What Would It Mean If the Harris Campaign Centered Black Women’s Health?

Part of the Series

Communities Beyond Elections

Black women are a driving force behind the Harris-Walz ticket; a recent survey finds Black women support Harris by a margin of 59 points. They host Zoom calls where tens of thousands pledge to volunteer for her campaign. Black sororities and political groups line up money, media and on-the-ground actions to sustain the momentum for the first possible Black woman president of the United States.

“Freedom! Freedom!” Beyoncé sang in a Kamala Harris campaign ad. On-screen, Harris strode in slow motion as a U.S. flag billowed. After watching this spectacle, I closed my laptop and looked out at the street. Middle-aged Black and Latina women waited by a church for free food. They dabbed sweaty faces and leaned on walkers. Their very presence in this line is indicative of the core issues in this election. Black women — especially the poor and working class — have been in crisis. They are wrecked by health issues, including disproportionately higher rates of death during childbirth, high blood pressure, diabetes, poverty-induced stress, fibroids, domestic violence, heart attacks and sickle cell disease. They care for families, at times shouldering that burden alone. They bear the weight of history on their backs.

Black women deserve support. Imagine what could happen if activists pushed Harris to put Black women’s health at the center of her campaign. It would mean bulldozing centuries of stereotypes to highlight the innate preciousness of Black women’s lives.

Killing Me Softly

A map of “Black America” would show that the nation’s roughly 48 million Black people are mostly in the South, which has 56 percent. The Northeast, Midwest and West split the rest at 17 percent each, and in those regions Black people are cloistered in cities. Overlay gender onto your map, and you’ll see more than half of Black people (52 percent) are women.

The numbers show that Black America struggles with deep, intergenerational poverty that hits women the hardest. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “Black women have higher labor force participation rates than other women, meaning a higher share of Black women are either employed or unemployed and looking for work.” Yet 60 percent of them only make 63 cents to a white man’s dollar.

Such poverty can cause sickness. “Weathering,” a term coined by Arline Geronimus, describes how Black women endure chronic stress that can erode them like a rock “weathered” by the elements — except the “weather” is the U.S. itself. It can manifest as higher rates of diabetes and heart disease, cancer and fibroids. It shows up the most during their bodies’ most vulnerable moment, childbirth; the Black maternal mortality rate is off the charts. Non-Hispanic Black women are 2.6 times more likely to die during pregnancy than white women, and this number jumps fourfold for those 25 years of age or older. The statistic does not change with class status or education.

The Harris campaign has not even begun to touch this crisis. Harris hails the U.S. as a land of opportunity and democracy. Such rhetoric may win over some voters, but at the cost of telling the truth. The U.S. has been killing Black women systemically for centuries — and until we face that fact, we can’t stop it.

Fear of a Black Planet

The violence that Black women endures is not a fluke. It is how our society has worked from the start. From the 16th to 19th centuries, Western nations set up the trans-Atlantic slave trade like a giant factory of ships, masters and plantations. Twelve million Africans were thrown in; out came money for Europe and the U.S. It turned Black women into slaves who, when raped, made more slaves. The evidence of this horror comes in DNA historical research. As Frederick Douglass wrote in his memoir, “…slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable.” Black women’s place in the West was to be an object that created more objects — not considered to be thinking, feeling beings.

The Civil War put an end to legal slavery but racism still determines how Black people are treated — or, in a medical sense, left untreated. For example, in southern states with Jim Crow laws, Black infant mortality rates were higher, even up to the 1960s, than in non-Jim Crow states. And today, Black women die 2.3 times as much as white women when giving birth. For a Black woman to create life is to risk death.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out, the closest the U.S. came to achieving universal health care was in 1947. However, Krugman noted, it was defeated because southern white politicians were afraid that national health care would force them to integrate their hospitals. Later he said, a “change in demography” could undo the grip of white supremacy on national policies, like health care. Today, even after legal integration, Black women face maltreatment, amplified by colorism and a bottleneck of less access to care because of costs.

Even as Black women’s health crisis continues, it is the talk of demographic change that gets media attention. It drives white supremacists into a frenzy, they zero in on childbirth by people of color as well as immigration. It goes way back. In 1932, the American Birth Control League published an essay, “A Negro Number,” which claimed that “the present submerged condition of the Negro is due in large part to the high fertility of the race under disastrously adverse circumstances.” Of course, it’s total bullshit. It is never been the number of Black people that causes poverty and bad health but the system of white supremacy they are crushed by.

For a recent example of fear of demographic change, look no further than former Fox host Tucker Carlson. He repeated the white supremacist “great replacement theory,” claiming that Democrats “can import an entirely new electorate from the Third World and change the demographics of the U.S. so they will never lose again.” And now Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, soft-pedaled the great replacement myth by suggesting that Democrats don’t care about American (read: white) children. Vance said, “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.… And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” When he rattled off his cast of villains, they were tellingly, all people of color or gay. Of course, Vice President Harris is the target of this sexist rhetoric because she chose not to birth children but instead become a stepmother.

Who gets to define the future is why childbirth is such a powerful image. It is why the fight over Black women’s health, especially childbirth, is political. The health crisis of Black women is effectively invisible, a third rail in U.S. politics that no politician has put at the center of a national campaign. To embrace it is to embrace Black life itself.

“In the United States of America, in the 21st century, being pregnant and giving birth should not carry such great risk,” Vice President Harris said at the White House’s 2021 Maternal Health Day of Action. “But the truth is women in our nation, and this is a hard truth, women in our nation are dying before, during and after childbirth.”

It is an outrage when the deep, instinctual joy we have at a baby’s birth is violated by the death of the mother, especially a death caused by inequality, by racism. By making Black women the focus of that powerful, universal value, Harris could put forth practical ideas that save the lives of mothers.

What are those ideas? Black women have preached them, sung them, written them, made them into philosophy and poetry, made them into legislation. To stop the “weathering of their bodies” they have practiced radical mutual aid; to obtain food and housing security, they have unionized, and they have nursed each other and family. During the COVID quarantine, Black women wove networks of support, giving food and money to families falling through the cracks. During the height of Black Lives Matters, they drove protests. Now many who are rallying for Harris are framing their labor as an attempt to save democracy.

What can Harris do in return? A campaign that puts Black women’s health at the center, wrapped around the image of a mother and child, could force the nation — and maybe the world — to contend with the truth that Black women are worth protecting.