Do African American women still suffer from misguided beliefs about their bodies? Can a mistrust or repulsion be passed down through generations without any conscious reason why? I asked this question because of something I read recently that spoke of women who breastfeed their babies versus those who don't and found it interesting that where 80% of Hispanic women breastfed their child, and 79% of white women breastfed their babies only about 59% of African American women breastfed their children. Since I have read somewhere once that breastfeeding made for a stronger bond between mother and child my interest stimulated me to investigate further, and some of what I learned is in this post.
While what I learned may not come as a surprise to a lot of people it was all pretty shocking to me. I thought back for as far as my memory bank would go and realized that I had never seen my mother breastfeed, neither had I witnessed any other breastfeeding relative with-child in my family. My wife back when she was having children collected her breast milk but as far as I can remember made no attempt to breastfeed. Over the years, and especially when I was doing research about slavery I came across many pictures of black women breastfeeding white children and soon came to learn that during the days of slavery it was pretty common for a slave women to be made to give up her milk.
My memory is a little cloudy about which breast but I remember reading that one of her breasts was for the white child and the other for the slave woman's own child; and that there could even be punishment handed out for allowing a child to feed on the wrong breast. I realize that back in the day, say fifty or sixty years ago, breastfeeding may have been a little more common for African American women especially in the rural areas, and that over time improvements in baby bottles and baby formula could make bottle feeding your baby more attractive.
Today I hear about and read about women fighting for the right to breastfeed whenever and where ever they want and have become aware of several maternity clothes makers, from my online fashion store, that makes tops capable of allowing a mother to breastfeed pretty much on the go, but none of the women I saw and who were interested in those new maternity garments were black. Without any other supporting data, I realize that my conclusion doesn't really amount to much, but my concern is really whether there is a connection between black women being forced to give up their milk at one point and the fact that breastfeeding just doesn't seem to appeal to the majority of today's black women.
I do know that many of the older African American women that I am aware of do discourage breastfeeding. So much so that the only black woman I was able to gather some breastfeeding information about (see the link to the breastfeeding article below) said she didn't mind breastfeeding but she could not do that at her aunt's house. So now I am on the search to learn exactly where the negative press about breastfeeding comes from. Could negative feeling about breastfeeding in the black community be coming from something forced on black women so long ago? Or is it as the girl, forbidden to breastfeed her child at her aunts because as her aunt put it, breastfeeding was just too nasty?
I realize that there can be many other contributing factors like a lack of time, a lack of privacy, or the lack of desire to breastfeed when the bottle is so quick and handy but wouldn't it be mind-blowing if negativity injected into the African American woman's psyche hundreds of years ago has, somehow, been getting passed down from generation to generation? I think so. What are your thoughts?
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