the negative
feelings that become attached to black mothers and mothering. Via scenes of maternal
theft, loss, and censure, these televisual narratives portray black mothers’ feelings about
race as lagging behind. In Feeling Backward, queer theorist Heather Love explores how
“queers have been seen … as a backward race …. even when they provoke fears about
the future, they somehow recall the past” (2009, p. 6). Black women’s reproductivity
occupies a similar position in the multiracial imagination of the twenty-first century.
Because black women are the only women able to give birth to children who will always
be excluded from whiteness, their reproductive choices have the potential to contaminate
the post-racial harmony of a post-white future. While their decisions have important
consequences on the U.S.’s demographic future, their maternal style is often portrayed as
lodged in the past, as too reliant on an outdated way of thinking about race. Two scenes
in Halle Berry’s film Frankie and Alice (2010) help to demonstrate the ways in which
black women’s racial “backwardness” are communicated via tropes of maternal theft,
loss, and censure.

43
Dorothy Roberts discusses these policies in both Killing the Black Body (1998) and Shattered Bonds
(2002).

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In Frankie and Alice, Halle Berry plays Frankie, a go-go dancer in the 1970s with
multiple personality disorder.
44
Frankie has two alternate personalities, one is a young
black girl with a genius IQ known as Genius, and the other is a racist, middle-aged white
woman named Alice. Alice actively hates Frankie, and often attempts to harm her when
she is in control. During the course of the film Frankie receives treatment from a state
appointed psychiatrist Dr. Oz, (Stellan Skarsgård). Oz uses hypnosis to learn more about
Frankie’s alternate personalities and ultimately discover the trauma that caused Frankie’s
personality split. As a teenager, a pregnant Frankie attempted to move away from her
segregated southern home-town with her white boyfriend. On their way out of town the
two got into a car accident and her boyfriend died. Some time later, Frankie gave birth to
a baby girl. Frankie’s mother Edna delivered the baby and promptly discarded of her.
Frankie’s trauma, which drives the action of the film, is due to the coupling of maternal
loss and maternal censure. Frankie lost her daughter because her mother Edna murdered
her as punishment for Frankie’s “sinful” interracial relationship.
The audience first learns of Edna’s role in Frankie’s trauma when Frankie’s
psychiatrist Dr. Oz asks Edna about Frankie’s former white lover Pete. In response to the
doctor’s questions about Pete, Edna replies, “He [Pete] died Dr. Oswald. He died a long
time ago. That was God’s will. They was trying to live between two worlds and wouldn’t
have fitted in neither one” (Sax, 2010). This is the first time in the film that Edna uses
improper English. Her grammatical error underscores the backwardness of her
proclamation. Much like Ruby on Black-ish, Vee on Orange is the New Black, or as I will
discuss shortly, Octavia Spencer’s character in Black or White, Edna’s racial

44
Berry both produced and starred in Frankie and Alice.

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consciousness is dysfunctional, particularly in comparison to this white male doctor’s
kindness and tolerance. As Roopali Mukherjee discusses in The Racial Order of Things,
this contrasting of black racial consciousness and white racial tolerance “mark[s] black
racial consciousness as dysfunctional,” thus linking colorblindness with the norms of
whiteness (Mukherjee, 2006, p. 85).
Mukherjee discusses this hegemonic racial ideology specifically in the context of
Hollywood films from the 1990s. As I will discuss in the next section, the benevolent
white heroes in ’90s films like Die Hard with a Vengeance, also inform representations
of black and white parenting styles as binary opposites. Importantly, in both the films that
Mukherjee describes, and more recent movies such as Frankie and Alice, the white
heroes are shown as being able to transcend racial bias, whereas the black characters
“remain captive to their racial dogmas” (Mukherjee, 2006, p. 85).
Edna, Frankie’s mother is violently and pathologically captive to her racial
dogmas. When Dr. Oz pushes Edna to explain Frankie’s past further, Edna angrily
exclaims “I’ve always tried to do what was best for Frankie. I’ve only done what was
right” (Sax, 2010). Her tone and her answers during this confrontation imply that
whatever wrong Edna committed against her daughter was racially motivated. Edna
believed that her daughter’s interracial intimacy was against God’s will, and that God’s
violence, which was the cause of Pete’s death, was an appropriate response. She
expresses no remorse about this violent trauma. In her view, violence and trauma are
appropriate responses to the sin of interracialism. In this scene, the white man is the
arbiter of racial tolerance and the black woman the embodiment of separatism and
racism.

