1. Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 13.
2. Benjamin, 15.
3. World Health Organization, http://apps.who.int/gb/bd/PDF/bd48/basic-documents-48th-edition-en.pdf#page=7.
4. Adam M. Geary, Anti-Black Racism and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The invisibility of Black women with AIDS that Evelynn M. Hammonds highlighted much earlier in the epidemic continues. Hammonds, “Missing Persons: Black Women and AIDS,” Radical America 24, no. 2 (1990): 7–24.
5. The resonances may be particularly strong for those reading from other settler-colonial contexts in which anti-Black racism is foundational to the social milieu, such as Brazil and South Africa. See work by scholars working in and on those regions, including Melissa S. Creary, “Biocultural Citizenship and Embodying Exceptionalism: Biopolitics for Sickle Cell Disease in Brazil,” Social Science and Medicine 199 (2018): 123–31; Zimitri Erasmus, Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2017).
6. See, e.g., the rich two-volume work of W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race, Beginnings to 1900 (New York: Routledge, 2000) and An American Health Dilemma: Vol. II. Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States 1900–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2002). Even books with “twenty-first century” in the title, such as Dorothy Roberts’s important Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2012), narrate the story chronologically from that same earlier foundation.
7. The scholarship of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is robust, and rich points of entry might be either the foundational volume by James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: Free Press, 1981), or the more recent edited collection Susan M. Reverby, ed., Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). The Henrietta Lacks case came to prominence with the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Crown, 2010), and it had long been a subject of interest to historians interested in the ways that biotechnologies have intersected with notions of race and racial exploitation. See Hannah Landecker, “Immortality, In Vitro: A History of the HeLa Cell Line,” in Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics, ed. Paul Brodwin, 53–72 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
8. The term slow violence comes from Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
9. See, e.g., Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-genomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Roberts, Fatal Invention, 2. Many books that take a specifically more biological (as opposed to medical) frame also more justifiably use this same event as a hook, including Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge, and Justice after the Genome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 2; Ian Whitmarsh and David S. Jones, What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 2.
10. There have been many debunkings of genetics as a driver of health disparities—see, e.g., Pamela Sankar, Mildred K. Cho, Celeste M. Condit, Linda M. Hunt, Barbara Koenig, Patricia Marshall, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Paul Spicer, “Genetic Research and Health Disparities,” Journal of the American Medical Association 291, no. 24 (2004): 2985–89. More recent commentary has reiterated the frame and the debunking: Kathleen McGlone West, Erika Blacksher, and Wylie Burke, “Genomics, Health Disparities, and Missed Opportunities for the Nation’s Research Agenda,” Journal of the American Medical Association 317, no. 18 (2017): 1831–32. See also physical anthropologist Clarence C. Gravlee’s important work on how racism produces biological difference, in ways that are not genetically deterministic, in Gravlee, “How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139, no. 1 (2009): 47–57.
11. Cf. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology, or How to Do Things to Race,” in Race after the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, 44–66 (New York: Routledge, 2013).
12. The concept of “durability” has been developed further in my prior work. See Anne Pollock, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), esp. 8–12.
13. Camara Phyllis Jones, Benedict I. Truman, Laurie D. Elam-Evans, Camille A. Jones, Clara Y. Jones, Ruth Jiles, Susan F. Rumisha, and Geraldine S. Perry, “Using ‘Socially Assigned Race’ to Probe White Advantages in Health Status,” Ethnicity and Disease 18 (2008): 496–504.
14. Barbara J. Fields, “AHR Forum of Rogues and Geldings,” American Historical Review 108, no. 5 (2003): 1397–1405.
15. See, e.g., Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99. Terminology is explicitly discussed on p. 1244 in note 6: “I use ‘Black’ and ‘African American’ interchangeably throughout this article. I capitalize ‘Black’ because ‘Blacks,’ like Asians, Latinos, and other ‘minorities,’ constitute a specific cultural group and, as such, require denotation as a proper noun. . . . By the same token, I do not capitalize ‘white,’ which is not a proper noun, since whites do not constitute a specific cultural group. For the same reason I do not capitalize ‘women of color.’” Others have raised legitimate problems with capitalizing Black, especially around the danger of naturalizing and reifying the category—with such a fraught concept, all terminology is problematic, and the predominant convention in antiracist scholarship is my main guide.
16. Of course, it is perfectly possible to combine interest in the social processes with interest in the individual psychologies of those navigating the racist society—canonically, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Paladin, 1970), esp. his reflections in chapter 5, “The Fact of Blackness” (109–16), on an encounter with a French child who exclaims, “Look, a Negro!”
17. Evelynn M. Hammonds, “New Technologies of Race,” in Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert, 107–22 (New York: Routledge, 1997).
18. Camara Phyllis Jones, “Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale,” American Journal of Public Health 90, no. 8 (2000): 1212–13.
19. Zinzi D. Bailey, Nancy Krieger, Madina Agénor, Jasmine Graves, Natalia Linos, and Mary T. Bassett, “Structural Racism and Health Inequities in the USA: Evidence and Interventions,” The Lancet 389, no. 10077 (2017): 1453–63.
20. See David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
21. For a reader that is particularly rich in its inclusion of attention to Latino as well as Black health disparities, see Laurie B. Green, John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, and Martin Summers, eds., Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
22. Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2019).
23. For further discussion, see Pollock, Medicating Race, esp. 96–97.
24. Intersectionality is a foundational concept in Black feminist theory, and although it is particularly useful for analyzing intragroup differences (the specificity of Black women’s experiences, for example, which are not the same as Black men’s experiences), it also helps to attend to the inextricability of multiple facets of identity. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.”
25. Nancy Krieger, “Embodying Inequality: A Review of Concepts, Measures, and Methods for Studying Health Consequences of Discrimination,” International Journal of Health Services 29, no. 2 (1999): 295–352. The term accumulated insults is laid out in the abstract on p. 295 and on p. 296. For elaboration of how inequality becomes embodied as “the social produces the biological in a system of constant feedback between body and social experience,” see Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Bare Bones of Race,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 657–94.
26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 138.
27. Janet Shim, “Bio-power and Racial, Class, and Gender Formation in Biomedical Knowledge Production,” Research in the Sociology of Health Care 17 (2000): 174.
28. See, e.g., Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. chapter 6, “Race in the Age of Genomic Medicine” (155–86).
29. Anthony Ryan Hatch, Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 17.
30. Shiloh Krupar and Nadine Ehlers, “Biofutures: Race and the Governance of Health,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35, no. 2 (2017): 222–40; Jonathan Xavier Inda, Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life (New York: Routledge, 2016).
31. Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar, Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). The overview of Foucauldian biopower appears on pp. 2–5 and leads to the elaboration of “deadly life-making” on pp. 5–7.
32. Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), 4.
33. Melissa Harris-Perry gave a virtuosic keynote address at a conference on “Politics of Health in the U.S. South” (Vanderbilt University, March 17, 2016), in which she evocatively framed Black Lives Matter in terms of that theme. She gave the provocation that has stayed with me since: that we understand politics as matter, health as lives, and the U.S. South as Black.
34. Classic examples include Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
35. For discussion, see John Law, “STS as Method,” in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouché, Clark Miller, and Laurel Smith-Doerr, 31–58 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016).
36. Donna Haraway has long read media together with scientific texts; see, e.g., Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
37. Indeed, there is room to go further and include deeper engagement with fiction. See Ruha Benjamin, “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016).
38. Mary G. McDonald and Susan Birrell, “Reading Sport Critically: A Methodology for Interrogating Power,” Sociology of Sport Journal 16, no. 4 (1999): 283–300.
39. This is following in the footsteps of, e.g., Moya Bailey, “Misogynoir in Medical Media: On Caster Semenya and R. Kelly,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016).
40. Moya Bailey and Whitney Peoples, “Articulating Black Feminist Health Science Studies,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3, no. 2 (2017).
41. Nassim Parvin, “Doing Justice to Stories: On Ethics and Politics of Digital Storytelling,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 4 (2018): 515–34.
42. See, e.g., the important work of medical sociologists who use novel interviews to show how structural inequality shapes experiences of such wide-ranging phenomena as cardiovascular disease and autism. On cardiovascular disease, see Janet K. Shim, Heart-sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease (New York: NYU Press, 2014). On autism, see Jennifer Singh, who explores the little-studied topic of barriers to autism services for single Black mothers and grandmothers. Alice Hong and Jennifer Singh, “Contextualizing the Social and Structural Constraints of Accessing Autism Services among Single Black Female Caregivers,” International Journal of Child Health and Human Development 12, no. 4 (2020): 365–78. Many additional examples are referenced throughout this book.
1. All of the 911 quotes interspersed in the text are from the transcript of the call Morris made at 4:39 A.M., October 21, 2001. The full text was released by the Associated Press, November 8, 2001. Others have also drawn on this powerful transcript for political commentary, notably including imprisoned activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, “Powerless at the Post Office,” Michigan Citizen, December 29, 2001, V.XXIV, no. 5 A7.
2. There is one notable account of the impact of racism on health that does include a several-page discussion of this case, in the context of the failure of the government to provide equal body protection to African Americans, in a chapter on “Separate and Unequal Treatment: Response to Health Emergencies, Human Experiments, and Bioterrorism Threats,” under the evocative subheading “Will Government Response to Bioterrorism Be Fair?,” in Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities, 197–201 (New York: NYU Press, 2012).
3. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study has been the subject of a considerable body of scholarship; good entry points might be either the foundational volume by Jones, Bad Blood, or the more recent edited collection by Reverby, Tuskegee’s Truths.
4. References to Tuskegee were a recurring theme in focus groups of Brentwood postal workers reflecting on communication during the anthrax crisis. Janice C. Blanchard, Yolanda Haywood, Bradley D. Stein, Terri L. Tanielian, Michael Stoto, and Nicole Lurie, “In Their Own Words: Lessons Learned from Those Exposed to Anthrax,” American Journal of Public Health 95, no. 3 (2005): 489–95.
5. Ruha Benjamin, “Organized Ambivalence: When Sickle Cell Disease and Stem Cell Research Converge,” Ethnicity and Health 16, no. 4–5 (2011): 447.
6. I have been unable to find sufficient information about the other survivors to include them in this chapter. One, whose daughter gave an interview without releasing his name, went to the ER on October 25 while feeling relatively mild symptoms for two days (nausea and tiring easily) because two of his coworkers had already died and his job includes sorting government mail. He described his job in detail to the physician there, and he pressed for and received one tablet of Cipro pending his swab results. He returned twenty-four hours later as instructed and was promptly aggressively treated. He was released after sixteen days and wants to remain unnamed. Jennifer Lenhart, “Anthrax Patient Is ‘Just So Tired’ Va. Mail Worker Making Progress,” Washington Post, November 9, 2001.
