I am playing around with some ideas today in light of two developments.

First, earlier today I read about racist anti-choice billboards that were showing up in NYC. The terrific women of color-led reproductive justice organization, Sistersong, put out a statement about the billboards which read in part:

Yesterday, racist billboards went up in Soho attacking black women and our human rights by claiming “the most dangerous place for an African American child is in the womb.” SisterSong, a coalition of 80 women of color and Indigenous women’s organizations, denounces this cynical attempt to use race during Black History Month as an excuse to assault women’s rights. Black women are not the pawns of these white people who erect such billboards. We find them offensive, racist, sexist and – most of all – disrespectful of our decision making, our 400-year history of raising and caring for black children, and our human right to make health care choices for ourselves.

Thankfully just a couple of hours ago, the company that had put the billboard up succumbed to public pressure to take it down.

This incident is only the latest in a long history of rhetoric and policies that try to control black women’s bodies and dictate their reproductive decisions. One of my favorite books about this topic is Dorothy Roberts’ “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.” In the book, Roberts recounts an emblematic anecdote:

“In 1989, officials in Charleston, South Carolina, initiated a policy of arresting pregnant women whose prenatal tests revealed they were smocking crack. In some cases, a team of police tracked down expectant mothers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In others, officers invaded the maternity ward to haul away patients in handcuffs and leg irons, hours after giving birth. One woman spent the final weeks of pregnancy detained in a dingy cell in the Charleston County Jail. When she went into labor, she was transported in chains to the hospital, and remained shackled to the bed during the entire delivery. All but one of the four dozen women arrested for prenatal crimes in Charleston were black.”

The passage quoted above speaks to the ways that black women are disproportionately targeted and criminalized by the legal system. Our wombs were rented out during slavery and in 2011 the struggle to reclaim control over our bodies continues.

The second reason that I am thinking about how black and brown bodies are controlled by the system is because I am preparing for a presentation that I will be giving at a local University in a couple of weeks. The topic of my talk will be about how the PIC disciplines black and brown bodies. I will be particularly discussing how women’s bodies are controlled within the PIC. So I was very interested to read the following article today:

Kern County has agreed to pay as much as $7 million to former jail inmates who claimed they were strip-searched in front of other inmates or for no reason at the county jail. Thousands of former inmates soon will get notices they could collect part of the settlement. Payments will range from $200 to $2,500 per inmate.

Inmates claim they unnecessarily were searched when they were transported between jail facilities, that they were searched in unsanitary conditions and sometimes were searched in front of inmates of the opposite sex.

One of the most effective ways of oppressing individuals is to take away their ability to control their own bodies. This issue is particularly timely as the Republican Congress works steadily to further restrict women’s rights to abortion and to contraception by defunding Planned Parenthood. There is a method to the seeming madness.

As I continue to develop my thesis for my presentation, I will use this space as a way to explore what I really think about these issues.