Menzel, A. Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality. University of California Press, 2024.
Fatal Denial argues that over the past 150 years, US health authorities’ explanations of and interventions into Black infant mortality have been characterized by the “biopolitics of racial innocence,” a term describing the institutionalized mechanisms in health care and policy that have at once obscured, enabled, and perpetuated systemic infanticide by blaming Black mothers and communities themselves.