7. Tom Daschle, “The Unsolved Case of Anthrax,” Washington Post, October 15, 2006.
8. Courtland Miloy, “Anthrax Mystery and Misery Linger for Postal Workers,” Washington Post, October 25, 2006.
9. Jill Nelson, “The Façade of National Unity,” MSNBC Opinions, http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/647721.
10. Zachary Coile, “Chilling 911 Call from Stricken Postal Worker; Frightened and Short of Breath, He Already Suspected Anthrax,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 8, 2001, A1. Interagency communication gaps were indeed an issue. Caron Chess and Lee Clarke, “Facilitation of Risk Communication during the Anthrax Attacks of 2001: The Organizational Backstory,” American Journal of Public Health 97, no. 9 (2007): 1578–83. The Postal Service’s attribution of blame to the CDC would continue throughout the postmortem assessments, including, for example, in the GAO report Better Guidance Is Needed to Ensure an Appropriate Response to Anthrax Contamination, Report GAO-04-239 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2004), esp. 4–5.
11. Ellen Gamerman, “Postal Employees Are Rankled; Workers Question Why Anthrax Case Did Not Close Office,” Baltimore Sun, October 23, 2001, A1.
12. GAO, Better Guidance Needed, 32.
13. Gamerman, “Postal Employees Are Rankled.” Even after the deaths of Morris and Curseen, postal officials were still telling postal workers that they should not worry unless they received a follow-up call. Frances Clines, “Being Left in the Gloom of Night over Threat,” New York Times, October 22, 2001, B07.
14. Robert Schlesinger, “Fighting Terror the Anthrax Scare; DC Mayor Sees No Bias in Test Process,” Boston Globe, October 25, 2001, A26.
15. Wiley A. Hall, “Urban Rhythms: Class Dictated Our Response to Anthrax,” Washington Afro-American, November 19, 2001, 110, no. 12, A2. See also Hall, “Urban Rhythms: Terrorism Is Winning Its First Round of This War,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 2, 2001, 110, no. 11, A2.
16. As of 2001, the Smithsonian Institution’s web guide to African American resources at the museums specifically highlighted the National Postal Museum, pointing out that for years the Postal Service was the only federal agency that employed African Americans and that it remained the largest civilian employer of people of color. According to the Smithsonian, 21 percent of its more than 760,000 employees are African American. “African American Resources at the Smithsonian,” http://www.si.edu/opa/afafam/npm.htm. According to Julianne Malveaux, while only 11 percent of the labor force is African American, 28 percent of postal workers are. Malveaux, “Race, Class, and Crass: Always Work at the Post Office,” Sun Reporter, October 25, 2001, 58, no. 95, 6.
17. Frances Beal, “Race and Class Bias Infects Anthrax Fight,” Black World Today, http://www.tbwt.com/views/feat/feat7051.asp.
18. E.g., Michael Goodin, “The Wrong Bodies Are on the Sacrificial Altar,” Michigan Chronicle, November 13, 2001, 65, no. 6, A6; Bernice Powell Jackson, “Ode to Postal Workers,” Oakland Post, December 5, 2001, 38, no. 49, 4; and Malveaux, “Race, Class, and Crass.”
19. Ralph Wiley, “D.C. Talk,” http://espn.go.com/page2/s/wiley-011025.
20. Blanchard et al., “In Their Own Words.”
21. E.g., Marsha D. Lillie-Banton, Wilhelmina Leigh, and Ana Alfaro-Carera, Achieving Equitable Access: Studies of Health Care Issues Affecting Hispanics and African Americans (Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1996).
22. E.g., Clovis E. Semmes, Racism, Health, and Post-Industrialism: A Theory of African-American Health (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).
23. Hamil Harris, Jamie Stockwell, and Monte Reel, “Neighbors Remember 2 Postal Workers; Both Residents of Prince George’s County,” Washington Post, October 25, 2001, T03. See also Martin Weil, “Anthrax Victims Extolled for Service to Neighborhoods,” Washington Post, October 23, 2001, A10. More touching details of Curseen’s middle-class life are from Lisa Simeone, Weekend All Things Considered, October 27, 2001. Curseen was even described by his mother as a “health freak” who “jogged around his neighborhood three mornings a week, downed eight glasses of water a day, and never even drank Communion wine.” See Angie Cannon, “Unlikely Foot Soldiers in the War against Terror,” U.S. News and World Report, November 5, 2001, 18.
24. Of Marquette University, in Wisconsin. Greg Garland, “Postal Service Anthrax Victims Are Mourned; One Brentwood Worker Active in Community, the Other ‘Very Private,’” Baltimore Sun, October 24, 2001, 7A.
25. Thomas Frank and Ellen Yan, “America’s Ordeal; a Tale of Two Capitols,” Newsday [Long Island, NY], October 24, 2001, A04.
26. Amy Alexander, “Going Postal—for Good Reason,” http://africana.com/. A shorter version of this article also appeared as Alexander, “Second-Class Postals,” Nation, December 10, 2001, 6.
27. “Two New Anthrax Deaths Confirmed,” New York Beacon, October 31, 2001, 8, no. 43, 2.
28. Indeed, at the time of the anthrax attacks, I did have some Cipro on hand left over from my recent trip to West Africa. I had taken several courses of Cipro over the years while traveling in South Asia, Latin America, and West Africa, with absolutely no medical supervision beyond the travel clinic’s initial prescription.
29. Leslie Hausmann, Shasha Gao, Edward S. Lee, and C. Kent Kwoh, “Racial Disparities in the Monitoring of Patients on Chronic Opioid Therapy,” PAIN 154, no. 1 (2013): 46–52.
30. Ana I. Balsa and Thomas G. McGuire, “Prejudice, Clinical Uncertainty and Stereotyping as Sources of Health Disparities,” Journal of Health Economics 22, no. 1 (2003): 89–116.
31. Kirk Johnson, “The Victim; Demanding a Diagnosis, He Lives to Tell the Tale of Anthrax,” New York Times, December 3, 2001, A1.
32. Editorial, “So-Called ‘Little People’ Get Left out of Loop,” Buffalo News, October 29, 2001, B4.
33. Associated Press, November 8, 2001.
34. Avram Goldstein, “Mail Worker’s Family Sues HMO over Death; Man’s Anthrax Misdiagnosed as a Cold,” Washington Post, November 14, 2001, B04.
35. Associated Press, November 8, 2001.
36. Luciana Borio, D. Frank, V. Mani, C. Chiriboga, M. Pollanen, M. Ripple, S. Ali et al., “Death due to Bioterrorism-Related Anthrax: Report of Two Patients,” JAMA 286, no. 20 (2001): 2554–59.
37. Johnson, “The Victim.”
38. Johnson.
39. Washington Post, “Lawsuit Over Anthrax Settled,” August 9, 2002.
40. Goldstein, “Mail Worker’s Family Sues HMO.”
41. Goldstein.
42. Goldstein.
43. Goldstein.
44. T. M. Luhrmann, “Commentary,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 25 (2001): 469.
45. Luhrmann.
46. Both of these historical precedents are cited by Alexander, “Going Postal.”
47. Not long after this event, the Institute of Medicine released a study that controlled for insurance and found that attributing the racial differential to lack of access is incomplete. Given the same insurance, minorities receive less care. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Minorities Get Inferior Care, Even If Insured, Study Finds,” New York Times, March 21, 2002, A1.
48. Frank and Yan, “America’s Ordeal.”
49. Steve Twomey and Justin Blum, “How the Experts Missed Anthrax; Brentwood Cases Defied Assumptions about Risks,” Washington Post, November 19, 2001, A1.
50. This point about how compressed air machines work was one that employees raised in their criticism of the CDC and Postal Service response. GAO, Better Guidance Is Needed, 24.
51. Marie Coco, “We’re All in This Together, but Actually We Aren’t,” Newsday [Long Island, NY], October 25, 2001, A44.
52. “So-Called ‘Little People,’” B4. Kaiser reprised this line in the suit filed against it. “Mr. Morris lost his life because a criminal committed an unspeakable, cowardly act of terror. He died because someone put anthrax into an envelope, and sent it through the mail. We at Kaiser Permanente share the community’s outrage at this senseless crime, and join in the hope that the perpetrator will be brought to justice.” U.S. Newswire, “Kaiser Permanente Statement on Thomas L. Morris, Jr. Lawsuit,” March 26, 2002.
53. The question of who perpetrated the attacks is beyond my scope, but feminist antiracist analysis can fruitfully be put there as well. See Gwen D’Arcangelis, “Defending White Scientific Masculinity,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18, no. 1 (2016): 119–38.
54. Todd Purdum, “The Disease; More Checked for Anthrax; U.S. Officials Admit Underestimating Mail Risks,” New York Times, October 25, 2001.
55. “So-Called ‘Little People.’”
56. Schlesinger, “Fighting Terror.”
57. Schlesinger.
58. Amy Alexander, “Bleaching the Disaster,” http://africana.com/.
59. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the capacity to do the necessary research to adequately review the television coverage, but in the print media, the distinction was stark. The U.S. sources of talk about race and this tragedy I found were on television-related sources MSNBC.com, ESPN.com, and Black-related sources Africana.com and Black World Today.
60. Toby Harnden, “Black Postal Workers Angered by Treatment Delay,” Daily Telegraph [London], October 24, 2001, 11.
61. Among them, Gamerman, “Postal Employees Are Rankled”; “So-Called ‘Little People’”; Coco, “We’re All in This Together”; Frank and Yan, “America’s Ordeal”; Eleanor Clift, “Capitol Letter: Bad PR: Is Anthrax Testing in Washington Elitist?,” Newsweek, October 25, 2001. Except when noted, none of the articles I read mentioned that these victims were Black.
62. Twomey and Blum, “How the Experts Missed Anthrax.”
63. Washington Informer, “No Time for Double Standards,” October 31, 2001, 39, no. 2, 16.
64. Alexander, “Going Postal.”
65. Borio et al., “Death due to Bioterrorism-Related Anthrax.” The similar report on the survivors also left out mention of race, describing patient 1 as “a 56-year-old male postal worker” and patient 2 as “a 56-year-old man who worked at the Brentwood post office in the mail sorting facility.” Thom A. Mayer, Susan Bersoff-Matcha, Cecele Murphy, James Earls, Scott Harper, Denis Pauze, Michael Nguyen et al., “Clinical Presentation of Inhalational Anthrax Following Bioterrorism Exposure: Report of 2 Surviving Patients,” JAMA 286, no. 20 (2001): 2549–53.
66. For relevant discussion of the use of racial categories in medical research and practice, see Lundy Braun, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Duana Fullwiley, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, William Quivers, Susan M. Reverby, and Alexandra E. Shields, “Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?,” PLoS Medicine 4, no. 9 (2007): e271.
