For many people, though, a Black mother choosing joy is in stark contrast to the most prominent stories about Black motherhood. Throughout generations, society has rendered Black mothers dangerous—just think of the American mythology surrounding the so-called menace of the pathological Black matriarch of the 1960s, the treacherous welfare queen of the 1970s, and the drug-addled crack mother (and her babies) of the 1980s. In her groundbreaking 1998 book, Killing the Black Body, the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts observes that “white childbearing is generally thought to be a beneficial activity: it brings personal joy and allows the nation to flourish.” Black mothers, however, are seen as harmful degenerates and a drain on the nation—a group to be controlled and disciplined. Even within Black communities themselves, as Eva C. Haldane, a 39-year-old doula from Windsor, Connecticut, relayed to me during a Zoom interview, there are confining boundaries around what constitutes authentic and acceptable motherhood. Black mothers’ private lives are consistently subjected to public surveillance, scrutiny, and judgment, as if to suggest that these women cannot be trusted to be responsible for themselves, or that they are unfit for motherhood.
Recently, social-justice movements have helped expand and shift ideas about Black mothers and motherhood for the better, most notably through increased attention to the Black maternal-health crisis and through the advocacy of Black mothers who have lost children to police violence. Yet much of the American public still understands Black motherhood as an idea rooted in crisis, as the feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash explains in her new book, Birthing Black Mothers. Black motherhood, she has written, has become a “political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death.” The Black mother as a figure, Nash argues, exists as a kind of public symbol, synonymous with pain.
But in classifying Black mothers as symbols of crisis, trauma, and grief, society robs them of their agency, flattening their complex identities. Black women’s “worth is seen in our bodies,” the Reverend Theresa S. Thames, the associate dean of religious life at Princeton University, said in the recent Netflix documentary In Our Mothers’ Gardens. “And so we are not applauded until we produce something for someone else. We are not celebrated or validated until we do something for someone else.” Merely seeing Black mothers as vessels, or symbols to be harnessed and deployed for political aims, denies a far richer understanding of Black women, including the needs, wants, and experiences of Black mothers themselves.