Puerto Rican women and their families were promised success and stability after they underwent “la operación,” or sterilization. These efforts undercut the agency of women over their own bodies as they may have been drawn to the procedure and its false promises out of economic necessity/social pressure. The operation was marketed as a solution to poverty and many women thought that once their tubes were tied, they could be “untied.” This was not the case and they ended up losing their reproductive rights to give birth to more children. The film portrays these women as victims of this lack of knowledge and forced sterilization.

La Operación [. . .] does a remarkable job of linking colonial policies and their impacts on the lives of Puerto Rican women, a perspective that is often left out of discussions about the U.S.-led sterilization. [Description from Journeys at Dartmouth essay.]

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In 2018, Linda Villarosa’s New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa’s article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore.

Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies.

Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading. [Adapted from publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780385544887 | Doubleday Books

Excerpts

Excerpts from Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation:

In a phrase, African Americans “live sicker and die quicker,” which, if you estimate years of life lost because of deaths that could’ve been prevented, adds up to tens of thousands of lost years.

Even when income, education, and access to health care are matched, African Americans remain disadvantaged and racial disparities in health cut lives short.

By then, research had mounted — including early work by Arline Geronimus, ScD, who had coined the term “weathering” to explain the toll of racism on health — pointing to the way stress settles in the body, a bone-deep accumulation of persistent insults and traumatizing life circumstances. Today I’m chagrined to think I believed that the impact of insidious discrimination associated with the lived experience of being Black in America can be washed away in a bubble bath or calmed with journaling or meditation and me time.

I was overwhelmed by what I heard. A woman told the group that she had been rushed to the emergency room, blood gushing from her vagina, because of an IUD embedded in her tissue. When doctors refused to remove it, she yanked it out herself, causing excruciating pain and sterility. Another had a piece of her cervix removed without anesthesia. When she protested, her doctor insisted, “You have no nerve endings down there.” One woman wept as she said she had been sterilized without her consent.

I was forced to shift my own philosophy, confronted with the idea that Black people were being harmed and traumatized in health-care settings and that living in America was hurting Black women of all classes and education levels.

In the summer of 1973, Minnie Lee Relf and her baby sister, Mary Alice, just fourteen and twelve, were taken from their home in Montgomery, Alabama, cut open, and sterilized against their will and without the consent of their parents by a physician working in a federally funded clinic. The Relf family sought justice, and their case brought shocking awareness to the brutality wrought on the bodies of Black women by medical providers financed by the federal government. The pain the Relf sisters endured also changed the course of history: The lawsuit Relf v. Weinberger revealed that 100,000 to 150,000 poor, mostly Black women had been sterilized under U.S. government programs over decades. It also stopped this practice and forced doctors to obtain informed consent before performing sterilization procedures. What happened to the Relf girls is part of a through line of extreme abuse and disrespect of the Black body at the hands of medical providers in the name of science.

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In American Sirens, journalist and paramedic Kevin Hazzard tells the dramatic story of how a group of young, undereducated Black men forged a new frontier of healthcare. He follows a rich cast of characters that includes John Moon, an orphan who found his calling as a paramedic; Peter Safar, the Nobel Prize-nominated physician who invented CPR and realized his vision for a trained ambulance service; and Nancy Caroline, the idealistic young doctor who turned a scrappy team into an international leader.

At every turn, Freedom House battled racism — from the community, the police, and the government. Their job was grueling, the rules made up as they went along, their mandate nearly impossible — and yet despite the long odds and fierce opposition, they succeeded spectacularly. [Adapted from publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780306926075 | Hachette Books

Author Interview

Listen to an interview with author Kevin Hazzard on NPR’s Fresh Air below.

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Katrina was upgraded from a storm to a hurricane on August 25, 2005, hitting the Florida coast that day with 125 mph winds. Four days later, on August 29, Katrina made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 3 hurricane, with winds of 140 mph.

Flooded New Orleans, Louisiana, September 11, 2005. Photo by Commander Mark Moran, NOAA Corps. Source: Public domain

The hurricane breached 53 different levees in New Orleans, with 80 percent of the city flooded. Thousands of people lost their lives, and many thousands more were forced to abandon their homes and seek relief where they could.

In her 2010 article for The Nation, Reconstructing the Story of the Storm: Hurricane Katrina at Five, Rebecca Solnit reflected on its destruction and legacy:

In August 2005, 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast were devastated; more than 1,800 people died; 182,000 homes were severely damaged in New Orleans alone, where 80 percent of the city was flooded. Hundreds of thousands went into an exile from which some will never return. A great and justified bitterness arose in African-Americans who were demonized by the media and the government and who felt that they had not been treated as citizens or even as fellow human beings. An African-American woman at an antiwar rally in the nation’s capital a month later carried a sign saying, “No Iraqis left me on a roof to die.” [. . .]

