EXPECTING
EXPECTING INEQUITY
How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans
KHIARA M. BRIDGES
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
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2025-08-12 11:47:49 AM
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© 2026 Khiara M. Bridges
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INTRODUCTION: “I THINK I’M DYING”—CLASS PRIVILEGE AND THE PERSISTENCE OF RACIAL DISADVANTAGE 1
1 HOW WE GOT HERE: THE PECULIAR (BUT NOT UNCOMMON) RACIAL HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO 19
2 HEALTHCARE SEGREGATION IN THE CITY BY THE BAY 45
3 THE MANY CONTRIBUTORS TO RACIAL DISPARITIES IN MATERNAL MORTALITY 87
4 COVERING THE BLACK MATERNAL HEALTH CRISIS 117
5 GOING TO THE DOCTOR IN YALE SWEATPANTS: TECHNIQUES FOR AVOIDING RACIAL DISADVANTAGE DURING THE CLINICAL ENCOUNTER 143
6 THE RACIALLY CONCORDANT CARE INTERVENTION (AND ITS DISCONTENTS) 181
CONCLUSION: IF WE REALLY CARED—HOW TO SOLVE THE BLACK MATERNAL HEALTH CR ISIS 223
Acknowledgments 227
Notes 231
Bibliography 269
Index 295
INTRODUCTION: “I THINK I’M DYING”—CLASS PRIVILEGE AND THE PERSISTENCE OF RACIAL DISADVANTAGE
In February 2022, I began my research in the obstetrics department at Golden Health,¹ a world-renowned academic medical center offering stateof-the-art healthcare to the San Francisco Bay Area community. However, my investigations into maternal health had begun more than a decade prior, when I was conducting research at Alpha Hospital, a public hospital in New York City that cares for the city’s most marginalized.² It was there that I first encountered what is now a well-known, often-heard statistic: Black people die from pregnancy-related causes at three to four times the rate at which white people die.³ As appalling as that is, it isn’t the entire story. A fuller picture of black maternal health in the United States reveals that racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels and socioeconomic statuses.4 Poor black people die from pregnancy-related causes more frequently than poor white people do, middle-class black people die from pregnancy-related causes more frequently than middle-class white people do, and upper-middle-class black people die from pregnancy-related causes more frequently than upper-middle-class white people do.5 In other words, the higher rates of black maternal deaths in the United States are not because black people disproportionately bear the burdens of poverty, which we know compromises the health of those forced to live in it. Black people have higher rates of maternal deaths than white people across all income levels. This devastating fact reveals that racial disparities in maternal mortality are not a problem of class. They are a problem of race—of racism, to be precise. Further, the fact that wealthier black people die more frequency from pregnancy-related causes than wealthier white people do means that class
privilege is not protecting black people from racism. That is what led me to Golden Health. I wanted to investigate how racism showed up in the lives of wealthier pregnant black people and, most of all, what wealthier black people were doing to survive pregnancy and childbirth in a country that allows so many black people to fall victim to preventable deaths from pregnancyrelated causes. This book details what I’ve learned.
From my first day at Golden Health, I saw clear differences between it and Alpha Hospital. Yet perhaps the most striking difference was how orderly and efficiently Golden’s obstetrics department was run. Indeed, I felt the need to document—to pull out my iPhone and take a picture of—a whiteboard that hung behind the check-in desk to the immediate left of the intake workers’ heads. The whiteboard reported when individual providers were running behind schedule, and it gave patients estimated wait times for those providers. While I never witnessed a wait time that was greater than thirty minutes—and while the whiteboard was smugly blank on most days because there were no delays to share—this was not the most remarkable aspect of the whiteboard to me. Instead, I was simply blown away that Golden announced patient wait times. The whiteboard signaled that Golden patients expected to be seen by their provider at their scheduled appointment time and that the clinic understood that not meeting that expectation was an exceptional circumstance, not business as usual. In this way, the whiteboard signaled that Golden Health was light-years away from Alpha Hospital. The pregnant, indigent patients who turned to Alpha for prenatal care could expect to wait hours for their scheduled appointments, sometimes spending their entire morning or afternoon waiting to see their provider. This partially explains the confrontations between patients and staff—the smart-alecky exchanges, the hurled curse words, the raised voices—that regularly erupted in Alpha’s waiting room. Golden’s waiting area was not the site of these types of showdowns.
