Racism and Sexism Questions

Week 2: Racism and Sexism On Jennifer Morgan’s “Partus sequitur

ventrem”

Natal alienation: “alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood’” and from all “’rights’ or claims of birth. Social connection and relationship to kin, people, social life, civil society, and equally to his own birth and heritage are not constituted as legally binding in the eyes of the law (Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, 5,7).

Partus sequitur ventrem: The legal doctrine part of colonial law passed in 1662 in which “all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother…”; “that which is brought forth follows the belly (womb)”

“Inheritability of Slavery: Loss of Kinship/ Filial Relations

Paradox of the Reproductive Politics of Slavery: the ”inheritability” of slavery did not rely on “a high rate of reproduction from the enslaved– which remained low in all early American slave societies– but the ideological solidity of those slave societies needed reproducing women.”

“Building a system of racial slavery on the notion of heritability did not require the presence of natural population growth among the enslaved, but it did require a clear understanding that enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children.”

Systematic Alienation and Dispossession • Resituating heritability did not mean that the children would belong

to the biological mother or parents; but that kin relations and their lineage could be severed • “Enslaved people had to be understood as dispossessed, outside of

the normal networks of family and community, to justify the practice of mass enslavement.” • Enslaved women’s maternal possibilities became a crucial site of raical

meaning making which would be indexed and concretized by the law.

Racialized Gender Ideologies

• The reinscription of racial meaning in law both demonstrates and fortifies the discrepancies within gender ideologies; • In other words, points to the racial disparities

within gender construction itself. • Racialized gender ideologies were necessary

vehicles for the mobilization of power, law, colonial expansion, and capital;

• Dispossession and disaggregation of the black life via the family was critical to secure structures and operations of power • Legacy of slavery marks the inception of

”separation of families.”

Jennifer Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem,” 3.

“… my interest here is to link that legal history to the quotidian experience of racialized reproduction for enslaved women and, from there, to explore the implication of such experience on how we conceptualize the history of slavery…”

“The Virginia act is both a window onto the reproductive logics of slavery and a crucial fulcrum with which to explore the materiality of the race/reproduction bind for enslaved women” (3).

• Racialized reproduction for enslaved women and black women more generally links together legal history of slavery and lived experience of black people; but equally important, that this link affords us a critical vantage in understanding the representation of the history of slavery, early modern racial formations, and racial heritability (racial inheritance) through maternal descent

“But the question remains, if Atlantic slavery was defined by its heritability, how did women—arguably the vectors of racial inheritance—experience their role as conscripts of enslaveability?”

By now, we should be asking ourselves:

* What does Morgan mean black women functioning as a vector of racial inheritance?

* How, at the level of the body, do black women serve as a text/ ”as conscripts” for enslaveability”?

^^ To understand this, we have to “center” a gendered history of intimacy to understand the layers of racial meaning in Atlantic slavery. In other words, an analysis of how gender and race are staged in their intimacy allows us to think about the productions of meaning making that are part and parcel with the (re-)production of racial slavery, and how this staging, or construction through a colonial lens, of black sexuality enacts multiple modes of violence.

* Namely, black women’s gender and sexuality were reduced to the value of a commodity: Enslaved women’s bodies were seen equivalent to property which means in theorizing property relations (community, exchange, politics, rights), black women’s bodies– more specifically their reproduction, cannot be separated from thinking the nation-state

Metalanguage of Race

• The recognition of the reproductive lives of enslaved women would be the evidence of racialized dispossession.

• “Enslaved mothers were enmeshed in the foundational metalanguages of early modern Atlantic ideas of slavery, freedom, and racial colonialism.”