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Black mothers’ backward racial feelings are often communicated in moments
where they censure their multiracial, or post-racial daughters. Their daughters are
multiracial or post-racial insofar as they embrace a race-neutral ethos, where they don’t
see race. Often a character’s multi-racial background gets read as either cause or proof
that she embraces a multicultural or post-racial ideology. In these moments, multi-racial
African American women function as emblems of post-racial ideology. These
representations adhere to the dynamics of multiracial transcendence and the exceptional
multiracial that Ralina Joseph describes in Transcending Blackness, wherein “mixed-
race African Americans are used as a deracialized excuse, deployed against other people
of color as the solution to the problem of race” (2012, p. 26). One such moment takes
place in the ABC Family show, The Fosters between one of the main characters, the
mixed-race African American Lena, and her black mother, Dana. The Fosters, tells the
story of Lena and Stef Foster, an interracial lesbian couple raising a blended, multiracial
family of biological, adopted, and foster children. The mothers throw their daughter
Mariana a quinceañera, providing an occasion for Lena’s mother to visit and criticize her
daughter’s racial identity, racial consciousness, and parenting style. Dana is skeptical of
Lena’s desire to have a quinceañera for her own daughter, because Lena is not Latina.
The way Dana discusses this skepticism is couched in critiques of Lena’s racial identity,
and their conversation ends with Dana telling Lena “Like it or not you will never know
what it’s like being a black woman in America” (“Quinceañera,” 2013). Points Dana
made earlier in their conversation about racial identity being more than just skin color
are overshadowed by her dismissal of her own daughter’s blackness. The Fosters
consequently shows Lena’s multicultural embrace of her adopted daughter’s Latina

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heritage as the only good way to parent, thus contrasting Lena’s “good’ multicultural
parenting with her own mother Dana’s outdated and damaging racial consciousness.
Similar moments of “racial backwardness” take place on Black-ish, when the multiracial
Bow is criticized for not being black enough by her mother-in-law Ruby, on Scandal
when Olivia Pope’s terrorist mother critiques her daughter’s subservient relationship to
the white First Family, and in Black or White when the black grandmother of a
multiracial child asserts that the little girl needs to be raised with her black family in
order to be whole. Taken together these moments represent a world where the right way
to see race is by largely not seeing it. This colorblind ethos aligns with the news articles
on demographic changes I discussed earlier, many of which suggest that multiracialism
will finally allow the United States to “get over” its race problem.
In addition to the racially backwards black mother, there also exists the black
mothering suffering the loss of her child. In Frankie and Alice, Frankie suffers this loss
as a result of her relationship with her racially backwards mother. In other film and
television narratives the cause of this loss is often more abstract. What remains
consistent however, is the sense that in the end, nothing can be done to prevent these
kinds of tragedies from happening. As I discussed in Chapter Two, the documentary
Waiting for Superman, represents Anthony’s grandmother as a grieving black mother
who is anxious that she might lose her grandson in addition to her son. Movies like
Fruitvale Station (2013) and Lila and Eve (2015) show black mothers whose sons are
killed as a result of an indifferent criminal justice system. Fruitvale Station tells the story
of Oscar Grant, who was killed by a San Francisco BART police officer. The movie is
vague about which officer killed Grant or why. Instead it offers a scene near the very end

205
of the movie with Oscar’s mother crying about her inability to keep her son safe. Lila
and Eve, focuses on Lila (Viola Davis) a woman whose eldest son was shot and killed in
drive-by shooting. Lila struggles to cope with the loss of her son, and decides to
investigate the murder herself. Much like Oscar Grant’s mother in Fruitvale Station, Lila
agonizes over her failure to keep her son safe. Both Waiting for Superman and Fed Up,
the documentaries I discuss in Chapter Two, also feature representations of black
mothers who feel helpless to keep their sons safe. These representations, along with
news coverage of similar events, work to reinforce the sense that “black lives exist in a
state of precariousness” (Rankine, 2015).
These images are controlling not because they necessarily distort reality – many
black mothers are the victims of tragedy in the United States – but because they
normalize this tragedy. These representations both define and contain the tragedy of
black motherhood. This containment of the tragedy of black motherhood, takes place in
part because of the way that these representations work to evoke feelings in their
audience members; they leave the audience not with a politicized anger, but with a
private and personalized sadness. In all, there are multiple, overlapping ways that bad
feelings get attached to representations of black mothers. Black motherhood is
alternately represented as an affective blockage, inappropriately public, a source of
dysfunctional racial thinking, and/or a site of maternal tragedy. When white and black
reproduction is treated as a zero sum game, and as the multiracial buffer between
whiteness and blackness becomes increasingly important in the face of demographic
changes, black mothers – as the only women who will always birth black children –
become especially troublesome for the white social order. Because the biological

