“Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired:” Eugenics, Autonomy, and America’s Battle over the Black Female Body
The chapter of my current book project I most recently completed was about the life and work of Fannie Lou Hamer: the Mississippi sharecropper-turned-politician who was one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). This political party was formed by the black population of Mississippi out of disillusionment with mid-20th century establishment politics (and their overwhelmingly racist nature) and maintained unseating the all-white Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention (DNC) as one of its central aims. While it failed to do this in 1964, they succeeded four years later at the 1968 DNC, with the convention giving Hamer and her colleagues a standing ovation as they took their seats, a symbol of black Americans’ inalienable right to a place in the political process.
And while Hamer is most famously known for her passionate speeches, powerful singing voice, and political rags-to-riches story, there’s a piece of her early life which, while often overlooked, was nevertheless constitutive of her character and convictions. In 1961, Hamer underwent surgery to remove a uterine tumor, and awoke to the news that she had received—without her knowledge or consent—a full hysterectomy. It likely goes without saying that this was emotionally, spiritually, and physically devastating for Hamer, and for many of us it’s difficult to imagine a doctor getting away with this ever, let alone a mere 60 years ago. There’s obviously a contextualization here, though, that needs to be taken into account: black women in the Jim Crow south were afforded less rights, had less opportunity for legal recourse, and were less likely to be believed than any of their white counterparts.
The reality of racism and ethnic discrimination in the American healthcare system is not a new phenomena now, nor was it during Hamer’s lifetime. One only needs to Google “racism in healthcare” to see page after page of articles about this reality. Despite it's monstrous barbarity, though, it has continued to be a ubiquitous experience particularly for black women. What happened to Hamer was so common, in fact, that it had its own name: a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
This practice of removing a black woman’s uterus wasn’t only and effort to inflict undue pain and suffering, however. It was a small piece of America’s larger experiment with eugenics: intentional and malicious efforts at population control based on race, ethnicity, gender, accidental characteristics, etc. By giving black women unwanted hysterectomies, these doctors not only violated personal autonomy and their own hippocratic oaths, but made it impossible for these women to reproduce, thus lowering the black population slowly over the course of generations.
Again, I know this may be hard to imagine, but it’s a reality that has been thoroughly documented [1]. And while these very overt practices may not be as common as they once were, we can’t ignore the parallels between violations against female autonomy 60 years ago, and those violations today in the form of ongoing legislative battles over abortion rights after Roe v. Wade. Women’s self-government and bodily determination continues to be a relevant social and political issue for the U.S. and black women’s bodies have long been the object of control, particularly by white males.
When enslaved, black women were expected to perform the physical labor demanded of them and bear additional children to further increase the workforce (or sell for the master’s profit), with little-to-no separation between the two. Female slaves were expected to return to their labor immediately after giving birth and to only nurse their children between tasks. We also can’t ignore the fact that enslaved women were expected to be sexually available at their owners’ wills and that they were also expected to bear children to their masters. One of the most famous examples of this is the six children Thomas Jefferson fathered to one of his slaves, Sally Hemings [2]. Fannie Lou Hamer cheekily summed up America’s contradictory attitude between the continued discrimination of black women publicly and these erotic interactions privately: “Some of the white people will tell us, ‘Well, I just don’t believe in integration.’ But he been integrating at night a long time!” [3]
Hamer, along with many others, disdained the incrementalism of the movement for black liberation: “And you can always hear this long sob story: ‘You know it takes time.’ For three hundred years, we've given them time. And I've been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change” [4]. This is an issue we’re still dealing with, albeit in different forms; a lack of criminal justice reform and the abolition of the prison industrial complex, a lack of accountability for racism in police departments, no reparations for descendants of slavery and fervent, and ongoing attacks on affirmative action and social welfare programs designed to widen the net of opportunity for historically disadvantaged and discriminated-against communities. And, again, black women end up in the crosshairs more than anyone else (as can be seen, for just one example, in the racist “welfare queen” trope) [5].
In our history as a society, the black female body has been the object of more exploitation, control, and pain—and afforded less freedom, autonomy, and indemnification—than anyone else in our country’s long and oppressive past. We’ve simultaneously eliminated black women’s ability to bear children while also forcing them to bear white men’s children; we’ve denied them the ability to nurse their own children while forcing them to nurse white children; we’ve (falsely) accused them of taking advantage of “the system” while also creating historical and social conditions such that reliance on governmental systems is often the only option.
For any of the readers who might not know: I’m a white man. I don’t know what it’s like to be a black woman in America, and I don’t pretend to know. What I do know, though, is the historical reality of black women and their bodies being perpetually viewed as means to some end as opposed to ends in themselves. Doing as much has stripped away, not just a sense of worth and dignity, but the very humanity and sanctity we as Christians believe are inherent to all people as bearers of the image of God.
The bodies of black women cannot continue to be the battlegrounds on which white men fight their cultural wars. And those of us who align ourselves with the black community and follow black leadership—especially those of us in the church—have a responsibility to come alongside the task of seeking liberation, autonomy, and self-determination for all black people, but especially black women.
A phrase many of us likely see on t-shirts and bumper-stickers these days is, “The future is female.” And that’s true. But I don’t think it goes quite far enough. Yes, the future is female, but it’s black and free, too.
[1] See Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, (Washington, DC: Dialogue Press, 2012) and Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenics Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016).
[2] https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/.
[3] https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/hamer-were-on-our-way-speech-text/.
[4] https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2019/08/09/im-sick-and-tired-of-being-sick-and-tired-dec-20-1964/.
[5] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/20/255819681/the-truth-behind-the-lies-of-the-original-welfare-queen.
