Reference
Terms used in this exhibition
Every framework named in these seventeen chapters, defined in plain language, credited to whoever named it, and linked to the chapter where it does its work.
Obstetric racism
Named by Dr. Dána-Ain Davis, medical anthropologist, in Reproductive Injustice (2019).
The specific harm that happens to Black women and birthing people inside obstetric care. Davis named seven dimensions of it, including diagnostic lapses, being neglected or dismissed, coercion, and the medically unnecessary procedure. The word matters because it moves the explanation from a patient’s body to a system’s behaviour: it is not that Black women are harder to care for, it is that they are cared for differently.
Where it appears · Chapter 12 →Weathering
Named by Dr. Arline T. Geronimus, public health researcher, in 1992; developed in Weathering (2023).
The physical cost of living with sustained stress. Geronimus found that the health of Black Americans deteriorates earlier than that of white Americans of the same age, and that the gap widens through the years when people are most likely to give birth. Weathering explains why a Black woman at 25 may carry a body under the load of a white woman at 35. It is not about individual behaviour; it is what a body does under pressure that does not let up.
Where it appears · Chapter 11 →Intersectionality
Named by Kimberlé Crenshaw, legal scholar, in 1989.
The observation that a person can be harmed in a way that neither race alone nor gender alone accounts for. Crenshaw drew it from employment cases where Black women lost because the court could see racism against Black men and sexism against white women, and had no category for what happened to them. In maternal health it explains why improving access does not close the gap: money changes what choices exist, race can still change what happens after the choice is made.
Where it appears · Chapter 9 →Levels of racism · personal, institutional and systemic
Framework from Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, “Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale,” American Journal of Public Health (2000).
Three places racism operates, which need three different responses. Personal is what one person does to another. Institutional is what an organisation’s rules and habits produce, whoever is working there. Systemic is the pattern across institutions, held in place by history, law and money. Most arguments about racism are really arguments about which level someone is talking about.
Where it appears · Chapter 13 →Caste
Applied to the United States by Isabel Wilkerson in Caste (2020), building on earlier work including Allison Davis and colleagues, Deep South (1941).
A fixed ranking of human groups that a society keeps in place regardless of individual merit or intention. Where racism describes an attitude or an act, caste describes the structure the acts sit inside. It explains why outcomes persist after the explicit laws are repealed and after most people stop holding the beliefs the laws were built on.
Where it appears · Chapter 7 →White fragility
Named by Robin DiAngelo, sociologist, in 2011.
The defensive response that can follow when a white person is told something they did had a racist effect — withdrawal, anger, tears, argument. It is worth naming not to shame anyone but because in a clinical setting it decides whether a concern raised by a patient or a colleague gets addressed or gets managed.
Where it appears · Chapter 14 →Partus sequitur ventrem · “that which is brought forth follows the womb”
Virginia General Assembly, Act XII, December 1662.
The law that made a child’s status follow the mother’s rather than the father’s, reversing English common law. It made every birth to an enslaved woman a transfer of property, gave enslavers a financial interest in the pregnancies of the women they held, and made rape profitable. Seventy-one words. It is the hinge the rest of the exhibition turns on.
Where it appears · Chapter 2 →Pregnancy-related death · as against maternal mortality
Definition used by the CDC’s Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System.
A death during pregnancy or within one year of its end, from a cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy. It is a wider window than the international definition of maternal mortality, which stops at 42 days. The distinction matters when comparing figures across sources or across decades, because the two are often reported as if they were the same number.
Where it appears · Chapter 11 →Allostatic load
Term from Bruce McEwen, neuroendocrinologist; applied to racial health disparities by Geronimus and colleagues.
The cumulative wear on the body from repeatedly switching on the stress response. It is measured across several systems at once — blood pressure, cholesterol, inflammation, kidney function — rather than by any single reading, which is why a person can look well on any one test and still be carrying a high load.
Where it appears · Chapter 11 →False beliefs about pain
Documented by Kelly M. Hoffman and colleagues, PNAS (2016).