206
“problem” of black reproduction cannot be eliminated, the way in which black parents
teach their children about race becomes all the more important for maintaining white
social dominance.

Parenting in Opposition: Race Neutral Parenting and the Privatization of Race

Representations such as those found in Losing Isaiah, Frankie and Alice, or The
Fosters show black parenting and white parenting as binary opposites. In Losing Isaiah,
for example, white and black motherhood serve as foils; white motherhood is patient,
generous, and colorblind, whereas black motherhood is selfish, grief-ridden and painfully
race conscious. Throughout the film, Khaila’s journey to motherhood is only ever shown
to be fraught, grief-ridden, and painful. Her public claims to motherhood disrupt
Margaret’s white motherhood and the intimate sphere of white family life. Losing Isaiah
portrays this public racial motherhood as a source of negative feelings. In this context,
relegating race to the private sphere seems a reasonable, appropriate, and emotionally
satisfying response.
Representations like Losing Isaiah or Fruitvale Station, reports on the imminent
end of white America, and the histories of public feelings about race and motherhood
work together to create a multiracial imagination of a post-white future. As described by
Jared Sexton in Amalgamation Schemes (2008), within the multiracial imagination,
blacks become the source of racism and the obstacle to the U.S. being able to move past
the problem of race. This understanding of race, relies upon anti-blackness and white
supremacy. Multiracialism is celebrated for its ability to transcend blackness, allowing
whiteness to remain the racial norm and ideal. (Joseph, 2012; Sexton, 2008). Sexton

207
points out, “the assertion of a pernicious black racism relies for its rhetorical purchase
upon an impossible merging of racial blackness with the power of the racial state” (2008,
p. 36). In Losing Isaiah, when Margaret Lewin tells Khaila “All you people see is race,”
she is expressing this belief in a regressive black racism that benefits from state support
(Gyllenhaal, 1995). Hardly utopic, this multiracial imagination encourages the
privatization of race. It frames the state’s public acknowledgement of race as detrimental
to white success. In this multiracial imagination of a post-white future, blacks are racially
regressive, black motherhood generates bad feelings, and we would all best be served by
relegating race to the private sphere.
As discussed in the previous chapter, parenting’s importance to social
reproduction situates it as a crucially important practice in the production and
reinforcement of the racial order. When it comes to the privatization of race then, parents
are expected to properly teach their children how not to see race. In general, the
privatization of race refers to the ways that race and racism are discussed more as one’s
private feeling about racial others than as a institutionalized system of categorization and
inequality.
45
In The Threat of Race, David Theo Goldberg describes this phenomenon as
“civil society’s racism without responsibility” (2008, p. 343). This deregulation of racism
as he terms it, relies upon a public acceptance of colorblindness. It is a willing refusal to
see race or acknowledge its role as a political category charged with the power to
organize everyday life. In this context, wherein race is unseen as a meaningful social
category, racism cannot occur. This move “alchemizes the structural into the individual
… the public behind the veil of ignorant privacy, racisms into the virtues of

45
The privatization of race coincides with the general move toward privatization within neoliberalism
(Banet-Weiser, 2012; Duggan, 2003; Harvey, 2007).

