Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

In the early 1990s, male judges coerced two Black women in their twenties, Cornelia Whitner and Darlene Johnson, to get Norplant. Whitner had tested positive for cocaine use after giving birth, and Johnson stood accused of child abuse, though with insufficient evidence. These criminal cases, Roberts notes, punish poor Black women for having babies. In this chapter, Roberts explains how “crime, race, and reproduction gravely [threaten] Black people’s welfare as well as [their] concept of procreative liberty” (146).

In the mid-1980s, prosecutors addressed the panic over “crack babies” by going after their mothers. At least 200 women, between 1985 and 1995, “were charged with maternal drug use” (147). The charges included neglect, child abuse, and distributing drugs to a minor. Most Americans agreed with such tactics. A poll showed that 82% of Americans considered a woman who used crack while pregnant a child abuser. Around the same time, the Supreme Court imposed additional restrictions on abortion.

Crack cocaine emerged in the early 1980s and quickly became a national problem, partly because it’s cheap compared to cocaine. A gram of cocaine cost $50 at the time, but a rock of crack cost only $5. Because most crack was sold and purchased in inner-city neighborhoods, it was an easy target for the Reagan era’s War on Drugs and the media’s perpetual denigration of Black people.