(in first name alphabetical order)
Aziza Ahmed (Northeastern University), “Law, Science, and Social Movements”
I am currently working on a book project that documents how feminists intervened in and shaped the AIDS response. The book starts with a specific case study which documents how feminist lawyers and advocates engaged in a battle to change the medical definition of AIDS utilized by the Centers for Disease Control to surveille the epidemic and by the Social Security Administration to disperse disability-related benefits. They were victorious. Their win meant that more resources were dedicated to women in the fight against AIDS. Following from this, I argue that feminists fundamentally altered the course of the AIDS epidemic and the response to it. Drawing on oral histories, archival documents, legal filings, this article demonstrates how feminist lawyers and advocates knowingly mobilized legal strategies, including litigation and activism against administrative agencies, to alter the scientific understandings of HIV and AIDS.
In documenting this case, several dynamics have emerged that are specific to questions of race that I hope to explore in the book project. First, following from the work of Alondra Nelson in her book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, it becomes clear in reading advocacy material that calls to race are seen as a point of solidarity for those Black and Latina women impacted by the epidemic. Ideas about race and representation create points of tension between activists like those in ACT-UP (who are largely White and HIV negative) and those women who are living the experience of AIDS. Second, and related, advocates frequently draw on race and gender as missing from AIDS research, and thus contributing to a lack of understanding of the specific biological mechanisms around race and gender that are necessary to explore to fully understand the epidemics progression in the bodies of minority women. While useful for building solidarity, and for demanding access to what were then experimental treatments for AIDS, the claims rebiologize race and gender with upsides and downsides as a strategy. Finally, and in terms of the actual literature, I hope the book, and this case study in particular, will highlight how the stories of reproductive rights and justice told in the legal academy – almost exclusively about abortion — are incomplete without a greater understanding of the AIDS epidemic. This is not only an erasure of race and class issues in women’s health it betrays the importance that ideas of redistribution of material resources through welfare related advocacy had on shaping the women’s health movement.
Carla Yanni (Rutgers University), “A History of Gendered and Racial Exclusion in College Dormitories, 1880 to 1920”
Before there were deans of men, there were deans of women. Beginning around 1900, deans of women supervised the intellectual and physical health of their female charges. In fact, some of the first deans of women were physicians. At Oberlin, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Howard University, powerful female deans worked with architects to build physical spaces for the enactment of their duties. The residential hall was their greatest asset. Controversies about white and black women dwelling in the same dormitory broke out at Oberlin and the University of Chicago, in spite of the fact that University officials had high hopes for the residence hall as a space of social inclusion. At the University of Michigan, a generous donor (generous in terms of money, if not in human spirit) gave funds for a luxurious residence intended to serve as the hospitality hub of the entire campus. The donor did not want his special all-female dormitory to house non-white students. As he wrote: “I don’t know why the Orientals are there. It’s not the League of Nations.” Deans of women argued that the dormitory was a boon to women’s health, because the other common option—a boarding house—caused sickness. Boarding houses were unheated, the food was unwholesome, and the physical arrangements might lead to lapses in a young girl’s reputation. For example, if a boarding house lacked a first-floor parlor, a woman might be tempted to entertain a man in her bedroom. Immorality and illness were intertwined evils. Deans sought to protect women from dangers as diverse as eczema, malnutrition, and premarital sex – all by insisting they live in the dorm.
As a social historian of architecture, I was practicing the spatial turn in history before it was called that. In this paper, as in all of my research, I look closely at archival documents, maps, plans, architectural drawings, diaries, and the structures themselves to better understand how discrimination and inequality are built into the fabric of buildings and the patterns of daily life.
Elizabeth Nelson (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis), “Writing the History of Death, Race, and Disability in an Institution of Confinement”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore defined racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” This paper examines the intersection of racism, gender, and disability in the context of confinement/hospitalization in a state psychiatric facility. It does so through a microstudy of Clark v. Donahue, a case that went before the Indiana federal court from 1992-1995, during the closure of Indiana’s flagship mental institution, Central State Hospital. The case concerned the 1991 deaths of two young Black women, Lydia Shelby and June Highsaw, on the hospital’s Bahr unit—a locked ward for “difficult” patients. Shelby died due to an overdose of medication; Highsaw froze to death in her room, and high dosages of medication were again a contributing factor. Both women were labeled as mentally ill and intellectually disabled. Their mothers brought suit against the hospital, claiming that the medical director treated the women differently than white patients, using drugs to keep them “in a stuporous condition.” Highsaw and Shelby’s deaths were among a rash of “preventable” deaths in the early 1990s that led to the 1992 gubernatorial decision to close the hospital.
