Raising Love in a Time of Lovelessness: Lessons of Pinay Motherscholars Amid the Anti-Asian Virus

• In Event: The Intersections of Motherscholar Identities in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
To be a motherscholar in and of itself is a daunting task. As Matias (2011) offers, to be a motherscholar means both/and where each inform the other much like Leonardo’s (2012) raceclass concept where race informs class and vice versa. Similarly, the motherscholar is both a mother that draws from her practice of mothering to inform her research and pedagogy inasmuch as she is a scholar who draws from her activism to inform her practice of mothering. And, in knowing the academy is fraught with patriarchal and white supremacist tendencies, the careful balancing act of motherscholars, moreover, motherscholars of Color, often go unnoticed. Needless to say, the work of the motherscholar of Color is deep and when coupled with COVID 19 the work becomes almost unbearable. To complicate matters more is that with COVID 19 came a resurgence of Anti-Asian racism such that Pinay motherscholars of racial justice and education are not only teaching and researching about racism and education, they are now living and breathing it when raising their own children. Suffice it to say that during these times of heightened anti-Asian racism, national self-isolation, and the panic of a worldwide pandemic, we, Pinay motherscholars are struggling to raise our Filipino children with and in love during a heartless, loveless time.

Theoretical Framing
We draw from Critical Race Theory, FlipCrit, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Ethnic Studies to provide a critical race commentary on how the current day anti-Asian racism is nothing more than a similar play out of the U.S.’s handbook on anti-Asian sentiment. By juxtaposing the anti-Asian racism from today and yesterday readers come away with realizing that this resurgence of racism is a familiar manipulative strategy to scapegoat human beings as a means to an end for political manipulation and power.
Methods and Data
After setting the context of U.S. anti-Asian racism the paper then takes a narrative turn employing Critical Race Theory’s method of counterstorytelling (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) and methodologies from feminism of color like Pinayism (de Jesus, 2005; Tintiangco-Cubales & Sacramento, 2009) to engage in poetic assemblage. In doing so, it humanizes the paper by drawing from the experiences of a national pool of Pinay motherscholars. Each counterstory illuminates just how Pinay motherscholars navigate the hate found in a patriarchal and white supremacist academy and the white supremacy in their own communities under anti-Asian COVID 19, while still raising their Filipino children with love and in love.

Significance and Results
To be clear, though motherscholars writ large are experiencing a similar exhaustion of working while rearing children Pinay motherscholars are experiencing a compounded exhaustion of working while not only rearing, but also protecting, debunking, and saving our children’s identities, souls, and hearts (Daus-Magbual & Daus-Magbual 2018). To illuminate, interspersed throughout the paper is poetry that will unify at the end of the paper as a forever literary metaphor of what it is like to raise love in a time of lovelessness.

Authors

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Kentucky

• Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, San Francisco State University

• Jocyl Sacramento, California State University - East Bay

• Tracy Lachica Buenavista, California State University - Northridge

• Korina Jocson, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Arlene Sudaria Daus-Magbual, San Francisco State University

• Patricia Espiritu Halagao, University of Hawaii - Manoa