This is not to say that there were no confrontations in Golden’s waiting area. Rather, the confrontations that I observed in Golden’s waiting area were just different. For example, a patient who had recently given birth arrived at her postpartum appointment with her newborn, her husband, and her nanny. Despite the clinic’s COVID-19 precautions, which allowed only one
guest in the exam room, the patient insisted on bringing all three members of her party into the exam room with her, and she argued her case with Pamela, a medical assistant. The disagreement was resolved when Pamela told Tammy, the midwife who was scheduled to see the patient that day, that the patient refused to be seen if her newborn, husband, and nanny could not accompany her during her exam, and Tammy relented. Tammy later told me, “The policy is there for everyone’s safety—mine and theirs. But I’m not going to argue with these entitled patients all day. They don’t pay me enough for that.” When I later asked Pamela about it, she closed her eyes, squeezed the bridge of her nose, and said, “I. Do. Not. Understand. Why couldn’t the nanny wait in the waiting room with the baby? What’s the point of bringing your nanny if she’s not actually going to look after your kid?”
Over time, the journal in which I recorded the notes that I took at Golden Health was filled with minor observations that collectively described the gulf that existed between Alpha Hospital and Golden. I kept a tally of the number of patients wearing Patagonia jackets, the $240 piece of outerwear that is so ubiquitous among the middle- and upper-middle-classes in the Bay Area that outsiders may mistakenly believe that it is a regional uniform. I jotted down the names of the companies (Apple, Google, Meta, Salesforce, Uber) whose logos were embossed on the backpacks, messenger bags, tote bags, and laptop bags that patients carried—bags that probably had been gifted to them as swag at a company event. I recorded the brand names of the strollers that recently postpartum patients pushed into the clinic (Bugaboo, Nuna, UPPAbaby), and I would be stunned when I looked up the strollers’ sticker prices ($1,299.99, $825, and $999.99, respectively). I overheard patients on work calls where they discussed market contractions, growth opportunities, client relationships, change management, and, of course, artificial intelligence. Fifteen years prior, when I sat in the waiting room of Alpha Hospital’s obstetrics clinic observing its patients as they came and went, the conversations that I overheard never touched on such things. I was reminded again and again of the enormous gulf that separated Golden and Alpha.
When I began conducting in-depth interviews with the Golden Health patients who generously agreed to talk to me for this book, I discovered that the interviews were invariably as interesting (and fun!) as the ones that I had
3 “I Think I’m Dying”
had with Alpha Hospital patients. Orchestrating the conversations was a bit of a challenge, however. At Alpha, I could interview patients in the clinic while they waited for their appointments. But things were more complicated at Golden due to the efficiency of its obstetrics clinic, since patients never had to wait very long for their appointments. So to recruit Golden patients for this study, I began by pitching my research project to the patient. If patients expressed an interest in participating, I asked for their contact information, followed up via text message or email, scheduled a time for a Zoom or inperson interview, and then met to conduct the interview. This process was so prolonged that many patients who initially were willing to be interviewed eventually disappeared. (Indeed, I was ghosted by Golden patients more times than I care to admit.) Nevertheless, I managed to interview over two hundred pregnant or recently postpartum people for this book. All of the patients I interviewed were cisgender women, with the exception of one transgender man.
When it was finally time to transcribe my interviews with Golden patients, I noticed that I had spent a good deal of time during the conversations connecting with patients about things that we had in common. One patient and I discovered that we both attended Columbia University at the same time; she was in the business school when I was in the law school. Another patient and I bonded over our love of the Madeira wine made at the V. Sattui Winery in Napa Valley, a vineyard that we both visited whenever we found ourselves in the wine-making area, about an hour’s drive north of the city. Another patient and I connected over the highs and lows of book writing. When I saw her in the clinic for her postpartum appointment, she signed a copy of her first book for me, and I signed a copy of my first book for her. These were the types of shared experiences that I never had with the Medicaidinsured, low-income folks who comprised Alpha’s patient population.
