Bereaved Black Mothers and Maternal Activism in the Racial State

Abstract

Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 713 Erica S. Lawson Bereaved Black Mothers and Maternal Activism in the Racial State Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. —Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence Honor your son and his life, not the circumstances of his alleged transgressions. I have always said that Trayvon was not perfect. But no one can ever convince me that my son deserved to be stalked and murdered. No one can convince you that Michael deserved to be executed. —Sybrina Fulton, letter to the Brown family, Time The death of a beloved compels us to find new meanings in a permanently altered reality. For some Black mothers, grief over the violent and unexpected death of their child can lead to activism to change unjust social relations. Here, I speak of maternal grief as “public motherhood ” rather than as a private expression of pain.1 A public expression of grief, as noted by Judith Butler in the epigraph, can furnish a 1. See Lorelle Semley, “Public Motherhood in West Africa as Theory and Practice ,” Gender and History 24, no. 3 (November 2012): 600–16. 714 Erica S. Lawson type of political community. In the United States, maternal activism is evidenced by Mothers of the Movement, a group comprised of African American women whose children have been unjustifiably and violently killed.2 Indeed, for some bereaved Black mothers, the transformative possibilities of maternal politics informed by grief often emerge from the everyday impacts of structural racial violence. Some Black parents mourn their children who are entrapped in “punishing circuits of surveillance , containment, repression, and disposability,” which sometimes result in their deaths.3 Mothers of the Movement and Black Lives Matter articulate the concern that the disposability of Black lives is driven, in part, by the economic and racial injustice that sustains capitalism at the nexus of race and the manufactured fear of Blackness.4 In recent years, an alarming number of Black men and women have been killed in the United States. Many of these deaths have resulted from, although they are not limited to, Black people’s encounters with law enforcement agents and armed private citizens. In view of violence as a social problem, attempts have been made to upend its root causes. In addition to programs and policies—most recently, former President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative to provide opportunities for racialized young men—efforts include activism on the part of bereaved mothers and fathers to make sense of the deaths of their children and to 2. See Will Drabold, “Meet the Mothers of the Movement,” Time, July 26, 2016, http://time.com/4423920/dnc-mothers-movement-speakers. The Mothers of the Movement, listed here with their respective child’s name in parenthesis , are Sybrina Fulton (Trayvon Martin), Lesley McSpadden (Michael Brown), Gwen Carr (Eric Garner), Geneva Reed-Veal (Sandra Bland), Cleopatra Pendleton-Cowley (Hadiya Pendleton), Maria Hamilton (Dontré Hamilton ), and Lucia McBath (Jordan Davis). Among other goals, the Mothers of the Movement aim to advocate for an end to gun violence and to promote criminal justice reform. 3. Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3. 4. Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Travis Linneman, Tyler Wall, and Edward Green, “The Walking Dead and Killing State: Zombification and the Normalization of Police Violence,” Theoretical Criminology 18, no. 4 (2014): 506–27; Barbara Ransby, “Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement,” Colorlines, June 29, 2015; Sidney M. Willhelm, “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Experience in America,” Journal of Black Studies 10, no. 1 (1979): 3–19. Erica S. Lawson 715 advocate for legal and social change. As well, in the interest of ensuring that we not lose sight of the number...