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Two months ago, an American Olympic athlete named Torie Bowie died alone at home during childbirth.[1] The track star’s autopsy report states that Bowie died due to “complications from respiratory distress and eclampsia,” the latter condition being linked to “high blood pressure during pregnancy.”[2] High blood pressure levels have frequently been associated with the negative effects of racial discrimination,[3] and according to Linda Villarosa, “Preeclampsia and eclampsia, the seizures that develop after preeclampsia, are more common in Black women than women of other races” (51).[4] But beyond Black women being at heightened risk of life-threatening conditions exacerbated by everyday racism, many Black female athletes like Bowie face a further obstacle to healthcare: their athleticism can veil their vulnerability.
Although Bowie died alone at home during labor, her death sheds light on some of the dangers that Black women face in the medical system, particularly during pregnancy. Bowie is not the only prominent Black athlete to have had a life-threatening experience in labor. Serena Williams, who has won more Grand Slams than any other female tennis player in history, nearly died after giving birth to her daughter in 2018. Williams, who is predisposed to blood clotting, reportedly began struggling to breathe the day after undergoing an emergency C-section.[5] According to Maya Salam, Williams informed her nurse that she was likely having a pulmonary embolism, a condition Williams was familiar with after a near fatal experience in 2011.[6] Williams’ nurse initially dismissed her as being “confused” because of the pain medications she was on, delaying Williams’ access to life-saving medical interventions, and leaving her “bedridden for her first six weeks of motherhood.”[7] Arguably, Williams’ celebrated strength as a Black female athlete imperiled her pregnancy.
As they do with many other gendered aspects of society, women like Williams face double standards in sports. Female athletes are expected to excel in sports, while simultaneously conforming to societal expectations of them as women—specifically in regard to their femininity.[8] As Delia D. Douglas puts it, “the belief that athleticism and power are inherent in the male body means that success in sports for a woman implies that she has metaphorically become a man” (330). Such sexist beliefs are exemplified by the negative press that Williams has received over the years. Despite being celebrated by some as “the greatest player…that ever lived,”[9] Williams has also been relentlessly mocked for her athleticism. Among the litany of labels to which she has been subjected, Williams has been described as “a dude,” “an NFL linebacker,” and “half man, half gorilla.”[10] These labels—and most explicitly the description of Williams as “half man, half gorilla”—not only reinforce the heteronormative expectations of femininity imposed on female athletes, they also perpetuate the dehumanization of Black Americans that can be traced back to pseudoscientific discourses like race science, which were promoted during slavery.
Race science, which emerged in the eighteenth century, asserted that different races had distinctive characteristics that were best suited to certain environments. Importantly, race science hierarchized people according to a logic of evolutionary difference, arguing that certain races were more evolved—and therefore more human—than others. Medical professionals helped legitimize these false tenets of race science by providing scientific “evidence” to support beliefs in racial difference. As Villarosa explains, “Some southern doctors claimed to be experts in ‘Negro Medicine’ … and went to great lengths to prove that compared with whites, Blacks had not only higher [pain] tolerance and weaker lungs but also smaller skulls, better heat tolerance, resistance to some ailments, and susceptibility to others” (31). Villarosa emphasizes that the scientific fallacy suggesting Black people “could withstand enormous amounts of pain was the most dangerous” because “it provided rationalization for the most vicious aspects of slavery” (30). The belief that Black people were able to withstand more pain than white people remains engrained in contemporary medical practice,[11] where Black women are still frequently disbelieved in their pain.
The mistreatment of Black women in medicine cannot be separated from the dehumanization of Black women during slavery, or the discrimination that Black female athletes continue to face in sports. For centuries, the fitness of Black women’s bodies has been the subject of medical scrutiny. As Deirdre Cooper Owens and Sharla M. Fett explain, “as far back as 1662, colonial Virginia legislators made Black women’s childbearing a centerpiece of the system of chattel slavery when they passed a law stating that the [racial] status of a child would follow that of his or her mother” (1342-1343).[12] As Douglas puts it, Black women were perceived as “not only property, but as physically exceptional; as captive bodies, their whole worth lay in their corporeality” (331).[13] Importantly, Black women’s corporeality was not associated with feeling. In other words, the idea that Black women possessed superhuman strength was concomitant with the belief that they had nonhuman resistance to pain. This was the dangerous thinking that nearly killed Serena Williams.
While their stories differ, Bowie’s death and Williams’ near-death experience urge us to consider what these prominent athletes’ experiences with childbirth tell us about obstetric care for Black women more broadly. According to Villarosa, “Even when income, education, and access to health care are matched, African Americans remain disadvantaged …College-educated Black mothers, for example, are more likely to die, almost die, or lose their babies than white mothers who haven’t finished high school” (2).[14] In other words, no matter who you are—even if you are one of the most famous athletes in the world—the myth of racial difference, which presents Black women as physically exceptional and simultaneously impervious to pain, remains deadly.
Works Cited
[1] Chappell, Bill. “Torie Bowie, an elite Olympic athlete, died of complications from childbirth.” NPR Sports. June 13, 2023.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Smedley, Brian D. “The Lived Experience of Race and Its Health Consequences.” American Journal of Public Health 102.5 (2012): 933-934.
[4] Villarosa, Linda. Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of our Nation. New York: Doubleday, 2022.
[5] Salam, Maya. “For Serena Williams, Childbirth Was a Harrowing Ordeal. She’s Not Alone.” The New York Times, January 11, 2018.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8]Bill Chappell describes a telling example of these double standards in sports, explaining how Bowie’s teammate on the US track team, Allyson Felix, reportedly “worked out in darkness [at] 4 am so no one would know about her pregnancy.” See Chappell, Bill. “Torie Bowie, an elite Olympic athlete, died of complications from childbirth.” NPR Sports. June 13, 2023.
[9] Claudia Rankine cites John McEnroe, the famous tennis player, who described Williams as “the greatest player… that ever lived.” See Rankine, Claudia. “The Meaning of Serena Williams: On tennis and black excellence.” The New York Times Magazine. August 25, 2015.
[10] Delia D. Douglas cites a selection of social media posts compiled by Dr. David Leonard, in which Williams is repeatedly referred to as a “gorilla.” See Douglas, Delia D. “Dis’qualified! Serena Williams and Brittney Griner: Black Female Athletes and the Politics of the Im/Possible.” Relating Worlds of Racism: Dehumanisation, Belonging, and the Normativity of European Whiteness. Philomena Essed, et al., eds. Palgrave MacMillan: Cham, 2019. 329-356.
[11] Linda Villarosa notes, “As recently as 2016, a survey of 222 white medical students and residents published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that half of them endorsed at least one myth about physiological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than whites’” (40).
[12] Cooper Owens, Deirdre, and Sharla M. Fett. “Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery.” American Journal of Public Health 109.10 (2019): 1342-1345.
[13] Douglas, Delia D. “Dis’qualified! Serena Williams and Brittney Griner: Black Female Athletes and the Politics of the Im/Possible.” Relating Worlds of Racism: Dehumanisation, Belonging, and the Normativity of European Whiteness. Philomena Essed, et al., eds. Palgrave MacMillan: Cham, 2019. 329-356.
[14] Villarosa, Linda. Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of our Nation. New York: Doubleday, 2022.
Cover Image: “Expecting” by Joanna Malinowska (Creative Commons)