208
mestiaje/mesticagem” (Goldberg, 2008, p. 344). A fixation on the restorative social
power of multiracialism allows the valuation of whiteness over blackness to remain
intact. This discourse regards race and racism as expressions of personal ignorance, rather
than as state sanctioned systems of power. If race is private, then consequences of race
such as racism become private as well. Similarly, when racism is a private feeling that
does not necessarily impact one’s public actions, then public concern about eradicating
racism diminishes. Discourses of post-racialism, colorblindness and multiculturalism all
support this movement toward racial privatization.
46

The climactic courtroom scene in Kevin Costner’s Black or White (2015),
epitomizes what this privatized racism looks like and its connection to racialized
parenting. The film stars Costner as Elliott Anderson, the white grandfather of a mixed-
race African-American girl named Eloise. Elliott and his wife have custody of their
granddaughter because their daughter died during childbirth.
47
After his wife’s death,
however, Elliott’s custody of Eloise is challenged by Eloise’s black grandmother Rowena
(Octavia Spencer). The film’s central conflict is around whether Elliott is fit to raise
Eloise, which means the entire film builds toward Elliott’s courtroom defense of his
parental rights.
48
It is during this scene that Elliott publically admits to calling Eloise’s
father a “street nigger” (Binder, 2015). He continues, and says that although race is the
first thing he notices about a person “it’s not my first thought that counts, it’s the second

46
As Melani McAlister writes in Epic Encounters (2005), “at some level the process of constructing a
‘multicultural’ national identity for Americans was not so much different from the earlier task of making a
‘white’ one. … The idea of a ‘white’ nation … depended on masking differences … in order to forge a new
unity” (p. 258).
47
During the final courtroom scene Elliott implies that his daughter was statutorily raped by Eloise’s father
and that his daughter’s shame about her pregnancy ultimately led to her death.
48
This courtroom scene inverts many of the dynamics of the courtroom scene in Losing Isaiah. Whereas
Losing Isaiah hinged on who was more fit to mother a black son, Black or White investigates who is better
able to father a black daughter. In contrast to Losing Isaiah, the court rules in favor of the white parent.

209
third and fourth thoughts I have” (Binder, 2015). Elliott also says he does not want
Reggie to “infect” Eloise, and that he does not want Reggie’s “broken down black ass
anywhere near my granddaughter” (Binder, 2015).
Although admitting to using the word nigger and referring to a black man as
infectious might seem to cast Elliott as unequivocally racist, by this point in the story,
Costner’s character is firmly established as both well-meaning and the film’s hero.
Costner receives the majority of the screen-time, his character is the most developed, and
many of the scenes are shot from his point-of-view.
49
Consequently, Elliott’s seemingly
racist defense of his use of the word nigger plays as a moment audiences can sympathize
with. He is frustrated because he wants what is best for Eloise. From Elliott’s perspective,
which is ultimately the film’s perspective, caring for one black person (in this case the
mixed-race Eloise) and being racist (as evidenced by the use of racist language) are
mutually exclusive. He cannot be racist and love his granddaughter, which means he
must not be racist. This is what the privatization of racism looks like. Even when racist
beliefs are voiced in a setting as public as a courtroom, their violence is discounted
because the private nature of these thoughts make them irrelevant to the case at hand.
This filmic moment has its antecedent in films like Crash (2004), Losing Isaiah
(1995), and Gran Torino (2008). In these movies, the well-meaning white characters
ultimately get a pass for their racist feelings because their actions prove that their hearts
are ‘in the right place.’ Racism is just an internal feeling that can be safely contained and
managed. Importantly, Elliott serves as a contrast to the black characters in the film who

49
Additionally, the audience witnesses the moment when Elliott uses the term “street nigger.” He uses the
term because it is how Eloise’s father Reggie refers to himself, and Elliott only does so in order to tell
Reggie that he was raised in a good home and is not, in fact, a street nigger. With this context in mind, the
courtroom scene feels more like a setup because the audience knows Elliott meant the term with good
intentions.

210
possess a backward racial consciousness. Elliott’s commitment to color-blindness may be
faulty, but he is colorblind when it counts. Black and White portrays Elliott’s residual
racism as likely to be solved via his relationship with his multiracial granddaughter. The
film is less generous in the way it represents Rowena’s parental feelings and racial
beliefs. In contrast to Elliott, Rowena – Eloise’s black grandmother – is too willing to
attribute her son’s struggles to racism, and her family is too invested in simplistic notions
of racial solidarity. In the film, the black law firm representing Rowena (and run by her
brother) decides to make the custody battle about race in spite of Rowena’s concern that
this strategy is unfair to Elliott. The film portrays this attempt to drag Elliott’s private
racial feelings into the public space of the courtroom as unethical and ultimately
ineffective. At the end of the day, blackness is still the dysfunctional way of thinking
about race, and whiteness remains the norm.
Ultimately, Black or White makes racism visible only as a personal feeling. The
structural and systemic components of racism as racism are illegible.
50
In Black or White,
race is incidental and racism is an inappropriate trace feeling that can be solved via the
power of intimate, one-on-one relationships. Whether it is a multiracial child teaching her
white parents to “get over” racism, or parents instructing their children on how best to see
(or not see) race, the parent-child relationship is shown to be integral to the interpersonal
dynamics of the privatization of race. What occurs in these representations, is that those
racial parenting styles are represented as distinct and mutually exclusive. In these
representations, black parenting is race conscious and features racially backward black
mothers. In the end, color-blind ideology and middle-class white domesticity remain the

