Mothering While Black. Dawn Marie Dow
At the time of the interview, Christine owned her own business as an alternative medical practitioner and was engaged to marry a white man with whom she had been in a long-term relationship and with whom she had a son. Christine described how she started to feel more African American after she became a mother. She described having many white friends and knew many white families with whom she felt close and whose company she enjoyed, but after she became a mother, she found herself seeking out other African American middle-class mothers. Despite these close connections to a range of white people, during our interview, Christine easily rattled off a list of playgrounds that she no longer visited because of the cool reception she believed she received from the white mothers she met in these locations. She explained,
The main thing about being a black mom that is probably important to say is not feeling included in white motherhood society. . . . It feels like when I go to the playground, there is the “them” and there is the “us.” For the most part, black moms don’t care about what other moms are doing, but I have friends who have left playgroups because the white women look at us funny or like you don’t exist.
Christine never felt completely at ease or accepted when she visited parks in predominately white neighborhoods or participated in extracurricular activities comprised primarily of white mothers and children. At times, she even felt excluded and judged. Overall, Christine believed that white middle-class mothers distanced themselves from her and her son.
A key part of Christine’s experience as a mother was feeling that motherhood was not an experience that transcended racial divisions; in fact, it reified those divisions and excluded her from the dominant white middle-class mothering experience. Christine’s account illustrates the limits of existing research on middle-class families that focuses on how socio-economic status impacts mothers’ parenting practices without giving much consideration to how racial identity and gender further complicate those practices.2 Based on Christine’s experiences interacting with white middle-class mothers and her involvement in an African American middle-class mothers’ group, Christine believed African American and white middle-class mothers had different parenting concerns, took different approaches to raise their children, and experienced motherhood differently.
Christine’s account suggests how the intersections of race, class, and gender influence how mothers parent their children and how they navigate work and family. Christine’s distinct parenting concerns resurfaced when she described how these three factors informed her approach to raising her son.
I don’t want his understandings of black folks to be from the media. You know, I want him to know black people as we are. [I also don’t want him] growing up with that “black man” chip on the shoulder. Feeling we are weak. Whites have done something to us. We can’t do something because of white people. I want him to understand racism in reality so when stuff comes up, we can deal with it, but I don’t want him to go around looking for problems.
Despite being middle class and having plans to enroll her son in private school for his education, Christine felt limited in her ability to protect him from the realities of the intersection of racism and sexism—often referred to as gendered racism.3 Her concerns focused on how her son would be perceived and received by society.
Christine’s concerns are supported by research that demonstrates that African American children confront different treatment in school and with law enforcement, which continues into adulthood, in workplace settings, often varying based on gender.4 Sociologist Ann Ferguson, in Bad Boys, uses participant observation and interviews with African American boys, teachers, administrators, and relatives to provide insight into the dynamics of the school-to-prison pipeline.5 Ferguson uncovers how racial identity, masculinity, and conforming (or not) to mainstream white middle-class institutional norms are implicated in how boys are labeled “troublemakers” and destined for jail or are labeled “school boys” and put on an academic path.6 Indeed, scholars have consistently found that within schools, African American boys are more harshly disciplined and more often and more quickly labeled as aggressive and violent.7 African American girls also confront negative assumptions about their behavior, including being viewed as aggressive, sassy, or unladylike.8 This body of research has primarily focused on how educational institutions impact children and families from lower-income African American communities. Nevertheless, having additional resources did not remove these issues from Christine’s parenting concerns, or from those of the other middle- and upper-middle-class African American mothers in my research. Christine worked to find ways to temper the impact of this societal reception on her son’s self-concept and his ability to survive and thrive in life as an African American boy and future man.
When I asked Christine if she felt she had access to other African American middle-class mothers and families, she said, “Maybe not, I guess with my family and friends . . . but it seems like I have to search it out, and it doesn’t seem like it is there. Like, I had to put it in my head that I wanted some black mommy-friends and I had to go find them.” Christine’s account underscores the invisible labor that she engaged in to gain access to other middle- and upper-middle-class African American mothers, families, and communities. Unlike white middle-class families that have a range of neighborhoods and schools that include other white middle-class families, African American middle-class families often have trouble finding middle-class communities that include a significant representation of people of color. This was true for Christine and the other mothers I interviewed for this research.
The extra and often invisible labor to create networks that include other middle-class African American families may be particularly salient for mothers who live in large urban areas such as the San Francisco Bay Area, the location of my research. Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco have all experienced a significant out-migration of African Americans to suburban areas, particularly among middle-class African Americans.9 Indeed, the Bay Area, as an urban center, is not unique in facing this pattern; in recent years, many cities have established task forces to study the issue of the dwindling numbers of African Americans produced by out-migration.10 This phenomenon is becoming common across the United States, as African Americans increasingly move from cities to suburban locales where there may be few other African Americans.11
The phenomenon of out-migration has left behind less robust African American neighborhoods in terms of population and a more residentially dispersed middle class. It has also produced heightened racial isolation for those African Americans who have moved to predominately white suburbs. Some scholars have referred to this phenomenon as a reverse migration, or the New Great Migration, relating it to the Great Migration of African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century from Southern states to cities on the East and West Coast, and in the Midwest.12
To explain why having access to other middle-class African American families was important to her, Christine said,
I want my son to be around black people. We have wonderful neighbors and friends who are white. . . . [But] I really didn’t have any other black mother-friends who had kids the same age. I really want my son to be around black folks. . . . I have gone out of my way to find them, to make sure we see them frequently so he has black playmates.
Christine believed that providing her son with exposure to African American middle-class mothers and their children and families would help to support and develop his self-esteem and racial identity and increase his comfort level. It would also normalize his life experiences as “not unusual” because he is African American and middle class. On the one hand, Christine sought out African American middle-class mothers because she felt pulled toward these mothers based on cultural similarities, shared life experiences, and a desire to protect her son from racial bias. On the other hand, Christine also sought out these groups of mothers because she felt pushed away and excluded in her interactions with white middle-class mothers.
Christine’s vignette underscores that, for far too long, sociological understandings of the American family, motherhood, parenting, and the work–family conflicts and challenges that emerge from these understandings have been based on a reading of the experiences of white middle-class mothers and their families. The place of African American mothers and their families in this picture was viewed as a deviation