7.3 Inequality in Belonging
Kimberly Puttman
We have already started seeing how inequality in belonging relates to families. Let’s look deeper at citizenship, ethnicity, and sexual orientation to see how these social locations impact belonging.
Early Roots: Slavery, Bodily Autonomy, Citizenship and Class
In the first part of this book, we’ve examined how class, race, gender, sexual orientation and ability/disability shape the experiences of social problems. As we look deeper, we see that a powerful connection exists between slavery, bodily autonomy, citizenship, and class.
In the early years of our country’s founding, wealthy White immigrants wanted to maintain their wealth and social standing. In the North, many of these wealthy owners became mill or manufacturing businessmen. In the South, many of these wealthy owners owned land, growing cotton, tobacco, and sugar. These crops were labor intensive and needed abundant cheap labor to ensure profit. White enslavers enslaved Black Africans to do the work in forced labor camps (plantations). Northern manufacturers also benefited from slavery because their mills used cotton and other southern crops to create cloth and blankets they sold.
To ensure that they made money, enslavers enforced a system that stripped enslaved people of their bodily autonomy. Bodily autonomy is the idea that a person has the power to decide what happens to their own body (Artim N.d.). Part of the definition of slavery is that an enslaved person is denied their bodily autonomy by an enslaver. Enslaved people could not choose where they worked or what they ate. They could not get married (Berry 2018). Enslavers could harm or kill enslaved people for any reason without any legal retribution.
While these restrictions were horrific for any enslaved person, women faced additional challenges to their bodily autonomy. Enslavers could rape them at any time. Their children could be sold for any reason, as depicted in the illustration in Figure 7.8, showing a Black child being sold at auction, with their mother pleading to stop the sale.
Beyond the individual experience of violence, enslavers codified new rules about children and race. Reversing centuries of English law, which said that any child belongs to the father’s family, colonists enacted laws that said children belonged to the mother. In 1662, the Virginia colonists passed a policy which read:
Whereas some doubts have arrisen (sic) whether children got by any Englisman upon a Negro woman should be slave or ffree (sic), Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne (sic) in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother. (Roberts 2021:50)
Not only were the children of a White man and a Black woman considered Black, but the children were also enslaved at the moment of their birth.
Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology, and Africana studies, writes that the laws that created our current