She Was a Twin: Black Strategic Mothering, Race‐Work, and the Politics of Survival

Abstract

AbstractThis article, a part of the “Sorrow as Artifact: Radical Black Mothering in Times of Terror,” session given at the American Anthropological Association Meetings, 2014, grew out of ethnographic interviews conducted with African American upper‐middle‐class women living in Atlanta, Georgia and navigating decisions regarding career, marriage and family. Conversations that originally bore out Black elite women's turn to the “neo‐politics of respectability” as a strategy for mothering in the 21st century were further supported following the media coverage of the deaths of Black, primarily young people, at the hands of White male assailants. In this article, I explore the conundrum many elite African American women experience when trying to raise and protect their children. On one hand, African American women implement a strategy I call race‐work to protect their children. African American mothers talk to their children, implement and enforce rules of decorum, and extend their mothering practices to other members of the Black community in an effort to uplift the race. On the other hand, their race‐work strategies may be resulting in unintended health consequences to their pregnant bodies that in some cases result in illness or even death of their unborn children.