Source: Reuters/Lee Celano

After Hurricane Katrina, neoliberals and Bush provided a near-perfect example of Naomi Klein’s theory of disaster capitalism. Everything from supplying buses for evacuation to tarps for torn-up roofs became an opportunity for Bush supporters to reap financial rewards. The city’s public housing was torn down; the schools became charter schools, many along military lines. Told this way, what happened was pure loss, for the left as well as for the poor (though the schools before Katrina had been a mess). But that’s not all that Katrina triggered.

During the storm and its aftermath, far more people did heroic things, and these [. . .] are the key missing stories of the storm.

In an interview with the Today show, historian Michael Eric Dyson had this to say about Hurricane Katrina:

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn’t have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America’s poor deserve better than this.

Watch this Democracy Now! interview with Michael Eric Dyson about his book, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster.

Additional Resources

A Katrina Reader: Readings by & for Anti-Racist Educators and Organizers

What New Orleans’ Common Ground Collective Can Teach Us About Surviving Crisis Together by Shane Burley

Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective by scott crow (PM Press)

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Acts 1 & 2) a documentary by Spike Lee

This event is included on the Zinn Education Project’s Climate Crisis Timeline.

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Hurricane Sandy damages a pier in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Source: Mark C. Olsen/New Jersey National Guard

In her article, Solnit on Hurricane Sandy: Stop Ignoring Climate Change, which appeared in Mother Jones, Rebecca Solnit wrote:

This storm’s name shouldn’t be Sandy — though that means we’ve run through the alphabet all the way up to S this hurricane season, way past brutal Isaac in August — it should be Climate Change. If each catastrophe came with a message, then this one’s was that global warming’s here, that the old rules don’t apply, and that not doing anything about it for the past 30 years is going to prove far, far more expensive than doing something would have been.

The increasingly turbulent, disaster-prone planet we’re on is our beautiful old Earth with the temperature raised almost one degree celsius. It’s going to get hotter than that, though we can still make a difference in how hot it gets. Right now, locally, in the soaked places, we need people to aid the stranded, the homeless, and the hungry. Globally we need to uncouple government from the Big Energy corporations, and ensure that most of the carbon energy left on the planet stays where it belongs: underground. Read more.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Ocean Today:

Sandy, as a hurricane and a post-tropical cyclone, killed at least 117 people in the United States and 69 more in Canada and the Caribbean.

Sandy ranks as the second-costliest storm on record at $68 billion. Hurricane Katrina of 2005 is the highest at $108 billion.

The New York Stock Exchange closed for two consecutive days, the first time this has happened because of weather since 1888.

At its peak intensity, Hurricane Sandy measured a Category 3 as it made landfall in Cuba. Sandy was the 18th named storm, 10th hurricane, and second major hurricane of 2012. Read more.

Watch the NOEE Ocean Today video, The Making of a Super Storm, below.

This event is included on the Zinn Education Project’s Climate Crisis Timeline.

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A dedication ceremony was held for the Dozier School for Boys Memorial in Marianna, Florida on Friday, Jan. 13, 2023. Source: Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat

As reported by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in its 2014 article, Abuse, Racism Revisited at Florida Reform School:

First opened in 1900, Florida’s Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys swirled with allegations of cruelty, rape, and physical abuse for nearly all of its 111 years.

Located in the panhandle town of Marianna, Florida, the juvenile reform school was a target of frequent state and federal investigations that were largely ineffective: in 1903, investigators documented that boys were frequently held in leg irons; in 1914, six boys died in a dormitory fire; in 1934, a 13-year-old boy died thirty-eight days after arriving at the school on trespassing charges; and at least ninety-six boys died at the camp between 1914 and 1973. Dozier held thousands of boys over the span of its operation – some as young as eight years old, and many on “charges” as minor as trespassing, truancy, and incorrigibility. In 1963, two of four Black teenagers arrested for attempting to integrate a St. Augustine Woolworth’s were sent to the school for five months. Continue reading.

The school was finally closed in 2011, while being investigated by the Department of Justice.

According to Nina Berman and Michael Mechanic in their Mother Jones article, “It Was Kind of Like Slavery”:

At a state hearing last August [2013], after years of agitating by former Dozier boys, researchers from the University of South Florida got permission to unearth bodies from the grounds and run tests to determine who those boys were — and how they died. Last month, the scientists came out with an announcement that was disturbing, if not surprising. They had excavated 55 sets of remains at Dozier’s Boot Hill cemetery, 5 more than they’d originally identified, and 24 more than were indicated in the school’s official records. Other campus locations remain to be searched. Continue reading.

An overgrown structure at the Dozier School after it was closed. Source: Dunn History

Additional Resources

‘A Type of Justice’: Florida Reform School Yields Evidence of More Graves by Richard Luscombe (The Guardian)

Florida’s Dozier School For Boys: A True Horror Story by Greg Allen (NPR’s All Things Considered)

White House Boys Thankful for Dozier Memorial but Continue to Search for Justice by James Call (Tallahassee Democrat)

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