ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses three interrelated themes: 1) Stratified reproduction across local and global intersections; 2) racism and reproduction; and 3) strategies of resistance. Initially described by Shellee Colen, stratified reproduction frames the power relations that structure unequal entitlement to reproduction. Through settler colonialism, slavery, industrialization, and empire, control over the reproductive options of racialized people has been central to domination. Ultimately, these processes are best seen as undergirding the necropolitics of reproduction, or the use of political power to determine who will live and who will die. With the rise of White nationalism throughout the world, the relationship of stratified reproduction and how people imagine race, nation, and the next generation provides the broader context for understanding race and reproduction. The Sojourner Syndrome describes and explains how the interaction of class, racism, and gender on one hand, and agency and resistance on the other, may combine to produce these problematic health consequences. At the same time, African-descended women continue to engage in “transformative work” from electoral politics to the Movement for Black Lives addressing the immediate health consequences of movement work itself and simultaneously working to dismantle the structures of racism and seeking to achieve reproductive justice.
