The All-Nite Images / Otto Yamamoto
Erica Garner in 2016.
In the final days of 2017, a year rife with political, environmental, and humanitarian heartache, Erica Garner was killed by the very racism she dedicated the last three years of her life to eradicating. Taken against the backdrop of the public and violent murder of her father, Eric Garner—who was videotaped being harassed and choked to death by police while unarmed in Staten Island, New York—Erica Garner’s death is a painful reminder of the many ways the system is rigged against black Americans.
It is not a coincidence that these two tragedies coexist within one family. The inequality and injustices that are killing black mothers are byproducts of the same racial rules that have led to the death of black Americans at the hands of police. Progressives now have an opportunity to embrace and advance a vision and agenda that addresses the inequities and injustices. Unless that happens, the casualties will continue to mount.
Since police killed her father in July 2014, Erica Garner fought tirelessly to end police violence against black communities. In a recent interview she described the stress of fighting for justice. “This thing, it beats you down. The system beats you down to where you can’t win,” she said.
Garner was just 27 when she died, leaving behind an 8-year-old daughter and infant son. The cause of death was her second heart attack since giving birth, the result of a rare cardiac condition that occurs in the late stages of pregnancy or after delivery; a condition more prevalent in black women than in white and Hispanic women.
Erica’s death occurs in the midst of a growing maternal mortality crisis in the United States. Approximately 700 women die each year during pregnancy, childbirth, and the one-year postpartum period. As many as 60,000 women experience pregnancy-related health problems that nearly take their lives (known as maternal morbidity). The United States is the one of the only countries in the world where rates of maternal mortality and morbidity are on the rise.
Nationally, black women have a maternal mortality rate three to four times that of white women, and in New York City, where Erica Garner lived, black women are twelve times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. These disturbing trends cut across income and education levels: Black, college-educated mothers are more likely to suffer severe pregnancy or childbirth complications than white women who never graduated from high school. As we recently learned, not even Serena Williams is immune to near fatal health encounters after pregnancy.
The drivers of maternal mortality are numerous and complex: underlying racially-disparate health conditions like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension; inequitable access to timely and high-quality health services; racial bias in the medical profession; and a host of socio-economic factors like poverty, housing instability, and food insecurity, all of which are more prevalent in black communities.
As my colleagues and I argue in our recent book, The Hidden Rules of Race, the undercurrents of the U.S. economy (and society more broadly) are driven by a vast web of racial rules—policies, institutions, and common practices—all of which circumscribe opportunities for black Americans.
These rules include discrimination in the labor market and a yawning race and gender pay gap. They involve restrictions that have prevented multiple generations of black Americans from accumulating assets, leaving black Americans with roughly 8 percent of the wealth of their white counterparts, a disparity that holds across all levels of education. They include efforts to dismantle the health care system, to resegregate our schools, and to disenfranchise non-white voters. They include the policies that allow—indeed, encourage—the over-policing and criminalization of black bodies that killed Erica’s father.
These racial rules are deeply gendered. Scholar and activist Fleda Mask Jackson calls this the “double jeopardy” of “gendered racism.” Think of the expulsion of black girls from school; a lack of paid family leave, paid sick leave, and affordable childcare; barriers to reproductive health care; and the weight of caring for families and communities in the absence of men caught in the dragnet of the criminal justice system—just to scratch the surface. That’s not even to mention the toxic stress that results from the cumulative impact of these vast injustices.
Let us not dismiss the political environment in which Erica Garner’s life was cut short. She was fighting for racial justice during a presidential campaign that brought explicit racism, sexism, and xenophobia into the public square. White supremacists have recently marched through the streets of American cities, and a Republican-controlled Congress is pushing a policy agenda that would exacerbate racial and gender disparities for generations to come.
Some might say the Garners’ deaths are evidence of a broken system. But the system isn’t broken: it was designed this way. Each of the above mentioned racial rules arise from our nation’s legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
As we describe in Hidden Rules, there have been moments in history when advocates and policymakers have succeeded at writing more fair and equitable rules. But each drumbeat of progress was met with a fierce backlash that ultimately reinforced racial rules and perpetuated injustice and inequality. This inequality is not inevitable. We have the ability and responsibility to rewrite the rules.
Progressive political leaders have castigated Trump for his explicit racism and have condemned the Republican’s hateful and harmful legislative agenda. But that is simply not enough in this moment. Black mothers are dying. Black Americans are being killed by police. Women’s rights are being rolled back. Black kids in Flint are still drinking bottled water because the water being pumped into their homes is contaminated with lead.
Progressives have a responsibility not only to call out these disparities but to also remind Americans that it is not black and brown people who rob Americans of economic opportunity and prosperity, but rather policymakers who write rules that reward the wealthiest and most powerful at the expense of the vast majority. Progressive policymakers must then rewrite these rules with an agenda that includes universal health care, divestment from a corrupt and discriminatory criminal justice system, an expansion of voting rights, and a host of economic reforms.
We can and must do better by people like Erica Garner and the two children who survive her. Progressives can follow the boldness and moral clarity Erica demonstrated before her life ended. We can invest in the leadership of women of color, who have long understood and argued that economic justice will elude all of us until we can achieve racial and gender justice. Until we truly reckon with the abounding ways racism and gender bias harm American communities, families like the Garners will continue to pay the price.
Andrea Flynn is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where she researches and writes about race, gender and economic inequality. You can follow her on Twitter at @dreaflynn.