Nevertheless, there were many things that were common to both Alpha Hospital and Golden Health. The most significant commonality is that they both were places where the United States’ failure to protect the health of the nation’s pregnant people comes to a head. However, that failure looks different depending on whether it unfolds in sites where poor people receive their healthcare or in sites where the more affluent are cared for.
COMPARING HARMS: MEDICAID VERSUS COMMER CIAL INSURANCE
My fieldwork in Alpha Hospital’s obstetrics clinic led me to have a deep and nuanced understanding of New York State’s problematic efforts to provide healthcare to the most dispossessed and vulnerable pregnant people living within its borders. I describe these efforts as problematic even though they certainly have prevented many miscarriages, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths and have reduced the incidence of death and severe injury among pregnant and recently postpartum people. However, the government sometimes harms as it helps. There are three harms inflicted by New York State’s prenatal care program for Medicaid beneficiaries worth mentioning here. First, because Medicaid insists on addressing the far-ranging and far-reaching injuries that poverty inflicts with an abundance of technology, the pregnant poor cannot opt out of the medicalization of their pregnancies. Their ability to direct their own medical care is denied as they are forced to receive prenatal care from a system that assumes that pregnancy is not a healthy state of the body but rather a medical event that invariably kills if not properly managed. Second, Medicaid denies the wide range of needs, experiences, and capacities of the poor in this country, creating a fictional uniform population on which the government acts. The unique wishes and desires of individual pregnant patients within that larger patient population get lost in the process. Third, the entire system of public healthcare is made politically possible by the idea that it would be bad for everyone else if poor people did not receive medical care during their pregnancies. The fear is that without prenatal care, poor folks would give birth to sick children who would require expensive, government-funded healthcare for the rest of their lives and would burden the nation’s public schools and social safety net programs. Of course, these narratives unduly and unfairly pathologize the poor.
When I was conducting research at Alpha, I thought about the government a lot. But anyone who is examining healthcare for low-income pregnant people in the United States will find it impossible to avoid thinking about the government, since it is the entity that provides health insurance to the poor in this country. However, the government disappears almost
5 “I Think I’m Dying”
entirely when one examines healthcare for pregnant people who are not poor. This is because in the United States, large portions of the population disparage proposals that would guarantee citizens access to healthcare at all times—although these proposals, if implemented, would make the country more like the other high-income nations that it considers its peers. Naysayers call such schemes “socialist” and deride them as “un-American.” They say that America is exceptional and that universal healthcare has no place in the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is because of this commitment to American exceptionalism that the government falls out of view when a study focuses on healthcare for those with some degree of class privilege. For those who are pregnant and not poor in the United States, society does not expect that the government will provide healthcare and guarantee health. Instead, society expects that the market will do that work.
When individuals in the United States are class-privileged (and are not serving or have not served in the military), they do not rely on the prenatal care programs that the government furnishes through Medicaid (or to service members and eligible veterans). Instead, they rely either on the health insurance that an employer (theirs, their spouse’s, or their parent’s) provides or on an individual or family insurance plan that they have purchased from a health insurance exchange. Employer-based health insurance and individual or family health insurance plans are what people who are younger than age sixty-five and who earn above a certain income threshold use to access healthcare in the United States. Importantly, when people under the age of sixty-five attempt to access healthcare after surpassing that income threshold, they have entered a place where the market reigns and the profit motive rules. While the government definitely regulates this side of the healthcare industry, our healthcare system is based on the foundational principle that the private market—and not the government—will generate the highestquality healthcare at the lowest cost.