67. Robert S. Schwartz has compellingly argued that identifying inadequacy of care should be the unique use of race as a concept in medicine. Schwartz, “Racial Profiling in Medical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine 344, no. 18 (2001): 1392–93.
68. Veena Das, “Violence and Translation,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2001): 108.
69. Das, 109.
70. Nelson, “Façade of National Unity.”
1. The timeline here comes from Will Drye, “Hurricane Katrina: The Essential Timeline,” National Geographic, September 14, 2005, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/9/weather-hurricane-katrina-timeline/.
2. “Hurricane Katrina,” New York Times, September 25, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/hurricane-katrina.
3. Many have made this point about the unnaturalness of the disaster, for example, Jeremy I. Levitt and Matthew C. Walker, Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
4. Robert Roos, “Hurricane Katrina Sparks Fears of Disease Outbreaks,” Centers for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, September 2, 2005, http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2005/09/hurricane-katrina-sparks-fears-disease-outbreaks.
5. Roos.
6. An early paper coming to this conclusion was P. Gregg Greenough and Thomas D. Kirsch, “Hurricane Katrina: Public Health Response—Assessing Needs,” New England Journal of Medicine 355, no. 15 (2005): 1544–46.
7. Mary Alice Mills, Donald Edmonson, and Crystal L. Park, “Trauma and Stress Response among Hurricane Katrina Evacuees,” American Journal of Public Health 97, Suppl. 1 (2007): S116–23. The authors note that the effect was particularly strong for Black evacuees. For discussion of both short-term and long-term impacts of psychosocial stress on cardiovascular disease among those impacted by Katrina, see also Carl J. Lavie, Thomas C. Gerber, and William L. Lanier, “Hurricane Katrina: The Infarcts beyond the Storm,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 3, no. 3 (2009): 131–35.
8. Ninon A. Becquart, Elena N. Naumova, Gitanjali Singh, and Kenneth K. H. Chui, “Cardiovascular Disease Hospitalizations in Louisiana Parishes’ Elderly before, during and after Hurricane Katrina,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, no. 1 (2019): 74.
9. Kevin U. Stephens et al., “Excess Mortality in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: A Preliminary Report,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 1, no. 1 (2007): 15–20, esp. 19.
10. Matthew N. Peters, John C. Moscona, Morgan J. Katz, Kevin B. Deandrade, Henry C. Quevedo, Sumit Tiwari, Andrew R. Burchett et al., “Natural Disasters and Myocardial Infarction: The Six Years after Hurricane Katrina,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 89, no. 4 (2014): 472–77; John C. Moscona, Matthew N. Peters, Rohit Maini, Paul Katigbak, Bradley Deere, Holly Gonzales, Christopher Westley et al., “The Incidence, Risk Factors, and Chronobiology of Acute Myocardial Infarction Ten Years after Hurricane Katrina,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 13, no. 2 (2019): 217–22.
11. Sjaak van der Geest, Susan Reynolds White, and Anita Hardon, “The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals: A Biographical Approach,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 153–78.
12. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–6, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997).
13. Joseph B. Treaster, “Superdome: Haven Quickly Becomes Ordeal,” New York Times, September 1, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/us/nationalspecial/superdome-haven-quicklybecomes-an-ordeal.html.
14. American College of Cardiology annual meeting, New Orleans, La., March 24–27, 2007. I had attended many of these kinds of medical meetings in the years leading up to this one as part of the research for my first book, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
15. There also is a resonance here with the broader racialized framing of suffering Black patients as “drug seeking,” in which, for example, sickle cell patients seeking pain relief come to be seen as “a variant of the inner city drug addict stereotype.” Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 23.
16. For a discussion of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century foundations of the racialization of the criminalization of drugs, with special attention to New Orleans and Atlanta, see Michael M. Cohen, “Jim Crow’s Drug War: Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition,” Southern Cultures 12, no. 3 (2006): 55–79. For discussion of broader articulations of drugs as a threat that racialized groups pose to white suburban order, see Matthew D. Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 126–40, and Kane Race, “Drugs and Domesticity: Fencing the Nation,” Cultural Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2004): 62–84.
17. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
18. See, e.g., Gail Garfield, “Hurricane Katrina: The Making of Unworthy Disaster Victims,” Journal of African American Studies 10 (2007): 55–74.
19. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 11.
20. Rebecca Solnit, “Reconstructing the Story of the Storm: Hurricane Katrina at Five,” Nation, August 26, 2010.
21. Solnit.
22. Dan Berger, “Constructing Crime, Framing Disaster: Routines of Criminalization and Crisis in Hurricane Katrina,” Punishment and Society 11, no. 4 (2009): 491–510.
23. Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski, “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604, no. 1 (2006): 62.
24. Tierney et al., esp. 66.
25. Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Kind of Society Values Property over Black Lives?,” New York Times, June 18, 2020.
26. Havidan Rodriguez, Joseph Trainor, and Enrico L. Quarantelli, “Rising to the Challenges of a Catastrophe: The Emergent and Prosocial Behavior Following Hurricane Katrina,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604, no. 1 (2006): 82–101.
27. Agence France-Presse, “Troops Deployed in Anarchic New Orleans with Shoot to Kill Orders,” September 2, 2005. This quote appeared, for example, in the New York Times: “The guardsmen were posted at major intersections, and Army vehicles patrolled the streets, seeking to quell the looting and unrestrained crime that has shocked the nation. Some 300 members of the Arkansas National Guard, just back from Iraq, were among those deployed from foreign assignments specifically to bring order. ‘I have one message for these hoodlums,’ said Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana. ‘These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary.’” James Dao and N. R. Kleinfield, “Conditions in New Orleans Still Dire—Pumping May Take Months,” New York Times, September 3, 2005.
28. D’Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand, Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xix.
29. Louisa Edgerly, “Difference and Political Legitimacy: Speakers’ Construction of ‘Citizen’ and ‘Refugee’ Personae in Talk about Hurricane Katrina,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 3 (2011): 304–22.
30. Adeline Masquelier, “Why Katrina’s Victims Aren’t Refugees: Musings on a ‘Dirty’ Word,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 4 (2006): 736.
31. For insightful reflection on contrasts in empathy toward differently racialized refugees and impoverished Black American patients, see Michelle Munyikwa, “Racialization, Affect, and Refuge,” Anthropology News 58, no. 1 (2017): e226–29.
32. Linsey McGoey, Julian Reiss, and Ayo Wahlberg, “The Global Health Complex,” BioSocieties 6, no. 1 (2011): 1–9. This connection between partial citizenship and racialization is one that links Katrina far more closely to Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, than with other damaging storms, such as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which impacted a large swath of coastline including New York City.
33. Stephanie Strom, “After Storm, Relief Groups Consider More Work in U.S.,” New York Times, January 1, 2006.
34. U.S. Congress, Lessons Learned from Katrina in Public Health Care: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, United States Senate, July 14, 2006, 6.
35. Andrea J. Sharma, Edward C. Weiss, Stacy L. Young, Kevin Stephens, Raoult Ratard, Susanne Straif-Bourgeois, Theresa M. Sokol, Peter Vranken, and Carol H. Rubin, “Chronic Disease and Related Conditions at Emergency Treatment Facilities in the New Orleans Area after Hurricane Katrina,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 2, no. 1 (2008): 27–32.
36. Nancy Aldrich and William F. Benson, “Disaster Preparedness and the Chronic Disease Needs of Vulnerable Older Adults,” Preventing Chronic Disease 5, no. 1 (2007): A27.
37. William E. Brown, “Surviving the Superdome,” JEMS: A Journal of Emergency Medical Services 30, no. 11 (2005): 54–56.
38. Lydia Velazquez, Scott Dallas, Lisa Rose, Krista S. Evans, Rebecca Saville, Jialynn Wang, Sean K. Bradley, and James D. Bona, “A PHS Pharmacist Team’s Response to Hurricane Katrina,” American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy 63, no. 14 (2006): 1332–35, esp. 1333.
39. Marcello Tonelli, Natasha Wiebe, Brian Nadler, Ara Darzi, and Shahnawaz Rasheed, “Modifying the Interagency Emergency Health Kit to Include Treatment for Non-communicable Diseases in Natural Disasters and Complex Emergencies,” BMJ Global Health 1, no. 3 (2016): e000128.
40. Michael A. Jhung, Nadine Shehab, Cherise Rohr-Allegrini, Daniel A. Pollock, Roger Sanchez, Fernando Guerra, and Daniel B. Jernigan, “Chronic Disease and Disasters: Medication Demands of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 33, no. 3 (2007): 207–10.
41. Eileen Koutnik-Fotopoulos, “In the Wake of Katrina, Chain Pharmacies and Drug Companies Join Forces,” Pharmacy Times, October 1, 2005, http://www.pharmacytimes.com/publications/issue/2005/2005-10/2005-10-9919. There are resonances with this PR and that in the Global South, as described by Stefan Ecks, “Global Pharmaceutical Markets and Corporate Citizenship: The Case of Novartis’ Anti-cancer Drug Glivec,” BioSocieties 3, no. 2 (2008): 165–81.
42. Martha I. Arrieta et al., “Providing Continuity of Care for Chronic Diseases in the Aftermath of Katrina: From Field Experience to Policy Recommendations,” Disaster Medicine Public Health Preparedness 3, no. 3 (2009): 174–82.
43. This mapping of the terrain draws on Susan E. Bell and Anne E. Figert, “Medicalization and Pharmaceuticalization at the Intersections: Looking Backward, Sideways and Forward,” Social Science and Medicine 75, no. 5 (2012): 775–83. A key text about pharmaceuticalization in the Global North would be Simon J. Williams, Paul Martin, and Jonathan Gabe, “The Pharmaceuticalisation of Society? A Framework for Analysis,” Sociology of Health and Illness 33, no. 5 (2011): 710–25. A key text about pharmaceuticalization in the Global South would be João Biehl, “Pharmaceuticalization: AIDS Treatment and Global Health Politics,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2007): 1083–1126. The United States’ famously unequal system has never fit in to the bifurcation easily, something that has become clearer since the economic crisis; see Anne Pollock, “Transforming the Critique of Big Pharma,” BioSocieties 6, no. 1 (2011): 106–18.
44. See Anne Pollock and David S. Jones, “Coronary Artery Disease and the Contours of Pharmaceuticalization,” Social Science and Medicine 131 (2015): 221–27.
45. Jeffrey W. Bethel, Sloane C. Burke, and Amber F. Britt, “Disparity in Disaster Preparedness between Racial/Ethnic Groups,” Disaster Health 1, no. 2 (2013): 110–16.
46. See Jeremy A. Greene, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Joseph Dumit, Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
47. Earl S. Ford et al., “Chronic Disease in Health Emergencies: In the Eye of the Hurricane,” Preventing Chronic Disease 3, no. 2 (2006): 3.
