image by Vitor Monthay

I am overwhelmed, but I want to say something about this moment, when Roe v. Wade is gone, when it feels like we are sliding, fast, down an icy slope, like we are on fire and screaming and they are just watching us burn; I want to say something about how this moment is not only a gender moment but a racial one. (No, I am not changing the subject. I am deepening it.)

This moment is racial because Black women of all socioeconomic statuses die in or after pregnancy and childbirth at between three and five times the rate of their white counterparts. Forced pregnancy will mean forcing Black women to their deaths in racialized, horrific numbers. (I did not die, but I know something of this problem.)

It’s racial because, though abortion was not generally regulated at the founding, reproductive rights certainly were — at least, they were if you were Black. By now we all know, even we if we do not all accept, that, alongside settler colonialism, chattel slavery is the cornerstone of this country’s economic power. (There are a thousand ways to prove and describe this reality — here is just one: by the year’s before the Civil War, enslaved people were more valuable than all the capital invested in manufacturing, railroads, and banks combined.) And the engine of our economic power was Black women giving birth — being forced to give birth — to more Black children who could and would be enslaved. This control was envisioned by laws (see, for example, the 1807 Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves) and enacted by enslavers and their communities. Controlling the reproductive rights and power of women — Black women — is foundational to this country. What’s happened today, and all that led up to it, and all that will follow, cannot be separated from our history of slavery-based racial dominance. That history laid the groundwork, and we’d be wise to pay attention to this fact.

It’s racial because the evangelical movement to end abortion actually grew out of deep and violent resistance to racial integration. As Politco reports, “White evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t initially care about abortion. They organized to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions — and only seized on banning abortion because it was more palatable than their real goal.” What these groups wanted was continued racial hierarchy and not to have to share their lives, or the resources of this country and its schools, with Black people; taking a stance against abortion was simply a play to that end.

It’s racial because this decision comes from a Trump court, and Trump was elected, in large part, by white women, the majority of whom cast their ballot for the unabashedly racist pussy-grabber. White women (as a cohort) are an outlier among their gender, supporting Trump at higher rates than women of any other race. As Amanda Becker put it in the 19th, despite their misgivings, “in the end, they came home.” Home, that is, to the comfort of a status quo rooted in their racial dominance.

And yes, I want to say something about how grotesque it feels to experience an itching, electric plume of rage toward white women on this day, because they, too, will suffer; I know I am, in some ways, blaming future victims. To be sure, I am angry at the old white dudes on the Court, and in state and federal governments, who have the gall to control what happens in anybody’s uterus, to wrap their pale, male hands around my body. But the truth is that I am not just mad at the men. I am also mad at the white women because of how their long slumber, their long lethargy, their long indifference and even contentment regarding issues of race and racial dominance helped to make this moment possible. Indeed, I want to say something to every white woman I know, but it would sound too harsh, and perhaps be too harsh, and it wouldn’t be productive: If you aren’t collecting the white people in your life to deal with racial hierarchy, then you are part of why this happened. I don’t want to scream at my friends, at my family. Because beneath the desire to scream is, of course, the desire to weep.

I am overwhelmed, but I also want to say something about the opportunity. There is, after and beneath the fury and despair, an opportunity to think hard and together about what our North Star should now be. If the ground on which we live has been scorched, or if the scorching fire is now visible from our homes instead of being something we’ve only heard about, something happening over there, then what should we rebuild? We’ll have to grieve what — and who — is lost, and we’ll have to minimize the loss however we can; I’m not trying to skip ahead. But still, the future will come. And what should we build on top of the ashes? More monuments to racial dominance, our heads buried as our hands work? Or something else entirely? Will your hands work, and will your eyes watch what they do, so that you know, you know, in your bones, the bones your mother and your grandmother and her mother gave you, that you’ve done everything you can not to be part of the problem?