Black feminist theory is a field that has reached an impasse in its situatedness in conversation with white historiography (or ontology), which maintains that people were reduced to property objects in the colonial Americas. Recent conversations within Black feminist theory, for example, have likened the agency of propertized beings in the aftermath of slavery to that of an actant such as a rock (Hartman 2021). Previous iterations of this conversation promised to untether such actants from ontological terror (Warren 2018) via appeals to alternative epistemologies (Robinson 1983; Spillers 1987). Black feminist appeals have been taken up by a handful of scholars writing in the Black radical tradition (Hartman 2016; Moten 2003, 2007, 2013, 2017; Taylor 2019; Weheliye 2014; Weinbaum 2019). Scholars writing largely outside of the Black radical tradition, meanwhile, have sought to reconcile tensions between the Black feminist epistemology proffered by Hortense Spillers and embodied experiences of blackness and femaleness (Hartman 2007, 2008; Morgan 2004, 2018, 2021; Musser 2018; Nash 2019, 2021). Few such scholars, however, have been willing to forgo hard-won epistemological ground that changes the terms of debates about racial capitalism in order to accommodate the apparently cosmological intervention of Womanist theory (Walker 1983; Stewart 2021). This paper seeks to untangle some of the epistemological traditions at play in these debates, and to begin to structure a theoretical frame that will allow for the unconventional analysis of midwifery as Black radical tradition.