Through an examination of the Clark v. Donahue case alongside other sources—including archival materials, patient-produced newsletters, and oral history interviews with former staff—I assess the role of race, gender, and disability (including the disabling effects of confinement itself) in the production of death. I critique the notion of the “preventable” death, asking whether death was indeed a structural inevitability in such an institution. The interactions between structural and individual racism are further highlighted, not only in the examination of the medical director’s treatment of the two women, but also in the women’s life stories and their relationships with a wide range of hospital staff. In particular, I examine the inclusion of members of the largely Black, “non-professional” attendant staff as defendants in the lawsuit that the mothers brought against the hospital. As front-line staff, attendants provided direct patient care but were also called on to restrain “out of control” patients, including Shelby and Highsaw. An analysis of the women’s interactions with the attendant staff while still living reveals how racism troubles the thin line between culpability and care in institutions of confinement.
This paper is part of a larger study (with Emily Beckman and Modupe Labode) on the final years and closure of Indiana’s Central State Hospital, a microstudy that aims to elucidate (de)institutionalization and disability as lived experiences. Our research is partially oriented toward reconstructing the lives (and deaths) of mentally ill and disabled individuals who resided at this institution. We also confront the inevitable gaps in such a reconstruction, due to the limits of memory, the ethics of patient privacy, and the tendency of marginalized people’s sudden deaths to eclipse the totality of their lives.
Eric Herschthal (Ohio State University), “Slavery, Health, and Healing Now: The State of the Field”
This paper will survey the past twenty years of scholarship on slavery and medicine, summarizing major trends and suggesting possible pathways forward. Modern scholarship on slavery and medicine began in the late 1960s. The first generation of scholars largely relied upon contemporary medical knowledge to determine the exact illnesses enslaved people suffered from, quantity disease and mortality prevalence, and to understand how the material conditions of slavery contributed to certain illnesses. While this approach, which combined retroactive diagnosis with quantitative analysis, created a baseline for today’s scholarship, by the late 1990s scholars began to question its utility. Increasingly, historians wanted to know not only what diseases enslaved people actually contracted, but what physicians, planters, and slaves thought they contracted, and how those ideas were shaped by the social and political contexts of slavery. This shift away from what some have called a “biomedical framework” and towards a social constructivist approach reflected broader changes in the histories of science and medicine. Under the influence (whether directly or indirectly) of Michel Foucault, Steven Shapin, and Bruno Latour, among others, historians of slavery and medicine began to query the ways in which plantation physicians asserted and maintained their medical authority, how medical institutions, from hospitals to medical schools, helped legitimize that authority, and how physicians ultimately helped uphold slave regimes.
Several key themes have come to dominate the recent scholarship. First, scholars have begun to understand slave plantations as the original sites of racialized medicine—that is, the places where physicians first began to conceive of black and white bodies as functioning differently, and in need of different kinds of treatment. Relatedly, several scholars now argue that this early form of racialized medicine, or what Suman Seth has called “race-medicine,” did not built off of racial theories emerging in Europe; rather, European theories about racial difference emerged from the medical knowledge being produced in slave societies. This geographic shift in knowledge production—from the center to the periphery—dovetails with a larger theme that is sometimes made explicit, but is more often left implicit. Medical practice in slave societies was not “distinctive” or cordoned off from the larger medical profession, as earlier scholars suggested. Instead, the rise of modern medicine was intrinsically tied to slave plantations. Modern specialties from gynecology to psychiatry, as well as early public health campaigns, often had direct ties to slave plantations. Another common emphasis has been to move away from understanding racialized medicine as something solely created by and for proslavery ideologues. Rana Hogarth, for instance, has shown that, in fact, white physicians that were either opposed or indifferent to slavery often accepted beliefs about black and white bodily difference as well.
No less central to recent scholarship has been a focus on the African-derived healing traditions. Beginning with Sharla Fett’s Working Cures (2002), historians have increasingly explored the rich array of African derived healing traditions, emphasizing that African-derived understandings of healthcare—not the white medical profession’s—functioned as the day-to-day healthcare for most enslaved people. African descendant healthcare providers, be they midwives or nurses, obeah men or root doctors, offered alternative theories of health, healing, and the body that enslaved people used to retain autonomy over their own bodies, connect with their ancestral past, and directly challenge slaveowners. There is also an increasing awareness that African-descendant healers were not exclusively used by enslaved people, but by slaveowners as well. Pablo Gomez has even argued that African healers so dominated healthcare in the early Caribbean that their epistemological tradition—one rooted in direct experience rather than established theory—formed one key foundation for Western scientific empiricism. A final major focus has been on gender, and, specifically, the reproductive health of enslaved women. Katherine Paugh and Sasha Turner have recently shown how the reproductive health of enslaved women took on central importance to British policymakers in the wake of the African slave trade’s abolition; they have been joined by others, notably Deirdre Cooper Owens, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, and Sharla Fett, who have shown how black midwives fought against the intrusion of white male physicians into black women’s traditional domain.