Metalanguage of Race: Evelyn Higgonbotham • Following M.M. Bakhtin, Higginbotham explains “To understand race

as a metalanguage, we must recognize its historical and material grounding… as ‘the power of the word to mean.’” • “This power evolves from concrete situational and ideological

contexts, that is, from a position of enunciation that reflects not only time and place but values as well.” • The concept of race is never “neutral” and is charged due to these

ideological and historical contexts. • “The social context for the construction of race as a tool for black

oppression is historically rooted in the context of slavery.” • In this case, we see race, or more specifically blackness, is anchored not only

in race relations but property relations in law, society, and politics

Metalanguage of Race (continued) • “Defined by law as “animate chattel,” slaves constituted

property as well as a social class and were exploited under a system that sanctioned white ownership of black bodies and black labor.”

• Sojourner Truth, AfAm abolitionist and women’s rights activist: the system of chattel slavery procured black women having the right to their own bodies and sexuality.

• “While the law and public opinion idealized motherhood and enforced the protection of white women’s bodies, the opposite held true for black women’s.”

Developing the Virginia Slave Code

• 1661 Barbados slave code was the first comprehensive law passed in the English colonies to regulate enslaved population • But there was an absence of a legal definition of who—what category

of person– was enslaved. • Virginia was the first to regulate maternal descent and did so in a

way… that appeared to have no obvious legal precedent in either English law or colonial slave codes. • The amalgam of legal borrowing and commonly held assumptions

about who would be enslaveable and from whence the legal right to property orginated

Passage of 1662 Act: Making Explicit the Relation Between Heredity and Race • The act made clear that the status of enslaved people would be

passed down not through the father but the mother; • Partus sequitur ventrem: “offspring follows the belly”; that the

children would be slave or free “according to the condition of the mother.” • This allowed English slaveowners claimed the right to children born

into slavery “like cattle.” • Slaves were more on the side of property than of being constitute as people • Thomas Aquinas: “If a man sows on another’s land, the produce belongs to

the owner of the land. Now the woman’s womb in relation to the seed of man is like the land in relation to the sower.”

“The transference of partus sequitur ventrem from domestic animals to humans thus resulted in the characteristic of maternal transmission of slave status.” • But Morgan points out that there is more “unthinking decisions”

utilized in the characterization of the slave. • That there are shifts from the practices of inheritance and slave labor

to European settles turning people into property in the law allows “to bolster racialized barriers to freedom.” • Partus act was crucial in the gendering and racialization of African

people while also barring rights and freedom. • “Throughout the Atlantic world, even where labor regimes “militated

against dependable demographic increase,” slaveowners across national boundaries mobilized the specter of the reproducing slave woman as an important avenue of social and economic control.”

• “Why and how race became the key to enslaveability was a question posed and resolved using myriad strategies across the early modern Atlantic as traders and settlers constructed paradigms that enabled the exchange of human commodities and the enslaved constructed paradigms that enabled their response to the New World order. Children born to parents who occupied positions increasingly seen as racially distinct posed political, ideological, and economic problems. Their indeterminancy needed to be fixed… • “The law imposes order as it both configures those children as

property and asserts its right to do so.”

• Enslaved women’s bodies were turned not only into property and commodities (of value because of their capacity for reproduction), but also in turn conceived as objectifiable. • Their bodies, seen as objects and commodities, became “the

productive site of racialized meaning wherein enslaved women’s reproductive capacities are rendered as violent conduits of human commodification.” • “Her interiority, the contained and private transformation happening

inside her body that produced a New World space of racial inheritance and geographical dispossession.”

• Angela Davis: the extent to which dispossession took place among the community of the enslaved (namely between black women and their children) as part of the disaggregation of black life in stabilizing the conditions of civil society.

• Gender ideology, no doubt, asserts inequalities in society, culture, politics, and ways of knowing and belonging to a place.

• But we can understand from the historical conditions of partus sequitur ventrem how racialized meaning part and parcel with gender were instrumentalized to bar the enslaved from protection, rights, freedom in addition to dispossession of the family, sense of place, and sense of self. These conditions would be central to the expansion of settler colonialism of the United States

• The negation of black womanhood (or black female subjectivity), this exclusion, is foundational to the way in which the notion of persons and the human would be established both historically and in the present.