index of 2005 conference papers

Motherhood, Racialization, and the State

Steve Martinot
San Francisco State University

Introduction -- the case of Regina McKnight

Regina McKnight is a black seasonal tobacco farm worker in South Carolina, living homeless. At this moment, she sits in prison, doing twelve years for murder, for the crime of having given birth to a stillborn baby. The state charged her with murder because she used cocaine while pregnant. She has two other children, and was grieving for her mother, who had recently been run over by a truck near the farm where she worked. It didn't matter that there is no scientific research linking cocaine use to stillbirth, nor that the state couldn't prove McKnight's cocaine use caused the death of the fetus. What mattered was making McKnight an example under a child-abuse law that can be applied to "viable fetuses." In 2003, the Supreme Court decided not to review the case, allowing the conviction to stand without recourse.

For the state's white prosecutors, it was not her homeless exposure to the elements, nor the malnutrition attendant upon underpaid agricultural labor, nor the exhaustion of long work hours, but an unseen toke that took her baby's life. It is not the health of the mother that the state is concerned with, for which the provision of better labor protections and conditions would have directly enhanced the baby's chances of survival. And neither is the state concerned with McKnight's misery; that is precisely what it uses against her. The state's true concern lies elsewhere, in the judicial control of motherhood, and through the criminalization of mothers, the de-criminalization of its negligence toward the labor conditions imposed upon McKnight.

But McKnight's prosecution also relied upon an entire history of agricultural labor, from plantation slavery to sharecropper debt-servitude to seasonal wage labor: a vast social machine grinding away without regard for morality or justice. It makes McKnight's physical situation extraneous because it makes her humanity irrelevant. The toll taken by her homelessness, her bereavement, the duress of her daily toil, is discounted in the name of that history, and the impunity it grants the white corporate state. The label tacked on that history might read "drug war," or "war on terrorism," or maquiladora, or states' rights, or free trade; but each is only another form in which women are refused personhood for political purposes.

That is, women are subjected to a dual instrumentality, first, as a mode of production of children through which the state can lay claim to their bodies; and second, as a social location for more general practices of political impunity. In recent welfare reform, for instance, single mothers are sent out to work, subjecting them to social duress for which the law can then hold them responsible -- in the name of family values. Similar physical and psychological control can be seen in the whittling away of abortion rights. Steps taken toward criminalizing abortion as murder make women responsible to the state in order to hide the state's abandonment of responsibility toward a child-care infrastructure. In these hypocrisies, female biology becomes a weapon used to subdue and regiment women's social being and social consciousness. Indeed, the gradualism by which the state erodes abortion rights is essential. At each step, it once more objectifies and degrades those for whom the issue is an importance, while sanctifying itself by pretending, through that same gradualism, to be democratic and responsible.

Today, the state's advocacy of sexual abstinence, for which it deploys religious fundamentalism, should be understood as an ultimate dehumanization, and would be if it were not encased in a growing political ethos that both criminalizes women, and criminalizes sexuality through them. Both have the effect of valorizing patriarchal and masculinist violence against women. Through the abortion issue, the state in turn translates that violence against women into a perceived violence of women against fetuses, as a means of further regimenting their bodies, as a mode of social militarization enacted before the doors of the prison-industrial complex.

Reflections on the origins of slavery

What needs to be understood here, in terms of social militarization and prisons, is its underlying racialization, the inseparability of race and white supremacy from the state's construction of gender and sexuality. The instrumentalization of women (of which McKnight is one victim) echoes moments of the initial construction of the slave system of the English colonies in the 17th century, and the structure of racialization that emerged from it. Revisiting that history will reveal the inner workings of the machine that consumes McKnight, the moments of gestation of the modern state that instrumentalizes her.

The English colonies were settlements organized for the amassing of wealth by capitalist means. The first profitable cash crop was tobacco, and the first laborers on the plantations were English indenturees, some voluntary, some transported prisoners, some kidnapped off the streets of English cities. The internal structure of these colonies was corporate in nature. All the colonists, rich and poor, were employees of the corporation, with the colonial council playing the role of a board of directors. Its job was the usual: to guarantee a labor supply, find markets for produced goods, insure colony profitability, and keep order.

