Interpreting Inequality: Examining Colorblind Racial Ideology in Black Women’s Prenatal Healthcare Narratives

• In Event: What After Colorblind Racism? Theorizing Race and Ethnicity in the Modern World

Abstract

Across diverse national contexts, Black women’s prenatal healthcare experiences have largely been characterized by racialized neglect and unequal treatment. Yet, a small but growing body of literature suggests that Black women do not always interpret these experiences in explicitly racial terms. While sociologists have richly theorized how members of the dominant racial group downplay, evade, and otherwise ‘talk around’ race by drawing on colorblind racial ideologies, far less attention has been paid to how racially minoritized actors may also draw on or repurpose similar colorblind frameworks —albeit in different ways and toward different ends. Neglecting this possibility limits our understanding of how racial inequality is reproduced in the contemporary moment. This paper addresses this gap by examining how Black women interpret and narrate the significance of race in their prenatal healthcare experiences across two national contexts: Canada and Jamaica. Drawing on 16 in-depth interviews, I identify three narrative practices—akin to Bonilla-Silva’s (2013) colorblind “styles”—that Black women use to make sense of their racialized experiences of prenatal care: (1) racial reframing, (2) comparative racial minimization, and (3) racial centering. The first two narrative practices reproduce colorblind racial ideologies by downplaying the significance of race, while the third explicitly challenges it. By theorizing these narrative practices, I develop a portable analytic framework for examining how racially minoritized actors may make sense of racial inequality within ostensibly “race-neutral” domains of social life. In so doing, this paper extends scholarship on colorblindness by illuminating how hegemonic racial ideologies circulate beyond the dominant group.

Author

• Kayonne Christy, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor