Black American Motherhood

July 30, 2015 4:15 PM

“I love you so much, I want to carry you around all day in my pocket”. Emily Bernard writes about being the mother of brown-skinned daughters after Ferguson.

"For this black mother, the trick is to provide my children safety without suffocation, and prepare them for the fight while also reminding them that the world is a good place, where it’s good to get angry and good to hope."

This is one of the curated responses to Ta-Nehisi Coates book, Between the World and Me (previously).

posted by Deoridhe (4 comments total)

Thank you for posting this. I have been reading Coates' book (as a long time fan of his writing). As a white/Jewish female person (I am trying to identify myself as something other than white, since, as Coates points out, white isn't really a thing other than not-Black), I know both that this book is not for me, and absolutely for me. Because if I cannot understand that the culture of violence against Black bodies, none of us are going to ever really be free. It is hard to imagine that we are still a few weeks shy of the first anniversary of Michael Brown's death. It feels like much longer. And yet there were so many people before him.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:26 PM on July 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

How odd that the photo shows someone who looks nothing like Dr. Bernard.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:58 PM on July 30, 2015

My wife, who is Jamaican and black, has three children, all in their 20's. One of the three ran out of gas while having an poignant emotional breakdown earlier this year, on their way up to college from Key West, up in the middle of that part of Florida we call "the Sticks", in the night. Being "from here", and consequently occassionally able to call in great favors when such moment demands, I called a friend who had a friend who would alert me the moment our young child's name came up anywhere by any authority whatsoever in the state. It was a crazy big favor. I had to call in this gigantic favor for fear of the unknown.

A member of own family, black, was emotionally compromised, out of gas, on a highway, by themself, in the Florida Sticks. And they had called the police for help. If I had allowed myself the luxury, I would have been terrified. Instead, I prayed. And I called in favors.

It worked out. Even as upset as they were—being young, black and Jamaican in the US in 2015 is not always as cool as it might sound—they had the presence of mind to ask for a black officer. Praise god for small favors. This tiny, simple but wise choice may have been the single smartest decision of their entire life, long may it be.

I find fault in the terms "race" and "racism". There is one race: the human race. Discrimination based on skin-color is what we actually mean when we talk about racism. By calling it racism, we perpetuate the problem by implying there is some sort of distinction that is both apparent and obvious, and unmentionable and invisible. That is the sort of unwell, paradigmatic thinking I reserve for particular spectrums of religiosity and delusion. It is fantasy-thinking.

In the meantime, we are going through tough times while we work this out. I believe the foundation of our country was inherently flawed—by failing to address whole swaths of its population, building the success of the nation on their backs, and the "giving" freedoms without paying compensation or owning up to guilt—and just as a house built on a bad foundation will never be able to be righted, we will not be able to compensate for the mistakes of the past and subsequently are forced to suffer together through the consequences.

Eventually, it will work out. But for us, not the US. That said, I look forward to the day when a nation is formed off-planet that gets it right. For now, we have a whole earth-based human history to live down. The best any of us can hope for is to individually be part of the solution and not part of the problem. It's like the hell we all suffered through during the Bush-Cheney years to get to the relief of the Obama administration. Without the terribleness of that particular especially bad time, we would never have arrived at this particular good one. Here's hoping for—and working towards—much better.

In the mean time, teach your kids who are not-white to ask for the cops who are not-white etc.
posted by Mike Mongo at 1:31 AM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

^ I threw in cops at the end there and I meant police. It's not a cops vs us issue. That's just an apparent manifestation. If it weren't for the good people we would all be trouble, police authorities and otherwise.
posted by Mike Mongo at 1:39 AM on July 31, 2015