Unfortunately, the United States has fallen far short of expectations on both counts. The country has the highest healthcare costs among highincome nations,6 and the quality of the healthcare provided in the United States is uneven, at best.7 This is undeniably true in the context of maternal health. The rates of maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States
are much higher than those in other high-income nations. As a point of comparison, in the United Kingdom and Canada, nations where the government administers a system of universal healthcare, the maternal mortality rates are close to half the rates in the United States.8 Notably, while other industrialized nations’ maternal mortality rates have been falling, the United States’ rates have been steadily increasing. In fact, the United States is one of just thirteen countries that have experienced upticks in their maternal mortality rates over the past twenty-five years.9 The United States is the only developed country among the thirteen: “Bahamas, Georgia, Guyana, Jamaica, North Korea, St. Lucia, Serbia, South Africa, Suriname, Tonga, United States, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.”¹0
While my focus in this book is on the fact that maternal mortality rates are particularly bad for black people in the United States, it is important to understand that the maternal mortality rates for white people in the country should also be the stuff of national shame. People in twenty-four other industrialized nations have better chances of avoiding a pregnancyrelated death than white people in the United States.¹¹ Yet the state of black maternal health in the United States is even more dire than the terrible state of white maternal health in the country. And this is why I was first drawn to study pregnancy and childbirth in the United States: The tragedy of maternal mortality does not befall racial groups equally.¹² And I was drawn to Golden Health specifically because even wealthier black people are dying more frequently than wealthier white people during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Indeed, the most privileged black people have maternal health outcomes that are more dismal than the least privileged white people. As obstetrician and activist Joia Crear-Perry explained in congressional testimony, “A White woman with less than a high school education has a better chance to live in childbirth than a Black woman with a college degree. . . . [A] Black woman who initiates prenatal care in the first trimester has a worse outcome in birth than a white woman with late or no prenatal care.”¹³ In the compelling words of Crear-Perry, “As a black mother, I cannot buy or educate my way out of dying at three to four times the rate of a white mother in the United States.”¹4 Anthropologist Dána-Ain Davis puts it even more bluntly: “To believe that one’s educational attainment
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Startingly, statistics show that racial disparities in maternal mortality actually increase as one moves up the socioeconomic ladder. A report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that black people with less than a high school education are 1.8 times as likely as white people with less than a high school education to die from a pregnancy-related cause.¹6 However, black people with a college education or more were 5.2 times as likely as white people with a college education or more to die from a pregnancy-related cause.¹7 In other words, the rates at which uneducated black people and uneducated white people die are closer than the rates at which highly educated black people and highly educated white people die. In this way, class privilege leaves black people exposed to a racial inequity that their low-income counterparts manage to avoid.
The same is true in the context of infant mortality.¹8 One study relying on data out of California shows that if you are black and poor, your baby is almost twice as likely to die as the baby born to your poor, white counterpart.¹9 However, if you are black and wealthy, your baby is 2.5 times more likely to die as the baby born to your wealthy, white counterpart.²0 Again, the rates at which low-income black babies and low-income white babies die are closer than the rates at which wealthier black babies and wealthier white babies die. Thus, class privilege, when enjoyed by black people, produces a distinct type of vulnerability.
What this means is that while the notion that the United States has achieved racial equality is, in most cases, enthusiastically untrue, the country has managed to achieve some degree of racial equalization with respect to low-income people’s infant and maternal mortality rates. When it comes to the likelihood that a newborn or a pregnant or recently postpartum person will die, race matters less when one is poor than when one is wealthy.
This is a striking fact that must be explained in terms of the Medicaid programs designed to ensure that low-income pregnant people can access prenatal care—the ones that I studied during my research at Alpha Hospital. Moreover, it is likely that Medicaid narrows racial disparities in infant and
8 Introduction and insurance coverage will serve as a protective mechanism against adverse birth outcomes in an anti-Black society is ideological pablum and offers a false sense of security.”¹5
maternal mortality through the three harms described above—through its denial of poor people’s ability to direct their medical care and its insistence on medicalizing pregnancy, its erasure of the vast differences among those who are low income, and its construction of the pregnant poor as a danger to the rest of the nation. That is, Medicaid delivers a uniform program of prenatal care for the poor. By standardizing care, it denies pregnant patients the freedom to direct the course of their care and removes opportunities for providers to exercise discretion. While this standardization problematically limits patient and provider autonomy, it also reduces racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality. In so doing, Medicaid serves antiracist goals. In a country where race matters so very much, Medicaid, in the context of infant and maternal mortality, has managed to make race matter just a little less.