Ezelle Sanford III (Princeton University), “The Patient’s View from Behind the ‘Color Line:’ Alternative Approaches toward Recovering African American Clinical Experiences”
On August 17, 1979 the nation’s largest segregated hospital Homer G. Phillips, was forcibly closed by the City of St. Louis. Though rumors of the hospital’s closure had circulated for decades, the City surprised both hospital employees and community members on that day, intentionally obscuring municipal hospital consolidation plans with hopes to prevent widespread community protest. Closing day was hectic on the ground, described by some as a “siege,” as hundreds of police blocked entrance to the hospital. Helicopters circled overhead, anticipating perhaps violent protest from African American community members. In the chaos, hospital employees and staff evacuated the facility. In the melee, these individuals left documents on their desks expecting to return after the institution had been successfully shut down. They never returned.
In the months and years that followed, archivists and librarians from the Missouri History Museum were invited to the defunct facility to collect historically important materials. While these individuals collected cultural artifacts and patient medical records, documents critical to reconstructing the history of this important institution were lost. Unlike other historically important institutions, there is no “Homer G. Philips” collection of documents and materials produced by the facility.
The history and legacy of Homer G. Phillips Hospital has captured the attention and imagination of historians and community members alike, and yet none have been able to produce a complete institutional history due to the dearth and dispersal of primary sources. Useful archival materials have been scattered across local and national archives. Newspapers recount extraordinary events in the hospital’s history but not the every-day operations necessary to understand patient experiences. Some medical professionals who trained and worked at the hospital have had their materials preserved and deposited in local repositories. In other words, primary sources traditionally employed by historians, are useful to account for only part of the story. The voices of the municipal hospital’s patients, both African American and working class, however, remain silent in the archive. This silence has been amplified in the field as the institution has yet to garner the attention and analysis it deserves.
Racial segregation, undergirded by local and federal policy, produced the conditions which catalyzed the construction of the 700-bed hospital. The history of racial segregation was not marginal to the development and modernization of modern American healthcare. Rather, it was quite central, as the modernizing system embedded within it the social ideals of the era. Archivists and archives, as the collectors and preservers of historical materials, determined what “valuable” material to collect. Their implicit and explicit biases exacerbated a persistent, yet all-to-present, problem in the history of medicine: recovering the voices of patients in clinical settings.
And yet, the history of racial segregation has also shaped the production of knowledge. Not only are the prominent and frequently-studied institutions and organizations invariably white—the very construction of historical archives, the historian’s “laboratory”—has been shaped by racial bias. Though this is a problem often recognized in the discipline at large, and in such interdisciplinary fields as African American Studies, much more work can be done in the history of medicine to acknowledge the archival silences of African Americans.
How do historians recover these voices from the margins and rectify the silences of the archive? Reflecting on my recovery of Homer G. Phillip’s institutional history, this paper outlines three alternative and interdisciplinary methods to recovering the history, experiences, and perspectives of African American hospital patients. These methods include ethnographic, literary, and oral historical practices. Additionally, this paper will evaluate the possibilities and limitations of these practices for historians invested in marginal perspectives.
George Aumoithe (Princeton University), “A Forum Against Social Difference in Healthcare: Contesting Inequality and Healthcare Rights in the Medicaid Hearings of 1968”
While statutory law elaborates certain forms of social difference like categorical eligibility for federal funding and constitutional law lists protected classes based on categories such as race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, and disability, these forms of distinction are messily negotiated in the real-time forums of policy analysis and creation. Examining the relationship of healthcare and welfare in U.S. social policy requires understanding how its roots have been shaped by program designers, administrators, and rights-bearing actors. This paper examines contestations over how states differentially deployed the 1965 Medicaid law and its category of “medical indigency” to cover people who fell below the official poverty line, but for whom catastrophic illness threatened poverty. Large states like New York, California, and Massachusetts seized upon the medical indigency category to expand care to millions of people who did not receive welfare cash assistance. The rapid expansion of Medicaid to cover the medically indigent, however, resulted in backlash from more conservative states largely in the South. In Congress, Southern reaction consequentially reshaped the Social Security Amendments of 1967 to sharply curtail eligibility standards, which cut off millions of newly enrolled Medicaid recipients elsewhere. Shortly following these amendments, President Lyndon B. Johnson directed Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Wilbur Cohen to hold a series of Medicaid hearings in nine major metropolitan areas in the United States.
