‘Cause I Slay: A Beyoncé Timeline for February 2016
I bore you one morning
just before spring
my head rang like a fiery piston
my legs were towers between which
a new world was passing.
~Audre Lorde, Now That I am Forever with Child
This is also in particular for the Black women. In particular who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.
~Jesse Williams, 2016 BET Awards
Matter. Personal matters. Legal matters. Physical matter. Material matter. As a wordsmith, I cannot help but think about the varied meanings of “matter” in Black Lives Matter. The personal experiences in which it becomes clear that your experiences are insignificant, or do not matter. The legal matters that prove your life has no value, or does not matter. The invisibility that cloaks an otherwise hyper-visible body, proving your body has mass—a physical object—but lacks subjectivity, an object of no value. And black matter, the kind of matter that is profitable yet easily replaceable, or inconsequential matter.
Much of the Black Lives Matter movement is, understandably, focused on death and specifically the premature death of, often unarmed, black women, men, and children due to police violence. Beyond police violence, premature death afflicts black bodies throughout the lifespan due to health disparities, microaggressions, and simply living while black in a nation whose legal system and social institutions continuously fail to register black people as full citizens.
The manner in which “matter” can mean so many different yet the same things in relationship to black lives makes me think about the very moment when black lives come into being and another bone chilling matter: birth. A devastating instance of premature death that does not have the national public platform it warrants is infant mortality. Infant mortality is defined as the death of a live-born baby prior to her/his first birthday. As of 2014, the black infant mortality rate in my home state, Ohio, is more than twice that of white infants and Ohio ranks second to last in the country for infant mortality. Franklin County, the county home to my university, leads all other counties in the state in neonatal, postneonatal, and total infant deaths. Between 2007 and 2014, Ohio has made no significant progress in reducing the black infant mortality rate in spite of significant data collection and clinical and social service-based action plans having been put into place.
Why does the intervention fail? I am not a medical professional or social services provider, but I am a black woman and a critical race studies scholar who has birthed three children. I offer, then, an unscientific matter of perspective that considers matters of humanity. Simply put, birthing black lives is a national crisis and one that I suspect is driven by the lack of value placed on black lives. In Columbus, Ohio black babies die at more than twice the rate of white babies and, according to Dr. Arthur James at the OSU Wexner Medical Center, it affects black women across social class; formally educated black women are more likely to experience infant mortality then a high school educated white woman.
Perhaps this fact explains why the clinical and social service action plans have not worked. Surely, black women, like all women, benefit from education about pregnancy, childbirth and raising infants, as well as social services to help keep mothers and children healthy and safe. But that is not keeping the Ohio infant mortality rate 23% higher than the national average, which means it is even higher for black babies who are die at twice the rate of white babies.
Infant deaths are divided into three categories: pre-term birth; sleep-related deaths; and birth defects. In Ohio, a staggering 46% of infant deaths are attributed to pre-term birth. This fact coupled with the fact that interventions over the last two decades have failed to improve outcomes suggests to me there are factors at play beyond clinical and social factors. Implicit bias—forms of bias occurring at the sub-conscious level—and microaggressions—insults and dismissals by a dominant group toward a marginalized group—are receiving growing scholarly attention across disciplines and particularly in law, psychology, sociology, and education. This attention needs to extend to the infant mortality crisis.
I delivered my first son almost one year after completing my doctoral exams. My husband and I had planned to adopt, since he is adopted and I was concerned about hereditary issues, but I was thrilled to learn I was expecting. I read books, websites, pamphlets, any material I could find about pregnancy and childbirth. I took a water aerobics class and ate lots of vegetables and protein. I attended regular prenatal doctor visits and even took a very annoying childbirth class. I never expected to have an emergency cesarean.
During my 39th week doctor’s appointment, I noticed the heartbeat on the fetal Doppler did not sound the same as usual—it was distinctively different. Because my husband and I had decided to move from Maryland, where I was in graduate school, back to our hometown of Columbus, Ohio at the beginning of my eighth month of pregnancy, I had to switch doctors. The new doctor, rather than listening herself as my previous doctor did (and subsequent doctors), always had her medical assistant do the Doppler prior to her entering the room. The medical assistant noticed nothing, but said she would have the doctor listen. Upon listening, the doctor immediately told me to go straight to the hospital.
At the hospital, I waited four to five hours for a perinatal specialist to arrive from the children’s hospital. She diagnosed an “abnormal, normal heartbeat” and said that since I was full-term (but not the least bit dilated), she recommended inducing labor, a truly nightmarish process when your body is not ready to give birth. That process began around 11:00PM on August 12, 2003. Around 7:00AM the next morning, a nurse rushed into the birthing room and said the baby’s heart rate was dropping and we had to do an emergency cesarean section. At 7:24AM and without my husband being allowed to be present during the surgical delivery, my oldest son entered the world with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The induced labor and the heightened traumatic impact on my body most likely caused the cord to tighten and begin to cut off his airway, hence the heart rate drop and already irregular heartbeat.
My son was a healthy 7lbs. 11ozs. and had no physical or developmental disabilities. This story has a happy ending, yet it still haunts me. What would have happened if I had not spoken up and said something is not right? What if I had not even noticed the change in heartbeat? What if, in addition to my doctor’s laziness of delegating an important procedure to a medical assistant, she had ignored my concern? What if the doctor got there too late since, after the delivery, she told my parents, “I thought I was going to be able to enjoy my coffee this morning?” Which is mild compared to her telling me at my postpartum visit that she only delivers babies for the money and never really liked children, in spite of having two of her own. No wonder the labor and delivery nurse for my second child, when learning I had switched to my current physician from the previous one, exclaimed: “I wouldn’t let Dr. ___ deliver my dog!”
Well, I am devastated by knowing what can happen, not just as evidenced by the 46% of pre-term infant deaths in Ohio, but from the many black women I know who can tell stories of either their own or their infant’s near death experience due to pre-term birth. And recently the devastation hit very close to home when I learned my little cousin lost her baby just four days shy of her due date; the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck three times. She, too, knew something was wrong and went to the hospital only to learn it was too late.
She did everything right, just like me. As a college-educated, twenty-nine year old black woman, she, like myself, speaks to Dr. James’s analysis that suggests the black infant mortality crisis is about more than clinical and social needs—it is not some pathology produced by blackness. I know nothing about my cousin’s doctor and am not proposing negligence, but I do know we must make sure that medical professionals divorce stereotypes of black pathology from their perceptions and treatments of black patients. Black life must be a serious matter. Birthing black lives is a serious matter.
Oh, and, by the way, my OB/GYN for my first child was a black woman; my next two sons were delivered by an African American man and a Dominican-American man, respectively, in a practice that also includes an African American woman—they listened, they love babies; they were phenomenal. My point is that the devaluation of black life, the reduction to object, is one that operates both explicitly—the unapologetic racist—and implicitly through the ways in which, across racial lines, we can find stereotypes shaping how we perceive and assess black life. Thus, just as Jesse Williams frames his 2016 BET acceptance speech for Humanitarian Award recognizing the uniqueness of black women’s experiences and the need to do better for them, infant mortality demands that we “stay woke.”