Beliefs with no basis in biology that are still held about Black patients: thicker skin, less sensitive nerve endings, stronger bones. In the 2016 study, 73% of white laypeople and about half of white medical students and residents endorsed at least one. Those who did rated Black patients’ pain lower and recommended less accurate treatment.
Where it appears · Chapter 10 →The Flexner Report
Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, Carnegie Foundation, 1910.
The report that reorganised American medical education and, in doing so, closed five of the seven Black medical schools then operating. It is a standard example of a decision made on grounds of quality that produced a racial result lasting a century, and it sits behind the shortage of Black physicians today.
Where it appears · Chapter 1 →The Sheppard–Towner Act
Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, 1921.
The first federal social welfare law, funding maternal and infant health services. In practice its administration became a mechanism for licensing and supervising Black midwives out of practice across the South — not by banning them, but by setting the terms on which they could continue.
Where it appears · Chapter 1 →Grand midwife · granny midwife
Community term; “grand midwife” is preferred by many Black midwives today.
A Black midwife practising in a Southern community, most often trained by apprenticeship and carrying knowledge across generations. Grand midwives attended a large share of all births in the South into the twentieth century. “Granny” was the term outsiders used and carries the diminishment they intended.
Where it appears · Chapter 1 →The PREM-OB Scale · SACKRED Birth
Developed by Dr. Karen A. Scott, obstetrician and researcher, with Black mothers and birthing people.
The Patient Reported Experience Measure of Obstetric Racism — the first validated instrument for measuring obstetric racism, built on Davis’s dimensions. In Scott’s SACKRED Birth Study, 806 Black women reported on births across 348 hospitals in 34 states, and the scores did not vary with clinical risk. Whatever the measure was picking up, it was not the pregnancy.
Where it appears · Chapter 12 →Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy
Enslaved women operated on by J. Marion Sims in Alabama, 1845–1849.
Three of at least eleven enslaved women on whom Sims developed the surgical repair of vesicovaginal fistula, without anaesthesia and without any consent they were in a position to give. Anarcha was operated on some thirty times. Sims is still called a father of modern gynecology; the field he founded rests on their bodies, and their names were recovered by later scholars from his own account.
Where it appears · Chapter 10 →Redlining
Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration practice, from 1934.
The federal grading of neighbourhoods for mortgage risk, in which the presence of Black residents was itself a reason to mark an area hazardous and deny lending. It set where families could buy, which set what their homes were worth, which set what they could pass on. The maps are the clearest single explanation of the wealth gap that exists now.
Where it appears · Chapter 4 →Racial covenant
Private clauses in property deeds, enforceable in court until Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).
A clause written into a deed forbidding the sale, lease or occupancy of a property by people of a named race. They were private contracts, but courts enforced them — the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld them as late as 1942. Many remain in the public record today even though they are unenforceable.
Where it appears · Chapter 5 →Alien land law
State constitutional and statutory provisions, roughly 1889–2018.
Laws barring land ownership by “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” The phrase names no race. It did not have to: federal law barred Asian immigrants from naturalising on racial grounds, so the clause reached exactly who it was written to reach. Florida was the last state to remove one, in 2018.
Where it appears · Chapter 5 →Reproductive justice
Named in 1994 by twelve Black women in Chicago, now carried by SisterSong.
The right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent the children one has in safe and sustainable communities. It was framed deliberately against a choice-centred model that assumed the choice existed, and it puts maternal health inside a larger question about the conditions people are given to raise families in.
Where it appears · Chapter 15 →Reparations · as against redistribution
Distinction drawn from William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality (2020).
Reparations is a debt owed for a specific harm, calculable, and payable by the party responsible — in Darity and Mullen’s account, the federal government. Redistribution is the ongoing movement of resources toward greater equity, which anyone can take part in. They are not the same thing, and one does not substitute for the other.
Where it appears · Chapter 16 →Each definition here is a summary. The scholars named developed these ideas at length, and their books and papers are listed in the sources at the foot of the chapter each term links to.
See also People named in this exhibition.