What They Did to My Mama: Intersectional Analysis of Head Start, 1960s Racial Capitalism, and Black Motherhood

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 5:25 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Toward Family Engagement: Reimagining Parental Involvement (Table 6)

Abstract

Drawing from government records and periodicals, this paper demonstrates that Head Start’s main appeal among 1960s policymakers and Black activists alike was to support poor Black parents though through differing discourses, rather than educate their young children as is traditionally imagined. Head Start allowed policymakers to provide concessions to Black mothers’ economic aspirations while promoting an ideology that stigmatized Black parents and suppressed potential for collective organizing between struggling poor and middle-class families. This finding is significant as Head Start’s origins is emblematic of the continued focus on education-based policies to respond to more radical demands for uplift and channel unrest towards individual and cultural reforms, rather than accepting responsibility how un- and under-employment is fundamentally structured by racial capitalism.

Author

• Kenzo K. Sung, Loyola Marymount University