This paper compares the proceedings of these 1968 Medicaid hearings in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, New Orleans, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC to show how Medicaid’s boundaries refracted in different ways depending on the region. Since the intent, meaning, boundaries, and implementation of the medical program for the poor and the near-poor was not firmly defined as a welfare program in its early years, the meeting transcripts provide an important text for understanding the emergent, contingent, and conflicting regional “legalities” of Medicaid. Medicaid increasingly became associated with welfare medicine as attempts to constrain unforeseen cost increases rose to the fore of federal health planning and policy-making. The design of Social Security, however, meant that Medicaid’s administration within state welfare departments limited its ability to “mainstream” recipients and the medical care that they received. Instead, the expansion of Medicaid based on the broader-based mandate of medical indigency was replaced by categorical programs that gradually expanded Medicaid coverage: to categories of workers formerly excluded (agricultural and domestic workers), disease-specific recipients (kidney/renal disease, AIDS patients), and dependents (pregnant women, children, dual-eligible Medicare-Medicaid elderly). All of these groups and more entered the forum of the 1968 hearings and sought to elaborate the particularities of their healthcare challenges and the promise and shortfall of the early Medicaid law. All of this occurred against the backdrop of a shift away from an intent to reduce inequality via medical indigency standards that included the working poor and toward cost containment. A regional focus, however, shows that this shift did not occur unilaterally nor without political conflict. The Medicaid hearings of 1968 reveal how politicians, administrators, civic groups, and rights-bearing residents contested the program’s possibility to contribute to healthcare equality even as questions of cost eclipsed the original promises of the “Great Society.”
Giuliana Perrone (University of California—Santa Barbara), “Unfinished Freedom: The Long Legal Afterlives of Slavery in the United States”
This paper explores the ways in which racial difference became inscribed in post-emancipation American law. It shows that the process of institutionalizing racial categories in post-bellum law began immediately following the end of the Civil War by building on preexisting racial categorization. It argues that judges across the former slave South crafted a jurisprudential tradition that recognized emancipation (the end of enslavement), but failed to realize the promises of abolition (the total eradication of slavery as an institution). In so doing, rulings laid the groundwork for Jim Crow and the consecration of race-based difference into American law – a full three decades before the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson enshrined the “separate but equal” doctrine.
This paper is drawn from my book project, tentatively titled The Problem of Emancipation in an Age of Slavery, which historicizes the long, ambiguous, and complex trajectory of black (un)freedom. Using an original collection of nearly 700 post-emancipation slave cases – suits involving slavery decided in Southern state appellate courts after the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment – I show that judicial rulings set the terms of ongoing debates about racial identity, civil rights, and national belonging. I demonstrate that slavery, as a legal institution and a social practice, remained omnipresent in Southern courtrooms and sometimes actionable in American law well after its ostensible demise.
This paper will focus on representative cases organized into three categories. First, I will explore the ways in which judges viewed suits from the antebellum era in light of emancipation. These include disputes over contracts for the sale and hire of slaves, as well as those related to the estates and personal finances of white Southerners. In this section, I focus on cases that reveal the persisting antebellum influence on jurisprudence, particularly when it came to descriptions and inclusion of black bodies, and the ways in which judges considered how the end of slavery might – or might not – alter legal agreements for slaves. Overwhelmingly, courts determined agreements made prior to the end of slavery remained enforceable. As a result, money for slaves continued trading hands, even after enslavement had become illegal.
Second, the paper will investigate suits that asked courts to consider former slaves as legal persons for the first time. I will pay special attention to those suits that placed and defined freed people in the new legal order, and that articulate the ways in which judges viewed the ability of former slaves to enjoy the civil rights that accompanied citizenship. Cases related to the black family are of particular interest, as they reveal the complex problems associated with the denial of a legal identity from birth. For instance, could the children born to formerly enslaved people be legitimate if their parents previously lacked the ability to lawfully marry? Courts disagreed, which meant that some former slaves never enjoyed the ability to inherit from their families. Rulings in domestic law suits reveal that judges did not believe that the law at their disposal permitted the total eradication of the multitude of disabilities slavery inflicted. As a result, they often lumped freedpeople in their own separate category, defined by their former bondage.
