“She's Been Doing Everything Right”: Mothers of Color and Economic Violence

Abstract

Abstract Racial capitalist, neoliberal ideologies restructure and privatize the very social ecologies that support Black and Brown life. Crossing temporal registers to excavate the story of Eula Mae Love (d. 1979) along with contemporary media case studies of Shanesha Taylor, Debra Lynn Harrell, and Eva Hernández, this paper suggests a framework of economic violence to critically encompass the systemic injuries that low-income mothers of color confront, and to create conditions and possibilities for countering this violence. I argue that this commonplace violence against low-income Black and Brown women is disregarded; as a product of a racial-capitalist system, economic violence is assuaged and proliferated by racialized narratives of meritocracy and other cultural discourses that naturalize these injuries. Indeed, as economic violence serves a purpose for the low-wage, cheap labor needs of capital, low-income mothers of color are recurrently criminalized for attempting to create the conditions of survival for themselves and their families. Critical feminist policy analysis must, I urge, address the material and social conditions that produce economic violence in the lives of low-income mothers of color to re-imagine and renew calls for intersectional, redistributive economic justice.