48. See, e.g., Stuart Galishoff, “Germs Know No Color Line: Black Health and Public Policy in Atlanta, 1900–1918,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 40, no. 1 (1985): 22–41. I have written about this association between whiteness/chronicity and Blackness/infectiousness in Pollock, Medicating Race, esp. in chapter 1, “Racial Preoccupations and Early Cardiology.”
49. In international contexts, the racialization of infectious disease can be part of anti-Indigenous ideologies; see Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
50. See Priscilla Wald, “Imagined Immunities,” in Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean, 189–298 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000).
51. The false promise of pharmaceuticals as capable of alleviating marginalization is explored by Stefan Ecks, “Pharmaceutical Citizenship: Antidepressant Marketing and the Promise of Demarginalization in India,” Anthropology and Medicine 12, no. 3 (2005): 239–54.
52. Ruth E. Berggren and Tyler J. Curiel, “After the Storm—Health Care Infrastructure in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” New England Journal of Medicine 354, no. 15 (2006): 1550.
53. Rebecca B. Horn and Thomas D. Kirsch, “Disaster Response 2.0: Noncommunicable Disease Essential Needs Still Unmet,” American Journal of Public Health 108 (2018): S202–3.
54. John E. Salvaggio, New Orleans’ Charity Hospital: A Story of Physicians, Politics and Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).
55. K. Brad Ott, “Healthcare and Human Rights Consequences of the Closure of New Orleans’ Charity Hospital after Hurricane Katrina,” Race, Gender, and Class Supplement (2015): 160–83, https://search.proquestcom/docview/1749900978. Even as of this writing almost fifteen years later, the building complex remains abandoned.
56. M. Janine Brodie, Erin Weltzien, Drew Altman, Robert J. Blendon, and John M. Benson, “Experiences of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees in Houston Shelters: Implications for Future Planning,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 8 (2006): 1402–8. Many other sources also highlight the detrimental impact of those dispersed by the storm lacking their medical records, e.g., Crystal Franco, Eric Toner, Richard Waldhorn, Beth Maldin, Tara O’Toole, and Thomas V. Inglesby, “Systemic Collapse: Medical Care in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science 4, no. 2 (2006): 135–46.
57. Ott, “Healthcare and Human Rights.”
58. Jean Ait Belkhir and Christiane Charlemaine, “New Orleans’ Katrina Recovery for Whom and What? A Race, Gender and Class Approach,” Race, Gender, and Class Supplement (2015): 8–24, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1749901092.
59. Ronald C. Kessler and Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group, “Hurricane Katrina’s Impact on the Care of Survivors with Chronic Medical Conditions,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 22, no. 9 (2007): 1225–30.
60. Kessler.
61. Sandeep Gautam et al., “Effect of Hurricane Katrina on the Incidence of Acute Coronary Syndrome at a Primary Angioplasty Center in New Orleans,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 3, no. 3 (2009): 144–50.
62. Peters et al., “Natural Disasters and Myocardial Infarction.”
63. Moscona et al., “Incidence, Risk Factors, and Chronobiology.”
64. Susan Cutter, “The Geography of Social Vulnerability: Race, Class, and Catastrophe,” Social Sciences Research Council forum on “Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences,” https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/the-geography-of-social-vulnerability-race-class-and-catastrophe/.
65. These two phenomena are not completely disconnected: Anna Hartnell highlights that the “branding” of New Orleans as a “culturally backward ‘museum,’ as well as an excessive ‘party town,’ is a superficial aspect of the city’s marginality,” and yet these aspects combine with a “genuinely transgressive cultural legacy” rooted in the cultural practices of formerly enslaved people. Anna Hartnell, After Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2017), 3.
66. David Atkins and Ernest M. Moy, “Left Behind: The Legacy of Hurricane Katrina,” British Medical Journal 331 (2005): 916.
67. Atkins and Moy, 917.
68. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.”
69. Foucault, 241.
70. Foucault, 245.
71. Foucault, 245.
72. Foucault, 254–60.
73. There is a robust body of scholarship that critiques Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics on the basis of the centrality of Eurocentrism and racism to the Western conceptualization of the “human” itself that is beyond my scope but certainly worthy of exploration. Perhaps the most comprehensive is Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
74. Sociologist Kathleen Tierney argued in her analysis of Katrina that “virtually nothing has been done since 9–11 to make this nation safer” and that “indeed, the opposite is the case.” Tierney, “The Red Pill,” Social Sciences Research Council forum on “Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences,” https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/the-red-pill/.
75. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 11.
1. Bob Herbert, “For Two Sisters, the End of an Ordeal,” New York Times, December 31, 2010; NAACP and Solitary Watch, Scott Sisters: Mississippi Justice, 2011, http://womenandprison.org/social-justice/view/help_free_the_scott_sisters/; Curtis Stephen, “Sisters Freed from Mississippi Jail,” Crisis, Winter 2011, 33–35.
2. Christopher Burkle, “The Mississippi Decision Exchanging Parole for Kidney Donation: Is This the Beginning of Change for Altruistic-Based Human Organ Donation Policy in the United States?,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 86, no. 5 (2011): 414–18; Arthur Caplan, “The Use of Prisoners as a Source of Organs—an Ethically Dubious Practice,” American Journal of Bioethics 11, no. 10 (2011): 1–5; Aviva Goldberg and Joel Frader, “Prisoners as Living Donors: The Case of the Scott Sisters,” American Journal of Bioethics 11, no. 10 (2011): 15–16; Jennifer L. Visconti, “Exchanging a Kidney for Freedom: The Illegality of Conditioning Prison Releases on Organ Donations,” New England Journal of Criminal and Civil Confinement 38 (2012): 199–217.
3. Criminal Trial Transcript, http://www.scribd.com/doc/35281862/Scott-transcript.
4. Bob Herbert, “So Utterly Inhumane,” New York Times, October 12, 2010; Ward Schaefer, “Scott Sisters Appear Before the Parole Board,” Jackson Free Press, December 15, 2010.
5. Schaefer, “Scott Sisters Appear.”
6. Herbert, “So Utterly Inhumane.”
7. Asha Bandele, “Their Fight for Freedom,” Essence, November 2011, 142. This explicitly Christian articulation is in line with the history of a great deal of civil rights organizing—most famously the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
8. Free the Scott Sisters (blog), http://freethescottsisters.blogspot.com/; Stephen, “Sisters Freed from Mississippi Jail.”
9. Artaymis Ma’at, “The Scott Sisters Prevail!” Jackson Advocate, March 29, 2012, 1B.
10. NAACP, “Criminal Justice: Restoring Justice to a Damaged System,” NAACP 2010 Annual Report, 14.
11. Brandon King, “Building Power in a Frontline Community: The Cooperation Jackson Model,” Socialism and Democracy 30, no. 2 (2016): 220; Akinyele Umoja, “Introduction: The Political Legacy of Chokwe Lumumba,” Black Scholar 48 no. 2 (2018): 2.
12. “The Shocking Case of the Scott Sisters!” Flyer (blog), 2010, http://www.scribd.com/doc/34548313/Flyer-Back.
13. Ward Schaefer, “Barbour Suspends Scott Sisters’ Sentences,” Jackson Free Press, December 29, 2010.
14. “3/25 Day of Blogging for the Scott Sisters!” Free the Scott Sisters (blog), March 22, 2010, http://freethescottsisters.blogspot.com/2010/03/325-day-of-blogging-for-scott-sisters.html. The call was picked up by many Black bloggers, first for March 18 and then for March 25; see, e.g., Jesse Muhammad, “A Day of Blogging for the Scott Sisters . . . Black Blogosphere Stand Up!” March 18, 2020, http://jessemuhammad.blogs.finalcall.com/2010/03/day-of-blogging-for-scott-sistersblack.html.
15. Ward Schaefer, “Scott Sisters Rally Draws Hundreds to Capital,” Jackson Free Press, September 15, 2020.
16. Herbert, “So Utterly Inhumane.”
17. Leonard Pitts, “Sisters May or May Not Be Guilty, but Mississippi Assuredly Is,” Seattle Times, November 21, 2010.
18. “Governor Barbour’s Statement Regarding Release of Scott Sisters,” published in the Jackson Free Press, with an accompanying article: Ward Schaefer, “Barbour Suspends Scott Sisters’ Sentences.”
19. Jamila Jefferson-Jones, “The Exchange of Inmate Organs for Liberty: Diminishing the ‘Yuck Factor’ in the Bioethics Repugnance Debate,” Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice 16 (2013): 121.
20. Goldberg and Frader, “Prisoners as Living Donors,” 15.
21. Timothy Williams, “Jailed Sisters Are Released for Kidney Transplant,” New York Times, January 8, 2011, A13.
22. Executive Orders 1046 and 1047, posted on Free the Scott Sisters (blog), at http://www.scribd.com/doc/47626550/Gladys-Scott-Gov-Orders.
23. Emily Wagster Pettus, “Pardon Unlikely for Sisters Awaiting Transplant,” Associated Press, April 1, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=13268768; Elizabeth Crisp and Gary Pettus, “Released from Jail, Mississippi Sisters Still Seek Full Pardon,” USA Today, April 1, 2011.
24. James Ridgeway, “The Scott Sisters’ ‘Debt to Society’ and the New Jim Crow,” Mother Jones, January 7, 2011, https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2011/01/scott-sisters-debt-society-and-new-jim-crow/.
25. Artaymis Ma’at, “Florida Policeman Leaves Jamie Scott Stranded on Freeway,” Jackson Advocate, March 29, 2012, 1B.
26. Holbrook Mohr, “Sisters Out for Kidney Donation Want to Be Pardoned in Miss,” Boston Globe, January 13, 2012.
27. Jimmie E. Gates, “Freed Scott Sister Must Lose 120 lbs,” USA Today, January 26, 2011.
28. Melissa Nelson Gabriel, “Still Fighting: Scott Sisters Find New Life in Pensacola after Prison, Heartbreak,” Pensacola News Journal, July 23, 2018.
29. Harold Gater, “Scott Sisters, Who Got Life for Armed Robbery, Continue to Ask Gov. Bryant for Release,” Mississippi Clarion Ledger, July 29, 2019.
30. Angela Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglas and the Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James, 74–95 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
31. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery.”
32. Alice Thomas-Tisdale, “Scott Sisters Attend Meeting on Black Boys,” Jackson Advocate, April 5, 2012, 1A, 14A.
33. “Scott Sisters Speak in Brooklyn!” Clips from Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and National Conference of Black Lawyers Forum featuring Jamie and Gladys Scott and panelists Chokwe Lumumba (legal counsel to the Scott sisters), Michael Tarif Warren (lawyer activist), Marc Lamont Hill (activist, author, scholar), Rukia Lumumba (activist), April R. Silver (activist, writer), and a moderator. Forum held on April 23, 2011, and posted to YouTube, May 15, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJKlWT7X7wk.
