Book review: The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria by Robin P. Chapdelaine

Abstract

and as a problem to solve. African Americans and Native Americans had less access to obtaining birth certificates. When they did possess them, the “fact” of their race created obstacles to employment, marriage, and voting rights. Due to pressure brought by multiple groups, including the NAACP, in 1968 the Census Bureau agreed to move “race/color” to a section of the birth certificate that remains, to this day, confidential state information. Pearson reveals the simultaneous meanings of race as a “fact” of the population and a construction that can bring harm to individuals. With these challenges to the birth certificate’s claim to truth by individuals and groups harmed by its growing authority over individual identity and populational policies, Pearson is easily able to bring this long history up to the current wave of “bathroom bills” and other legislation used to empower the facts of the birth control over the autonomy of trans-Americans to live their lives as their authentic selves. Both the state and private citizens have used birth certificates to discriminate against multiple groups in US history, but Pearson shows us that those discriminated against also have a history of action and agency in reshaping the birth certificate. In the closing of the book, Pearson lauds the flexibility of the fixed document that is the birth certificate: “If our documents are meant to say who we are, then we ought to have a say in our documents.” (292) Pearson is only able to craft this sweeping narrative of a complex, powerful document over 150 years with exhausting research. Or at least, research that appears in her notes as exhaustion-inducing (I cannot speak for her frame of mind or level of energy at the end of the project). By my count, Pearson visited eleven different archives in nine different states to dig through papers of both government agencies (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Children’s Bureau) and individuals at the center of birth registration debates (such as Lemuel Shattuck and Grace Abbott). Juggling personal correspondence, government reports, and newspaper articles (to name just a few source types) Pearson exhibits her dexterity and care as a researcher. Historians interested in any number of topics in twentieth-century America could find new research paths just with a close reading of her footnotes. In the end, Pearson crafts one of those fascinating histories of an entity of all our lives that has always seemed inevitable in the progress of American culture. When I teach graduate students about how to come up with a research question, I ask them to practice by just looking around them and asking: “why is that?” Pearson asked, “why is that?” about one of the most meaningful documents in the country and answered with an original and captivating story that forces us all, historian and American alike, to reconsider our understandings of the facts of our own births. The birth certificate marks all of us, from the very moment we arrive in the world, as belonging or not, and as valuable or not. It creates the fiction that we all naturally fit within socially constructed categories like gender, race, lineage, and developmental age. Pearson is deftly able to create a narrative that appeals to, and should be read by, historians in multiple fields. Weaving together narratives of politics, race, gender, health, and family, Pearson has produced a manuscript with chapters that instructors can easily use to teach US History or any range of more specialized classes. An important historiographical intervention into the links between state surveillance, public health, and constructions of race, The Birth Certificate is a timely and eye-opening book.