Black Mothering Is A Means Of Protest

Exemplified By The Mothers Of The Movement

photo by Femi Matti

“ ‘I am about life,’ I said to myself. ‘I’m gonna live as hard as I can and as full as I can until I die. And I’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind before they are even born. I’m going to live and I’m going to love Kamau, and, if a child comes from that union, I’m going to rejoice. Because our children are our futures and I believe in the future and in the strength and righteousness of our struggle.’ I was ready for whatever happened. I relaxed and let nature take its course.”

— Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Lucia McBath, the mother of murdered teen Jordan Davis, stood before the DNC tonight and said solemnly, “I lived in fear that my son would die like this. I even warned him.”

I know the fear she mentions, intimately. Every Black mother knows this terror. We are lucky every day that we don’t wind up living it. It’s enough to make a body quit birthing. It’s enough to quell the urge to continue ourselves. Some of us refuse mothering because of it, as a painful and hard act of mercy. They want to spare their hypothetical children all of the inevitable suffering, and I don’t blame them one bit.

In America, Black mothering can feel as futile as Sisyphus’ mission. The system pushes against our dreams, like gravity against the Greek myth’s boulder.

But we push back.

As in every era of American summers, the summer I became a mother was a summer drenched in Black blood. I spent many nights clutching my belly, trying to will my son to stay where I could still protect him. Two summers later, and Black blood still flows with no signs of slowing. My veins thicken and bulge again, one of the early tells of pregnancy. Making a life is a slow crawl to the miraculous. Every cell in my body prioritizes this life making labor. And while it works, my Twitter feed floods with the latest recordings of the end of somebody’s Black baby. And another mother’s baby watches from the back seat.

Where do Black mothers put all that terror when we have to mother through it? How do we rise to roll the rock uphill? Despite the evidence, we resist the narrative that Black lives are born simply to suffer. We mother as a means of protest against a world that says we shouldn’t exist.