Said Ali Muldrow, Co-Executive Director at GSAFE (an organization concerned with LBGTQ+ youth), quoted in "Contributing Factors in Black Parents Breastfeeding" (Wisconsin State Journal).
I note that Muldrow, who works in the LBGTQ+ realm, said "women," but the Journal wrote "Parents" in the headline, producing the odd phrase "Black Parents Breastfeeding." I know the explanation — a trans man could breastfeed — but if Muldrow is saying "mother," isn't that good evidence that "mother" is the right word? I see that Muldrow said "average slave" when she must have meant the average female slave, but it's spoken word and, in context, we know what she meant. The Journal is probably following a style guide and adhering to it rigidly. That's a preference for confusion and awkwardness over the possibility of committing one of the sins designating as mattering today.
As for breastfeeding... it's a strange part of human life! Of course, different women have different reactions to it. Let's honor authentic feeling. Yes, you need to take care of any baby that you have and keep. But there are different healthy ways to get your start in life and changing views about what you ought to do. Being pushy about what women must do isn't going to work with everyone.
Now, Muldrow is saying that when black women decline to breastfeed they are not making a choice. It's a life of coercion — that's the premise. There's something disrespectful in that, and I think I understand why she's choosing to indulge in that disrespect. I think she's saying government needs to give black people more money, more housing, more health care, more support of every kind, and until that happens, they're just coerced.
Meanwhile, it's the baby, the new black person, who loses out (if breastfeeding is indeed so important). It's one thing to want to protest against historical wrongs and to demand reparations, but as an act of protest, depriving your own baby is very poorly aimed. In any case, if you have no choice, you are not protesting. You are displaying yourself and your baby as woeful victims.
But it's Muldrow saying there's no choice and characterizing them as victims. The actual nonbreastfeeding mothers are being pointed at and talked about. Muldrow herself is breastfeeding her baby. I'm looking at a photograph of her, but I won't purport to know what race she is. In any case, she is not in the group whose mindset she describes. I'd like to hear from them!
ADDED: I am following my own ethic of not identifying people by race based on my own observation. The person must self-identify. In this case, Muldrow's statements read very differently depending on whether or not she is black, and I'm not trying to undercut her but refusing to assign a race to her. I went back over the article to see if the identification is anywhere in the text. The closest thing I can find is this, in her quote: "We actually have never recovered from that." That's rather vague, because I — a white person — could say "We" — meaning America — "have never recovered from slavery."
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The average slave gave birth multiple times during adolescence, and then was forced into forced labor about two weeks later.
So has every other woman for most of humanity's existence. Does she think cavewomen got 6 months maternity leave?
There is a reason that these tiresome people with their tiresome complaints, all tiresome variations on the same tiresome ideology, get the "whatever" dismissal by people. It's because they are tiresome.
Slavery was abolished almost 160 years ago -- which is about eight generations ago.
The last slave in Muldrow's ancestry was something like her
great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
... and heal and bond with their baby, that's been completely devalued throughout the history of our society. We actually have never recovered from that. You have to have a conscious conversation about what does it look like to recover and reclaim. It means, yeah, breastfeeding, but it also means having the financial reality and the housing and the employment support and the space and the equipment to pump and the different things that you need to support you in breastfeeding.
Wasn't this a Woody Allen movie??
Wisconsin State Journal?
Isn't that one of thse Racist newspapers?
That Keep insisting on using HORRIBLY RACIST words, to describe rocks of color?
Why do we, as a society, continue to listen to such racist fonts of racially charged racism?
REMOVE the racist Wisconsin State Journal from society!!
CANCEL the racist Wisconsin State Journal!!
The Civil War ended in 1865 and slavery shortly thereafter.
"We actually have never recovered from that."
This idea of old physical trauma constantly informing persons 2-4 generations removed is really influential, but badly so. Because, sorry the social situation IS different.
So when does the effect of slavery wear off? Never?
Will it be never?
Pretty sure she doesn’t know the first thing about people giving birth as slaves.
I’m done with this. If these people who were never slaves, and whose parents and grandparents were never slaves, insist on re-enslaving themselves in their own made up world so they can rage against the oppressive whitey… their problem not mine.
Enjoy your self imposed shitty lifestyle.
I think she's saying government needs to give black people more money, more housing, more health care, more support of every kind, and until that happens, they're just coerced.
We need to get beyond the "feels" and back to reality.
What's the figure at which coercion for black people ends?
And what's the corresponding figure for each of the other races?
There's an old debate about the breakdown of the black family. In the 60s it was often liberals who brought it up, because they assumed some combination of government programs would help. Maybe today people have given up, or family breakdown is more endemic (Moynihan, "defining deviancy downward"), and I suspect we're not supposed to talk about it in any disparaging way.
