Legacies of Slavery: Black Domestic Workers, Waste, and the Body

Abstract

One of the legacies of slavery which helped shape the ideology of the Jim Crow South concerned the perpetuation of black women’s exclusion to the margins of the established order through their exclusive association with the body and its functions. This association was used to justify black women’s destiny as domestic workers in the Jim Crow South, which meant that they were doomed to handle filth, and thus to become tainted with it according to the official discourse. This article explores first the deprecating connotations of the association of black women with the body established by the dominant southern ideology as a relic of the slave period, and then focuses on black domestics’ involvement in the management of bodily fluids and waste as part of their professional tasks in the Jim Crow South.