What's Birth Got to Do With It? Skepticism, Voice, and Race at a Midwives’ Vigil in London

ABSTRACT This paper argues that interactions between midwives and allied birth workers “off the clock” reveal diffuse processes of racialization in voice, speech, and visual signs in political spaces. Ethnographically attending to a small demonstration (“the vigil”) staged by midwives in London, England, and the preparation events, it analyzes the production of “white public spaces” that protect privilege by obscuring “negative realities” of white complicity in racism. With “incommunicability” and “raciolinguistics,” this paper provides an analysis of the words, signs, and relationships communicating the negotiation of “competing crises” on the ground. Responding to the characterization of race and racism as “silent things” in the British context, I propose skepticism as a salient register in contexts of competing knowledge or divergent points of view: It can breed uncertainties about the intent or effect of political struggles when race is sidelined or silenced.