Contemplating Antiracist Mothering in the Lives of White Women in Multiracial Families (original) (raw)

Mothering White children: An Africana Canadian woman’s experience

Unsafe environmental conditions, including parents' inability to care for them, abuse and high risk behaviour by their primary caregivers, force many children out of the places they call home. When they leave home, the Canadian state assumes immediate and sometimes long-term care for them. Caring involves being placed in foster homes that offer a balance between the needs of the children and the provisional abilities of the foster families. This is not unusual; however, placing a White foster child with a Black foster family, headed by a single woman in a middle class predominantly White suburb, offers sufficient challenges to warrant further exploration of how racist attitudes are maintained and transformed in everyday relationships between state representatives, the general White population and the Black family. This article explores my experience of ongoing tensions along racial lines while caring for children as a foster parent. Introduction This article explores my experien...

How Black Mothers “Successfully” Raise Children in the “Hostile” Canadian Climate

Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 2013

This article explores mothering from the perspective of a middle-aged, Black Caribbean mother living in Canada and her oldest daughter’s experiences. Engaging a first voice account from the daughter, the article provides a view into the mothering style and techniques that the daughter experienced as a result of being mothered by a woman born and partially raised in the Caribbean, uprooted from her home in the immigration process, and who subsequently makes another home in Canada. The perspectives proffered by the two women’s voices highlight the struggles of Black mothering under the gaze of White Canadian parenting expectations.

Building Racial Equity in and Across Motherhood

Journal of Motherhood Initiative, 2022

Mothering is personal; mothering is cultural; mothering is political. This article explores Black mothering, motherhood, and motherwork within social institutions of health and education. The experiences of Black mothers are the backdrop against which the paper investigates empowered mothers and their negotiations. It posits that the notion of empowered mothering has existed always within Black, African descended communities. Empowered mothering breeds resistance, and so it has been passed down for generations. In this article which features the ethnocultural impact of race on mothering, I employ the lens of critical race theory and I investigate mothering through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality concept. Intersecting sites of oppression, such as class and gender, emerge in my analysis of the phenomenon of empowered Black mothering. In this article, I reference the work of scholars such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Crenshaw, Erica Beatson, and Delores Mullings as I unpack how empowered Black Caribbean diasporic mothers perform acts of resistance. This article is an extension of a recent presentation delivered at the International Association of Maternal Action and Scholarship (IAMAS) 2021conference. “Mumma a ashes betta dan Mumma a grave” —Jamaican proverb

Intersectionality and critical race parenting

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2018

This conceptual article employs critical race theory (CRT) as a theoretical framework to explore the importance of intersectionality in critical race parenting. In particular, I focus on intersectionality to understand better how Whiteness and racial power play out in intimate relationships within the family, particularly between White parents and family members of color. Through autoethnography, I use my own experiences as a White parent in a multiracial family to argue for an intersectional approach to ParentCrit that 'centers the uniqueness of racial oppression' as well as the myriad ways in which Whiteness is socially constructed within social relations.

#BLM Mamas’ Motherwork: Conceptualizing the Critical Race Socialization of Black Children

Center for Critical Race Studies in Education at UCLA, 2021

In this research brief I outline what I call the Critical Race Socialization (CRS) of Black Children, inspired by my master's thesis, a qualitative project exploring how Black activist mothers aligned with the #BlackLivesMatter movement resist racism through childrearing (Watts, 2018). This theorizing of Black motherhood through CRS is fashioned from key threads of Critical Race Theory (CRT)

Critical Race Parenting: Understanding Scholarship/Activism in Parenting Our Children

Parenting is often discussed in the field of education, but frequently in terms of family or community deficiency, rather than strengths (Bonilla Silva, 2006; Few, 2007), particularly when communities of color are being examined. In this conceptual article, we advocate for the use of critical race theory (CRT) in discussions of parenting and utilize counterstorytelling to validate the lived experiences of parents like ourselves, who are critical race scholars as well as mothers of children of color. Our counterstories will be embedded throughout the discussion as a way to highlight the relationships between academic research and lived experience. Through reviews of academic research and counterstorytelling, we explain the relevance of critical race parenting and the ways in which the inclusion of CRT can support more historically situated, contextual, and complex engagements with the interplay between race and parenting of children of color.

Narratives from White Mothers of Biracial Sons and Daughters

Unsettling Whiteness, 2014

Book chapter. Little research with White mothers of biracial daughters and sons exists globally. Research that does exist, including work from Harman, Levine-Rasky, Reay et al., Robinson-Wood and Twine indicates there are some common experiences with racism and discrimination. Experiences result in narratives that are created within the national cultures where the mothers reside. Narratives from White mothers of biracial daughters and sons interviewed in the United States (US) were analysed using the following categories: (1) colliding with White privilege; (2) colluding with White privilege; and (3) contending with White privilege. Analysis revealed that White privilege operates as a social mechanism whereby society reproaches White mothers of biracial daughters and sons for having transgressed dominant social norms. Efforts toward dismantling White privilege in the US education system that include multicultural teacher training can benefit by addressing this dynamic.

“Mommy, is being brown bad?” : Critical Race Parenting in a Post-Race Era

The Journal of Teaching and Learning, 2016

This article looks at the counter-pedagogical processes that may disrupt how children learn about race by positing a pedagogical process called Critical Race Parenting. By drawing upon counterstories of parenting I posit how Critical Race Parenting (CRP) becomes an educational praxis that can engage both parent and child in a mutual process of teaching and learning about race, especially ones that debunk dominant messages about race. And, in doing so, both parents and children have a deeper commitment to racial realism that does not allow for colorblind rhetoric to reign supreme.