Bad, Black, Mothers---
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Aishah Shahidah Simmons
Dec 2, 2009, 8:49:24 AM12/2/09
to firewalki...@gmail.com, push2p...@googlegroups.com, Cyber Quilting Experiment
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From: Jacqui Patterson
Date: Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 11:49 PM
Subject: [WOCUnited] Bad, Black, Mothers---Blog by Melissa Harris Lacewell
To: WOC United <wocu...@yahoogroups.com>, Incite DC <inci...@yahoogroups.com>
Blog by Melissa Harris Lacewell
Bad Black Mothers
by The Nation
Bad black mothers are everywhere these days.
With Michelle Obama in the White House, consciously and conspicuously
serving as mom-in-chief, I expected (even somewhat dreaded) a
resurgence of Claire Huxtable images of black motherhood: effortless
glamour, professional success, measured wit, firm guidance, loving
partnership, and the calm reassurance that American women can, in
fact, have it all.
Instead the news is currently dominated by horrifying images of
African American mothers.
Most ubiquitous is the near universally celebrated performance of
Mo’Nique in the new film Precious. Critically and popularly acclaimed
Precious is the film adaption of the novel Push. It is the story of
an illiterate, obese, dark-skinned, teenager who is pregnant, for the
second time, with her rapist father’s child. (Think The Color Purple
in a 1980s inner-city rather than 1930s rural Georgia)
At the core of the film is Precious’ unimaginably brutal mother. She
is an unredeemed monster who brutalizes her daughter verbally,
emotionally, physically and sexually. This mother pimps both her
daughter and the government. Stealing her daughter’s childhood and
her welfare payments.
Just as Precious was opening to national audiences a real-life
corollary emerged in the news cycle, when 5-year-old Shaniya Davis
was found dead along a roadside in North Carolina. Her mother, a 25-year-
old woman with a history of drug abuse, has been arrested on charges
of child trafficking. The charges allege that this mother offered her
5-year-old daughter for sex with adult men.
Yet another black mother made headlines in the past week, when U.S.
soldier, Alexis Hutchinson, refused to report for deployment to
Afghanistan. Hutchinson is a single mother of an infant, and was
unable to find suitable care for her son before she was deployed. She
had initially turned to her own mother who found it impossible to
care for the child because of prior caregiver commitments. Stuck
without reasonable accommodations, Hutchinson chose not to deploy.
Hutchinson’s son was temporally placed in foster care. She faces
charges and possible jail time.
These stories are a reminder, that for African American women,
reproduction has never been an entirely private matter.
Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, chose the stories of enslaved black
mothers to depict the most horrifying effects of American slavery. In
her novel, Beloved, Morrison reveals the unimaginable pain some black
mothers experienced because their children were profitable for their
enslavers. Enslaved black women did not birth children; they produced
units for sale, measurable in labor contributions. Despite the
patrilineal norm that governed free society, enslaved mothers were
forced to pass along their enslaved status to their infants; ensuring
intergenerational chattel bondage was the first inheritance black
mothers gave to black children in America.
As free citizens black women’s reproduction was no longer directly
tied to profits. In this new context, black mothers became the object
of fierce eugenics efforts. Black women, depicted as sexually
insatiable breeders, are adaptive for a slave holding society but not
for the new context of freedom. Black women’s assumed lasciviousness
and rampant reproduction became threatening. In Killing the Black
Body, law professor, Dorothy Roberts, explains how the state employed
involuntary sterilization, pressure to submit to long-term birth
control, and restriction of state benefits for large families as a
means to control black women’s reproduction.
At the turn of the century many public reformers held African
American women particularly accountable for the “degenerative
conditions” of the race. Black women were blamed for being
insufficient housekeepers, inattentive mothers, and poor educators of
their children. Because women were supposed to maintain society’s
moral order, any claim about rampant disorder was a burden laid
specifically at women’s feet.
In a 1904 pamphlet "Experiences of the Race problem. By a Southern
White Woman” the author claims of black women, “They are the greatest
menace possible to the moral life of any community where they live.
And they are evidently the chief instruments of the degradation of
the men of their own race. When a man’s mother, wife, and daughters
are all immoral women, there is no room in his fallen nature for the
aspirations of honor and virtue…I cannot imagine such a creation as a
virtuous black woman.”
Decades later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report “The Negro
Family: The Case for National Action” designated black mothers as the
principal cause of a culture of pathology, which kept black people
from achieving equality. Moynihan’s research predated the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, but instead of identifying the structural barriers facing
African American communities, he reported the assumed deviance of
Negro families.
This deviance was clear and obvious, he opined, because black
families were led by women who seemed to have the primary decision
making roles in households. Moynihan’s conclusions granted permission
to two generations of conservative policy makers to imagine poor,
black women as domineering household managers whose unfeminine
insistence on control both emasculated their potential male partners
and destroyed their children’s future opportunities. The Moynihan
report encouraged the state not to view black mother as women doing
the best they could in tough circumstances, but instead to blame them
as unrelenting cheats who unfairly demand assistance from the system.
