Luanne
S6/P57
She died right here on this plantation, and so long as she was alive, ain’t hardly none of us never got whipped nor branded. She kept us safe. But what we do when she leave? We put her in the ground and we keep on bein’ slaves. Ain’t nothin’ change. Life she lived was better than others. Life she give us better than most on other plantations. And still, when we die, we just slaves in the ground.
The Wet Nurse
"Black breastfeeding has a complicated history dating back to the era of slave trade and the use of wet nurses. During that time, black female slaves were forced to breastfeed white babies; a practice which was known as “wet nursing."
“Black women who had given birth were not allowed to birth their own babies, many of whom starved or were malnourished and died from the lack of nursing and nourishment. They were really there to feed the babies of their masters and enslavers. Black milk would eventually become a huge driver of slave trading — a market created and run solely by white women."
Latham Thomas
Maternity Wellness Expert and Author
Another mother’s love: exploitation, wet-nursing, and present-day Black breastfeeding
by Rachel Nicks
"You just gave birth to your beautiful baby. As you breastfeed, someone comes and rips your baby from your chest and replaces it with your slave owner's child – or children. You may never see your baby again or you may be separated from your child for so long that your community is forced to come up with another way to nourish your infant so that it doesn’t die."
-Rachel Nicks
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"Behind the Myth of Benevolence"
image by Titus Kaphar
"If we are not honest about our past, then we cannot have a clear direction towards our future," Kaphar says in an interview.
THE MAMMY CARICATURE
from The Jim Crow Museum
image by Andy Warhol
Mammy is the most well known and enduring racial caricature of African American women. The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University has more than 100 items with the mammy image, including ashtrays, souvenirs, postcards, fishing lures, detergent, artistic prints, toys, candles, and kitchenware. This article examines real mammies, fictional mammies, and commercial mammies.
won’t you celebrate with me
won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Slavery was inherently cruel and unjust, and it was cruel and unjust to different people in different ways. Today, Clint Smith discusses the experience of enslaved women, and how their experience of slavery was different than men. Women had a unique vantage point to understand slavery, and were particularly vulnerable to some terrible abuses under the institution.
EMILY WEST with R. J. KNIGHT
"White women used wet-nursing as a tool to manipulate enslaved women’s motherhood for slaveholders’ own ends."
EmpressOnyxx
TikTok Scholar
EmpressOnyxx is a TikTok scholar who focuses on contemporary and historic Black feminism and Intersectionality. She has dozens of short videos that break down everything from the suffragette movement to contemporary rap music. Be prepared to go down the rabbit hole of Black Female Radical wisdom.
"Black women wet nursing white women’s babies didn’t end with abolition. “Many Black women were still wet nurses in the 1940s,” McClain said. “I wasn’t breastfed; I grew up not seeing or hearing about it. Our moms, grandmothers and aunties didn't speak of it. And if a Black woman did come across another Black woman who breastfed, there was a feeling of ‘Oh, you think you’re better than us?’”
Ty McClain
Lactation Consultant
Charlotte Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)
Mothers’ Milk: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women
in the Antebellum South
By EMILY WEST with R. J. KNIGHT
"Wet-nursing is uniquely gendered kind of exploitation, and under slavery it represented the point at which the exploitation of enslaved women as workers and as reproducers literally intersected. Feeding another woman’s child with one’s own milk constituted a form of labor, but it was work that could only be undertaken by lactat- ing women who had borne their own children. As a form of exploita- tion specific to slave mothers, enforced wet-nursing constituted a distinct aspect of enslaved women’s commodification."
Delegate Jackie Hope Glass
(D-89)
Delegate Glass speaking before the Virginia Assembly on the connection between forced Black wet nursing and contemporary Black health.
Black Breastfeeding after a History of Trauma
by Mekha McGuire
"The history of the controlled reproductive capacities of Black and afro descended women is the foundation on which this country is built. The legacies of terror, oppression, and gendered dehumanization still impact the ancestors of those who survived the vast grief of enslavement."
Latham Thomas
Founder of MamaGlow
"This is a call to all women to reclaim their bodies and the birth process as sacred."
Mama Glow is an abundant, radiant energy that comes from within. It’s your initiation, birthing yourself as a powerful woman, as you prepare to give birth to your bundle of joy. Birth is our rite of passage, a ceremony marking a transformative stage in your life, and Mama Glow is our birthright—to walk in immense grace, power, and wisdom, to have understanding, reverence, and the deepest trust in our bodies. Having faith in the benevolent universe and being an active participant in the co-creation of your beautiful life. This act of standing in your power ignites a force within that glows from the inside out.
Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery
by Deirdre Cooper Owens, PhD and Sharla M. Fett, PhD
The legacies of slavery today are seen in structural racism that has resulted in disproportionate maternal and infant death among African Americans.
The deep roots of these patterns of disparity in maternal and infant health lie with the commodification of enslaved Black women’s childbearing and physicians’ investment in serving the interests of slaveowners. Even certain medical specializations, such as obstetrics and gynecology, owe a debt to enslaved women who became experimental subjects in the development of the field.
Ashley May
Black breasts do not exist separate from Black bodies and the situated existence we navigate in this world nor the racialized experience of motherhood.
Note from Almila Kakinc-Dod, Editor-in-Chief
Type de « négresse » d’Adana Nourrice noire allaitante éditions G. Mizrahi, Adana, carte postale, 9 x 14, vers 1910
The photo to the left is an eerie depiction of not only the impact of slavery that continues into today in the U.S. but also worldwide. At first glance, this can presumably be a black woman enslaved to be a "wet nurse" for a white family. Yet, this was taken all the way across in Adana, Turkey, where the Ottoman Empire had its own dark practises of slavery.
Black Breastfeeding Week:
The Politics of Breastfeeding
image by Bisa Butler
Essential to the solution is the acknowledgement that breastfeeding is a privilege, not a right. To paint the picture that breastfeeding should come easy, as long as you’re lactating and of course doing everything right, is a disservice to the many black women that face socioeconomic constraints that prevent them and their babies from accessing life giving milk. Many black women simply do not have the luxury. Luxury comes with privilege. A type of privilege held by white women and to a certain extent Black women, like myself, who faced little to no challenges while nursing their babies.
-May