34. See Anthony Ryan Hatch, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 16.
35. Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97 (1976).
36. Jessica Bakeman, “Barbour: Suspended Sentences for the Sick Saves Miss. Money,” Clarion Ledger, February 5, 2012.
37. See Nicholas Freudenberg, “Adverse Effects of US Jail and Prison Policies on the Health and Well-Being of Women of Color,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 12 (2002): 1895–99; Dora M. Dumont, Brad Brockmann, Samuel Dickman, Nicole Alexander, and Josiah D. Rich, “Public Health and the Epidemic of Incarceration,” Annual Review of Public Health 33 (2012): 325–39.
38. American Public Health Association, Policy Statement 9123: Social Practice of Mass Imprisonment, 1991, https://www.apha.org/policies-and-advocacy/public-health-policy-statements/policy-database/2014/07/29/10/00/social-practice-of-mass-imprisonment.
39. Christopher Wildeman and Emily A. Wang, “Mass Incarceration, Public Health, and Widening Inequality in the USA,” The Lancet 389 (2017): 1464–74.
40. Dora Dumont, Scott A. Allen, Brad Brockmann, and Nicole E. Alexander, “Incarceration, Community Health, and Racial Disparities,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 24 (2013): 78–88.
41. Wildeman and Wang, “Mass Incarceration,” 1468. Moreover, longer incarceration has more deleterious effects postincarceration. Evelyn J. Patterson, “The Dose–Response of Time Served in Prison on Mortality: New York State, 1989–2003,” American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 3 (2013): 523–28.
42. See Anthony Ryan Hatch, “Billions Served: Prison Food Regimes, Nutritional Punishment, and Gastronomical Resistance,” in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed. Ruha Benjamin, 67–84 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019).
43. Ann J. Russ, Janet K. Shim, and Sharon R. Kaufman, “‘Is There Life on Dialysis?’: Time and Ageing in a Clinically Sustained Existence,” Medical Anthropology 24, no. 4 (2005): 297–324.
44. Sherine Hamdy, “When the State and Your Kidneys Fail: Political Etiologies in an Egyptian Dialysis Ward,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 4 (2008): 563.
45. Ma’at, “Scott Sisters Prevail!”
46. Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 5.
47. Petryna, 6.
48. Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, “Biological Citizenship,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 458.
49. Vinh-Kim Nguyen, The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 109.
50. Vinh-Kim Nguyen, “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship,” in Ong and Collier, Global Assemblages, 143.
51. Nguyen, Republic of Therapy, 176.
52. Nguyen, “Antiretroviral Globalism,” 143.
53. Nguyen, Republic of Therapy, 109.
54. Nguyen, 108.
55. Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 168.
56. Nelson, 184.
57. Aditya Bharadwaj, “Biosociality and Biocrossings: Encounters with Assisted Conception and Embryonic Stem Cells in India,” in Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities, ed. Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas, 98–116 (London: Routledge, 2008).
58. Jessica Martucci, “Negotiating Exclusion: MSM, Identity, and Blood Policy in the Age of AIDS,” Social Studies of Science 4, no. 2 (2010): 235.
59. Michelle Goodwin, Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Human Body Parts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xiii.
60. Goldberg and Frader, “Prisoners as Living Donors.” This question has also been explored, including mention of the Scott sisters case, in Virginie Vallée Guignard and Marie-Chantal Fortin, “Emerging Ethical Challenges in Living Kidney Donation,” Current Transplantation Reports 6, no. 2 (2019): 192–98, and in R. Bisi Adeyemo, “Don’t Break My Heart, My Achy Breaky Heart: A Call for Legislation to Expressly Grant Inmates the Right to Donate Their Non-vital Organs,” Howard Law Journal 60, no. 3 (2017): 781–816.
61. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, “Real-Time Demand: Information, Regeneration, and Organ Markets,” in Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006): 180; see also Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs,” SAIS Review 22, no. 1 (2002): 61–80.
62. There has been significant anthropological attention to Islam and organ donation, including Hamdy, “When the State and Your Kidneys Fail,” but surprisingly little to Christianity and organ donation. In her monumental exploration of organ donation in North America and Japan, anthropologist Margaret Lock gestures to how religiosity matters, referring at one point to “in America, land of Christianity,” but her meditations upon Christianity are mostly about how early and medieval Christianity provides the historical roots for contemporary ideas about organ donation. Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 154.
63. Rev. Jeremy Tobin, “Thoughts on the Scott Sisters: ‘The Land Is Not Yet Free!’” Jackson Advocate, June 12, 2012.
64. This is not to deny that these categories and their relationship with state power, on one hand, and biomedical research, on the other, are tremendously problematic. See Steven Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Geoffery Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); Ian Whitmarsh and David S. Jones, eds., What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010).
65. Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Materializing Hope: Racial Pharmaceuticals, Suffering Bodies, and Biological Citizenship,” in Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge, ed. Monica J. Casper and Paisley Currah, 61–80 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011).
66. Dorothy Roberts, “Race and the New Biocitizen,” in Whitmarsh and Jones, What’s the Use of Race?, 259–76.
67. Emily Lee, “Trading Kidneys for Prison Time: When Two Contradictory Legal Traditions Intersect, Which One Has Right of Way?” University of San Francisco Law Review 43 (2009): 507–57.
68. Burkle, “Mississippi Decision.”
69. Scott Vrecko, “Therapeutic Justice in Drug Courts: Crime, Punishment and Societies of Control,” Science as Culture 2, no. 18 (2010): 217–32.
70. Lawrence Cohen, “Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Donation,” Deadalus 128, no. 4 (1999): 135–65.
71. Cohen, 152.
72. Krista L. Lentine, Mark A. Schnitzler, Huiling Xiao, Georges Saab, Paolo R. Salvalaggio, David Axelrod, Connie L. Davis, Kevin C. Abbott, and Daniel C. Brennan, “Racial Variation in Medical Outcomes among Living Kidney Donors,” New England Journal of Medicine 363 (2010): 724–32.
73. Gater, “Scott Sisters.”
74. Susan Donaldson James, “Scott Sisters Kidney Donation Threatens Organ Transplant Laws,” ABC News, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/scott-sisters-kidney-donation-threatens-organ-transplant-laws/story?id=12515616.
75. Caplan, “Use of Prisoners.”
76. Karla Holloway, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
77. Laura Mamo and Jennifer R. Fishman, “Why Justice? Introduction to the Special Issue on Entanglements of Science, Ethics, and Justice,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 38, no. 2 (2013): 160.
78. K. Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 197–98.
79. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 174.
80. Reverby, Tuskegee’s Truths.
81. For the broader context of control of Black women’s reproduction, see Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998). For more extended consideration of the inevitably coercive nature of sterilization in prisons in particular, see Rachel Roth and Sara L. Ainsworth, “If They Hand You a Paper, You Sign It: A Call to End the Sterilization of Women in Prison,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 26, no. 1 (2015): 7–50.
82. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
83. Alexander, New Jim Crow.
84. Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US,” New Left Review 13 (2002): 55.
85. Wacquant, 54.
86. Ruha Benjamin, “Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2 (2016): 145–56; Benjamin, Captivating Technology; Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar, “When Treating Patients Like Criminals Makes Sense: Medical Hot Spotting, Race and Debt,” in Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine, ed. Nadine Ehlers and Leslie Hinkson, 31–53 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); Hatch, Silent Cells.
1. Mike Colias, “How GM Saved Itself from the Flint Water Crisis: Rusting Engine Blocks Flagged a Big Problem,” Automotive News, January 31, 2016, http://www.autonews.com/article/20160131/OEM01/302019964/how-gm-saved-itself-from-flint-water-crisis.
2. Ron Fonger, “General Motors Shutting Off Flint River Water at Engine Plant over Corrosion Worries,” M Live, October 13, 2014, http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2014/10/general_motors_wont_use_flint.html.
3. Regulators consider fifteen parts per billion to merit amelioration, and even five parts per billion to be cause for concern. Ninety percent of Flint homes tested had lead levels above twenty-seven parts per billion. Christopher Ingraham, “This Is How Toxic Flint’s Water Really Is,” Washington Post, January 15, 2016.
4. Ashley Southall, “State of Emergency Declared over Man-Made Water Disaster in Michigan City,” New York Times, January 17, 2016. The formal gubernatorial request for support from the federal government is a key step by which state and local authorities that are overwhelmed by a disaster can get access to federal resources.
5. For an overview of this issue and additional resources, see John R. Scully, “CORROSION Assigns ‘Editor’s Choice’ Open Access to Key Papers Related to the Water Crisis in Flint, Michigan,” Corrosion 72, no. 4 (2016): 451–53.
6. Mitch Smith, Julie Bosman, and Monica Davey, “Flint’s Water Crisis Started 5 Years Ago. It’s Not Over,” New York Times, April 25, 2019.
7. Curt Guyette, “Flint and Expected Consequences,” Detroit Metro Times, April 18, 2018; Steve Carmody, “5 Years after Flint’s Crisis Began, Is the Water Safe?,” NPR, April 25, 2019; Julie Bosman, “Michigan to Pay $600 Million to Victims of Flint Water Crisis,” New York Times, August 19, 2020.
8. “Society Must Be Defended” is a key phrase from the philosopher Michel Foucault as he introduces the idea of biopolitics and is discussed at more length in chapter 2.
9. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2011), 10.
10. U.S. Census Briefs, “The Black Population 2010,” C2010BR-06, September 2011, p. 15. Flint is featured as eighth in the list of a table of “Ten Places with the Highest Percentage of Blacks or African Americans: 2010.” This figure is for “Black or African American alone.” The figure for “Black or African American alone or in combination” is slightly higher—59.5 percent.
11. Michael Moore, dir., Roger and Me (Dog Eat Dog Films, 1989). Scholarship about the deindustrialization of Flint has been in dialogue with Moore’s film as well, notably Steven P. Dandaneau, A Town Abandoned: Flint, Michigan, Confronts Deindustrialization (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).
12. For a classic and comprehensive account of the sit-down strike and its legacies, see Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
13. Detroit is the most high-profile case of the imposition of racialized emergency management across many of Michigan’s Black-majority cities; see Mark Jay and Philip Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020), esp. 44–47.
14. David Fasenfest and Theodore Pride, “Emergency Management in Michigan: Race, Class and the Limits of Liberal Democracy,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 3 (2016): 332: “Since 2009, eight Michigan cities (Allen Park, Benton Harbor, Detroit, Ecorse, Flint, Hamtramck, Lincoln Park, and Pontiac) have operated, or continue to operate, under an Emergency Manager (EM) appointed by the state’s governor. In total, according to the 2010 US Census . . . , these cities have a combined population of 955,843, representing just 9.7 percent of the state’s total population. At the same time, the cities accounted for a total of 699,225 African-American residents, representing just under half (49.8%) of all of the African-American residents in the state of Michigan.”