Pregnant, class-privileged black people are holders of insurance cards that typically are provided through an employer. These cards allow them an escape from the lower tier of the United States’ two-tiered healthcare system. They are free from the standardization, regularization, and forced conformity that Medicaid demands. Yet that freedom from standardization, regularization, and forced conformity comes at a cost: It also frees pregnant, class-privileged black people from a government oversight that, in this context, shields patients from some of the market-driven, profit-maximizing, discretion-packed processes found in the profit-generating side of the healthcare industry. The result is that black people with higher incomes and higher levels of education die more frequently than white people with higher incomes and higher levels of education; their babies suffer the same fate. Class privilege leaves these socioeconomically fortunate black people susceptible to a race-based harm. That irony pulled me to Golden Health, determined to investigate it.
THE FRAGILITY OF THE PROTECTION THAT CLASS PRIVILEGE OFFERS
It is common in the United States to collapse racial disadvantage and class disadvantage, resulting in a misperception that all black people are poor (and, conversely, that all white people are not poor). The collapse does more
9 “I Think I’m Dying”
than make class-privileged black people invisible. It also suggests that classprivileged black people, when they are visible, are not racially disadvantaged. According to this logic, graduate degrees from elite universities and highpaying jobs ensure that the black people who obtain them can enjoy freedom from negative experiences due to their race. In the context of healthcare, this logic suggests that wealthier black people never have the demeaning, degrading, demoralizing encounters inside of healthcare institutions that low-income black people frequently report. However, this is a fallacy. Dozens and dozens of black people who spoke with me as I was conducting research for this book shared disturbing experiences that they had once had with healthcare providers. These encounters made vivid for me the fragility of class privilege’s ability to shelter wealthier black people from race-based disadvantage. Consider Rita’s and Annette’s stories.²¹
At the time of our conversations, Rita, who identified as “a black Jew,” was forty-five years old and pregnant with her second child. Rita’s father, who was a white Jewish man, was a physician until his retirement; her mother, who was black and not Jewish, was a schoolteacher before her death. Rita grew up in Washington, DC, and attended elite private primary and secondary schools. When she was fifteen years old, she traveled to Italy on a trip organized by her high school and experienced the trauma of what she called “unwanted sex.” It was her first sexual experience. Soon after, she developed painful ulcers on her vulva. She was able to return to the United States and seek medical care shortly after the onset of her symptoms. Not ready to tell her parents what had happened to her in Italy, Rita went to the doctor’s appointment by herself. The gynecologist that she saw was unaware that Rita was a high-achieving student at a competitive high school, had enjoyed a solidly middle-class upbringing, and had a Jewish father—an aspect of her background that she, in retrospect, believed would have shielded her from what ultimately happened to her during the appointment. (Although she has her father’s last name, it is not recognizably Jewish.) The doctor saw only a fifteen-year-old black girl with a sexually transmitted infection. He permitted antiblackness to fill in the details.
Rita said, “The way he treated me. . . . It was just so extreme. I lost speech because it was so extreme—how awful he was to me.” Rita remembered
that he said to her, “You’re promiscuous. You’ve brought this on yourself. You’re the type of person who would have sex with anyone on the street. You would probably eat garbage out of a trash can.” Rita also described her sense during the appointment that if she somehow could have gotten the doctor to understand who she was, he would treat her differently: “I was thinking to myself the whole time, ‘Oh, he doesn’t know that my father is Jewish.’
The doctor was Jewish as well. And I kept thinking, ‘If only he knew that my father is Jewish—that he’s a Jewish doctor like him. . . .’” Rita told me that the experience was memorable not simply because of the outrageousness of the physician’s conduct but because a part of her believed him:
I already felt stupid that [the sexual assault] had happened to me. I already felt like an idiot and every negative thing. I already felt dirty, disgusting because I had these sores on my vagina. But the cruelest part about the way he treated me was not what he said but that it made sense to me. It didn’t roll off my back. It did make me feel bad. I now have the wisdom of age. I now have tens of thousands of dollars of therapy under my belt. [laughs] I know that [the sexual assault and the sexually transmitted infection] do not define me. But the gynecologist, that day, he was like, “No. This does define you.” It took me so long—decades—to learn that he was wrong.
