One of the most insidious forms of racial oppression is medical racism which, combined with medical sexism, causes especially devastating harm to Black women and children. Black women are 3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. The majority of the deaths, 2 in 3, are preventable, and all of the causes of these disparities can be traced back to structural racism. A general lack of access to medical care means that Black mothers are much more likely to receive prenatal care late in their pregnancy…
The epidemic of violence against Indigenous women reaches back beyond the beginnings of the United States as a nation. We now recognize how sexual violence has been deployed against Indigenous communities as a tactic of genocide. In recent history, we’ve made small moves to begin addressing this violence – like increasing protections for Indigenous women in the Violence Against Women Act. Now, following tireless activism by Indigenous communities, the federal government is taking significant action to address these issues. In October 2020, two bills seeking to address violence against Indigenous…
The Atlanta shooting earlier this year resulted from an intersection of racism, sexism, and anti-sex-worker stigma that is not new to women of Asian descent. Historically in the US, racism and sexism have always intersected to create the hypersexualization of Women of Color. Sexualization is another way of saying sexual objectification, in which a person or group of people is treated as a sexual object instead of a person. When we talk about hypersexualization in this context, we are identifying the ways in which this dehumanizing objectification disproportionately affects Women…