Black mothers were again blamed as the central cause of social and
economic decline in the early 1990s, when news stories and popular
films about “crack babies” became dominant. Crack babies were the
living, squealing, suffering evidence of pathological black
motherhood and American citizens were going to have to pay the bill
for the children of these bad mothers.
Susan Douglass and Meredith Michaels, authors of The Mommy Myth
explain that media created the “crack baby” phenomenon as a part of a
broader history that understands black motherhood as inherently
pathological. They write: “It turned out there was no convincing
evidence that use of crack actually causes abnormal babies, even
though the media insisted this was so…media coverage of crack babies
serves as a powerful cautionary tale about the inherent fitness of
poor or lower class African American women to be mothers at all.”
This ugly history and its policy ramifications are the backdrop
against which these three contemporary black mother stories must
be viewed.
Undoubtedly Mo’Nique has given an amazing performance in Precious.
But the critical and popular embrace of this depiction of a monstrous
black mother has potentially important, and troubling, political
meaning. In a country with tens of thousands of missing and exploited
children, it is not accidental that the abuse and murder of Shaniya
Davis captured the American media cycle just as Precious opened. The
sickening acts of Shaniya's mother become the story that underlines
and makes tangible, believable, and credible the jaw-dropping horror
of Mo’Nique's character.
And here too is Alexis Hutchinson. As a volunteer soldier in wartime,
she ought to embody the very core of American citizen sacrifice.
Instead she is a bad black mother. Implied in the her story is the
damning idea that Hutchinson has committed the very worse infraction
against her child and her country. Hutchinson has failed to marry a
responsible, present, bread-winning man who would free her of the
need to labor outside the home. Hutchinson does not stay on the home
front clutching her weeping young child as her man goes off to war.
Instead, she struggles to find a safe place for him while she heads
off to battle. Her motherhood is not idyllic, it is problematic. Like
so many other black mothers her parenting is presented as disruptive
to her duties as a citizen.
It is worth noting that Sarah Palin's big public comeback is situated
right in the middle of this news cycle full of "bad black mothers."
Palin's own eye-brow raising reproductive choices and parenting
outcomes have been deemed off-limits after her skirmish with late
night TV comedians. Embodied in Palin, white motherhood still
represents a renewal of the American dream; black motherhood
represents its downfall.
Each of these stories, situated in a long tradition of pathologizing
black motherhood, serves a purpose. Each encourages Americans to see
black motherhood as a distortion of true motherhood ideals. Its
effect is troublesome for all mothers of all races who must navigate
complex personal, familial, social, and political circumstances.
From: Jacqui Patterson
Date: Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 11:49 PM
Subject: [WOCUnited] Bad, Black, Mothers---Blog by Melissa Harris Lacewell
To: WOC United <wocu...@yahoogroups.com>, Incite DC <inci...@yahoogroups.com>
FYI.....
Blog by Melissa Harris Lacewell
Bad Black Mothers
by The Nation
Bad black mothers are everywhere these days.
With Michelle Obama in the White House, consciously and conspicuously
serving as mom-in-chief, I expected (even somewhat dreaded) a
resurgence of Claire Huxtable images of black motherhood: effortless
glamour, professional success, measured wit, firm guidance, loving
partnership, and the calm reassurance that American women can, in
fact, have it all.
Instead the news is currently dominated by horrifying images of
African American mothers.
Most ubiquitous is the near universally celebrated performance of
Mo’Nique in the new film Precious. Critically and popularly acclaimed
Precious is the film adaption of the novel Push. It is the story of
an illiterate, obese, dark-skinned, teenager who is pregnant, for the
second time, with her rapist father’s child. (Think The Color Purple
in a 1980s inner-city rather than 1930s rural Georgia)
At the core of the film is Precious’ unimaginably brutal mother. She
is an unredeemed monster who brutalizes her daughter verbally,
emotionally, physically and sexually. This mother pimps both her
daughter and the government. Stealing her daughter’s childhood and
her welfare payments.
Just as Precious was opening to national audiences a real-life
corollary emerged in the news cycle, when 5-year-old Shaniya Davis
was found dead along a roadside in North Carolina. Her mother, a 25-year-
old woman with a history of drug abuse, has been arrested on charges
of child trafficking. The charges allege that this mother offered her
5-year-old daughter for sex with adult men.
Yet another black mother made headlines in the past week, when U.S.
soldier, Alexis Hutchinson, refused to report for deployment to
Afghanistan. Hutchinson is a single mother of an infant, and was
unable to find suitable care for her son before she was deployed. She
had initially turned to her own mother who found it impossible to
care for the child because of prior caregiver commitments. Stuck
without reasonable accommodations, Hutchinson chose not to deploy.
Hutchinson’s son was temporally placed in foster care. She faces
charges and possible jail time.
These stories are a reminder, that for African American women,
reproduction has never been an entirely private matter.
Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, chose the stories of enslaved black
mothers to depict the most horrifying effects of American slavery. In
her novel, Beloved, Morrison reveals the unimaginable pain some black
mothers experienced because their children were profitable for their
enslavers. Enslaved black women did not birth children; they produced
units for sale, measurable in labor contributions. Despite the
patrilineal norm that governed free society, enslaved mothers were
forced to pass along their enslaved status to their infants; ensuring
intergenerational chattel bondage was the first inheritance black
mothers gave to black children in America.
