Challenging Capitalistic Exploitation: A Black Feminist/Womanist Commentary on Work and Self-Care

Abstract

at the onset of the pandemIC, like many people around the globe, I was anxious and fearful. The novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, was dangerous and mysterious. There were, and still are, many misconceptions and unknowns about the transmission, effects, and treatment of this virus, resulting in pervasive uncertainty and confusion. As an African American woman, I am a member of two groups frequently mistreated and underserved in healthcare -women and African Americans. Consistent with other health disparities, people of color -and particularly African Americans -are more likely to contract and die from the virus. 1 Not surprisingly, then, I was terrified not only of getting sick but also of how I might be mistreated or underserved by those in charge of my care. I felt that if I were to contract this virus, I would surely die. This may seem like an unreasonable fear, but the risk of contracting COVID-19 combined with recent health diagnoses heightened my sense of precarity.Shortly before the pandemic, I had undergone several diagnostic medical tests. I learned that I was on the verge of diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. A sleep study revealed that I was experiencing severe sleep apnea. Specifically, my breathing stopped 32 times

“Free Black Children…That Means Everything”: Black Mother’s Visions of Freedom Within a Radical Healing Framework

“…While all the mothers valued their children’s education, they considered earning a degree from an institution of higher education as one future pathway (among many) that their children might choose to pursue, and they did not want to send the messages that they valued that particular pathway over other options. On the one hand, the mothers’ rejection of higher education as the best route for their children to pursue in adulthood represented an intentional departure from false meritocratic and capitalistic expectations in the USA about upward social mobility and valuing individual’s labor over their wellness (Caldera, 2020). On the other hand, most of the mothers in our sample were highly educated from a traditional academic standpoint (65% had a graduate degree).…”

Self‐Care

“…Indeed, self‐care remains an urgent concern for life “in the wake,” where anti‐Blackness and violence are the norm, “the ground we walk on” (Sharpe 2016, 7). Altheria Caldera puts it bluntly: “Self‐care is necessarily about refusing to be complicit in my own destruction” (2020: 713). And, Jameta N. Barlow contends, “Until we name [self‐love], claim it, and devour it, the lack of love for our communities and ourselves will continue to remain the real silent killer” (2016, 211).…”

“…An emphasis on survival and on a more capacious and inherently connected self carries into contemporary Black feminist work, which has tracked self-care practices across a range of domains, from daily life (Cox 2015;Williams 2018Williams ) 2019Scott 2016;Van Gelder 2016), in academic contexts (Caldera 2020;Nicol and Yee 2017) and as scholarly disposition (Nash 2019). Aimee Meredith Cox (2015), for example, discusses Black girls' notion of "entitlement" as necessary and corrective within a system that otherwise devalues and refuses them care (see also Kelley 1997).…”

Sex tracking apps and sexual self-care

“…The now culturally pervasive concept of self-care has shifted significantly from its initial politicised meaning in the feminist and Black civil rights activism of the 1960s and its continuing radicalism in contemporary Black feminism (Caldera, 2020; Hickson et al, 2021; Kaltefleiter and Alexander, 2019; Michaeli, 2017; Nayak, 2020; Peipzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Scott, 2016, 2017). The industry and discourse of self-care has become essential to post- and neoliberal feminist articulations of female subjectivity.…”