Social Rhetoric and the Construction of Black Motherhood

In this article, historical womanist theory, which situates Black women as a unique racialized and gendered laboring class in the United States, is empirically validated through testing of several key fundamental assumptions of the theory. This research identifies ways in which images of Black women's reproduction and parenting are manipulated in order to justify ongoing regulation and dominance of Black labor: biological, reproductive, and productive through an analysis of popular film and policies that disproportionately impact Black women in the United States.