50
For example, Reggie’s failures are entirely the result of his immorality and poor work ethic.

211
norm. I have shown how this dynamic exists on shows like Black-ish – in the clash
between Bow and Ruby – on The Fosters – in the contrast between Lena and her own
mother Dana – and on Orange is the New Black – in the way Vee “mothers” the black
women in comparison to Red’s mothering of the white inmates. Extant, and Frankie and
Alice, also explore the tension between black and white parenting styles. In Frankie and
Alice, Frankie’s psychiatrist’s generous paternalism contrasts sharply with Frankie’s
mother’s violent actions. On Extant, Halle Berry’s character frequently confronts whether
she must teach her non-human children isolationism or integration. In the scenes where
Berry’s character aligns herself with racial solidary and isolation, her character is also
shown to be erratic, impulsive and irresponsible. Early in the series when she touts
assimilation and acceptance, she is married to a white man, parenting a white child, and
living in an upper middle class neighborhood. Berry’s character on Extant demonstrates
that the tension between black race-conscious parenting, and white race-neutral parenting
can also exist within the same person.
To return to Black or White, in the world of the film, Rowena functions as one of
the affective blockage points that I discussed earlier. Her feelings about race create the
movie’s central conflict. Rowena is not alone. She is one of many representations of
black motherhood that portray black maternity and motherhood as obstacles to the
circulation of good feelings about racial progress. At the same time that these
representations show the black female reproductive body as an affective blockage point,
they also utilize the black maternal body as a conduit for feelings of fear about the
changing racial order. Governed by a discourse of the pathological, these film and
television representations of black reproductivity and black maternity continue to

212
represent black motherhood and mothering as disordered. Furthermore, the black genetic
tie between mother and child is shown to be a source of grief and trauma. These tropes of
backwardness, maternal grief, and maternal trauma are closely interrelated and often
appear simultaneously. When taken as a whole, these narratives present a vision of black
mothers and mothering as backwards, painful, and traumatic.

Not all of the representations of black motherhood that I have discussed in this
chapter are bad, irresponsible or even stereotypical; many are endearing, humorous and
challenge the status quo of representing black motherhood as solely pathological. In spite
of this greater diversity of representation, middle-class, white families with married
heterosexual parents remain the norm. On shows like The Fosters, and Black-ish – both
of which represent families outside of this norm – much of the narrative drama revolves
around the family’s relationship to this norm. In the first minute of the pilot episode of
Black-ish the main character states that living in an all white upper middle-class
neighborhood makes him feel like an oddity. A moment later a tour bus drives by and the
tour guide states “If you look to your left, you’ll see the mythical and majestic black
family. Out of their natural habitat and yet still thriving” (“Pilot,” 2014). Similarly, in the
first episode of The Fosters, the white Stef scolds her African-American wife Lena for
bringing home foster children without asking, stating “Any more kids and it’s going to be
like the Brady Bunch around here, and we’re definitely not the Brady Bunch” (“Pilot,”
2013). Out of their natural habitat, and not the Brady Bunch, these families and
representations offer images of diversity while referencing the fact that white families
middle-class, heterosexual families remain the norm and ideal. In these representations,

213
and others like them, they represent a comforting vision of a post-white future, where
even though whiteness may not be the majority, it remains a central orienting structure
for family and society.

