Too Loud to Be Ignored

“She my daughter. The one I managed to have milk for and to get it to her even after they stole it; after they handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses.”

                                                                                                       - Toni Morrison, Beloved

Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores the grueling experience of black womanhood during slavery. Motherhood forms a place of fiery purpose within the main character Sethe, as her children are the only precious things she can claim within enslaved life. However, the oppressive and foul forces of slavery find a way to claw at and distort this. Sethe is poisoned by deep trauma resulting from violence and sexual assault. This drives her to kill her daughter, as a form of protection. As a result, her love is insulted and titled “animalistic” and “too thick”. Slavery abused Sethe into a beast-like state, in which she could not see her own value. 

Sethe tells the story of Margaret Garner. A woman who’s life, who’s very real experiences, Beloved is based on. A woman who was driven to kill her own daughter. 

Morrison uses Garner’s life to explore how past systems of oppression stripped black women of their dignity, identity, and freedom to love. Her exploration of the dehumanization of black women shares relevancy with many other aspects of slavery. For example, James Marion Sims, the “Father of Modern Gynecology”,  performed cruel and shocking experimentation on enslaved women using the racist notion that black people did not feel pain. As a result, we obtained large amounts of medical knowledge that is still used today. 

The suffering of black women has long been masked by the cruel idea of their sub-humanity. Suffering inflicted upon them for the gain of white society. When we understand this, we can begin to understand the barriers that black women and mothers are grappling with today. The medical abuse, assault, and devaluing of black female bodies may feel an extreme of the past. 

But the past does not disappear, it finds new ways to live. 

The U.S. still perpetuates sub-humanity within the black female community- by under serving their medical needs. Their facial expressions have been reported by medical professions to display less obvious suffering. They are denied pain medication and under-diagnosed, therefore facing serious harm or mortality at much higher rates. 

Black women are paid 63 cents for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man (Almeida and Salas 2021). 

The wage gap means black women have less access to quality health insurance.

Disparities in access to contraception cause black women to experience unintended pregnancy at higher rates than other racial groups (Sreenivas 2022). 

The recent overturning of Roe v Wade has made this worse. 

Numerous studies show racial bias in the provision of painkillers to black female patients (Caramenico, n.d.).

Unconscious bias and systemic racism causes black women to have less access to quality care. 

Women are often considered to exaggerate struggle. 

As a result, the likelihood of maternal mortality is over three times higher for black women than for white women (Caramenico, n.d.). 

Black women are now trapped between their assumed racial “resilience to pain” and their gendered “hysterical reactions.” 

The medical industry does not listen to black women. It feeds off of knowledge gained from torturous testing, off of notions of resilience, off of notions of exaggerated suffering. It devalues, and it ignores. 

During the time of slavery, black women were considered property. Margaret Garner would have been charged with destruction of property after killing her child. In the eyes of white people, enslaved women were perceived as objects to justify abuse. 

Sethe and Margaret Garner’s story teaches us how discrimination is maintained by the creation of power structures. The fraught and dangerous intersectionality between blackness and womanhood puts black mothers at the bottom of society. And this enforced idea of sub-humanity remains accustomed. 

It is a broken scale that weighs our humanity against each other. 

The abuse of black women fed the progress of our country. 

Therefore it continues to thrive within our citizens and institutions.

The suffering of black women is not quieter,

Their pain is not less, 

White society is conditioned not to listen.

References

Almeida, Beth, and Bela Salas. 2021. “Women of Color and the Wage Gap.” Center for American Progress. americanprogress.org/article/women-of-color-and-the-wage-gap/.

Caramenico, Alicia. n.d. “Blacks, women experience pain medication disparities, study finds.” Fierce Healthcare. Accessed April 9, 2023. fiercehealthcare.com/healthcare/blacks-women-experience-pain-medication-disparities-study-finds.

Sreenivas, Shishira. 2022. “Birth Control Access: Health Care Disparities and Bias.” WebMD. webmd.com/sex/birth-control/contraception-access-care-disparities-bias.

Stevenson, Amanda. 2021. “Black Women Over Three Times More Likely to Die in Pregnancy, Postpartum Than White Women, New Research Finds.” Population Reference Bureau. prb.org/resources/black-women-over-three-times-more-likely-to-die-in-pregnancy-postpartum-than-white-women-new-research-finds/.