15. For a foundational introduction to this theme, see Jean-Paul Sartre, “Colonialism Is a System,” originally given as a speech in 1956, in Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams, 30–47 (New York: Routledge, 2001).
16. Darnell Earley, who is Black, and Gerald Ambrose, who is white, are the two former emergency managers who have faced criminal charges for their role in the Flint water crisis. Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, “2 Former Flint Emergency Managers Charged over Tainted Water,” New York Times, December 20, 2016.
17. See Jason Stanley, “The Emergency Manager: Strategic Racism, Technocracy, and the Poisoning of Flint’s Children,” Good Society 25, no. 1 (2016): 1–45.
18. The financial risks were known in advance, as is clear from Caitlin Devitt, “Michigan Deal Finances Flint Breakaway from Detroit Water,” Bond Buyer, March 26, 2014.
19. Peter J. Hammer, “The Flint Water Crisis, the Karegnondi Water Authority and Strategic–Structural Racism,” Critical Sociology 45, no. 1 (2019): 103–19, esp. 111.
20. Hammer.
21. Leonard M. Fleming, “Flint Mayor, State Clash over Water Tax Liens,” Detroit News, June 27, 2017.
22. In this sense, “care” is like what M’charek and Casartelli characterize as “forensic care.” Amade M’charek and Sara Casartelli, “Identifying Dead Migrants: Forensic Care Work and Relational Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 23, no. 7 (2019): 739. The well-being of the residents of Flint did eventually become a site of care among a significant network of scientists and others, because of crucial activism on the part of residents—for an accessible overview, see Anna Clark, The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water Crisis and the American Urban Tragedy (New York: Henry Holt, 2018).
23. As per the revisions of the emergency manager law passed in 2011. Stanley, “Emergency Manager.”
24. Malini Ranganathan, “Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 27, no. 3 (2016): 17–33, esp. 27.
25. Stanley, “Emergency Manager.”
26. Katie Levy, dir., Here’s to Flint (ACLU of Michigan Documentary, 2016). The same activist statement is also quoted by Stanley and Pulido.
27. Yvette Shields, “Flint Will Stick with Great Lakes Authority Water, While Honoring Karegnondi Debt,” Bond Buyer, April 19, 2017. Socializing the risk of the financial decisions made to benefit the few is another way in which the Flint experience resonates with structural adjustment, since holding the state responsible for decisions made by and for a few rulers is a key element of neocolonial fiscal governance—see, e.g., Noam Chomsky, “The Capitalist ‘Principle’ and Third World Debt,” Green Left Weekly, May 24, 2000, https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/noam-chomsky-capitalist-principle-and-third-world-debt.
28. See Jenna M. Loyd, “Obamacare and Sovereign Debt,” in Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine, ed. Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson, 55–82 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
29. See Stanley, “Emergency Manager,” esp. 36–37.
30. Jones, “Levels of Racism,” 1212.
31. Sociologist Peter J. Hammer terms the ability of emergency managers to profit from the public purse while disregarding the needs of the disempowered citizens strategic racism, which is to say “the manipulation of intentional racism, structural racism and unconscious biases for economic or political gain, regardless of whether the actor has express racist intent.” Hammer, “Flint Water Crisis,” 104.
32. Jones, “Levels of Racism,” 1212.
33. Laura Pulido, “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3 (2016): 1–16.
34. For a good introduction to the ideologically laden moral logics of structural adjustment in Africa, see James Ferguson, “Demoralizing Economies: African Socialism, Scientific Capitalism, and the Moral Politics of Structural Adjustment,” in his book Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, 69–88 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
35. Jorge Furtado, dir., Island of Flowers (Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre, 1989).
36. For a feminist critical race analysis of the problems of techno-utopic narratives, see Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, “Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1, no. 1 (2015).
37. Paul Egan, “Flint Red Flag: 2015 Report Urged Corrosion Control,” Detroit Free Press, January 21, 2016, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/01/21/flint-red-flag-2015-report-urged-corrosion-control/79119240/.
38. See Chelsea Grimmer, “Racial Microbiopolitics: Flint Lead Poisoning, Detroit Water Shut Offs, and the ‘Matter’ of Enfleshment,” Comparatist 41 (2017): 19–40, esp. 25–26.
39. Janine MacLeod, “Water and the Material Imagination: Reading the Sea of Memory against the Flows of Capital,” in Thinking with Water, ed. Celia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, 40–60 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), e.g., “Watery language naturalizes the movements of capital. To the degree that it is carried by aqueous imagery, capital is figured as a necessity, no less a biospheric feature than an ocean or a raincloud” (42), and later, “as investment comes to be regarded as an essential source of health, good livelihood, and agency, water’s more fundamental association with these qualities falls into the background” (44).
40. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, “Introduction: Toward a Hydrological Turn?” in Chen et al., Thinking with Water, 3.
41. Quoted in Pulido, “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism,” 11.
42. Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen, “Legal Personhood in Postgenomic Times: Plasticity, Rights, and Relationality,” in Personhood in the Age of Biolegality: Brave New Law, ed. Marc van Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 60.
43. John Wisely, “Flint Residents Paid America’s Highest Water Rates,” Detroit Free Press, February 16, 2016, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/02/16/study-flint-paid-highest-rate-us-water/80461288/.
44. Andrew R. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), esp. chapters 4 and 5, “Suburban Renewal” and “The Metropolitan Moment” (103–45). For discussion, see Michigan Civil Rights Commission, The Flint Water Crisis: Systemic Racism through the Lens of Flint (Lansing: Michigan Civil Rights Commission, February 17, 2017), 49–51.
45. Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 8.
46. See, e.g., K. Ravi Raman, “Community–Coca-Cola Interface: Political-Anthropological Concerns on Corporate Social Responsibility,” Social Analysis 51, no. 3 (2007): 103–20.
47. See, e.g., Antina von Schnitzler, Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016).
48. Astrida Neimanis, “Alongside the Right to Water, a Posthumanist Feminist Imaginary,” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 5, no. 1 (2014): 5–24, esp. 8.
49. Michelle Murphy, “Distributed Reproduction, Chemical Violence, and Latency,” Scholar and Feminist Online 11, no. 3 (2013), https://sfonline.barnard.edu/life-un-ltd-feminism-bioscience-race/distributed-reproduction-chemical-violence-and-latency/.
50. The tendency toward mysticism is even more striking in the field of “discard studies,” which emphasizes the unpredictable liveliness of waste, often obscuring the brutal workings of power relations that create that unknowability; see Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 112.
51. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
52. For an overview of this issue and additional resources, see Scully, “CORROSION.”
53. Monica Davey, “As Aid Floods into Flint, a Fix Remains Far Off,” New York Times, March 6, 2016.
54. Paul Farmer is the most influential example, and he has discussed the concept this way: “The first notion is the preferential option for the poor. Any serious examination of epidemic disease has always shown that microbes also make a preferential option for the poor. But medicine and its practitioners, even in public health, do so all too rarely. Imagine how much unnecessary suffering we might collectively avert if our health care and educational systems, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations genuinely made a preferential option for the poor?” Farmer, “How Liberation Theology Can Inform Public Health,” Sojourners, January 2014, https://sojo.net/magazine/january-2014/sacred-medicine. Politics of vulnerability is certainly fraught: Michigan is an epicenter of anti-abortion politics, in which claims of protecting vulnerable fetuses are used to justify controlling women. However, in Flint Lives Matter, the politics is one that prioritizes not a mystification of the unborn but the very concrete already here.
55. “Positive signs in the contemporary world are the growing awareness of the solidarity of the poor among themselves, their efforts to support one another, and their public demonstrations on the social scene which, without recourse to violence, present their own needs and rights in the face of the inefficiency or corruption of public authorities. By virtue of her own evangelical duty the Church feels called to take her stand beside the poor, to discern the justice of their requests, and to help satisfy them, without losing sight of the good of groups in the context of the common good.” Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, para. 39.
56. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.
1. Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1, 138.
2. Abigail A. Sewell and Kevin A. Jefferson, “Collateral Damage: The Health Effects of Invasive Police Encounters in New York City,” Journal of Urban Health 93, no. 1 (2016): 42–67.
3. As a classic analyst of theories of technological politics, Langdon Winner, canonically argued, “Its [technological politics’s] starting point is a decision to take technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, the theory of technological politics suggests that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics.” Winner, “Do Artefacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 21–22.
4. This is most elaborated in terms of sousveillance, which is to say the surveilled observing the surveilling authorities from below, in a way that anticipates the use of smartphones to record police violence. Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments,” Surveillance and Society 1, no. 3 (2003): 331–55.
5. Carol Cole-Frowe and Richard Fausset, “Jarring Image of Police’s Use of Force at Texas Pool Party,” New York Times, June 8, 2015.
7. Brittney Cooper, “America’s War on Black Girls: Why McKinney Police Violence Isn’t about ‘One Bad Apple,’” Salon, June 11, 2015, https://www.salon.com/2015/06/10/americas_war_on_black_girls_why_mckinney_police_violence_isnt_about_one_bad_apple/.
8. Mitch Mitchell, “Family Sues Ex-McKinney Officer for $5 Million for Excessive Force at Pool Party,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, January 3, 2017, https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/dallas/article124409854.html.
9. Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” in Are All the Women Still White? Rethinking Race, Expanding Feminisms, ed. Janell Hobson, 23–28 (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2016). For a compelling overview of the broader context of the emergence of Black Lives Matter, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
10. Jane Margolis, with Rachel Estrella, Joanna Goode, Jennifer Jellison Holme, and Kim Nao, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).
11. Margolis et al., 24.
12. Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1.
13. Wiltse, 2. Pools as prominent sites of segregation and civil rights activism are not exclusive to the U.S. context but has a fascinating history in many places, especially in other settler colonies. See, e.g., Penelope Edmonds, “Unofficial Apartheid, Convention and Country Towns: Reflections on Australian History and the New South Wales Freedom Rides of 1965,” Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 2 (2012): 167–90.
14. Victoria W. Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
15. Olga Khazan, “After the Police Brutality Video Goes Viral,” Atlantic, July 29, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/after-the-police-brutality-video-goes-viral/564863/.
16. “Best Places to Live: #1. McKinney, Texas,” Money, September 19, 2014, http://money.com/money/collection-post/3312309/mckinney-texas-best-places-to-live/.
17. U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts, McKinney, Texas, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/mckinneycitytexas/POP060210.
18. Khazan, “After the Police Brutality Video.”
19. Chun, “Race and/as Technology,” 46.
20. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (1998; repr., New York: Vintage, 2010).