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Conclusion: In the Space between Whiteness and Blackness: Exposing
Fears of Black Reproductive Proximity

because white men
can’t police their imagination
black men are dying

- Claudia Rankine, Citizen, p. 135

This dissertation has sought to examine how racial fear – specifically fears of the
black maternal body – can perform a particular kind of disciplinary and biopolitical
governance in the United States. Rather than accept these fears as natural or justifiable, I
have asked what histories have put these fears into motion. The fears that police black
men’s bodies – which are the same ones that go unpoliced in the white male imaginations
to which Rankine refers – are related, but not identical to, the fears of black maternity and
black reproductivity that I have analyzed thus far.
Post-Trayvon Martin, post-Michael Brown, and amid Black Lives Matter, there
exists a multiplicity of discourses about the (un)reasonable and (un)justifiable fears of
black masculinity that exist in the United States. But less has been said about the
persistent and insidious fears of black women that continue to circulate in U.S. culture.
As Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality, “silence itself …is less the absolute limit
of discourse … than an element that functions alongside the things said” (1990, p. 27).
The silence that exists around fear’s relationship to the black female body – as opposed to
other kinds of racialized feelings like disgust, anger, or pity – is part and parcel of the
fears that led to the shooting deaths of John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and others. In order to
understand the full dimensions of anti-black fear, fears of racial difference and fears of
otherness in general, we must look at these silences, the less obvious sites and sources of

215
racial fear. Which led me to the question that has shaped this project: What can we learn
about fears of blackness and racial difference by focusing on those racial fears less often
named as fear?
This is the reason I begin with an articulation of the relationship between
visibility, silence, and fear. Thinking the silences and spaces created by racial fear
alongside the visibility and spectacle incited by racial capitalism opens up a way of
conceptualizing hypervisibility as a condition of racial fear. Certainly the black male
body has been hypervisible within the criminal justice system, and within the recent
coverage of police brutality. The theoretical framework I have constructed contributes to
and expands upon the connections that black feminist theorists have already drawn
between the hypervisibility of the black female body and the historical threat to
whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity that this body symbolized at different
periods in U.S. history.
Foucault’s theories of governance as both disciplinary and biopolitical help to
further explain the relationship between fear, visibility, and control. Whether via
surveillance, internalized disciplinary gazes, or demographic quantification, the visibility
of both individual bodies and the social body are integral components of how individuals
and the state exercise power on one another and themselves. Moreover, representations
(both as speaking for and re-presenting) produce and reflect the norms which further
govern bodies and society.
The Moynihan Report offered a vital scaffolding for exploring how racial fear
functions as a connective tissue between disciplinary and biopolitical modes of power,
and between the laws, politics, and representations that govern the black female body.

216
The Moynihan Report, along with the theorists that I consider throughout the
introduction, suggests that one of the driving forces behind fears of blackness is a fear of
blackness’ proximity to whiteness. Whereas police officers’ fears of black men are often
framed as being about the men’s physical proximity, what the case studies I explore
illustrate, is that fears of black women are more often tied to the proximity of black and
white reproduction and families.
The Moynihan Report situates the “black problem” as a familial problem, and the
problem of black families as a woman problem. The report begins and ends with the
problem of the black family and centers black women’s experiences during slavery as
explanatory cause. Consequently Chapter One, begins with this history of interdependent
kinship –legislated via partus sequitur ventrem and anti-miscegenation laws – in order to
uncover the U.S. government’s long history of intervening into both white and black
reproductive practices, interventions undertaken to protect the coherency of whiteness as
a racial identification, and in turn protect the value of whiteness as property and white
men’s property interests.
The histories of race suicide discourse, the forced sterilization of poor white
women, partus, and anti-miscegenation laws show how these discourses helped to
manage the riskiness of white and black motherhood in ways that ensured that white
masculinity and white patriarchy stood to benefit most from women’s reproductive labor.
It is these interdependent histories that contribute to the policing of the boundaries of
motherhood and fatherhood in the wake of the development of assisted reproductive
technologies. The intimate ties between white and black motherhood and fatherhood as
mutually constitutive identities makes the legal definition of motherhood and fatherhood,