Lemann in the Promised Land says it used to be believed that slavery itself had broken down the African-American family. After all, family members were routinely split up at the slave market, they had virtually no way of staying in touch, etc. But according to Lemann, there was later research suggesting that slaves would do heroic things to make marriage meaningful, stay in touch with kids, etc. It was the Jim Crow days that really brought about fatherless families, kids being raised by mixed groups of female relatives, etc. I think one big problem was that "just a bit" of freedom brought about the parties with music and dancing, once a week or so. Older strands of music were brought together and put to an exciting beat, to be discovered by various musicians and entertainers, with rock 'n roll finally winning over the boomers. Those parties, as one might expect, were hotbeds of "hooking up" and not worrying all that much about (the younger) kids. The parts of "black culture" that are most exciting to whites, and therefore lucrative, are a mixed blessing at best.
Now, Muldrow is saying that when black women decline to breastfeed they are not making a choice. It's a life of coercion — that's the premise. There's something disrespectful in that, and I think I understand why she's choosing to indulge in that disrespect. I think she's saying government needs to give black people more money, more housing, more health care, more support of every kind, and until that happens, they're just coerced.
Oh geez, the Women Infant Children (WIC) program must be very coercive. Perhaps we should end it? And I can't think of anything more coercive than school lunch programs.
There was no Roe vs Wade then.
Well she is black, and quite prominently so. And she's taken to The Moth Radio Hour to explain how she's going to raise her babies differently than she was raised. So is that a choice that she as a black woman has made? I thought they had no choices? Or is it just some black women? Is that racist?
Anyone who's had a baby in recent years knows there's no one who works harder at coercion than a breastfeeding advocate.
Ali is Black, but that doesn't matter. She's progressive and that takes priority over race, religion*, gender, culture, hair style, or number of piercings you might have. In this case, her Blackness is supposed to give her more gravitas.
But because she is a progressive, she is foremost Collectivist, and sees people as only a part of a series of categories/tribes, from the Primary (in this case, Progressive), to Secondary Tribes (Race, gender, etc). Keep in mind that any of these tribes can be used at any time of convenience to make their point. High on a perch, they assert their ideas and look down on you.
What Ali is stating simply portrays Blacks- once again- as untethered to their own life path, at the mercy of history and unable to function by themselves as individuals. They must be helped, raised, understood to be victims for all time. In Ali's world, they cannot manage to make this individual decision (breastfeeding) as an individual, but only as a history ladened member of the Black Secondary Tribe.
*Religion: Progressivism, or far left leanings are most definitely the new, 'approved' State religion.
What crap.
The Left is NEVER satisfied.
I read your post (so found it interesting enough to get through) but the viewpoint of the author is so pointless and stupid (not sure I give a crap what race this author is, but suppose it's relevant to whether the viewpoint is evil or just massively stupid). I grow more convinced as I get older that one of the primary goals of the progressive left is never, ever to encourage black babies, children and adults to perform better as a group.
That was the fate of most women throughout history.
The CDC states 117,626 black pregnancies were terminated by surgical abortion in the U.S. in 2018, the latest year I could find for abortion statistics. These fetus deaths accounted for 33.6% of the total abortions in the US that year, but came from only about 6% of the women of child bearing age. On the brighter side, those aborted Black babies were spared the trauma of not being breast fed. So racial progress!
Muldrow insufficiently addresses the issue of "race" in her writing. From her website as a Madison School Board candidate: "I grew up in a multiracial family in Madison...."
Can we presume that "multiracial" in her case means "black" and "white?" Is she herself "multiracial" or is she of pure unmixed "race?"
This is important to know. If, as can be inferred from the article, "black" mothers should be provided with housing and financial support for breastfeeding, then certainly "multiracial" mothers would merit only some fraction of the housing and financial support provided to pedigreed full blooded "black" mothers.
Or do we go with the "one drop" thing?
At what age and how often did the average non-slave birthing person produce offspring from 1619 to 1865 in the US, and how long did those persons take before returning to their presumably unforced labors? Are we comparing past history of slaves to the experiences of contemporary free people, or are we comparing past history of slaves to present day free blacks? The author makes clear it is the latter, a comparison rife with unspoken assumptions, many of which are not to the advantage of her argument for present day breast-feeding accommodations. For example, were slave children cared for in a group creche, and fed on cow or goat milk, or were they kept with their mothers, to allow breast feeding? She doesn't say.
How about instead of such sly suggestions that today's free women are like unto their slave forebears in lacking all ability to choose how they act, we condemn slavery utterly, and start from there?
The whole two weeks to get back to work and breastfeed the infant has been the human condition since the beginning of time. In large parts of the world it still is the norm. This manufactured grievance is tiresome.
