Black Motherwork as Activist Stance: #BLM Mothers Cultivating Developmentally Responsive Activism in Children

• In Event: Black Mamas Teach: Leaning on, Learning From, and Centering Black M(other)work as Educational Praxis

Abstract

In the midst of multiple pandemics, most salient of which is the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Covid-19 global crisis, Black women’s intergenerational Motherwork continues to transform material conditions and rupture binaried boundaries that serve to dehumanize and invisibilize our experiences. In this present moment, this looks like emphasizing the unique ways Covid-19 disproportionately impacts Black families, advocating for #policefreeschools and ensuring that decisions to reopen schools or require vaccinations does not become yet another way to criminalize Black children. Black mothers continue to be at the frontlines of the pandemic and picket line, centering and elevating the voices of their children and their broader communities.

Weaving themes of Black maternal power, individual and collective networks of care (affectionately known as the village), and practices of survivance (with freedom dreams of liberation), in this paper, I conceptualize Black motherwork as an activist stance. This paper (re)visits and (re)interprets existing qualitative interviews from 2016 master's thesis project The Critical Race Socialization of Black Children during the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Utilizing the three core components of Motherwork as codes, (1) survival (2) power and (3) identity, I (re)analyze six in-depth, two-hour interviews with Black mothers who view their organizing with #BLM as central to their parenting and their parenting as vital to the ways they resist institutionalized racism. In response to their children feeling othered in schooling and broader societal contexts, these mothers engage in the process of critical race socialization, which includes cultivating developmentally responsive approaches to activism or organizing with/for/by their children. These dyadic approaches to transformative social change were also considerate of the individual characteristics of each child (e.g. processing pain through poetry and performance versus direct action. The mothers in this study shared that their children’s methods to resisting institutionalized racism in schools and community (e.g. direct action protests, Black history Vlog, organizing classmates in schools), were chosen and driven by their children and also inspired by bearing witness during #BLM actions, critical media literacy and community relationships with their “village” (Author 1, 2018). Activism for these mothers is an important pathway to positive development, learning and intergenerational healing-- supported by broader literature on the direct positive effects of activism in the lives of Black youth, and parental racial socialization’s role in positive youth sociopolitical development (Anyiwo, Palmer, Author 1, Starck, & Hope, 2020). This paper contributes to work that rests at the intersections of activism, mothering and identity, and reimagines the timeless legacy and impact of Black children and families in transforming schooling and community spaces.

Author

• Janay M Garrett, The University of Pennsylvania