The plantations were capitalist agro-businesses from the beginning, mass-producing commodities for international markets. The English endenturees were chattel laborers. To be chattel meant to be capital goods that could be sold or used to pay debts. Though the first African laborers arrived in 1619, Africans were not brought in large numbers until after the 1650s. At first, Africans were released, like the English, after having served a standard indenture period. But the auction market process, to which only Africans were subjected, since English bond-laborers had contracts, led to the idea of perpetual servitude for Africans. The auctions served to determine the market value of African bond-laborers, rendering them forms of capital in the way the stock market determines the value of corporate stock today.

For the colonial elite, a way of categorically differentiating African and English bond-labor, beyond mere descriptive differences, had to be developed, in order to end the common cause they made in running away or in other forms of resistence. The elite tried various means, such as differing political status, differing servitude status, differing punishment options; nothing worked until they hit upon a means of creating a cultural distinction, which engendered a psychological realignment of English identity. The modern concept of race names not only social division, but more importantly, the ability to unite all English together against the enslaved Africans; that is, to define the African "slave" as the core of English social cohesion, precisely as an alien enemy. The corporate organization of the colony, based on gradients of administrative stratifications, was crucial to the colony's ability to mold a social consensus of this type (unlike the Spanish colonies, based on military and feudal principles, and which arrived at a different structure of racialization). The modern concept of race emerged not only from the indispensibility of African labor, but the overarching demand for English social consensus to corporate allegiance, and finally, the ability to pretend the difference was biological.

Ultimately, this system of social categorization took a century to evolve. The English did not arrive at seeing themselves socio-culturally as white until the 1690s. The effect was to transform their social identity from allegiance to England to a "white" racialized identity. And a critical step in this process, which later facilitated the biologization of race, was the social "redefinition" of women in the 1660s.

The "Redefinition" of Gender

In 1662, the colonial council enacted a matrilineal servitude ordinance. The statute established that children of mixed couples would take the servitude status of their mother, rather than their father. It thus rendered children of bond-labor women future bond-laborers, even though the father was a free man. Explicitly addressing mixed couples, in the context of a trend toward perpetual servitude for Africans, its implicit meaning was to re-define African motherhood as economic production, and thus produce a socio-cultural division between English and African motherhood.

The statute violated the central tenet of patriarchy, which traced descent to the father. It did so in the interest of plantation wealth, and added momentum to holding Africans in life-time servitude. Having been thus classified as productive instrumentalities, African women were thus made increasingly vulnerable to sexual assault, within which English men attained a new level of impunity.

Under this matrilinearity statute, African women became a microcosm of the colonialist project itself, which was the seizure, control, and exploitation of the territory and labor of others, and the use of the cultural traditions of the colonized against the colonized themselves. As colonized, African women's sexuality was divided from motherhood, the first being objectified as materiality in the sense of territorial entitlement, and the second being transformed into an economically productive function. Sexuality became the raw material upon which motherhood was rendered wealth to be tabulated in ledger books or court records; and motherhood became a juridical definition of property upon which sexuality was rendered social territory for English men. The women were robbed of their womanness as persons, and robbed of personhood as women, dismembered by sexuality turned against motherhood and motherhood turned against sexuality. Thus, 300 years later, McKnight's personhood as a woman, of no concern to a corporate state structure focused on her functionality as a bearer of children, is victimized precisely through that functionality, in the name of children who are of no concern to that state except as instruments for controlling her as a person.

