Mothering While Black. Dawn Marie Dow
middle-class mothers and poor and working-class African American mothers. In the contemporary era, African American middle-class mothers navigate a social and cultural context that has shifted to include increasing class divisions within African American communities, new neighborhood and educational constraints and opportunities, and postracial perspectives on identity that have not fully been considered in previous research.30
Scholars have questioned the idea that class is more important than racial identity by pointing out persistent challenges middle-class African Americans encounter across a range of social contexts, despite their additional resources.31 African Americans’ access to middle-class privileges is mediated through their racial and gender identities, which often prevent them from reaping the full benefits of their educational and economic resources.
When African Americans possess markers of middle-class status, such as a college education, a good job, and a decent income, those markers are often not accompanied by the same material benefits or security as they are for their white American counterparts.32 Middle-class African Americans continue to confront both explicit and implicit discrimination and, as a group, their economic, occupational, social, residential, and educational opportunities are substantially different from those of middle-class whites.33 African Americans with similar credit histories and financial profiles as whites, for example, face additional hurdles when seeking mortgages.34 Indeed, the lives of middle-class whites have often been underwritten by the economic wins of previous generations, which include, for example, parental assistance with educational costs, contributions to down payments for first-time home purchases, or inheritances.35
By contrast, scholars suggest that middle-class African Americans are more likely to be asked to give financial assistance to, rather than receive it from, their parents.36 They also are more likely to live in neighborhoods with fewer resources than those in which poor whites live.37 And when they do move into predominately white middle-class neighborhoods, research demonstrates that they face challenges such as feeling less welcome, experiencing additional surveillance when using neighborhood resources, and managing stress related to encounters with racism.38 Thus, even when they physically occupy the same spaces as middle-class whites, middle-class African Americans’ experiences of those contexts are very different due to their distinct societal reception.39
Where intergenerational economic mobility and class retention are concerned, the futures of African American middle-class children are far from certain. Patrick Sharkey points out that nearly 50 percent of these children experience downward mobility, as compared with 16 percent of their white middle-class counterparts.40 As a consequence, the reproduction of middle-class status cannot be taken for granted within African American families, and this uncertainty may impact parenting practices and priorities.41
A number of scholars who study middle-class parents have identified differences between what African American and white parents emphasize to their children,42 how they approach discipline,43 and what they identify as their current and future parenting concerns.44 The practices of African American middle-class families may differ from those of lower-income African Americans, but their practices may also differ from white middle-class parents whose children do not have to learn how to navigate racial stigma.45 Researchers have also found diversity in how African Americans approach the racial socialization of their children and the extent to which gender influences how they socialize their children.46 In the contemporary era, African American middle-class families continue to experience racism, with their children beginning to have such encounters at an early age.47
Despite evidence of clear differences in how society responds to middle-class African Americans as opposed to middle-class whites, research on families often focuses on how individual characteristics such as income, educational attainment, culture, and family structure impact life outcomes. Although these are important, this scholarship fails to consider how certain kinds of social status constrain or empower the deployment of resources and how mothers and families respond to those constraints. Part of the explanation for the absence of this analysis is that when the experiences of middle-class families are considered, that consideration is often limited to white middle-class families, which have not been impacted by histories of residential segregation and related processes, such as racial discrimination in lending, redlining, racial steering, and school defunding.48 Part of the experience of being white middle-class parents is not having to regularly or explicitly think about racial identity or how racial identity informs parental concerns or decision-making. Conversely, as Margaret O’Donoghue points out, African American middle-class parents do not generally share the luxury of not thinking about racial identity, racism, and gendered racism and how it informs their and their children’s experiences, decisions, and opportunities.49
Part of unpacking and understanding African American middle-class mothers’ approaches to raising their children requires examining how these families are received differently, or at least how they perceive themselves to be received, in the broader mainstream and largely white society. Diversity in families and their structures is, in part, produced by how intersections of racial stratification and cultural factors constrain and empower their resources.50
In addition to addressing concerns related to racism, African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers’ parenting practices provide insights into the diverse micro-level processes related to racial formation theory.51 Michael Dawson suggests that African Americans view their fates as linked because of shared cultural, economic, and political perspectives and shared experiences of discrimination.52 Mary Waters comes to a similar conclusion regarding this linked-fate orientation, but she attributes it to American society giving African Americans no alternative other than to identify as a racial group.53 Recently, however, this linked-fate orientation has been questioned. A report produced by the Pew Charitable Trust Foundation revealed that 40 percent of African Americans perceive an expanding gap in the values of middle-class and low-income African Americans, such that African Americans can no longer be viewed as one undifferentiated racial group.54 African Americans at the economic extremes—highest income and lowest income—most strongly held this belief of an expanding gap in values. Research conducted by Karyn Lacy also underscores how some middle-class African Americans choose to highlight their racial and/or class identities depending on their social context.55 This scholarship suggests there is both increasing diversity in how middle-class African Americans choose to identify and enduring shared concerns that traverse class background. Even so, it fails to examine how gender further complicates these identity processes. In addition, this research has not fully explored the motivations that middle-class African American mothers have in fostering specific versions of African American middle-class identity in their children.
CHALLENGING THE GOOD MOTHER–GOOD WORKER PARADIGM
Despite recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data demonstrating that 67.9 percent of married mothers and 76 percent of unmarried mothers participate in the labor force, the second ideology related to motherhood and parenting assumes that, in the American context, there is widespread acceptance of the idea that being a good mother requires women to focus primarily on their children and families.56 This perspective is derived from two related ideologies—separate spheres and the cult of domesticity—that emerged during the Industrial Revolution. The separate spheres ideology emphasizes that women should dedicate themselves to the private sphere of home and family, and that men should dedicate themselves to the public sphere of work and wage earning.57 The cult of domesticity, as a complementary ideology, emphasizes four key virtues of “true womanhood”: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.58 These ideologies assume the superiority of the nuclear and self-sufficient family in accomplishing the needs of the family.
Although these ideologies emerged more than a century ago, they continue to shape dominant views of the family in both mainstream and academic discourse. Two contemporary academic iterations of separate spheres and the cult of domesticity dominate family and work scholarship. The first is the intensive mothering ideology, which envisions mothers as ideally committing enormous financial and emotional resources to their children and being intimately involved in all aspects