Finally, this essay will explore the existence of alternative paths for dealing with the lingering legacies of slavery. Arguably, many could have limited, or prevented outright, the consecration of race-based difference into American law. Louisiana, for example, refused to hear any further cases related to slavery after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. Its court interpreted the constitutional change as not only taking away any ability for courts to further legitimize slavery-based business, but also any capacity to even entertain such litigation. However, in a series of rulings, the United States Supreme Court limited this more radical legal vision for Reconstruction, permanently leaving vestiges of slavery firmly in place.
This essay will not directly investigate healthcare, but it will speak to the ways in which Reconstruction-era judicial pronouncements in post-emancipation slave cases had material consequences for individuals and structural effects on the ways in which black rights and citizenship became defined in law. I hope to offer an assessment of the legal bedrock for modern race-based discrimination that can open up larger conversations about the ways that this shaped assumptions about health and equal access to healthcare in the United States.
Graham Mooney (Johns Hopkins University), “Primary Care in a Hyper-segregating City: Health, Justice, and the 1948 Baltimore Medical Care Plan”
In the immediate post war period, a number of cities and states created tax-funded plans that provided basic medical screening and services for hundreds of thousands of poor Americans. These understudied experiments in social medicine have been largely-forgotten as significant aspects of welfare provision, yet they were important forerunners of Medicare, Medicaid and Community Health Centers. The Maryland and Baltimore Medical Care Plans were introduced in the late 1940s. They screened the indigent population and follow-ups were made with local private health providers, particularly family doctors. Analysis of the plans in the early 1950s exposed the entrenchment of racial inequalities that had shaped access to private primary health care in the decades before. Racist attitudes on the part of local providers meant that the plans struggled to eradicate inequalities in access or health outcomes.
Kimani Paul-Emile (Fordham University), “American Drug Regulation: Substance or Abuse?”
This article advances a theory of drug regulation that addresses two previously unexamined questions: how law-makers are able to regulate drugs differently irrespective of the dangers the drugs may pose and independent of their health effects, and the process followed to achieve this phenomenon. For example, although tobacco products are the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, they can be bought and sold legally by adults, while marijuana, a substantially safer drug, is subject to the highest level of drug control. This article posits a conceptual model for making sense of this dissonance and applies this model to the regulation of six common drugs: cocaine, marijuana, tobacco, alcohol, opioids, and anabolic steroids. Although much has been written on the topic of licit and illicit drug regulation, none of the scholarship in this literature has attempted to explain through an examination of pharmaceutical, illicit, and over-the-counter drugs how the apparent inconsistencies and incoherence of the U.S. system of drug control have been achieved and sustained. This work fills the gap in this literature by proposing an innovative theoretical model for understanding how drugs can become “medicalized,” “criminalized” or deemed appropriate for recreational use, based upon little or no empirical evidence regarding the pharmacodynamics of the drug, and the ways in which this process is influenced by and maintains structural inequality.
Kwame Holmes (Bard College), “Black White-Collar Professionals and the Histories of Black Emotion in the Civil Rights Era”
Here I am interested in complicating our conceptualization of the Civil Rights-Black Power era or the “Long Civil Rights Movement” or the postwar “Black Freedom Struggle.” These terms represent scholars’ attempts to precisely locate the “start” or “stop” of the social movements that culminated in all sorts of political progress from federal legislation to black mayor-ships in towns and cities across the country. Yet these terms offer little to help scholars understand individual emotional experience of the civil rights movement, which were more complex than legalistic notions like “civil rights” and which exceeded the historic boundaries of “postwar,” and make mockery of temporalities like “end” or “beginning.” As this chapter will indicate, modes of emotional austerity were features, not by-products, of white-collar professionalism after World War II, and they exerted material pressure on the course of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In this talk, I discuss the life and career of E. Frederic Morrow, the first black man appointed to an executive administration job at the White House. Long after other African Americans became “the first” in other areas of political or economic life, Morrow still had to face the psychological consequences of his experiences, a realm of experience the historiography has—as of yet—not made room for.
