Racism and Black Bodies

          ​In this episode, we restart our march through history, which we left off a few episodes ago back in the 18th century. With our guest, Dr. Hilary Green, we dive into 19th-century American slavery and the idea that black and brown bodies are “closer to nature” than light-skinned bodies. Dr. Green talks about racism, popular ideas of biology, and how our denial of black suffering still resonates today in racial health disparities.

Some resources:

1. Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 by Hilary Green
   
2. More information on Dr. Green’s walking tour of the University of Alabama Campus
   
3. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery by Jennifer Morgan
   
4. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs
   
5. The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation by Diana Ramey Berry
   
6. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens
   
7. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson
   
8. Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson
   
9. Almanack and Ephemeris by Benjamin Banneker
   
10. Dr. Gwenetta Curry’s work on race and stress