Expecting Inequity: How The Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even The Wealthiest Black Americans -- Khiara M. Bridges In Conversation With Zoë Lucier-Julian

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Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans — Khiara M. Bridges in Conversation with Zoë Lucier-Julian

This event takes place in person at Charis and on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Click here to register to attend virtually. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event. Charis welcomes Khiara M. Bridges in conversation with Dr. Zoë Lucier-Julian for a discussion of Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans, 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.
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.
About the Author 
Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press. She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. While in law school, she was a teaching assistant for the former dean, David Leebron (Torts), as well as for the late E. Allan Farnsworth (Contracts). She was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. She speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and she is a classically trained ballet dancer.
About the Conversation Partner
Dr. Zoë Lucier-Julian (they/them) is a community-rooted clinician, scholar, and teacher in Atlanta, GA. They currently serve as the first Director of Clinical Innovation and Liberatory Research at Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation, and as a board member in support of SPARK RJ Now!
Informed by reproductive justice and research justice praxis, Zoë’s work is focused on sexual, reproductive, and perinatal health equity through intergenerational and interdependent collaboration toward collective liberation.
Ultimately, they hold themselves accountable to their communities – Black queer, trans, and gender expansive people.  With their ancestors and descendants in mind, they continue to radically reimagine health care systems and training paradigms beyond their oppressive origins toward a decolonized, liberated future.
The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.
 Charis Books is a fully wheelchair accessible space with on site van accessible parking, two ramps, and additional overflow accessible parking nearby. Additional accessibility information can be found on the Accessibility page of our website. In-person event guidelines:

All attendees must wear a face mask during the event.
We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.
This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast. Click here to register to attend virtually.
As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request specific accessibility accommodations, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304.Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. 
By attending our event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email info@chariscircle.org.

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