Maria K. John (University of Massachusetts—Boston), “‘Don’t Get Sick After June’: a seventy-year long survival strategy for American Indians navigating structural racism and funding disparities in the Indian Health Service”
An old joke in Indian Country goes simply: “Don’t get sick after June”. The cartoon above, produced in 2011 by Oglala Lakota artist Marty Two Bulls, speaks directly to the unspoken punch line of this joke as it vividly illustrates how one could easily die waiting for care at the Indian Health Service (IHS). While, in its life time, this joke has mostly referred to IHS services for reservation communities (where scarce resources are known to run dry in the second half of the calendar year) the gravity of this joke and the frightening truth in the image above have held as much relevance for the state of urban Indian medical services since the middle decades of the twentieth century. The precarious reality of funding within the IHS for both reservation and urban communities alike was recently thrust into the national spotlight in the wake of the federal government’s record-breaking shutdown in January 2019. This paper will discuss the ramifications of the federal shutdown on Indian Health Services with a view to historicizing this very recent catastrophe in a long-running record of medical neglect, chronic underfunding, and structural barriers to access within the IHS. By unpacking the reasons why, for almost seventy years, the refrain “don’t get sick after June” has remained painfully relevant for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities, this paper argues that the US federal government’s woefully inadequate and underfunded system of healthcare for Native peoples is one of the nation’s greatest examples of structural inequality and racialized disparity created by the government in the realm of health.
Compared to Whites, AI/ANs are far more likely to report fair or poor health. AI/AN adults are twice as likely to have diabetes, 30 percent more likely to have hypertension, and 27 percent more likely to be obese. Compared to the overall population, AI/ANs experience post-traumatic stress disorder at higher levels, but they have limited access to mental health care. Despite chronic health disparities of many kinds suffered by AI/ANs, per- person healthcare expenditure for the IHS in 2017 was only a third that of per-person federal health care spending nationwide. By further comparison, reports published consistently over the last twenty years by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the National Tribal Budget Formulation Group, and the National Indian Health Board (among others) all continue to reveal that, “The federal government spends less per capita on Native American health care than on any other group for which it has this responsibility, including Medicaid recipients, prisoners, veterans, and military personnel.”
While this paper considers the IHS as a whole, special focus is given to the funding shortages faced by urban Indian health services. Nearly 80% of American Indians and Alaska Natives live in urban areas, but urban funding for those patients makes up less than 1% of the IHS budget. As the paper will unpack, the reasons for this particular funding disparity, exposes the government’s racialized criteria for determining who has the right to access IHS medical care.
Rhonda Y. Williams (Vanderbilt University), “‘Now that I understand the system …’: Unpacking Structural Inequality through Place, Activism & Oral History”
I remember Shirley Wise telling me the story about soaking fresh greens in her kitchen sink. Soaking greens was a critical step in the prepping process – the way you remove the dirt, the grit, and get them ready for the cooking pot. She shared this matter-of-factly and joyfully, as we chatted in the kitchen of her rehabilitated house in Baltimore – where she had greens soaking in the sink.
Wise moved into her rehabilitated house in 1980 – after 25 years of public housing residency and more than a decade of tenant activism. While clearly Wise expressed pleasure, and relief, with not having to concern herself with a neighbor’s dirty water backing up into her sink, she still loved and missed Lafayette Courts.
After over a decade on the waiting list, public housing saved her family from unsanitary living conditions, including weak floorboards and holey floors, lack of heat, and vermin. Lafayette Courts, in particular, was the place where her family – her paraplegic mom, sister, brother, and newborn baby – could live together, and this afforded all of them “a sense of stability” and better, healthy living conditions. Other first families felt the same way. “For whatever reason that they came here,” stated Wise, “they had a real sense of community, and a real sense of pride, because it was a beautiful place.”
But, to be clear, Wise also had serious concerns and no problem critiquing the housing authority, government officials, or policies and practices that produced unsafe conditions and demeaning experiences for tenants – as tenants, as poor people, as black people, as social welfare recipients, and as urban dwellers.
As part of a grassroots archive created between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, Mrs. Wise’s story is evocative and revelatory. Her oral history like those of other tenants make visible the lives of low-income people and how they are impacted by and reveal structural inequalities through how space and place are literally constructed and managed. Such grassroots archives make legible the complexity of residents’ lives, as well as how space is imbued with ideologies and policies that produce both (dis)ease and potential opportunities for health and wellbeing.
Here, health and wellbeing refers to not simply the individual human body and psyche, but the social body, and crucially the individual body in relation to the social body in time and space. With this in mind, two overarching questions are: How can studying residents’ lives and the goings-on in residential spaces help us understand how wellbeing and (dis)ease – or pathology and ill-health – are reproduced? In what ways have policy and spatial forms masked, sustained, and structured ideological violence and inequality?