When Rita explained her present-day decision to receive her prenatal care from a black obstetrician, she pointed to her first gynecology appointment. Consider Annette as well, who was in her mid-thirties when she became pregnant with her first and only child—her now five-year-old daughter. Annette earned her law degree from an elite university and worked as a lawyer for a nonprofit in the Bay Area. She described herself as multiracial; however, “if I have to check one box, I check ‘black.’” I talked to Annette about her pregnancy over Zoom during the worst of the pandemic in 2020 as her little girl popped in and out of frame throughout the conversation.
Annette told me that when she was in her sixth month of pregnancy, her heart sometimes beat irregularly. The irregularity would last for hours at a time. Occasionally, her heart raced for so long and with such unevenness that she went to an emergency room for help, but the irregularity always went away when she was being observed. Annette always reported her symptoms
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to her midwives at the prenatal care appointments that followed her emergency room visits, and her midwives always dismissed the possibility that the symptoms were a sign of a more serious condition: “They all said, ‘Your body does weird things when you’re pregnant. Or maybe it’s stress.’ But no tests, no nothing.”
When Annette finally went into labor—after several more trips to the emergency room—the heartbeat irregularity returned. Because she was already in the hospital, her providers decided to perform an electrocardiogram, which revealed a pregnancy-triggered heart condition. Because of the condition, Annette had to deliver her baby in the cardiac intensive care unit (ICU). Her labor and childbirth were nightmarish.
Nearly everything went wrong. The physician who attempted the Foley bulb induction²² was a fairly unskilled resident, and the procedure was “excruciating” as a result: “They had a resident doing all of these things. It felt to me that they were saying, ‘Resident, this is a great way for you to get practice. This is a great opportunity for you to get your hands on a really once-in-a-lifetime thing.’ They made that choice instead of saying to themselves, ‘Wow, this is probably the most physically traumatic day of this woman’s life. Let’s just have the actual [attending physician] insert the Foley bulb.’ No. They didn’t consider my experience of the whole thing. Instead, they had this fucking resident who’s like, ‘Ahhhh, I can’t . . .’”
Then when it was time to push, Annette suffered a third-degree vaginal tear,²³ which her providers, again, allowed a resident to suture: “They had the resident do it! And he was doing it wrong! And so, [the attending physician] had to come in and be like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no!’”
Finally, when Annette was in the recovery room, resting after the birth of her daughter, her heart began to beat irregularly again, making it necessary for her to go back to the cardiac ICU—without her daughter: “And it’s seared off in the most awful way in my brain—the sound of her crying when they took her out of my arms.”
Five years later, Annette still became visibly angry when she talked about her experiences during her pregnancy. By the end of our conversation, her face was flush and her voice quivering:
It’s upsetting. I mean, I didn’t die. My daughter didn’t die. I’m well aware that it could have been so much worse. But for me, it comes back to this question. . . . I don’t know. . . . If I was some pretty, rich, thin, white lady having my heart race, would my midwives have been like, “Oh, we’ve got to get you into the—. . . .”? You know what I mean? As opposed to, “Oh, I think it’s just stress,” when it was a fucking heart condition that could kill me or cause my daughter to die if it’s not managed. No one paid attention the whole time that I was paging the doctor quite literally saying, “I think I’m dying.”
Annette’s class privilege—her juris doctor degree from a top law school, her status as a civil rights attorney—did not guarantee her a positive experience with reproductive healthcare. During her routine prenatal care appointments, her midwives did not insist on figuring out why a racing heart had sent her to the emergency room on multiple occasions. During her labor and delivery, Annette’s doctors did not think about what it must have felt like to her to be diagnosed with a potentially fatal condition on the day that she was to give birth to her first child.
Now, of course, it is not clear that Rita’s and Annette’s black race explains why they had such traumatic experiences. People of all races in the United States have terrible encounters with healthcare institutions. Further, scores of women of all races report disempowering experiences with obstetricians and gynecologists.²4 Black people do not have a monopoly on receiving poor healthcare in this country. But we would be naïve if we did not ask the question: What role did Rita’s race play in her physician’s decision to treat her with such contempt? What role did Annette’s race play in causing her providers to dismiss her symptoms of a potentially fatal heart condition? If Annette had, in fact, been a “pretty, rich, thin, white lady,” would she have managed to avoid a hellish childbirth experience?