Yet neither were English women left untouched by this colonial law. The children of English women, whether indentured with a release date, or free, would follow the mother into freedom. Thus, their bearing children by African men would violate the elite desire to render permanent the servitude of African-descended persons. Such women were to be specially punished. And all English women, rich and poor, were to be carefully watched and governed, to insure they produced no free persons of African descent. Though nominally free, English women lived under surveillence and the imposed obligation to discretion and constrained sexual comportment. Their sexuality was to be socially micro-managed, as a cultural project of male colonial society (eventually mythified as white female purity). In effect, they were redefined as a different form of property, whose value consisted in their not being sexual beings, while bearing demonstrably "English" children. Ironically, this left English men essentially celebate, married to de-sexed signifiers for property and propriety, rather than to a warm and real woman.

In sum, sexuality was embodied in African (-descended) women while refused to English women, rendering sexuality an extension of the market, and the bond-labor market an extension of sexuality. Motherhood was functionalized for English women in the process of appropriating it as production in African women. The bodies of African women became the cultural site of sexuality in order that English women be socially de-sexualized, while English women became the site of validated motherhood in order to economically capitalize African motherhood. Each became a different kind of breeding stock for men: the producers of property or the carefully guarded producers of heirs to that property. Both groups of women were deployed to constitute each other as property, preparatory to them being categorized as "white" and "of color." Property relations were rendered inseparable from gender relations, as a moment of fundamental social categorization, from which the structures of racialization evolved. The "color coding" of sexuality and the sexualization of color augmented the emerging "color coding" of labor.

The desperation of such a situation is immeasurable (as it is for McKnight). As each African woman watched the machinery of law fold down upon her, to whom could she turn? White women were being led to imprisonment in the attic, to be prepared for that marble pedestal guarded by all white men. Her refusal to bear children would only violate her own selfhood, while the children she bore would never be hers. African men were being stripped of their personhood through a similar color coding whose primary source was to use color as a barrier to escape. Family was rendered impossible in all cases.

In sum, this historic instrumentalization of women, a division of women along color lines, resides at the nexus of three structures: the system of "slavery," the structure of racialization by which a "white" racialized identity was invented, and the extreme cultural alienation attendant upon the imposition of complex desexualizations. Together, they formed a social fortification behind which the social cohesion of English society could define itself as white, wallow in its white supremacy, and construct itself as a white nation (in 1776).

The Meaning of Anti-miscegenation Laws

In the wake of the matrilinearity statute (1662), the Colonial Council passed a series of ever more stringent anti-miscegenation laws. Their increasingly strong prohibitions only testified to their failure to curb what was evidently desired practice, and a problem only for the elite. Had there been a popular or cultural antipathy to mixed marriage, its occurrence would have been minimal, and official prohibition unnecessary.

But if banning miscegenist practice was only an elite desire, what interest or political purpose was served? Eva Saks argues that anti-miscegenation law represents the "power of legal language to construct, criminalize, and appropriate the human body itself." It is thus not only consistent with the ethos and the structure of slavery, it is essential to it. By violating sexuality as such, anti-miscegenation law raises the socio-political control of bodies to the level of a cultural norm, as a condition for the economic relation of enslavement. Thus, anti-miscegenation law politically bridged the gap between the forcible control of laboring bodies and the ethical entitlement to codify slavery. It canonized under the righteousness of law the elite's criminal desire to enslave Africans; that is, it sanctified hierarchical control of all individuals through the ability to criminalize the social being of some of them.

In particular, in the context of matrilinearity, personal intimacy between African women and English men had to be prevented, since it might lead the English man to take a protective stance toward the woman, obstructing that woman's vulnerability to the assumed rights of property. The Council's action thus served to proclaim and enforce as a natural community a homosocial solidarity among English men over and against African women as persons.

Ultimately, though "race" presents itself as the "natural" basis for anti-miscegenation, it was anti-miscegenation that constituted the formal process through which actual racialization took place. Only racialization produced success in enforcing anti-miscegenation in the face of human desires and attractions, while juridical prohibitions consistently failed. The chain of intensified bans on mixed relationships, during the 17th century, far from expressing an instituted racism, was a primary mechanism for its invention, and eventually through that, an invention of race. Neither the Declaration of Independence, nor the revolutionary war, nor the Constitution could abolish the slavery that concretized anti-miscegenation without the state (or white corporate society) putting an end to itself as white, and thus losing that part of its identity -- hence, the production of Jim Crow after the Civil War, and the prison-industrial complex after Civil Rights. In essence, it was as white that colonial society broke its allegiance to England, whose effect was the founding of a different social identification, an allegiance to a "white republic." This is already expressed in the Declaration, where the colonists proclaim themselves a different "people" from the English.

