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This podcast explores the criminalization of black motherhood and how black women are denied their roles as mothers and political and economic actors. It discusses the historical and systemic inequalities that intersect in the lives of black women. The episode highlights the story of Eliza Cobb, who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to hard labor through a convict leasing system. It also discusses the stereotypes and language used to label black women as unfit mothers, which perpetuates their exclusion from economic and cultural participation. The war on drugs disproportionately targeted black mothers and perpetuated harmful stereotypes. The story of Suzanne Sellers exemplifies how state policies and punitive approaches ignore the root causes of addiction and punish mothers for their material conditions. The episode emphasizes the need for rehabilitation and support systems rather than punishment in the criminal justice system. Sellers' journey of recovery and advocacy shows the capa Hi, today I am going to be exploring through a podcast how black women, or like the criminalization of black motherhood, specifically on how black women are denied in their roles as moms, political and economic actors. And I'll be diving into the intersections of historic history and systemic inequalities. And I'm also here with Lila. Hi, I'm Lila. And so we're basically just going to go through a chronological relationship between black women and the carceral system. And I understand that this is a really heavy, like very massive topic to try and cover in around half an hour, so I'm not going to be making any huge claims, but I just want to really draw parallels throughout history to see how black women are again and again disenfranchised as economic and political actors. So first we're going to start with exploring how the Potion Crow era has morphed into mass incarceration. So to give some background, the end of slavery did not really lead to the freedom of African Americans, as we are often told it did. Instead, the state and federal government created systems such as convict leasing and chain gangs through a new bandit prison system that was particularly popular in the South because they had to make up to the fact that they lost a lot of people to give free labor to throughout slavery, from slavery. So these practices were not only for punishment, but were mainly tools to just reassert white supremacist ideas and extract labor from black bodies. So our first example is Eliza Cobb, who is a black woman born into post-emancipation America in 1866. At the age of 22, she was raped and gave birth alone in an outhouse surrounded by debris and sharp tools, and she claimed her baby was stillborn, but an all-white jury convicted her of infanticide based on a coroner's report that was later revealed to be incorrect. Eliza Cobb was sentenced to hard labor through a convict leasing system, first at a sawmill camp and later at a state prison farm, and she became one of the few black women that worked in the southern lumber industry and endured conditions that were very reminiscent of slavery. So I think her story really shows how black motherhood is pathologized because there is such a narrative surrounding her alleged crime that stripped her of any subjectivity and reduced her mainly to a mother who was seen as criminally negligent, especially with the rise of white women entering the system, like the work system, through the Industrial Revolution. A lot of times to juxtapose white women who were becoming more masculine, they had to further remove black women from the ideas of traditional femininity. So her sex was often invoked in a carceral narrative where she bore no resemblance to an idealized figure of white womanhood, so black women were often portrayed as deviant others who failed to live up to the white middle-class ideals of womanhood. And later, when she was actually revealed that the coroner thought that her baby could have been stillborn, her economist was still denied, despite the fact that she had a lot of favorable letters from the people in the camps where she was working. And ultimately her appeal was successful, but this was through advocates that argued for her release, not in a way to affirm her dignity or her humanity, but they instead tried to emphasize the fact that she was too quote-unquote mentally incapacitated to even commit infanticide. And they included a photo of her that they sent to the court where they dehumanized her. They said that she was so disfigured and she was so ugly and that she had a perceived idiocy, and those were all manipulated into evidence of her diminished culpability. So basically they were saying she's too stupid to even be able to commit this crime. Obviously this isn't true, but it reinforced white supremacist notions that black women were monstrous, strange, and inherently lacked the qualities of personhood that were seen in white women, such as beauty and morality, intelligence, and maternal care. So ultimately I mean like her freedom depended on appealing to white authorities, not as a person, but as a racialized and dehumanized subject. So I just think that this story really reminds us about how black women are criminalized and exploited and dehumanized in a society that continues to thrive on the remnants of slavery. So yeah, I mean, I think obviously this is a very historic example, but the ideas of how women are still perceived today, especially black women, I think another point that's really important to bring up is that the oppression of black women and black bodies is not strictly physical. A lot of it has to do with the language and the stereotypes that we use that surround them. So for example, black women being labeled through cultural narratives as unfit mothers and monstrous are descriptions that further reinforce their exclusion from economic and cultural participation, and also like legitimacy and building families. But also these are stereotypes that still exist today in contemporary society, so it just also really shows like if this is how you're setting up the system, the system's only going to really reinforce these stereotypes throughout history. And I think especially if we fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s, we'll still see a lot of remnants through the historical patterns of how black women are perceived, specifically with the war on drugs, where black women were disproportionately targeted as Ligia constructed the myth of the crack mother and they're labeled like crack babies, and the stereotype continues to perpetuate very harmful ideas and create systemic barriers for black mothers. So the narrative of crack mothers primarily emerged during the 1980s and 1990s, where black mothers were initially portrayed as neglectful and their children were seen as victims of the mother's moral failings. And this was really further reinforced by the welfare clean myth, which further vilified poor black women as irresponsible and unfit to parent. This framed black mothers and black women as a societal burden, and these tropes shaped the public perception and helped justify community policies that further led to the criminalization of black motherhood. Like, for example, state policies targeted black mothers under the guise of protecting fetal life, the laws like Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 prioritized child removal over family preservation. I think one example of this is Suzanne Sellers, who was a mother who gave birth during the crack epidemic and faced devastating consequences because of these policies. When her son was first born, he tested positive for substances at birth, which led to a child welfare case that culminated in the termination of her parental rights. Despite Sellers undergoing treatment, achieving sobriety, and also demonstrating her capacity to parent, she was coerced into signing her rights away under the ASFA. And this act really reinforced the narrative that black mothers were beyond rehabilitation and perpetually unfit and undeserving of the opportunity to raise children. This is like something that we saw before when we were thinking of Eliza Cobb, where she was automatically assumed as guilty of murdering her child because she was kind of already seen as an unfit mother. And I also think that the war on drugs really shows that you're punishing people for circumstances that they're already in, instead of introducing ways to rehabilitate them back into society and offer support systems that would ultimately help bring these people out of poverty. We see this a lot with the criminal system even today. It's not really as focused on justice as we like, but it's more focused on punishment and more like removing people from society, whereas it should be focused on how do we rehabilitate people who are usually victims of violence themselves, and how do we allow them to re-enter society in a way where they feel supported and have the freedom and autonomy to achieve economic and political expression and freedom. So yeah, basically Stellar's story really exemplifies how the state's punitive approach ignores root causes of addiction, which are untreated trauma and poverty and other environmental factors that can't really be explained. And then also it instead punishes mothers for their material conditions. A single drug test was the sole basis for removing her child, which overlooked many systemic factors that were at play. Instead of enrolling her into a rehabilitation facility or allowing her to reclaim her relationship with her child after she became sober, the child welfare system and their policies instead tore the family apart. And this happens to a lot of families, which can often lead to permanently severing the fundamental relationship between a mother and a child, which I don't have time to get into today, but has shown to have very adverse consequences on the child's mental health as well. So mothers are punished for their addiction instead of rehabilitated, and consequently their children become victims of the system as well, which has many implications for how they grow up in the future, but we don't have time to dive into that today. But I think also Stellar's is a great person to point to because her journey throughout life really highlights the capacity for recovery that black women are often not given, and they aren't assumed to be able to rehabilitate. But over the years she has been able to rebuild her life, earned multiple academic degrees, became an advocate for child welfare reform, and is now the founder and executive director of a non-profit organization called Families Organizing for Child Welfare Justice. She also, after her children grew up, her children sought to reconnect with her, and the trauma of family separation left lasting scars that they're still trying to deal with today, but it just shows that family reunification is possible, and if she had been given the proper treatment, she would have been able to be a very successful mother. I think her story really underscores a critical need for systemic change, and how the war on drugs has really demonized mothers and also victimized children, and this type of instability really perpetuates cycles of injustice. I think something that's really important to think about with these policies is that even though these interventions are presented under a guise of protecting children or fetuses, they often disproportionately target black women, and the war on drugs and laws like ASFA really remind us of the important intersection of racism, sexism, and the carceral states, which work together systemically to devalue black motherhood and also deny black families the support they need to thrive. I think something that's super important is that economic marginalization has always really gone hand in hand with the criminalization of black motherhood, and that's what we're going to talk about now. So we're going to be talking about a story that happened around 2014-2015, but I think that to give some background, the expectation that black women historically were really expected to work in low-wage jobs and a lot of exploitative roles, often through domestic work or agricultural labor, and this expectation also persists today because black women disproportionately do hold minimum-wage jobs without benefits. I think there's definitely other reasons for it, but traditionally a lot of them are just disproportionately more likely to hold jobs such as