We do not know. We cannot prove that but for Rita’s and Annette’s black race, their providers would have given them excellent healthcare. But this lack of proof is always true. Although we may have damning statistics describing the higher rates of injury and death that black people suffer in hospitals and healthcare facilities, we do not know in any individual case whether the person’s black race caused them, in particular, to suffer an injury
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or death. This is a reality that makes racism both deniable to racism skeptics and elusive to many who are confident that racism persists in countless ways in the post–civil rights era. (As Annette said, “You’ll never know, right? Unless they show up in white hoods to the appointment, you don’t entirely know—which is one of the mind-fucks about it.”) Nevertheless, many of the class-privileged black women who spoke with me for this book were confident that even though they enjoyed some degree of affluence, their black race mattered—or had the potential to matter—as they navigated healthcare systems in the pursuit of a healthy pregnancy, childbirth, and newborn. Many of the class-privileged black women that I interviewed were confident that their race placed them at a distinct disadvantage—despite their advanced degrees from competitive universities, high-status jobs, and amassed wealth. As a result, they adopted strategies for diminishing the effects of that felt disadvantage and for avoiding what Dána-Ain Davis calls “obstetric racism”—the fact that racism “materialize[s] during Black women’s medical encounters” involving reproductive healthcare and “threat[ens] maternal life and neonatal outcomes.”²5
THE EXPLORATION TO COME
It is not surprising that the wealthier black San Francisco residents interviewed for this book experienced disadvantages on account of their race, as San Francisco has a long history of imposing race-based burdens on nonwhite people. In this way, the racial burdens faced by the black women who spoke with me began long before they set foot in a provider’s office for prenatal care: As black San Franciscans, their lives are set within a historical context of race-based disadvantage . Chapter 1 provides a racial history of the City by the Bay—a history of genocide, exclusionary zoning, banishment to internment camps, racial covenants, redlining, urban renewal, and gentrification. This chapter explains how San Francisco’s current racial and socioeconomic demographics—black people comprise only 5 percent of the city’s population, and close to half of them live in poverty—are not random or arbitrary but are the product of policy decisions made over generations. These policy choices have led the people who are the focus of this book—affluent black
San Francisco residents—to be rarities. Unicorns, in fact. But a caveat is in order. Although there is a distinctiveness to San Francisco’s history and to black people’s absence from the city, there is nothing unique about the techniques that San Francisco used to manage nonwhite people’s place in the city. Genocide, exclusionary zoning, racial covenants, redlining, urban renewal, and gentrification have been features of every major city in the United States. As a result, San Francisco’s story is every city’s story. Consequently, this book both is and is not about San Francisco. It is a book about race, class, and reproduction in the United States that simply is set in San Francisco.
With this in mind, chapter 2 analyzes how the efficient, orderly operation of Golden Health’s obstetrics clinic is made possible by the existence of “the General,” the public hospital in San Francisco that cares for the city’s indigent residents. This type of healthcare segregation—in which wealthier, commercially insured people and poor, Medicaid-insured or uninsured people receive their healthcare from different institutions—is not unique to San Francisco. It is a phenomenon that exists in most cities in the United States. Beyond simply noting the existence of healthcare segregation in San Francisco and in the country at large, chapter 2 argues that the “nice” hospitals and healthcare facilities where wealthier people receive their care can possess features that make them nice because there are other “not nice” hospitals— “poor people’s hospitals”—that care for the publicly insured and uninsured. In this way, the comfort that wealthier people enjoy is made possible by the discomfort that poor people endure. Further, chapter 2 allows us to begin to see how Golden and other hospitals that cater to the “haves” benefit from the nation’s failure to protect the health of black pregnant people. Racial disparities in maternal mortality mean that these hospitals will be virtually guaranteed a customer base that includes commercially insured black patients who will understand the creature comforts and small luxuries that these hospitals offer as evidence of a superior healthcare that is also on offer. The sad state of black maternal health in the United States means that these commercially insured black people can be expected to take their commercial insurance (and its higher reimbursement rates) to these institutions as a strategy to survive the nation’s black maternal health crisis—a strategy that pours money into these institutions’ coffers.
