The commodification of Black birth

English common law had a settled rule about the status of children: it followed the father. It had been that way for centuries, and the American colonies inherited it along with everything else.

In 1662, the Virginia General Assembly reversed it.

The new statute held that a child took the condition of the mother. If the mother was enslaved, the child was born enslaved, regardless of who the father was. The Latin phrase the colonists used for it was partus sequitur ventrem — offspring follows the womb.

Consider what that single sentence accomplished.

It made enslavement heritable through the maternal line, so that slavery could sustain itself by birth in addition to purchase. It declared every child born to an enslaved woman as property at first breath. And because paternity no longer mattered to a child's status, it removed any legal consequence for a white man who fathered children with the women he owned. For all intents and purposes, assault produced assets.

Black women's reproduction became, by statute, a mechanism of capital accumulation.

Broadside advertising the sale of William Bland’s property at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, 19 February 1847. Three men, four women, one boy and “some children” are listed between the horses and the cattle. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture · Object 2011.155.292 · No known copyright restrictions

Everything that follows in this exhibition descends from that law.

The medical experimentation we will cover later happened because there was a population of women whose bodies were owned and whose consent had no legal standing. The wealth ledger you will read was built on labor that reproduced itself for free. The surveillance of Black mothers by the state, the removal of Black children from their families, the long American habit of treating Black women's accounts of their own bodies as unreliable — all of it has legal ancestors, and this is a major one.

It also explains why an exhibition about racism in America belongs in a reproductive health curriculum rather than beside one. Slavery in the United States was not only a labor system. It was not only an economic system. It was a violent reproductive system, requiring specific unyielding control over Black women's bodies to function.

That control did not end when the legal system of enslavement did.

The law made a woman's womb into the mechanism by which slavery renewed itself. Every chapter after this one is a consequence.