Goodbye Mammy, Hello Mom: Head Start, Black Motherhood, and 1960s Racial Capitalism

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Class, and Colonialism in U.S. Educational Contexts

Abstract

Drawing from periodical and government records, the paper demonstrates that Head Start’s primary appeal among 1960s policymakers and Black activists alike was to support poor Black parents, not educate their young children as is traditionally imagined, though through differing discourses. Head Start allowed policymakers to provide concessions to Black mothers’ economic aspirations while promoting an ideology that stigmatized Black parents and suppressed the 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, Rowan University