If a society cannot "get over" events that happened 200 years ago, what chance to they have of ever getting over it?
So when does the effect of slavery wear off?
When people start laughing at the people who claim they still suffer from it.
Never been to Madison but from reading this blog for more than 10 years it appears that outside of our hostess and Meade, everyone else is bat shit crazy, is this true or am I missing something?
Never been to Madison but from reading this blog for more than 10 years it appears that outside of our hostess and Meade, everyone else is bat shit crazy, is this true or am I missing something?
Tocqueville was right. If black slaves had fought and won their own freedom, they would truly feel free, but if they were handed their freedom, they never would be.
There wasn't but a minutes-long blip between when (nearly) everything MLK stood for had been achieved and this relentless need to find grievances that make zero sense in the modern world.
Race pimping must be very lucrative.
I don’t care about the plight of American blacks any more. Sorry but my years teaching in an historically black college, my involvement in civil rights in the 60s. A waste of my time and theirs. An utter, sad, futile waste of time.
"refusing to assign a race to her."
The blogpost talks a bit about the oddities of the publication's style guide, substituting 'parents' for 'mothers' so as not to offend the occasional breast-feeding daddy out there in trans-world. OK, and it's Madison, so the trans-police will be on the look-out for cancellation targets.
But you have your own odd style guide going too. Your blog, so your choice. But it's not a matter of 'assigning' race to the person you are talking about; it's just a decision not to provide a description -- self-censorship, in the same way most publications today self-censor when they write about crime and the like. Your reason -- her "statements read very differently depending on whether or not she is black" -- is a bit different from those for the self-censorship common in crime stories but they are kind of weird too (not that they are necessarily inaccurate, just weird). And very odd, really, given how we are also told that race/gender identity/class are the characteristics that define who we are -- victim/oppressor, preferred/disfavored, etc.
So if she were black, the statements would read better/stronger or worse/weaker than if she were white/Asian/Hispanic/Native/etc.? Or is it more whether she is speaking 'her truth,' but it wouldn't be 'her truth' if she were of the 'wrong' race? Hard to keep up with all the speech codes, tiptoeing through endless minefields of potentially offensive descriptors to ever-more-sensitive subgroups. In the end it seems to be mostly about what the reader brings to the story, and there are plenty of those who bring nothing but a chip on the shoulder.
mikee said...
At what age and how often did the average non-slave birthing person produce offspring from 1619 to 1865 in the US, and how long did those persons take before returning to their presumably unforced labors? Are we comparing past history of slaves to the experiences of contemporary free people?
I've heard, that Slave owners wouldn't even provide Basic cable to the enslaved people, let alone HBO.
I've Even Heard; that some Slave owners wouldn't even provide microwave ovens, or refrigerators!!
Not only did she say “women” she said “slave”, not “enslaved person”!
Slavery effectively ended at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Trying to blame present ills on a practice that was ended over a century and a half ago is kind of childish. “We actually have never recovered from that.” Actually, you did — by the 1950s and 1960s, if not much sooner than that. After LBJ and the Democrats passed the “Great Society” programs, poor urban blacks reverted. Coincidence? I think not.
Cubanbob @ 10:58: “…This manufactured grievance is tiresome.”
Yes, it certainly is. I think what makes it particularly tiresome is its triviality; its minute scale and the immaterial nature (and uncertain reality) of the alleged wrong. This is scraped up and fed the wrong way into the Poor Me function and we then get a classic Mountain From Molehill. Very unsatisfying. I am willing to attend to real wrongs, even ones that aren’t as big or bad as claimed. But this? This is ridiculous. It’s a sign that they really have run out of moral capital.
Styles change. When I was a kid basically nobody breastfed. Later they decided you must or the child is doomed to ___. Now I don't know what they're doing.
Give me a break! Over the millennia, many poor white women also worked in the fields until they were ready to give birth, then returned to that work as soon after giving birth as was feasible. It was a matter of getting the crops in so that they wouldn't starve in the winter, and based on class, not race.
Never been to Madison but from reading this blog for more than 10 years it appears that outside of our hostess and Meade, everyone else is bat shit crazy, is this true or am I missing something?
There’s a guy named Blaska.
Obviously calls for another viewing of Meeting the parents.
It was said that Native American women would squat in their fields, give birth, and carry on with their chores. no time to jog out to score their Enfamil. Tedious is dead on the case here. As with Brooksie, they all dance for their patrons and scrape up the tossed coin, "making a difference" in the process.
Breastfeeding is Soulfeeding.
But does that make soul food and soul music breast food and breast music?