Finally, when legislation color-coded sexuality in its drive toward racialization, it created a second sexual division of labor, alongside the "private" sexual division of labor of the patriarchal family hierarchy. This "public" sexual division of labor is between women and the state's proprietary claim on their bodies. It played a central role in the campaigns to criminalize black men after Reconstruction, in order to promulgate Jim Crow. It resides in the unending white panic over mixed couples, which appears today in the compulsive white drive to maintain neighborhood segregation. The populist or paramilitary violence by which all of this occurs marks the location where the white state produces itself through a militarization of society.

In that sense, the sexual abstinence that the state fosters today is another element of the militarization of society. We recognize this in McKnight's imprisonment, which names her a white-perceived threat to social order.

Summary

In sum, the legislation of motherhood and women's sexuality transformed property by extending the concept of the productive body to the body as property. Women's sexuality, seized as productive in Africans, and de-sexualized for the English, extended both as a commodification of female social being. The exercise of social control over commodified womanhood formed the ground for the codification of both slavery and the whiteness of white society. And the redefinition of women, as a color-coded social categorization, produced a structure of racialization that reorganized all property relations, and all class relations. The racialized class structure pitted a black working class against a solidarist white corporate society in violent dependence on it. Matrilinearity and anti-miscegenation constitute the link between the originary incorporation of colonial endeavor, and the invention of the modern concept of race by which that colonial endeavor rationalized itself. The concepts of "gender" and "race" have never been independent of each other. They have always been mutually conditioning in establishing who is available for exploitation (by state or capital) and who is not.

At no time did the invention of race or the redefinition of women occur without the involvement of the state. No law is without its function as boundary between social values -- between what is within the law and what is outside it. Law engenders cultural norms by definition, out of their absence. Matrilineal and miscegenation laws redefine who or what is to be a subject of the law, and who or what is to be its object. Once the binary social values of English "subject" and African "object" congealed through enforcement of juridical relations, they become naturalized as social custom. The social divisions resulting from the law then appear as the natural cause of that law. When the legislated division of women naturalized the color-coding of labor, it laid the basis for the racialization of society, which in turn produced a concept of "race" that naturalized the originary division of women. The state was at all times the arbitrary domain in which this entire complex of inversions took place. In racialized society, or a society based on gender hierarchy, no justice is possible except as an act of insurgency. Regina McKnight sits in prison today because her defenders had only the rituals of court appearances to use against her redefinition by another of the state's institutions.

Works Cited:  

Silja J.A. Talvi, "Criminalizing Motherhood," in The Nation, Dec. 3, 2003. Regina McKnight's trial was in May 2001.  

Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization ( Temple UP, 2003).

Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (Verso, 1996), Volume II.  

Howard Zinn, The People's History of the United States (Harper, 1980), p.24.  

Joseph Boskin, Into Slavery: Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony (Univ. Press of America, 1979), p. 14.  

Martha Hodes, ed. Sex, Love, Race (NYU Press, 1999).  

T.H. Breen, ed., Shaping Southern Society (Oxford UP, 1976)  

William W. Hening, ed. Statutes at Large: A Collection of All the Laws of Virginia ... (Richmond, 1809), vol II.  

Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery (Hill and Wang, 1997).  

Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race.  

Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: an American Grammar Book," in Diacritics, vol. 17(2), Summer 1987.  

Eva Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law," in Raritan, 8, 1988, p. 39.  

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (Harvard UP, 1993).  

Harry and David Rosen, But Not Next Door ( Avon, 1962).

index of 2005 conference papers