I maintain that an exploration of private and public spaces, concrete interiors and exteriors, and individual living and social policies reveal the racial, gender, and economic architectures of inequality. Race and poverty structure urban geography. Racially and economically segregated cities became the primary homes of public housing, and the location of public housing shapes administrative policies and managerial behavior – both of which influence how tenants experience public housing, societal perceptions of tenants and low-income public housing, and increasingly low-income people’s quality of life and social wellbeing as occupants of government-structured spaces.
In means-tested subsidized housing, deeply private interior living spaces (e.g., kitchens, bedrooms, living-rooms), as well as exterior spaces (e.g., tot lots, elevators, streets, neighborhoods), were sites of surveillance and control that required “handling” and “treatment.” For instance, Goldie Baker, a black resident, recounted a conflict that she had with Lafayette Courts management. Baker wanted maintenance to remove an old icebox from her apartment in order to make room for her refrigerator, “one of the few pieces of furniture she still possessed from her days as a home owner.” She had a big family and a limited amount of apartment space. Moreover, her refrigerator could store more food and cut down on more frequent grocery trips. Her attempts to organize her living space and manage her family’s wellbeing collided with managerial power. Maintenance didn’t come and when she went to inquire, the black manager asked her if she was “crazy.”
A simple request to maximize interior space in the particular place of racially segregated public housing resulted in an upbraiding and castigation. Driven by familial needs, Baker keenly understood – from generational knowledge and contemporary perceptions – how living in low-income housing impacted her social status and mediated her ability to “access” social respect. Refusing to be dismissed and mistreated because she was poor, black, female, and lived in public housing, Baker bypassed the manager and went to the white housing commissioner, where she compared managerial mistreatment of tenants with the dehumanizing system of slavery: “I am not nobody’s slave, and he ain’t talking to no slave. Slavery’s over. I said, he don’t have no respect for me, he don’t need to be over there.”
Systems of racial, gender, and economic discrimination were not only based on social diminution, but also enacted through administrative policies that operated, according to Shirley Wise, on “fear structure that was attached to the units.” This “fear structure” – concretized through surveillance and ultimately the threat of eviction – stoked residents’ anxieties and disrupted social belonging. Yet again, public housing tenants, by stint of their residency, were treated differently; they were deemed socially irresponsible and less worthy. According to Wise:
You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do the other. You kept late hours … I mean they had little spotters all over the community right… So you had, when they say public housing, they meant in the real true sense. Your life was public too.
For a new generation of tenants, however, disparate treatment based on their residency in public housing became unpalatable. Stated Wise: “So …[that was] the way. And, for people who had to do that, fine, but when we came along, the new generation of public housing residents came along who said that no we have rights too, then how do we affect some kind of change.”
Wise and others began to understand that where they lived shaped their day-to-day, and this, in fact, politicized and radicalized them. In this way, spaces of living and activism not only further expose the existence of inequality, but also, just as importantly, the roles that black women have played in struggles for individual and collective wellbeing. The concepts of “health” and wellbeing are relative, situational, mutable, corporeal, and social. Shirley Wise understood this, and just as critically the grassroots archive of stories poignantly communicate this. Arriving full narrative circle, after sharing her affection for public housing as a home-place and a constraining space where she couldn’t sometimes do basic things (like soak greens); after having spoken fondly of tenants’ sense of community and relaying how public housing as a communal space was undermined, Wise plainly and unequivocally asserted: Public housing “did warehouse people, I now say, now that I understand the system.”
Sharla Fett (Occidental College), “Confronting the Chattel Principle: Black Health and Healing in the Age of Slavery”
When James Pennington explained his outrage over references to “kind masters” and “the mildest form of slavery” in his 1849 narrative, he got to the heart of what it meant for a system to produce black pain, illness, and suffering. The “chattel principle,” Pennington argued, lay at the heart of the institution of slavery and no amount of ameliorative treatment by individual slaveowners could prevent the harms resulting to enslaved people’s bodies and spirits. The laws of slavery that codified the principle of human beings as moveable capital also helped to generate scientific theories of racial difference and racist white medical practices. Free and enslaved black practitioners enmeshed in the political economy of chattel slavery had to contend both with the racial objectification of black patients’ health and with white surveillance and attempted control over black healing.
To explore these issues, my paper proceeds in two steps. First, I consider how the burgeoning scholarship on slavery and capitalism might offer new insights and raise new questions about the structural determinants of enslaved peoples’ health and healing. Scholars such as Edward Baptist, Daina Ramey Berry, Walter Johnson, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Sowande’ Mustakeem and Calvin Schermerhorn illuminate the impact of racial capitalism on black lives and bodies in sites as varied as transatlantic slave ships, domestic slave markets, plantation fields, slaveowner households, and white medical schools. These studies of race and property in the slavery era contribute to a deeper understanding of the foundations of institutionalized medical racism and racialized health disparities in post-emancipation societies.
