On Reimagining Sleep and Rest Outside the Shadows of Racialized Labor

This article consists of a transcribed conversation between two colleagues and close friends, neuroscientist and expert on Black peoples’ sleep, Lauren Whitehurst (Yale University) and Black feminist scholar Mali Collins (American University), to flesh out the nuances between sleep and rest, what it does to Black bodies, and what it means for our reproductive futures. This conversation (recorded, transcribed, and edited) will also consider the intersections between Black feminist adages that mandate rest and self-care as a political act, and the shift and caregiving work that both affords and prohibits these expressions of feminism. Taking into account Collins’s active doula practice of seven years and Whitehurst’s lived activism as a Black farmer, this conversation engages Black feminist theories of science, psychology, innovation, and medical humanities to return the emphasis of rest on our ability to live fully, and how the quality of Black rest is neglected from infancy to mature age.