I have always heard about brave soviet farm women who squatted in the field to deliver the baby then went right back to work, 2 weeks seems a bit extravagant. My favorite end of slavery quote is when B.T. Washington said "Cast down your bucket, where you are." a sailing quote from Moby Dick.
I am guessing that the Ali Muldrow in this post is the same Ali Muldrow who is president of the Madison School Board, who, according to Dave Blaska, is responsible for getting the police officers removed from Madison schools, resulting in the chaos discussed in another post yesterday. Unless,of course, there are two progressive Ali Muldrows screwing up the Emerald City with their political views as a “community leader”…
This is what Muldrow writes in Muldrow's Linkedin profile: "Growing up in a multiracial family where identity was discussed at the dinner table and difference was celebrated gave me a sense from an early age that I had a reasonability to confront injustice."
what is an average slave ?
how different from above/below slaves?
This article is ridiculous.
How does the author think new-born slaves survived? Is the slaveholder supposed to have been buying formula at the local Walmart? We all know they were being breastfed.
What, the child could have been fed cow's milk or goat's milk? Sorry, pasteurization was not invented until 1862, and the children would have died in droves from unsterilized bottles.
So, the vast majority of slave children were breastfed by their mothers. And like almost all mothers through history, they had to return to some form of work very soon after birth. BFD, it has nothing to do with anything at all in the modern world, except guilt-tripping by the descendants of slaves, descendants who WOULD NOT EXIST if the U.S. had never had slavery. I refuse to feel guilt about things I disapprove of that I never did, things that stopped being done a century before I was born.
“what is an average slave ?
how different from above/below slaves?”
So are you asking “What is the standard slave deviation?” Probably the square root of one slave.
"I think she's saying government needs to give black people more money, more housing, more health care, more support of every kind..."
She's saying black people want more government tits to suck on.
so I go looking into history for mammy = wetnurse
: commenters - any ignorance is not to be excused -
Some historians believe that the practice originated in the 1600s when Malaria claimed numerous lives of many white settlers.
The slave owners believed that feeding their babies with milk from their native slaves would provide them natural immunity towards Malaria. This had a trickle-down impact on not only racial but also the psychological, financial, and political fabric of the society throughout the Black community.
Before the introduction of welfare for unmarried women and WIC, black women were more likely than white women to breastfeed (and were slightly more likely to be married before having children). After single-mother welfare and WIC, breastfeeding rates (and marriage) fell so low specifically among black mothers that WIC introduced a new benefit: six more months of extra food for those who breastfed their children for a full year. But with the introduction of limitations on what may be asked of recipients, there aren’t good numbers on the outcome of such programs. Black women with jobs today are slightly more likely to breastfeed than black women without jobs: the reverse is true for white women. Regarding family formation, lower-income whites now have more in common with lower-income blacks: class definitely trumps race, with many life outcomes finding poor whites at the bottom.
The lowest rates of breastfeeding are in Ireland, France, and U.K. The European Union overall has the lowest rates worldwide but vary by country. The U.S. hovers a bit below average, with both poor and rich countries, Guinean and UAE being closest. Asians and Mexicans who emigrate to America show drops in breastfeeding rates, but they start out low too. Rwanda now has the highest rate worldwide, attributed to intense interventions by UNESCO after the genocide. Sweden has the second highest breastfeeding rate, but with the introduction of child leave for fathers, whereby men and women take turns at home, breastfeeding has dropped off.
So. Which policies or economics encourage or discourage breastfeeding? It’s all over the map. But clearly, the Great Society, not slavery, has had the largest effect on recent black breastfeeding rates. Economics and cultural fads (including NGO campaigns) seem to have more of an effect than anything. White homemakers, an easy group to study, bopped up and down as they were fed messages about whether natural or formula feeding was best.
Ironically, victim academia like this article might actually lower black breastfeeding rates more than other factors.
"The average slave gave birth multiple times during adolescence, and then was forced into forced labor about two weeks later."
gahrie : So has every other woman for most of humanity's existence. Does she think cavewomen got 6 months maternity leave?
Probably not (and I doubt the "multiple times during adolescence" thing for slaves too)
In pre-modern times (as in pre-modern societies now) getting enough food was hard work, and most humans lived a marginal existence. Nutrition affects both (a) the timing of menarche and (b) the effectiveness of breastfeeding as a contraceptive. So most pre-modern women would not have been getting pregnant till they were 17 at the earliest, and probably wouldn't have got pregnant again until their baby was at least 12 months old, and on average longer than that.
So a healthy pre-modern woman with no miscarriages might have had two kids by the time she was 19, which is about as late as you can go for adolescence" - but I seriously doubt that was the average performance.
PS I liked the idea that feeding your baby without a larger pile of welfare checks was "coercion." It sure is - but the gal with the whip is called Mother Nature.
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