The second half of the paper considers how enslaved practitioners across the Atlantic World – ranging from African ritual specialists in Brazil to enslaved midwives in the U.S. antebellum South—practiced within, against, and outside of the structures of the political economy of chattel slavery. Over the past twenty or thirty years, scholars such as Deborah Gray White, Sharla Fett, James Sweet, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Diana Paton, and Sasha Turner have approached enslaved healing practices using a variety of frameworks to grasp the rich therapeutic worlds and complicated power relations that emerged within many slave societies. Frameworks of culture and community formation, religious expression, labor, and more recently, juridical institutions and intellectual history each emphasize distinct aspects of enslaved healers’ work and context. Examining the literature of how healers in the U.S. and wider Atlantic world interacted with structures of power and surveillance, I trace the insights and limitations of these interpretive frameworks for understanding Afro-Atlantic healing practices and legacies in the face of structural racism and the chattel principle.
Tala Khanmalek (Princeton University), “‘Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed’: Rumor, Racialized Sexuality, and the 1917 Bath Riots in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands”
My intertextual reading of national archives and Chicana feminist literature emphasizes how late nineteenth-century colonial forms of governance and public health control shaped strategies of containment and subversion in El Paso/Juaìrez. On January 28, 1917, a group of women led by 17-year-old Carmelita Torres defied quarantine orders at the U.S.-Mexico border, which required Mexican-heritage people to undergo a toxic delousing procedure. According to local and national coverage of the protest, rumors that United States Public Health Service officials had photographed women in the nude ignited what would come to be known as the Bath Riots. This paper examines (the absence of) archival sources through Gloria Anzalduìa’s Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza to show the ways in which these rumors expose issues of propriety and perversion central to the material production of gendered racialization. Specifically, I analyze newspaper reports to highlight the racialized and sexualized construction of Mexican women as disease vectors—rather than carriers—in need of regulation, as well as four state photographs of the El Paso disinfection plant. I argue that Anzalduìan borderlands theory, including her recuperation of loose tongues as “wild,” reveals a counter-discourse to biopolitical subjection in the transmission of rumors among working-class Mexican women.
Wangui Muigai (Brandeis University), “A City’s Neglect on Trial: US v. Helen G. Jackson”
During the winter of 1941-1942 African Americans across the country closely followed the Washington D.C. trial of Helen Jackson, a young black mother charged with second-degree murder for the death of her six-month old daughter Jane.
Cases of infanticide had long been covered, and sensationalized, in newspapers. Yet Jackson’s case stood out not because of its gruesome details, but because her story was so familiar. The frustration and despair that led Jackson to see crime as her only option, resonated with black readers who knew of many young women like her who found their dreams of migrating to build new lives derailed due to their race and gender. With each attempt to get public assistance and care for her sick baby girl, Jackson paid the costs of being an African American, single mother, and a migrant in a city struggling to respond to the needs of its growing black population.
The case marked a shift in viewing the death of a black child from a judgment against parents to a judgment against society and its indifference towards black children. As the black press argued, the question at the heart of the case was not, “why did Jackson do it?” but rather, why was this a scenario many young African American women found themselves? Amidst a wave of black war-time migration, the particular obstacles facing young black women became the primary lens through which Jackson’s case was discussed and debated. In the eyes of black newspaper reporters and their readers, the blame lay with the network of city and charitable institutions that systematically denied her, and countless other black women and children, any relief. The Baltimore Afro-American zeroed in on the underlying irony, writing, “When her baby was warm and alive the State didn’t care; no one would help her keep it that way; doors only closed in her face; yet the State cares now: her baby is dead: she killed it to keep it from being hungry, that’s why she shrugs.” Jackson’s tragic story came to symbolize the struggles and lack of sympathy facing black mothers. As news coverage and interviews with other black women living in the WWII-era reveal, many described similar experiences of despair and humiliation when trying to seek help from relief and health care agencies.
In this paper, I draw on trial records, including Jackson’s own testimony, alongside newspapers and historical accounts to examine the ways US v. Jackson was discussed and represented in legal spaces and the black public sphere. I will take particular care to situate the trial within contemporaneous debates over the policies and practices of segregated health care and social welfare, and historiographies of black migration, health care, illegitimacy, and the law. In doing so, the paper takes up the workshop’s invitation to explore the interplay of structural racism and sexism within legal and medical sites.