Mothering While Black. Dawn Marie Dow
the competing devotions framework, which views mothers who allot more time to work as having a stronger “work devotion,” and those who allot more time to family as having a stronger “family devotion.”60 Both of these ideologies also privilege the nuclear family form. Although these ideologies of motherhood have been critiqued by a range of scholars—including the scholars who identified them—they still retain their hegemonic influence on many American mothers’ decisions regarding work and family.61 Indeed, when mothers combine work and family, whether by necessity or choice, they are said to experience internal conflict and feel compelled to justify their decisions in relation to these ideologies.62 Much of the scholarship that focuses on middle-class mothers suggests that all mothers make decisions in light of the same default cultural expectations, supports, and constraints and must seek out alternative cultural reference points and resources when they veer from the more traditional paths. However, as discussed in the next sections, scholars who examine the intersections of race, class, and gender have challenged the universality of these ideologies regarding work, family, parenting, and motherhood.63 Indeed, there is good reason to believe that these perspectives neither apply to nor are embraced by all mothers.
BRINGING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER COMPLICATIONS INTO MOTHERHOOD
Intersectional scholars have underscored that the ideologies and related practices of separate spheres and the cult of domesticity, and their contemporary iterations, were based on research that primarily focused on the perspectives of white middle-class mothers and their families, or included too few participants from other racial groups to adequately analyze possible distinctions based on racial and class identity.64 However, not all groups of mothers were encouraged by society to adopt these ideologies and practices.65 Indeed, as Bonnie Thornton Dill underscores, cultural pluralism and shifting economic terrains demand diverse family forms, which some may view as subordinate to other family structures.66 This body of scholarship that focuses on the family and motherhood has often downplayed or ignored the diversity in mothers’ experiences in relation to these ideologies.67 When nonwhite mothers and families are included, scholars often prioritize analyzing distinctions based on class status over racial identity, even when such distinctions are evident in the data.68 When race is examined, it is often viewed through a lens of cultural difference instead of as a component of the societal structure that shapes social interactions.69 Implicitly, this suggests that the experiences of white mothers and their related worldviews can be generalized to all women.
Long-standing differences in the cultural beliefs, practices, and material conditions between African American and white women date to the era of slavery and challenge the universal dominance of these ideologies among today’s African American women and mothers.70 Although African American middle-class mothers have been exposed to these dominant ideologies, they have historically been structurally, culturally, and economically excluded from embracing their practices and/or internalizing their beliefs. To the extent that African American and white families encounter similar pressures, they may respond in the same way—but historically they have often faced different realities.71 As a group, African American mothers have had a different relationship to paid labor, both legally and based on their economic circumstances, which has had important implications for African American middle-class mothers and their children.72 This different relationship has also played a part in producing a sense of value in mothers’ contributions in the public sphere and a different perspective on work within the home.73
In the contemporary era, African American middle-class mothers’ parenting practices and opportunities continue to be shaped by economic, cultural, and structural resources that are different from those of white middle-class mothers at both the macro and micro levels.74 Their practices and opportunities are shaped not only by characteristics that are internal to their families but also by external constraints they confront when deploying their resources in the broader society.75 Taking an intersectional approach, scholars have underscored that although the majority of white middle-class mothers have internalized the ideologies identified above, mothers of other racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds have generally not been encouraged to embrace and internalize them.76 Indeed, partially in response to negative societal evaluations of their worth and value, and a negative societal reception in the form of discrimination, African American women and mothers have proactively created and reproduced beliefs and practices related to motherhood, parenting, and childcare that differ from their white counterparts.77 As a consequence, African American mothers are often influenced by and feel beholden to distinct ideologies that reflect their own daily experiences and the needs of their communities.78 Indeed, even when these mothers decide to conform to traditional approaches to mothering, the logic behind those decisions may be framed by different motivations.79
THE ROAD MAP OF MOTHERING WHILE BLACK
This section explains the layout of this book. Part I, “Cultivating Con-sciousness,” includes four substantive chapters and examines how African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers approach parenting. Existing scholarship often asserts that class status trumps the importance of racial identity in decisions related to parenting.80 However, the accounts of these mothers illustrate how intersections of racial identity, gender, and class influenced their parenting practices, their motivations, and the specific version of racial identity they sought to foster in their children. These mothers used typical middle-class parenting strategies, but they also modified them and used additional strategies to address concerns related to the different societal reception they believed that they and their children would confront based on racial identity, class, and gender. Rather than only occasionally coming into play in specific situations, these three factors had a persistent and continuous impact on these mothers’ everyday experiences, decision-making, and parenting practices. They used specific strategies to maintain their sons’ safety and prevent them from being criminalized as “thugs.” They had other practices for protecting their daughters’ self-esteem and fostering their independence, self-worth, and self-sufficiency. Their parenting strategies were often motivated by a desire to foster specific versions of African American middle-class identity in their children that were influenced by different orientations to racial identity and middle-class status. Their accounts add to existing scholarship by examining the increasing diversity in African American middle-class racial identity and by revealing that some study participants believed their children had a broader range of identities from which to choose than “just black.”
Chapter 1, “Creating Racial Safety and Comfort: Class-, Race-, and Gender-Based Parenting Concerns,” outlines how study participants integrated aims for their children’s achievement with creating racially comfortable spaces for their children in their daily parenting decision-making. These decisions included, for example, their children’s schools and extracurricular activities. This chapter also describes how racial identity and gender together impacted the worries that these mothers had for their children and outlines different strategies mothers deployed to ensure their children could successfully inhabit and reproduce a middle-class status.
Chapter 2, “Border Crossers: Understanding Struggle,” introduces a group of mothers who aimed to ensure that their children were fluent in all parts of the African American community and in cultures of privilege. Border crossers defined authentic African American racial identity as understanding socioeconomic struggle and possessing “street smarts.” They wanted their children to be at ease in their interactions with African Americans from a range of social and economic positions. These mothers tended to be among the first generation of people in their families to reach middle-class status. Typically, they had been raised by working-class or poor parents (or grandparents) who did not have college degrees. This orientation to identity was strategically important to these mothers and their children, as they continued to need the skills to navigate social contexts marked by different levels of racial and economic privilege.
Chapter 3, “Border Policers: Finding Our Kind of People,” discusses mothers who wanted their children to