What white mothers need to know
The activist and scholar bell hooks observed that the homeplace was a site of revolution. Whether you are a mother, or someone who works with mothers, you know that the act of mothering - all the emotional labor, bedtime stories, care and love, feeding, comforting, and encouraging - is an incredibly profound and meaningful experience.
But mothers are tired. Mothers are frustrated. Mothers are overwhelmed. The pandemic forced mothers everywhere to wake up to a painful truth…this world is not set up to support us. And until we understand how the institution of motherhood is socially constructed to exploit women and reinforce social inequality and injustice, we will continue to devalue mothers and hold them back from fully realizing their power and place in the world.
It’s time for a motherhood revolution.
This is a four-part blog series in which I dive into four cultural forces that oppress modern motherhood in America: patriarchal motherhood, whiteness, capitalism, and patriarchal religion. Stay tuned for the rest of the series, where I dive into mothering under capitalism, whiteness, and patriarchal religions!
Before I dive into this week’s topic, I want to take a second to acknowledge that white mothers and mothers of color will likely have very different reactions to this blog post. If you self-identify as a person of color, you may not particularly feel like reading a post about whiteness written by a white woman - feel free to pass on this week if so inclined! I welcome any feedback - please feel free to contact me if there is anything I have written that is incorrect or biased.
There is not one, universal experience of motherhood. What being a mother means to me is different from every other mother, and my reality and experiences in motherhood are not universally shared.
I will never, ever, EVER know what it means to be a Black mother in America. I did not fear that I faced an increased risk of mortality during my three pregnancies. My children have never been targeted because of the color of their skin or texture of their hair. I have never been afraid to let my teenage son walk alone downtown. I have never had to defend my family against prejudice of any kind...and that's mostly because I'm white.
It is up to ALL mothers to create the inclusive, healing, loving culture that we want our children to inherit. But it is primarily the work of white, straight mothers to shoulder the majority of the burden of creating a new culture of inclusivity.
What is whiteness?
“The plague of racism is insidious, entering into the minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into the bodies to find lifelong purchase in bloodstreams.”
― Maya Angelou
Whiteness means that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared. This results in systemic racism that is embedded in the laws and regulations of a society or an organization. It manifests as discrimination in areas such as criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, education, and political representation.
Just like patriarchy prioritizes men over women, whiteness privileges lighter skin over darker skin. Understanding whiteness means understanding the history of racism and white supremacy in our county, which is the ideology that white people should maintain domination.
History of Black mothering in the United States
“Blaming Black mothers, then, is a way of subjugating the Black race as a whole. At the same time, devaluing motherhood is particularly damaging to Black women.”
― Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
Let’s take a moment to examine our own history. The history of Black motherhood in this country is distressing. But it is critical that we truly understand the whole story of motherhood in our country for both white and Black mothers so that we can see where our culture needs to change the most.*
*I highly recommend the book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts as a must-read for anyone who cares to learn more about racial justice for mothers.
I am not going to detail the horrors that mothers experienced under slavery in America. But white women need to remember that it was perfectly legal for women in this country to be raped, forced to bear children, and then possibly have their baby taken away from them while they breastfed and cared for other women’s children.
That happened.
That is part of our history and it must be reckoned with, because we continue to feel the effects of these atrocities today. The history of racism against Black mothers continues today with the maternal mortality crisis.
In the book The Big Letdown: How Medicine, Big Business, and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding, Kimberly Sears-Allers reminds us that “as slaves, black women were never allowed to fully participate in the protecting and nurturing aspects of motherhood, including the act of breastfeeding.” To this day, the rates of breastfeeding among Black mothers are lower than among white mothers.
Even after slavery ended, the devaluation of Black motherhood and the control of Black reproduction continued.
The practice of eugenics (the attempt to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior) was presented as a science. One of the most impactful chapters in Killing the Black Body is “The Dark Side of Birth Control,” where Roberts exposes Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood) as collaborating with eugenicists to promote birth control as a way to limit the birth rates of families of color.
For many white women, the advent of the birth control pill represented sexual liberation and reproductive freedom. But Roberts honors the ambivalence felt by Black women around birth control when she writes, “we must acknowledge the justice of ensuring equal access to birth control for poor and minority women without denying the injustice of imposing birth control as a means of reducing their fertility.”
With just a few examples that I listed above, we can see how motherhood in the US has been experienced very differently by different groups of people. It is (past) time to create a new culture of mothering that is actively inclusive and anti-racist.
A new culture of anti-racist mothering
Resmaa Menakem writes about creating a new culture of "whiteness without supremacy." He wants us to redefine the word whiteness to mean an ideology that is actively anti-racist, and actively against white-body supremacy. We do not need to ask women of color to shoulder the burden of teaching us what this means. White-bodied mothers are perfectly capable of doing this work.
When Betty Friedan and many other white feminists in the 1960s and 1970s wrote about motherhood, they expressed it as a burden. Silvia Federici called being a housewife a fate worse than death in her 1975 essay, “Wages Against Housework.” The prevailing attitude was that children prevented women from leaving the house, getting an education or having careers; children trapped mothers at home. (This is an overgeneralization but reflective of much of the writing at the time.)
But generations of Black mothers saw motherhood as a refuge, a place where they were able to express love and creativity, create kinship networks and share childcare responsibilities communally. This legacy that was gained in slavery continues today; as bell hooks writes in “Homeplace (a site of resistance)”, Black mothers and grandmothers intentionally created a sense of home in the midst of oppression and domination to build a home place that was a site of liberation.
This sense of mothering as activism is something that white mothers can be inspired by. I will leave you with some questions to consider:
How can we create our own resistance at home?
Can we be actively anti-racist in our mothering as a way to build a home place that is a site of liberation?
What else do you need to learn for this to happen?
What can you do today?
Below is a very preliminary list of some suggested resources to begin the lifelong work of shifting our culture to one that is actively inclusive and uplifts and celebrates ALL mothers and children.
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Raise an Antiracist
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
Kimberly Sears-Allers, The Big Letdown: How Medicine, Big Business, and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the mending of Our Bodies and Hearts
D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Kim Anderson, Mother of the Nations: Indigenous Mothering as Global Resistance, Reclaiming and Recovering
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams (editors), Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines
Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor