- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
Thankfully, I’ve been able to collect more literature for my project outside of what was given to me by Professor Basaran. I found one book and took a few of the surroundings ones from the library that were all in the same realm of population/family size values. I’ve narrowed the scope of my project to be about family choice/planning: who can/should start families, how big families should be, how should families be created, what is an ideal pregnancy/birth etc. I think I may need to narrow this even more; however, I think I will be able to do with further research/ reading the books I have. I couldn’t really find articles on what I wanted but now that I have a better vision for my project, perhaps after going through the books I can try again.
Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy As a Site of Racialization
- Part Two: Race (cont)
- infant mortality rate for Black babies is nearly two-and-a half times higher than for white babies (85)
- Infant mortality among African Americans in 2000 occurred at a rate of 14.1 deaths per 1,000 live births— more than twice the national average of 6.9 deaths per 1,000 live births.
- “In fact, 1 of every 2,500 black women in New York City who becomes pregnant dies. The similar figure for white women is 1 in 14,000”
- Caused by racial health disparities such as certain conditions affecting black women more and decreased access to healthcare
- Women of color given lesser quality care than white women, even when you control for things such as insurance status and socioeconomic status
- Physician racism
- folklore that white people tend to be pathology-free while non-whites tend to be sites of disease, disorder, and “issues.” (96)
- 100-102, the way Dr. Rose and other doctors speaks about non-white patients is so problematic and makes me think they don’t think people of color should have families. I’ll think about this more as I continue to read
- “He argues that investigations that “show the persistence of high African American infant mortality[,] even when African American women enroll in early prenatal care at high rates[,] and that show that college-educated, middle-class African American women still have higher rates of low birthweight and infant mortality than poorly educated, impoverished whites” are “suggestive of genetics being a more powerful determinant” (90)
- ““culturalist racism,” wherein culture is used to condemn persons or a group of people as effectively as did the race concept of yore.” (104)
- Biological race v biological culture: a way to group people together and stereotype them based on the “culture” of that group, which makes them “the way they are” and explains their place in society; cultural/social racism which then physicians adopt to give lesser-quality care. They blame cultural differences for unresponsive patients and stop trying to treat them properly (105-107)
- 108: Chinese women
- 109: Mexican women
- Black women are not talked about, probably due to America’s long anti-black history
- “Foucault remarked, “Interest considered as the interest of the population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be of the individuals who compose it, this is the new target and the fundamental instrument of the government of population.” (100) Foucault articulates the sense that, once constituted as such, a population dissolves the individuals who compose it. Once apprehended as a “population,” it is the population that is acted upon; those who make up the entity become nothing more than the stuff through which the population can be touched, manipulated, and affected. The particular is dissolved in order to produce the universal.” (114)
- I don’t think that this book is really giving me what I want. It centers more on what physicians think of patients in terms of their race and background rather than how they are as parents and family members and the values both groups hold. But I will skim the last chapter and see what that can give me.
- “belligerent confrontations between staff and patients result from patients being viewed by Alpha Hospital ancillary staff as uneducated and unintelligent, yet somehow incredibly shrewd manipulators of the Alpha “system.”” (155)
- “The wily patient, although stupid (simply put), nevertheless possesses the ability to craftily and astutely exploit the hospital for the purpose of attaining access to undeserved appointments, ultrasounds, and other gratuitous health care.” (155)
- Stupidity and duplicity
- Patient behavior is attributed to stupidity rather than staff error such as poor instruction and failure to speak a patient’s name louder (155-156)
- Welfare queen
- “writes, the figure of the welfare queen— and the extramarital sex and blatant immorality she implies— enabled Reagan to enlist the support of the religious right in his efforts to reduce the size of social welfare programs. In so doing, he reiterated the perception that “out-of-wedlock births, rather than structural conditions, . . . cause impoverishment among single-mother-headed families”” (162) This specifically is more of what I am looking for.
- ADC/AFDC: for widowed mothers with children who were the deserving poor because they could not support themselves due to the death of their husband. Shifts in the 60s to women with children who were abandoned by husbands or men they never married, with women being unemployed. In the 60s, the ADC/AFDC excluded unemployed, single mothers. In the 30s, when the program began, most of the recipients were white and in the 60s, most were black. “writes, the figure of the welfare queen— and the extramarital sex and blatant immorality she implies— enabled Reagan to enlist the support of the religious right in his efforts to reduce the size of social welfare programs. In so doing, he reiterated the perception that “out-of-wedlock births, rather than structural conditions, . . . cause impoverishment among single-mother-headed families”” (164)
- Controlling what is an acceptable family and the exception to that
- White families the ideal and black families the antithesis
- Controlling what is an acceptable family and the exception to that