pay-per-child care, and I think obviously there's a lot of reasons, like access to education also, where you even are born the socioeconomic status that your family's born into, but I digress. Either way, their economic status often makes it really difficult for them to find child care and obtain professional opportunities. So when you combine this with the vilification of black mothers throughout history, as seen as purposely neglectful or just unfit mothers, these stereotypes really compound each other to create even greater struggles for when they try to interview for jobs. So I think a story that really exemplifies this actually happened in 2014-2015, and her name is Shanisha Taylor. She was all over the news when this happened, so a pretty notable story, but Shanisha was a homeless single mother where she was living out of her car with her two young children, and she got a job interview one day to, I believe, work a desk job, and it was really her potential path out of homelessness. But because of her current financial state, she wasn't able to source child care, and I think just having a lack of community in general, which is something that we talk about in class all the time, it means people to have very precarious situations. So anyways, she ultimately decided to leave her children in her car when she went to the job interview. Obviously the windows were down and the car was on, so her children were safe, but her decision wasn't born out of neglect, but it was more so desperation and inability to get child care. Instead of securing the job that she thought she could get, when she came out of the job interview, she was arrested and jailed for 11 days and charged with two felony counts of child abuse and lost custody of her children in the process. So ultimately, the story does have a happy ending, but mainly because it kind of blew up in the news, so ultimately she was able to be reunited with her kids, and also people online raised thousands of dollars for her to help get her and her family back on her feet. But the fact that this even happened in the first place is kind of insane, and if there wasn't the media to step in, she probably would likely not have been reunified with her kids and probably be on trial for child neglect. I think this really highlights how Black women are often forced into really impossible choices due to a lack of accessibility to child care, affordable housing, and just economic opportunities that are presented to them in their lives. In a system where poverty really disproportionately affects single mothers, and particularly Black women, their social safety net has been really eroded due to just the way that our system is set up. Honestly, people aren't getting as many SNAP benefits as they need because they're not getting as much government assistance as needed, but this often leads to families relying on really fragile solutions, and cuts to child care subsidies and specifically social programs make it really difficult for these mothers to make stable arrangements, and often force women to make really high-paid decisions that all too often result in punishment rather than support. Really great insight, Anna. I really appreciate the work that you've done, and I think your project is really interesting. We've been able to kind of visualize what Anna talked about. In my project, I'm working with the Family for Justice at Keeling, and we are doing a project reviewing media coverage of MCF Birmingham over the past decade to understand how the Free Herd campaign and the No Women's Prison Project has affected representation of incarcerated people in Massachusetts in the media. And I think obviously for Family for Justice at Keeling, that organization is an abolitionist organization started by Black women, specifically Black mothers, and they first-hand have experienced just the kind of unique positions that Black women and Black mothers have, especially as incarcerated women. An example of this is in 1996, for example, Congress denied food stamps and welfare payments for life for people who were convicted of drug felonies. Many happened to be women with children who were in desperate need of medical or mental care, and instead of recognizing that these people were in a precarious state, they instead decided to punish them for decisions they had made previously in their lives. And this ultimately just leads to a continued cycle where children grow up in poverty, and just having a lack of accessibility to resources makes it even harder for mothers and parents in general to want to reach out to the state and ask for help. For example, there was a study conducted on parenting in low-income urban neighborhoods where marginalized mothers already had fears of their children being taken from their custody because they were low-income. So they already take a lot of precautions to have very selective visibility in their interactions with systems, and that may include social services but also other systems in general. So it's a way that you can keep trapping people because you're not allowing them access to resources that are insured within the federal government, but you're also making it very dangerous for them to even reach out to get the support and assistance that they need. Okay, so I've presented a few stories that give historical context to the way that black mothers are treated in society today, and I hope that, I don't know, I hope I've proven that it's still a problem, and the way that black women and black mothers are criminalized in the system is still a very prevalent issue. So I think something that we need to ask ourselves now is where do we go from here? I think first and most important is we need to continue to challenge these narratives that criminalize black motherhood. At the end of the day, these policies need to support families and not separate them. I think this means expanding access to health care and child care and overall economic opportunities that will ultimately reduce the surveillance and policing of black families. I also think education is a really big part of this. A lot of these stories I had no clue of until I decided to pursue this as my final project, but these are the lives that millions of people live in America every single day, so we