One of the most unique things about Black women’s experiences in this country is that we are the only group of people whose bodies have ever been legally mandated as the place that reproduced noncitizens. Indigenous women were never striving for their children to have American citizenship, but rather sovereignty on their own terms. And Latina immigrant women who are unfairly maligned for giving birth to children on American shores are hated precisely because they, too, can pass on the rights of citizenship to their children, even if they have been denied access to it themselves.
