Fruits of Momma’s Labor: Exploring Black Motherwork and Education in Los Angeles

Thursday, May 13, 2021
12:00PM 

Our fellow Nia Flowers will present on: Fruits of Momma’s Labor: Exploring Black Motherwork and Education in Los Angeles

Register at: tiny.cc/cbsr513

 Black mothers have continuously battled discrimination at the hands of racial capitalism and dehumanization from hegemonic ideologies rooted in anti-blackness that have shaped social science research, public policy, and the American imagination. The afterlife of slavery and the cultural myths of problematic Black families created in its wake have strategically characterized Black women as pathological. While intersectional theories grounded in Black feminism have contested pathological imaginaries of Black women and empirical work on Black families has reframed and contextualized Black motherhood, there still remains a need for research that provides a space for dialogue between emerging sociohistorical concepts and the people whose lives they implicate. Building from Black feminist frameworks on racially gendered labor, this study utilizes in-depth interviews to analyze the ways Black mothers perform motherwork while navigating their children’s educational institutions. I focus on how Black women negotiate their work relationships after becoming mothers, illuminating their matriculation into performing motherwork, and how they view the educational responsibilities of motherwork while raising children in Los Angeles. In my findings, I identify and conceptualize three distinct performances of motherwork: transformative, adaptive, and integrative.These categories help provide an understanding of how becoming a mother impacts the ways in which some Black mothers engage their relationships with work, thus elucidating how they make meaning of their time spent crossing between and through these public and private realms. The mothers in this study also explain that their enactment of motherwork includes navigating educational spaces to optimize their children’s schooling opportunities. In addition, they understand that motherwork includes teaching their children life lessons on how to matriculate into adulthood, preparing them for the realities of anti-blackness while instilling in them hope for change, progress and justice.