need to be very cognizant of that. And secondly, I think through that is we need to amplify the voices of black mothers and activists working towards this type of justice. Organizations like Families for Justice is Healing are leading the charge in demonstrating how community-driven solutions can really break the cycle of criminalization and provide real support for families. So obviously going off my last point, I think I really am excited to pass the mic over to Leila, who's done some work this semester with Families for Justice is Healing, and she can talk more about what she does over the semester. You think? No, no. Thank you, Anna, for that introduction. And I'm really impressed by the work that you've done and the insight that you have given us today. Yeah, so I work with Families for Justice is Healing. We did a project investigating media representation of incarceration in Massachusetts, specifically focusing on NCI Framingham and the plans for a new trauma-informed, gender-responsive prison, air quotes around all of that. So Families for Justice is Healing is a Massachusetts-based abolitionist organization founded by formerly incarcerated black mothers, focused on ending the incarceration of women and girls. And they have been working tirelessly to push against reformist ideas of trauma-informed prisons and challenge the public to reimagine the ways in which we address harm in our communities as well as urging for investment into communities to address the root causes of incarceration. So for our project, we wanted to see if the media was reporting on Families for Justice is Healing and where they were sourcing their information from, whether it was from people directly involved in abolitionist work, people who are incarcerated, or just law enforcement and other sorts of professionals and academics. And we just wanted to track how the media was responding to the prison moratorium bill and the No New Women's Project. And incarceration in the media is mostly centered around crime reporting, which is what we ended up seeing. And Families for Justice is Healing and the No New Women's Project was only mentioned in less than 20% of all the articles that we read. However, over the last decade, media representation of Families for Justice is Healing and the idea of letting people out of prison, reimagining the ways in which we deal with harm, have been increasing. So I think that because of this project, we are able to see that abolitionist groups can work within the media to challenge the narratives that have been perpetuated in the past and creating guidelines and pathways for journalists to source incarcerated people and people involved in abolitionist work. By identifying the ways in which the media perpetuates harmful narratives around incarceration, as well as how to start to challenge these ideas, abolitionist groups can begin to create relationships with media organizations and promote public awareness of movements like the No New Women's Prison Project. I will give the mic back to Anna to close this out. So hopefully we've convinced you of how the historical trends and the way that black women were viewed, specifically black mothers, on how that really perpetuates stereotypes and has continued to infiltrate contemporary America when it comes to the over-policing of black mothers and black families and also just the overall incarceration state in general. I think something that's really important that I want to take from my process of researching this process is just taking the time to center black voices when it comes to any other social issues because as I've learned in my research, there are really a lot of negative consequences of the over-policing of black mothers and how close black families are to the prison state in general. I think that there are a lot of negative consequences, but you can't completely attribute it to the carceral state. There's also a lot of other things that go into it. For example, abortion, access to abortion, access to health care, access to education. Those are all instances where black people are disenfranchised and also people of color in general are really disenfranchised. I think it's really important to keep in mind that we need to center these voices and we can't let feminist movements or other people co-opt this and present other narratives at the forefront because at the end of the day, black communities are just in general the most marginalized in America. I did a project on abortion rights and reproductive justice, and just a quick little caveat, in my women and gender studies classes. It's just very interesting to me how feminist movements have completely made that more of a white middle class feminist movement when in the beginning it was really about achieving reproductive justice to allow black women to have the right to pursue jobs and also to stop the end of forced sterilization amongst women of color, specifically black women and Puerto Rican women. So that's just a general example. Obviously, I'm not going to dive into that. That's not what this podcast is about. But I just think I have no clue that that was the true history of that movement. Even when I was starting out researching prisons, I knew that black people were disproportionately affected by the prison industrial system, but just not to the extent that they were. I didn't know that it impacted people's everyday lives so visibly. It was very much ingrained into society, so I think one of the takeaways I definitely had from this class was the importance of actively going out and centering the voices of black mothers and black people and people who are directly affected by the prison industrial system, rather than just relying on news articles and just the general media. So yeah, I hope that you learned a lot from this podcast, and I hope that you can take some of the insights that you and I talked about and kind of change the way that you look at societal issues and social issues to just, I don't know, hopefully make progress and hopefully that this system can change in some way, shape, or form. Not really sure how, not really sure when, but eventually, hopefully this system will create actual equality amongst people of color.
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