Khiara M. Bridges — Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans - with Akilah Johnson

An unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US—and why even affluent Black women are imperiled by substandard care. From a leading expert on race, class, maternal health, and reproductive rights.Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the US, Expecting Inequity reveals that not only are Black people three-to-four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. That is, wealthier Black people are much more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. Focusing on a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the affluent, Khiara Bridges looks at the choices around prenatal care and childbirth that class-privileged, pregnant Black people are making in order to survive what has been called the “Black maternal health crisis.”Bridges, whose previous work exposed how race and racism are embedded in maternal healthcare for the poor, draws upon two years of participant-observation to show how wealthier Black people try to leverage their class privilege to avoid some of the negative effects of their Blackness—only to discover that in a country that has never reckoned with its horrific racial past, there is no escaping racism’s reach. Throughout the book, engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating stories of women’s experiences with pregnancy and prenatal care illustrate how race and racism matter regardless of wealth or status.Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her books include Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization.Bridges is in conversation with Akilah Johnson, who joined The Washington Post in 2021 as a national reporter exploring the effect of racism and social inequality on health. In prior roles at ProPublica and the Boston Globe she covered the intersection of health, race, politics and immigration. At ProPublica, she won a George Polk award, National Magazine award and was Pulitzer finalist for examining covid-19's toll on Black Americans. At the Globe, she was part of a team of journalists who shared a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and she was a Pulitzer finalist as a member of the Spotlight Team investigation into racism in Boston. Her reporting has earned other national awards including NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards, ONA's Knight Award for Public Service and a National Headliner Award for Journalistic Innovation. Before her time at the Globe, Akilah covered education and public safety for the South Florida Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. She is a graduate of the University of Miami and alumna of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University.PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780262051552?ic_referral=QT1I-joXSERLFVhQtsQpi6o-plWfuUqg7-ZolftEuIYwM68XoiZrSiw3od3FLYDg0CGHmQofdarh3rz6pKjq-F9hQzrYceqcaPaBx4boBZ5qYUGYeXDSQTTB4kNvvuFD655KjZQ