Our Legacy: Self-Determination, Bodily Autonomy, and Anti-State Practices for Black Birthing Justice: A Reading List by CAM Morris

A reading list by CAM Morris from their teach-in "Our Legacy: Self-Determination, Bodily Autonomy, and Anti-State Practices for Black Birthing Justice” for the School for Black Feminist Politics.

Community organizer CAM Morris led a teach-in for the School for Black Feminist Politics, the political education arm of Black Women Radicals. The teach-in Our Legacy: Self-Determination, Bodily Autonomy, and Anti-State Practices for Black Birthing Justice, was on Saturday, April 23rd from 4:30-6:00 PM EST via Zoom.

CAM’s second teach-in will be in September 2022 and the time and location will be announced at the end of the summer.

About CAM Morris: Originally from the southside of Chicago, now residing in Washington, DC, (occupied Piscataway land) CAM (they/them) is a neuroexpansive, non-binary Black radical community organizer. Holding a Black queer feminist and abolitionist politic, the focus of CAM’s work is combatting colonization and neoliberalism, against US occupation and war, patriarchal violence, and capitalism.

Our Legacy: Self-Determination, Bodily Autonomy, and Anti-State Practices for Black Birthing Justice: A Reading List

Collage by Doriana Diaz, Black Women Radicals’ Visual Designer.

  • Bridges, M. Khiara, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization. University of California Press, 2011. 

  • Bonaparte, D. Alicia & Oparah, Julia, Chinyere. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Child Birth. Paradigm Publishers, 2015. 

  • Davis, Angela. Women, Race, and Class. Penguin Random House, 1994. 

  • Fried, Marlene, Gerber, Gutiérrez, Elena, Ross, Loretta, & Silliman, Jael. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice. Haymarket Books, 2016. 

  • Jackson, Zakiyyah, I. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in and Antiblack World. New York Press, 2020. 

  • Notes, Abolition [orginal author Claudia Jones]. The End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!. 1949. https://abolitionnotes.org/claudia-jones/neglect 

  • Owens Cooper, Deirdre. Medical Bondage. University of Georgia Press. 2017.

  • Ritchie, Beth. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. New York University Press, 2012. 

  • Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Penguin Random House, 1997. 

  • Ross, J. Loretta & Solinger, Rickie. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. 2017, University of California Press, 2017.

  • Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How Black Feminists Defined Abortion Rights. 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/how-black-feminists-defined-abortion-rights

  • Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and The Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.

  • Then, Black. The Price Slave Women Paid for the Birth of Modern Gynecology. 2015. https://blackthen.com/the-price-slave-women-paid-for-the-birth-of-modern-gynecology/ 

  • Washington, A. Harriet. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Time to the Present. Double Day, 2005. 

  • VA, Net. Women of Color and the Struggle for Reproductive Justice. 2010. https://vawnet.org/material/women-color-and-struggle-reproductive-justice 

RESOURCES *some resources may be date sensitive:

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