Maintaining Their Dignity: The Contemporary State of Schooling for Adolescent Black Mothers and Their Children

• In Event: Children’s Pedagogies of Care: Listening, Planting, Sensing, Dignifying, Playing, and Kincrafting

Abstract

In Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy, Kristin Luker (1996), begins with David, a bright and curious child, and his mother, Michelle, a high school student focused on graduating. However, “David’s future is already blighted…[and] in the eyes of many, already well on the way to a life of trouble and failure” (p. 3). The lives of David and his mother are wrapped up in the webs of care, education, and public health that are a central reproductive and educational justice issue of our time. Nowhere is this truer than in the contemporary lives of adolescent Black mothers and their children, who exist within the “dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing project” (Spillers, 1987, p. 72) of anti-Black terror that has haunted the lives of Black Americans since the Middle Passage. This lack of care, or ‘weathering’ (Geronimus, 1992) experienced by young Black mothers and children exposes the layers of racism, classism and sexism that are entrenched in our educational and public health systems.

The 1990s reproductive justice movement demanded the right to parent with dignity and support (Hans & White, 2019), and while this renewed movement (Onwuachi-Saunders, Dang & Murray, 2019) created some change for young mothers, adolescent parenthood remains largely disparaged in American society. Within a media culture where young, White mothers are glamorized, young, Black pregnancy is seen as “in every aspect, an antisocial act and a public health problem” (Geronimus, 2003, p. 881) and Black children are seen as future “problems” (Hofferth, 1987). Without centering both Black mothers’ and their children’s dignity, livelihoods and experiences, movements for reproductive and educational justice are both incomplete. Taking up Sherell McArthur and Monique Lane’s (2018) call for a “Black feminist pedagogical practice as a viable intervention alternative to traditional methods of educating Black girls” (p. 1), I engage with the schooling of adolescent Black parents and their children from the mid-late 20th century to now.

Within these historical and cultural factors, I engage with contemporary Black scholars (Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick) to weave understandings of how race, and particularly Blackness, is a key component of both the conversation around and the continued social, economic and educational concerns of young Black mothers and the ways they are (un)cared for. Specifically, I insist on viewing Black adolescent mothers outside of their “controlling images ' (Collins, 1990) as irresponsible, uneducated, and incompetent, and maintaining their dignity and right to parent in safe and supported ways.

Among these webs of violence, brutality and erasure that shape the lives of Black families, several pedagogical questions emerge, including: how do young Black mothers and their children experience care or have care withheld within school? What are the ways that Black mothers and their children experience and view themselves and their educations in the face of their societal markers as “moral and personal failures” (Solinger, 2000)? What are the “critical dialogues” (Chase, 2019, p. 570) that educators need to have with Black teenage mothers, their partners, and their children to center pedagogical care and healing?

Author

• Cece Fleury-Feldberg, Graduate Center - CUNY