217
and the constitutionally protected right to genetically related offspring, key to the
maintenance of whiteness as a coherent racial identity, one safe from the contaminating
threat of black reproductive proximity.
Fears of black and white reproductive proximity similarly govern the discourses
of risk, riskiness, and choice that emerge in public anxieties about childhood obesity and
the United States’ failing public schools. These moral panics, which center on social
rather than biological reproduction, highlight the nearness of the “at risk” and “risky”
child, both of whom can threaten the nation’s future if improperly managed. In Chapter
Two, I explored how three historical moral panics, which centered on the black female
body – the migrating black woman, the welfare queen, and the crack mother – give racial
meaning to how risk, riskiness, and choice get levied as new categories of stigmas and
privilege that hierarchize populations already hierarchized by racial identification.
The Moynihan Report argued that broken black families threatened to put a drag
on the racial progress of the black-middle-class who lived near them. Similarly, in the
narratives that circulate about obesity, public schools, and the Let’s Move and My
Brother’s Keeper campaigns, broken black families threaten to slow down the economic
and military progress of the nation because their children’s bodies are less available as
national resources. As such, these moral panics implicitly acknowledge the
interdependency of black and white social reproduction. The Let’s Move and My
Brother’s Keeper campaigns attempt to contain the threat that this social interdependency
poses.
This interdependence of black and white biological and social reproduction comes
to a head when the U.S. Census begins reporting that in 2042, the United States will no

218
longer be a majority white nation. As the U.S. shifts from a bi-racial to a tri-racial order,
parenting and black motherhood take on newfound importance for whiteness’ ability to
cohere as a racial identification. When black and white reproduction are represented as
constantly in tension, as a near zero-sum game, black reproduction can only ever threaten
white dominance. In many of the representations I consider in my final chapter, the
parenting styles of white and black mothers, or white fathers and black mothers are
shown to be similarly in tension with one another.
Whether pushed to the private sphere via discourses which seek to privatize race,
shown as tragically public, or as race-conscious and thus racially backward – black
mothers are contained and controlled across a diverse array of media representations in
ways that reinforce the norm of the middle-class white nuclear family. In the case of
representations of racially backwards mothers, much like in the Moynihan Report, black
mothers are shown as caught in the past; they are mothering in ways that are no longer
suitable for the era we live in. According to the news coverage, the United States’
changing demographics are predicted to change the social order in much the same way
that many hoped or feared the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s would. And once
again, in a climate of social disruption where the demographic proximity of blackness
and whiteness seems to be narrowing, black mothers emerge as hypervisible.
Black women’s hypervisibility is often conditioned by fears of the black maternal
body. As this dissertation demonstrates, these fears are themselves contingent upon
concerns about black and white reproductive proximity. The parameters of this proximity
are multiple: from the value laden definitions of maternal labor and motherhood, to the
reliance of white economic and military institutions on black employees and soldiers, to

219
the population growth upon which economic expansion depends. In each of these
discursive realms the approach of the black maternal body or black reproductivity is a
problem that must be managed in order to maintain the boundaries and power of
whiteness.
A recent Saturday Night Live sketch illustrates the often invisible and overlooked
ways that black women are feared in terms of racial proximity. In “The Day Beyoncé
Turned Black,” the show spoofs disaster and horror films and satirizes the public
response to Beyoncé’s “Formation” video by reimagining the video’s reception as the
trailer to a Hollywood movie. In this fictional trailer, white Americans across the country
hear “Formation” and realize that Beyoncé is (and has always been) black; the response is
a veritable apocalypse. Cars are left abandoned in the street, people run screaming
through their offices and “it was the day they lost their damn white minds” (Saturday
Night Live, 2016). The response is not anger, however, but fear.
While overall the sketch shows white fears of Beyoncé’s embrace of blackness, it
is in the sketch’s penultimate scene that we see the imagined and frightening
consequences of black reproductive proximity. As I have argued, this proximity, whether
material or imagined, is what animates fears of the black female body. In this scene, a
white mother walks cautiously into her daughter’s bedroom. Her daughter’s back is
turned and she is listening to “Formation.” When the daughter turns around, it appears
that she has been transformed into a young black girl. Horrified, the mother exclaims “Oh
God! You’re black too?!”

220
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Creator Farr, Brittany (author)

Core Title Reproducing fear amid fears of reproduction: the Black maternal body in U.S. law, media, and policy

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/29/2016

Defense Date 04/27/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African-American studies,blackness,fear,feminist theory,law,media studies,motherhood,OAI-PMH Harvest,popular culture,public policy,slavery

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Frazier, Robeson Taj (committee member), Joseph, Ralina (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member), Kun, Josh (committee member)

Creator Email brittany.angelique@gmail.com,farrb@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-287641

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Legacy Identifier etd-FarrBritta-4677.pdf

Dmrecord 287641

Document Type Dissertation

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Rights Farr, Brittany

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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