As free citizens black women’s reproduction was no longer directly
tied to profits. In this new context, black mothers became the object
of fierce eugenics efforts. Black women, depicted as sexually
insatiable breeders, are adaptive for a slave holding society but not
for the new context of freedom. Black women’s assumed lasciviousness
and rampant reproduction became threatening. In Killing the Black
Body, law professor, Dorothy Roberts, explains how the state employed
involuntary sterilization, pressure to submit to long-term birth
control, and restriction of state benefits for large families as a
means to control black women’s reproduction.
At the turn of the century many public reformers held African
American women particularly accountable for the “degenerative
conditions” of the race. Black women were blamed for being
insufficient housekeepers, inattentive mothers, and poor educators of
their children. Because women were supposed to maintain society’s
moral order, any claim about rampant disorder was a burden laid
specifically at women’s feet.
In a 1904 pamphlet "Experiences of the Race problem. By a Southern
White Woman” the author claims of black women, “They are the greatest
menace possible to the moral life of any community where they live.
And they are evidently the chief instruments of the degradation of
the men of their own race. When a man’s mother, wife, and daughters
are all immoral women, there is no room in his fallen nature for the
aspirations of honor and virtue…I cannot imagine such a creation as a
virtuous black woman.”
Decades later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report “The Negro
Family: The Case for National Action” designated black mothers as the
principal cause of a culture of pathology, which kept black people
from achieving equality. Moynihan’s research predated the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, but instead of identifying the structural barriers facing
African American communities, he reported the assumed deviance of
Negro families.
This deviance was clear and obvious, he opined, because black
families were led by women who seemed to have the primary decision
making roles in households. Moynihan’s conclusions granted permission
to two generations of conservative policy makers to imagine poor,
black women as domineering household managers whose unfeminine
insistence on control both emasculated their potential male partners
and destroyed their children’s future opportunities. The Moynihan
report encouraged the state not to view black mother as women doing
the best they could in tough circumstances, but instead to blame them
as unrelenting cheats who unfairly demand assistance from the system.
Black mothers were again blamed as the central cause of social and
economic decline in the early 1990s, when news stories and popular
films about “crack babies” became dominant. Crack babies were the
living, squealing, suffering evidence of pathological black
motherhood and American citizens were going to have to pay the bill
for the children of these bad mothers.
Susan Douglass and Meredith Michaels, authors of The Mommy Myth
explain that media created the “crack baby” phenomenon as a part of a
broader history that understands black motherhood as inherently
pathological. They write: “It turned out there was no convincing
evidence that use of crack actually causes abnormal babies, even
though the media insisted this was so…media coverage of crack babies
serves as a powerful cautionary tale about the inherent fitness of
poor or lower class African American women to be mothers at all.”
This ugly history and its policy ramifications are the backdrop
against which these three contemporary black mother stories must
be viewed.
Undoubtedly Mo’Nique has given an amazing performance in Precious.
But the critical and popular embrace of this depiction of a monstrous
black mother has potentially important, and troubling, political
meaning. In a country with tens of thousands of missing and exploited
children, it is not accidental that the abuse and murder of Shaniya
Davis captured the American media cycle just as Precious opened. The
sickening acts of Shaniya's mother become the story that underlines
and makes tangible, believable, and credible the jaw-dropping horror
of Mo’Nique's character.
And here too is Alexis Hutchinson. As a volunteer soldier in wartime,
she ought to embody the very core of American citizen sacrifice.
Instead she is a bad black mother. Implied in the her story is the
damning idea that Hutchinson has committed the very worse infraction
against her child and her country. Hutchinson has failed to marry a
responsible, present, bread-winning man who would free her of the
need to labor outside the home. Hutchinson does not stay on the home
front clutching her weeping young child as her man goes off to war.
Instead, she struggles to find a safe place for him while she heads
off to battle. Her motherhood is not idyllic, it is problematic. Like
so many other black mothers her parenting is presented as disruptive
to her duties as a citizen.
It is worth noting that Sarah Palin's big public comeback is situated
right in the middle of this news cycle full of "bad black mothers."
Palin's own eye-brow raising reproductive choices and parenting
outcomes have been deemed off-limits after her skirmish with late
night TV comedians. Embodied in Palin, white motherhood still
represents a renewal of the American dream; black motherhood
represents its downfall.
Each of these stories, situated in a long tradition of pathologizing
black motherhood, serves a purpose. Each encourages Americans to see
black motherhood as a distortion of true motherhood ideals. Its
effect is troublesome for all mothers of all races who must navigate
complex personal, familial, social, and political circumstances.
Jacqui Patterson
Coordinator
Women of Color United
Silver Spring, Maryland USA
"If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough." --Audre Lorde
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Aishah Shahidah Simmons,
AfroLez Productions, LLC
PO Box 58085
Philadelphia, PA 19102-8085
215.701.6150
Skype: afrolez
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