Wednesday, June 30, 2010

I'm Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women in Mississippi and the Scott Sisters

Jamie Scott and two of her grandchildren


In 1967 my father watched his mother die in his arms after a hospital in Vicksburg, Miss. refused to treat her after she suffered from a stroke. He was a high school teen and his mother was 42-years-old.

Before Wille Mae Brown died, my grandmother would stare out the window when it rained because she missed her deceased husband and often worried about how to rear her ten children with an eigth grade education.

To this day my father could care less for the state of Mississippi.

It is an understatement when I say that Mississippi is not safe for women folk then and now. And with the recent emergence of the Scott Sisters case, it seems as if nothing has changed. Black women have the political positioning of their ancestors who were enslaved. They are only to be fucked, breed babies and work for slave wages.

Ironically, Mississippi boasts the largest black population in the country, as well as the poorest and most unhealthy. In regards to women, there is only one reproductive helath clinic, and a disproportionate ratio for doctor's-to-patients.

And the health care services for black women are similar to triage centers in Baghdad. The rural areas are akin to living in the countryside of Uganda. A friend of mine said her annual pap smear was one thrust short of a rape or a dry sympathy fuck. All of her doctors were foreign born who cared not to learn the local English dialect or white males just removed from plantation owning great-grand pappies who spent roughly 10 minutes with each woman.


The procedure usually consisted of shoveling instruments in her vagina as they asked minimal questions just to satisfy the basic doctor's obligations.


And have you heard of the Mississippi Appendectomy? It is a term used to name the horrible practice of eugenics in Mississippi. Women went to the clinic or hospital to get simple procedures done to their wombs and wake up without wombs because they were given hysterectomies.


Nope, I am not bullshitting, it even happened to Civil Rights Activist Fannie Lou Hamer. She went in to the doctor's office thinking she was going to get a simple procedure done and received a partial hysterectomy.

Sick and Tired is not the phrase for the Scott Sisters and their case.

After two life sentences and $11 later, the Scott Sisters Case is beginning to gain momentum. I encourage all to read the case of the Scott Sisters, who have been separated from their children since 1993.

This modest blog does not allow me to fully recant the story like I would like, but I must point out a huge, troubling question I ask, "Where is the Al Sharpton?" It seems like when it comes to women folk, he is silent. Like I said, women folk just ain't safe around these parts.

http://freethescottsisters.blogspot.com

1 ish talking intellectuals holla at a sista:

RiPPa said...

I could remember clownin' one of my college buddies who was from Chicago back in the day. I used to always tell him that everybody black in Chi-town was from Mississippi, and he should stop frontin' on that "I'm from the city," shit.

Then 5yrs ago I made my first treck through the south on the way to Florida via New Orleans. As I traveled through Mississippi I couldn't help but to think of the ancestors and what they endured.

Even scarier was the thought of just how things were down there today after reading about how they rank in education (damn near the bottom!). And then the emergence of the Scott sisters case this year did me in. So now I'm wondering, why is it that we're just now hearing about this?

I now live here in Memphis TN., and it's bad enough here given the predominantly black population and the economic meltdown. But I could imagine just how fucked things are in Mississippi.