21. Jon Schuppe and Craig Stanley, “McKinney Community Fights Charges of Racism Brought on by Pool Party Video,” NBC News, June 8, 2015.
22. Naomi Adiv, “Hardening Racial Lines in Public Space: A Comment on the McKinney Pool Episode,” Metropolitics, July 7, 2015, https://www.metropolitiques.eu/Hardening-Racial-Lines-in-Public.html.
23. Barbara Harris Combs, “A Jim Crow State of Mind: The Racialization of Space in the McKinney, Texas Pool Party Incident,” American Behavioral Scientist, online first, June 30, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764219859617.
24. Wiltse, Contested Waters, 124. See also Caleb P. Smith, “Reflections in the Water: Society and Recreational Facilities, a Case Study of Public Swimming Pools in Mississippi,” Southeastern Geographer 52, no. 1 (2012): 39–54.
25. This is ubiquitous, albeit most obvious in high-profile venues such as the “swimsuit issue” of Sports Illustrated. See Laurel R. Davis, The Swimsuit Issue and Sport: Hegemonic Masculinity in Sports Illustrated (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997).
26. Matthew Haag and Cara Buckley, “Miss America Ends Swimsuit Competition, Aiming to Evolve in ‘This Cultural Revolution,’” New York Times, June 5, 2018. For background, see Grace Slapak, “Sink or Swim: Deciding the Fate of the Miss America Swimsuit Competition,” Women Leading Change: Case Studies on Women, Gender, and Feminism 4, no. 1 (2019): 72–92.
27. For example, London has banned body-shaming ads featuring bikini-clad women on the Tube. Jasper Jackson, “Sadiq Khan Moves to Ban Body-Shaming Ads from London Transport,” Guardian, June 13, 2016.
28. Julia Thylin, “The Burkini as a Symbolic Threat: Anthropological Perspectives on the Ban of the Burkini on French Beaches 2016,” master’s thesis, Lund University, 2016.
29. Tanisha C. Ford, “A Black Girl Song for Dajerria,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (2017): 156–60.
30. Ford, 158.
31. Ford, 158.
32. Ford, 157.
33. Sikivu Hutchinson, “Police Criminals and the Brutalization of Black Girls,” LA Progressive, June 9, 2015, https://www.laprogressive.com/brutalization-of-black-girls/.
34. Ruth Nicole Brown, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 2.
35. Tom Dart and Amanda Holpuch, “Texas Pool Party Incident: Teen in Video Says Officer Was Provoked by ‘Rudeness,’” Guardian, June 8, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/08/texas-pool-party-police-dajerria-becton-eric-casebolt-rude.
36. Cooper, “America’s War on Black Girls.”
37. Nnennaya Amuchie, “‘The Forgotten Victims’: How Racialized Gender Stereotypes Lead to Police Violence against Black Women and Girls: Incorporating an Analysis of Police Violence into Feminist Jurisprudence and Community Activism,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 14, no. 3 (2016): 660.
38. See Jamelle Bouie, “Michael Brown Wasn’t a Superhuman Demon, but Darren Wilson’s Racial Prejudice Told Him Otherwise,” Slate News, November 26, 2014, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/11/darren-wilsons-racial-portrayal-of-michael-brown-as-a-superhuman-demon-the-ferguson-police-officers-account-is-a-common-projection-of-racial-fears.html; Erica Campbell, “Officer Wilson’s Racialization of Mike Brown: A Discourse of Race, Gender, and Mental Health,” Journal of Gender Studies 29, no. 2 (2020): 227–33. The full transcript of the police officer’s aggrandizing testimony to the grand jury is publicly available: State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson, September 16, 2014, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1370569-grand-jury-volume-5.html#document/p216/a189399.
39. The McKinney pool party incident is invoked in the opening of the important book on the ways in which the “school-to-prison pipeline” critique must be expanded to include recognition of the harms to girls. Monique W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: New Press, 2016), 1–2. See also Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, with Priscilla Ocen and Jyoti Nanda, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected (New York: African American Policy Forum, 2015).
40. Chun, “Race and/as Technology,” 57.
41. Benjamin, Captivating Technology, 1.
42. “Assault Swim,” The Daily Show, June 8, 2015, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbSBZycnyac.
43. Lalo Alcaraz, Coming Soon: Attack of the 14-Year-Old Black Girl!, June 10, 2015, http://www.pocho.com/coming-soon-attack-of-the-14-year-old-black-girl/.
44. Cartoon by Markus Prime. Featured in Andrea J. Ritchie, “Dajerria Becton Survived a Violent Arrest at a Pool Party and Went Viral,” Teen Vogue, June 19, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/dajerria-becton-arrest-pool-party-viral. Although I was not able to reach the artist to secure permission to reprint the cartoon, I recommend that readers seek it out.
45. George E. Curry, “Fox News and AP Also Abused Black Youth,” North Dallas Gazette, June 16, 2015, https://northdallasgazette.com/2015/06/16/fox-news-and-ap-also-abused-black-youth/.
46. For discussion of intersectionality in the broader social movement, see Melissa Brown, Rashawn Ray, Ed Summers, and Neil Fraistat, “#SayHerName: A Case Study of Intersectional Social Media Activism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 11 (2017): 1831–46.
47. Sherri Williams, “#SayHerName: Using Digital Activism to Document Violence against Black Women,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 5 (2016): 922–25.
48. Armond R. Towns, “Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women’s Mobility,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 122–26.
49. For a rich exploration of the complex generativity of Black Twitter, see André Brock, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (New York: NYU Press, 2020).
50. One thoughtful article that invokes the Becton case among many others to make this case is I. Bennett Capers, “Race, Policing, and Technology,” North Carolina Law Review 95, no. 4 (2017): 1241–92.
51. Benjamin, Captivating Technology, 3. See also Benjamin, Race after Technology.
52. Beth Coleman, “Race as Technology,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 177–207; Chun, “Race and/as Technology.”
53. Chun, “Race and/as Technology,” 38.
54. Chun, 56–57.
55. Coleman, “Race as Technology,” 183.
56. Coleman.
57. This is the subject of a large body of scholarship. For a rich intersectional feminist account of how marginalized groups use Twitter to advance counternarratives and build activist networks, see Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020).
58. Coleman, “Race as Technology,” 199.
59. Chun, “Race and/as Technology,” 56–57.
60. Alondra Nelson edited a landmark special issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text on the topic of Afrofuturism, and her introduction provides a good route into the topic. Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 1–15. See also Ruha Benjamin, “Introduction: Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination,” in Benjamin, Captivating Technology, 1–24.
61. This is a prominent element, for example, of critique of race-based pharmaceuticals—e.g., Jonathan Kahn, who points out that health disparities are “caused by social discrimination and economic inequality” and argues that “the problem with marketing race-specific drugs is that it becomes easier to ignore the social realities and focus on the molecules.” Kahn, Race in a Bottle, 194.
1. Her full name is “Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr.,” but her family calls her “Olympia.”
2. Rob Haskell, “Serena Williams on Motherhood, Marriage, and Making Her Comeback,” Vogue, January 10, 2018, https://www.vogue.com/article/serena-williams-vogue-cover-interview-february-2018.
3. Haskell.
4. Being Serena, season 1, episode 2, 9:20.
5. Serena Williams, Facebook, January 15, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/SerenaWilliams/videos/10156086135726834/.
6. African American women’s mortality rate in childbirth is 42.8 per hundred thousand live births, compared with white women’s mortality rate of 11 per hundred thousand live births. Emily E. Petersen, Nicole L. Davis, David Goodman, Shanna Cox, Nikki Mayes, Emily Johnston, Carla Syverson et al., “Vital Signs: Pregnancy-Related Deaths, United States, 2011–2015, and Strategies for Prevention, 13 States, 2013–2017,” Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report 68 (2019): 423–29.
7. Lindsay Schallon, “Serena Williams on the Pressure of Motherhood: ‘I’m Not Always Going to Win,’” Glamour, April 27, 2018, https://www.glamour.com/story/serena-williams-motherhood-activism-me-too.
8. A recent biography has appropriately characterized Serena Williams as a “Digital Age Activist,” giving that title to chapter 5 of Merlisa Lawrence Corbett, Serena Williams: Tennis Champion, Sports Legend, and Cultural Heroine (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).
9. For discussion of connections between Serena Williams’s individual story and the data about Black women’s maternal mortality, see Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020), 21–24.
10. For a useful primer on reproductive justice, see Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
11. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Random House, 1997). A particularly powerful articulation of this key argument from the book as a whole comes on pp. 300–301.
12. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, “Reproductive Justice,” https://www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice.
13. SisterSong initiated the Trust Black Women project in response to antichoice billboards put up in Atlanta in 2010 that egregiously equated abortion among Black women with genocide, and the partnership has grown and developed since, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. See https://trustblackwomen.org/our-roots.
14. More information about these groups can be found at Race/Biomed, http://www.racebiomed.org/, and Black Feminist Think Tank, http://www.sheriemrandolph.com/projects.
15. “Race, Biomedicine, Reproductive Justice: A Public Dialogue with Dr. Loretta Ross and Dr. Whitney Robinson,” video, March 29, 2018, https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/59546. The question discussed comes at 1:23.
16. Dána-Ain Davis, Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 206.
17. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Presumed Incompetent,” in Thick: And Other Essays, 86 (New York: New Press, 2019).
18. Cottom.
19. Pain is probably the topic about which there is the most robust literature on doctors’ reluctance to take women’s complaints seriously; see Anke Samulowitz, Ida Gremyr, Erik Eriksson, and Gunnel Hensing, “‘Brave Men’ and ‘Emotional Women’: A Theory-Guided Literature Review on Gender Bias in Health Care and Gendered Norms towards Patients with Chronic Pain,” Pain Research and Management (2018), https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/6358624.
20. Andreea A. Creanga, Cynthia J. Berg, Jean Y. Ko, Sherry L. Farr, Van T. Tong, F. Carol Bruce, and William M. Callaghan, “Maternal Mortality and Morbidity in the United States: Where Are We Now?,” Journal of Women’s Health 23, no. 1 (2014): 4. See also Judette M. Louis, M. Kathryn Menard, and Rebekah E. Gee, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Maternal Morbidity and Mortality,” Obstetrics and Gynecology 125, no. 3 (2015): 690–94.
21. See, e.g., New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Severe Maternal Morbidity in New York City, 2008–2012 (New York: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2016), 15.
22. Amy Roeder, “America Is Failing Its Black Mothers,” Harvard Public Health, Winter 2019, 1–28.
23. For a concise overview of the weathering hypothesis, see Arline T. Geronimus, “Black/White Differences in the Relationship of Maternal Age to Birthweight: A Population-Based Test of the Weathering Hypothesis,” Social Science and Medicine 42, no. 4 (1996): 589–97. Stress has also been implicated as a cause for high rates of premature birth among African American women; see, e.g., Carol J. Rowland Hogue and J. Douglas Bremner, “Stress Model for Research into Preterm Delivery among Black Women,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 192, no. 5 (2005): S47–55.
24. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 104.
25. Roeder, “America Is Failing Its Black Mothers.”
26. The idea of “accumulated insults” of living in a racist society comes from Nancy Krieger and “inaction in the face of need” from Camara Jones. Krieger, “Embodying Inequality: A Review of Concepts, Measures, and Methods for Studying Health Consequences of Discrimination,” International Journal of Health Services 29, no. 2 (1999): 296; Jones, “Levels of Racism,” 1212.
27. Khiara M. Bridges, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 112.
28. Bridges, 113.
29. California Newsreel with Vital Pictures, Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making us Sick?, episode 2, “When the Bough Breaks,” transcript p. 2, https://unnaturalcauses.org/assets/uploads/file/UC_Transcript_2.pdf.
30. Being Serena, season 1, episode 1, 19:30.
31. Fran Kritz, “A New Campaign to Reduce C-Sections Is Especially Critical for African-American Mothers and Babies,” California Health Report, August 10, 2018, https://www.calhealthreport.org/2018/08/10/new-campaign-reduce-c-sections-especially-critical-african-american-mothers-babies/.
32. Being Serena, season 1, episode 1, 17:00.
33. Being Serena, season 1, episode 2, 10:30.
34. Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 20.
35. Terry Kapsalis, “Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction,” in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, 263–300 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
36. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).
37. Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).
38. Chelsea Litchfield, Emma Cavanagh, Jaquelyn Osborne, and Ian Jones, “Social Media and the Politics of Gender, Race and Identity: The Case of Serena Williams,” European Journal for Sport and Society 15, no. 2 (2018): 154–70.
39. Marc Peyser and Alison Samuels, “Venus and Serena against the World,” Newsweek, August 24, 1998, 46.
40. For examples and analysis, see Delia D. Douglas, “‘Dis’ Qualified! Serena Williams and Brittney Griner: Black Female Athletes and the Politics of the Im/Possible,” in Relating Worlds of Racism: Dehumanisation, Belonging, and the Normativity of European Whiteness, ed. Philomena Essed, Karen Farquharson, Kathryn Pillay, and Elisa Joy White, 329–55 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), esp. 337.
41. Moya Bailey, “Misogynoir in Medical Media: On Caster Semenya and R. Kelly,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016).
42. Delia D. Douglas, “Venus, Serena, and the Inconspicuous Consumption of Blackness: A Commentary on Surveillance, Race Talk, and New Racism(s),” Journal of Black Studies 43, no. 2 (2012): 127–45, esp. 133.
43. Janell Hobson, “The ‘Batty’ Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 87–105; see also James McKay and Helen Johnson, “Pornographic Eroticism and Sexual Grotesquerie in Representations of African American Sportswomen,” Social Identities 14, no. 4 (2008): 491–504. The prominence of Baartman as an icon of nineteenth-century racial and sexual science can and should be problematized—see Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender and Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 816–34—but the mobilization of the connection undoubtedly does powerful work in the twenty-first century.
44. For discussion, see Kristi Tredway, “The Performance of Blackness and Femininity in Postfeminist Times: Visualising Serena Williams within the Context of Corporate Globalisation,” in New Sporting Femininities: Embodied Politics in Postfeminist Times, ed. Kim Toffoletti, Holly Thorpe, and Jessica Francombe-Webb, 63–85 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
45. Steve Ginsburg, “Serena Finally Apologizes for Her Foot-Fault Rant,” Reuters, September 14, 2009, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tennis-open-serena/serena-finally-apologizes-for-foot-fault-rant-idUSTRE58D4JY20090914.
46. John William Devine, “Serena Williams’s US Open Meltdown and Why On-Court Coaching Should Not Be Allowed,” Conversation, September 10, 2018, https://theconversation.com/serena-williamss-us-open-meltdown-and-why-on-court-coaching-should-not-be-allowed-102925.
47. For a rich discussion of Williams’s angry outburst and much more, see Raquel Kennon, “Uninhabitable Moments: The Symbol of Serena Williams, Rage and Rackets in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric,” in Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood: Media, Literature and Theory, vol. 1, ed. Marquita M. Gammage and Antwanisha Alameen-Shavers, 27–52 (London: Anthem Press, 2019).
48. See Therí A. Pickens, “The Verb Is No: Towards a Grammar of Black Women’s Anger,” CLA Journal 60, no. 1 (2016): 15–31, esp. her discussion of this element of Serena Williams’s public persona (22).
49. Jaime Schultz, “Reading the Catsuit: Serena Williams and the Production of Blackness at the 2002 U.S. Open,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 29, no. 3 (2005): 338–57.
50. Roger Domeneghetti, “‘The Other Side of the Net’: (Re) Presentations of (Emphasised) Femininity during Wimbledon 2016,” Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure, and Events 10, no. 2 (2018): 151–63, esp. 159–60.
51. Quoted in Schultz, “Reading the Catsuit,” 345.
52. Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 38.
53. Laurel Wamsley, “‘One Must Respect the Game’: French Open Bans Serena Williams’ Catsuit,” National Public Radio, August 24, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/08/24/641549735/one-must-respect-the-game-french-open-bans-serena-williams-catsuit.
54. Serena Williams told reporters in a postmatch press conference, “I’ve had a lot of problems with my blood clots, God I don’t know how many I’ve had in the past 12 months. I’ve been wearing pants in general a lot when I play so I can keep the blood circulation going.” The comments were widely reported and discussed; see, e.g., Nadra Nittle, “The Serena Williams Catsuit Ban Shows That Tennis Can’t Get Past Its Elitist Roots,” Vox, August 28, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/8/28/17791518/serena-williams-catsuit-ban-french-open-tennis-racist-sexist-country-club-sport; Luke Darby, “Serena Williams’ Catsuit Is Banned from All Future French Opens,” GQ, August 25, 2018.
55. Whitney McIntosh, “Serena Williams’ French Open Catsuit Is for ‘All the Moms Out There,’” SBNation, May 29, 2018, https://www.sbnation.com/tennis/2018/5/29/17406858/serena-williams-french-open-catsuit-pregnancy-recovery.
56. Ramona Coleman-Bell, “Droppin’ It Like It’s Hot: The Sporting Body of Serena Williams,” in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, ed. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, 195–205 (New York: Routledge, 2006), esp. 196–97.
57. Schultz, “Reading the Catsuit,” esp. 340.
58. For discussion, see Delia D. Douglas, “Venus, Serena, and the Women’s Tennis Association: When and Where ‘Race’ Enters,” Sociology of Sport Journal 22, no. 3 (2005): 255–81; see also Nancy E. Spencer, “Sister Act VI: Venus and Serena Williams at Indian Wells: ‘Sincere Fictions’ and White Racism,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 28, no. 2 (2004): 115–35.
59. Of course, their philanthropy itself could be seen as part of selling out to corporate capital—the narrative being individual success, and then supporting “giving back” over structural change. See Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, “Venus and Serena Are ‘Doing It’ for Themselves,” in Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport, ed. Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald, 130–53 (Oxon, U.K.: Routledge, 2009).
60. Being Serena, season 1, episode 1, 19:40.
61. Being Serena, season 1, episode 2, 9:36. In the documentary, her agent, Jill Smoller, also reflects: “The enormity of everything was scary. But fortunately, because she advocated for herself, they ended up taking her in for a CAT scan, and they found the pulmonary embolism.”
62. Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1988), 130.
1. This was the subject of many news reports globally, e.g., in the Guardian. Nina Lakhani, “Detroit: Civil Rights Coalition Sues to Bar Water Shutoffs for Residents,” Guardian, July 9, 2020.
2. See Larry R. Churchill, Nancy M. P. King, and Gail E. Henderson, “The Future of Bioethics: It Shouldn’t Take a Pandemic,” Hasting Center Report 50, no. 3 (2020): 54–56.
3. This assignment is also informed by those of other teachers, including those who taught me. It is particularly resonant with a popular exercise in courses in science and technology studies and related fields that involves mapping out diverse elements that come together in one particular object to explore the broader social world. See Joseph Dumit, “Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time,” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 2 (2014): 344–62. My template builds on that exercise, choosing a focal event rather than an object. Both exercises have a common goal: to sit longer with things and wake up to connections. As Dumit argues, “even if we read newspapers, watch cable news (CNN, BBC, or FOX), or follow and resend Facebook posts, the war-torn, poverty- and disease-stricken, unequal, unbearable world is tragic—but somehow tolerable. A problem shared, I would argue, by Haraway and Deleuze, is how to disrupt our own tolerance, how to see the intolerable in the everyday” (347).
4. These three levels of racism were laid out in the Introduction and are drawn from Jones, “Levels of Racism.”
5. See Evelynn M. Hammonds and Susan M. Reverby, “Toward a Historically Informed Analysis of Racial Health Disparities since 1619,” American Journal of Public Health 109, no. 10 (2019): 1348–49.
6. Camisha A. Russell makes this point while addressing her own field of bioethics, and it is no less relevant for many scholarly domains. Russell, “Questions of Race in Bioethics: Deceit, Disregard, Disparity, and the Work of Decentering,” Philosophy Compass 11, no. 1 (2016): 52.
7. For further discussion about authentic implementation, see Ashanté Reese and Hanna Garth, “Beyond the Parentheticals: The Practice of Being in Conversation,” gradfoodstudies 6, no. 1 (2019), https://gradfoodstudies.org/2019/06/16/beyond-the-parentheticals/.
8. Although being intentional about citation in that way can be an interesting exercise, and open up space for engaging with more feminist voices, as Sara Ahmed demonstrated in her Living a Feminist Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), in which she cited no white men.
13. Jonathan M. Metzl and Helena Hansen, “Structural Competency: Theorizing a New Medical Engagement with Stigma and Inequality,” Social Science and Medicine 103 (2014): 126–33.
14. Kim Krisberg, “Programs Work from within to Prevent Black Maternal Deaths: Workers Targeting Root Cause—Racism,” Nation’s Health: A Publication of the American Public Health Association 49, no. 6 (2019): 1–17.
15. Mary T. Bassett, “#BlackLivesMatter—a Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities,” New England Journal of Medicine 372, no. 12 (2015): 1085–87.
16. Start by reading the organization’s website: https://whitecoats4blacklives.org/.
17. “King Berates Medical Care Given Negroes,” Associated Press, March 26, 1966. King’s quote has been rendered in different ways and is itself a rich site of analysis; see Charlene Galarneau, “Getting King’s Words Right,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 29, no. 1 (2018): 5–8.
18. “Health is more than a medical matter” is a mantra of my current department, Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London (https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/ghsm/).