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Racial disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity—and racial disparities in health, more generally—are the product of many different contributors, which chapter 3 explores. It begins by discussing genes and culture—two factors that defenders of the racial status quo propose to explain why people of color are sicker and die earlier than their white counterparts. Genes and culture are particularly problematic explanations of racial disparities in health. Not only is there scant evidence showing that they cause people of color to have shorter, sicker lives, but genes and culture absolve society of any responsibility for addressing racial disparities in health. Essentially, if black people’s genes or culture is killing them, what can society possibly do to save them? After exploring why it is troubling to suggest that people of color’s genes or culture is killing them, the chapter then investigates more likely contributors to racial disparities in health—differing access to healthcare across racial lines, epigenetics, stress and weathering, inferior quality of care provided to people of color on both individual and systems levels, and patient mistrust. In keeping with the critical orientation of this book, chapter 3 subjects even these more likely contributors to racial disparities in health to critical examination.
Chapter 4 analyzes the abundance of recent media attention to what has been called the “black maternal health crisis.” While there are many positive aspects of this media attention, it has problematic facets. As chapter 4 observes, coverage of black maternal deaths can be profitable for media companies and other third parties. It asks whether some individuals who engage with this coverage may be consuming it as entertainment—because many have found it pleasurable to read, watch, or listen to accounts of black suffering and death. Additionally, the chapter questions the effect that these journalistic accounts of black people who die or come close to dying during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period have on black people who are pregnant or desire pregnancy. Interviews with study participants provide some insights into how pregnant black people are experiencing the steady stream of coverage of “the black maternal health crisis.”
Chapter 5 continues this inquiry, investigating the various strategies that the class-privileged black patients interviewed for this book adopted to avoid becoming part of the statistics that reflect the nation’s failure to
care for the lives of pregnant and recently postpartum black people. While wealthier black people deployed many techniques to survive—and to thrive during—their pregnancies, this chapter sits with patients’ choice to receive their care from black providers. It delves deep into this choice, seeking to identify precisely what black patients hope a provider’s black race will give them. Chapter 5 explains that there is no single answer to this question. The answer depends on the patient. Some patients believe that a provider’s black race will protect them from the medicalization of their pregnancies, while others believe that a provider’s black race will perfect the medicalization of their pregnancies. This chapter also explores a phenomenon that I call “racial renunciation”—when a black patient refuses to believe that race and racism have impacted their healthcare experiences despite all evidence to the contrary. It probes racial renunciation, wondering why it may be disquieting to those (like myself) who are convinced that because race structures society in the United States, race invariably impacts individuals’ experiences. Chapter 6 conducts an even deeper exploration into black people’s choice to receive their prenatal care from black providers as a technique to survive pregnancy and childbirth. This chapter considers Golden Health’s response to pregnant black patients’ desire to be cared for by black obstetricians, midwives, and nurses. Golden’s Black Wellbeing Clinic allows black-identifying people to receive their obstetric and gynecological care from black-identifying providers. Racially concordant care—where patients and providers share racial identities—has been offered as the latest, most effective tool in the struggle against racial disparities in health. This chapter probes the racial concordance innovation alongside the approaches to addressing racial health disparities that came before it. Implicit bias trainings within medical education, while popular, have been revealed to be insufficient (and protective of the status quo). Cultural competence trainings have been subjected to extensive (and justified) critiques and may produce more problems than they solve. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives frequently are performative and, for that reason, ineffective; moreover, the Trump administration and conservative activist organizations have waged an extensive war against them, making it difficult for institutions to continue to implement them. Structural competence trainings allow for a more critical
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“I Think I’m Dying”
understanding of racial disparities in health—which may explain why they have not been taken up more widely within medical education. Many have looked to racially concordant care to protect black lives and health when the other tools at our disposal have failed. Chapter 6 examines Golden’s race concordance clinic, and it considers critiques of such race-conscious efforts to address racial disparities in health that have come from a relatively unexpected place—the political left. A brief conclusion follows.
Introduction