Patrica Hill Collins; Reconceiving Motherhood

Motherhood

Patricia Hill Collins

Reconceiving Motherhood

Edited by

Kaila Adia Story

DEMETER PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Patricia Hill Collins : reconceiving motherhood / Kaila

Adia Story, ed.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-927335-43-7 (pbk.)

1. Hill Collins, Patricia. 2. Motherhood. 3. African

American mothers. 4. Feminism. I. Story, Kaila Adia, 1980-,

editor

HQ759.P37 2014 306.874’3 C2014-906520-5

This book is dedicated to my ancestors,

for their guidance and protection.

To my brilliant parents, Sylvia Rogers and Dr. Ralph Story whose courage, support, love, and guidance allowed me

to envision, create, and complete this book.

To my grandmother, Mo, whose wisdom and insight

remains a reservoir of strength in my life.

To my partner Missy, for her encouragement,

support and unyielding love, and to my

Feminist sister for whom this work exists.

This is for you.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Motherhood as a Praxis, Institution, and Lived Experience:

A Brief Introduction

Kaila Adia Story

Multiracial Motherhood: A Genealogical Exploration

Sarah N. Gatson

Patricia Hill Collins as Pedagogical Mother

Abigail L. Palko

Mothering Past the Line of No Defense:

Millennial Daughters on the Path to Crafting

a Black Feminism of Their Own

Toni C. King and S. Alease Ferguson

Other mothers in Motion:

Conceptualizing African American Stepmothers

Deidre Hill Butler

Black Motherhood and The Power of the

Intersectionality Framework:

A Midwifery Perspective on the New Racism

Karline Wilson-Mitchell and Vincia Herbert

Sympathetic Distances of Black Motherhood:

Reflections on the Political Agency of Cultural Remembering

Shelley Grant

Nineteenth-Century Motherwork:

Ideology, Experience, and Agency in Autobiographical

Narratives by Black Women

Martha Pitts

Situated Knowledge—Coming to Voice, Coming to Power:

The Mothers Committee of Bayview Hunters

Nancy Arden McHugh

Living My Material:

An Interview with Patricia Hill Collins

Kaila Adia Story

Contributor Notes

Acknowledgements

I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY to thank those special individuals for their unyielding support throughout this process. To Dr. Andrea O’Reilly, thank so much for inviting me to edit this volume while I was still an unknown Assistant Professor. Your belief in my abilities as a scholar and editor has meant so much. To all of the contributors, whose work is housed in this volume, I thank you so much for your attention to detail, and all of your dedication and consistency throughout this process, you are all truly amazing, and working with you all has been an absolute pleasure. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Patricia Hill Collins for her amazing work as a brilliant scholar, public intellectual, and organic activist.

Collins has been, and remains, one of the foremost Black Feminist writers of our time. From the beginning of her writing and academic career, Collins’ perspective and approach to her work, has made meaning of the experiences of women and men of African descent. Continuously emphasizing the bearings that race, class, gender, and sexuality have on Black American culture. As a feminist writer who has always gone beyond just focusing on a generalized category known as women, her research agenda and approach to her published work has always explored the many ways that relations of gender, intersecting with race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and spirituality, and other differences affect every aspect of identity; every aspect of society. In line with her Pan-African perspective, as a feminist, Collins has always argued that analyses of gender must be historically contextualized and challenge us as citizens to re-examine and further question the a priori fact of the subordination of women. There is no time like the present to honor Collins work by highlighting it in this volume. Thank you all so much for you.

Motherhood as a Praxis, Institution

and Lived Experience

A Brief Introduction

KAILA ADIA STORY

MOTHERHOOD AS A PRAXIS, institution, and lived experience has been discussed by a myriad of scholars in general and specific ways. The dominant portrayal of what is, and what it means to be a mother, however, remains locked within a reductive and imaginary prism of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and sexism. Feminist scholarship in conjunction with motherhood studies has expanded, and continues to expand, our own analysis as citizens of what motherhood actually looks like within a lived context. Through this scholarship and activism, new definitions and terms have been created, and the freedom around the institution and praxis of motherhood and mothering has also expanded. Patricia Hill Collins has given new meaning to the institution of motherhood throughout her publishing career. Introducing scholars to new concepts, such as, othermothering and mothering of the mind, Collins’ creative and multifaceted analysis of the institution of motherhood, has in a sense, reconceived what it means to be a mother in a national and transnational context. By connecting motherhood as an institution to manifestations of empire, racism, classism, and heteronormativity, Collins has informed and invented new understandings of the institution as a whole.

Since the 1990 release of Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins has been articulating an alternative view of black womanhood within the academy and beyond. Her epistemological specificity, illuminates the non-complacement and resistant tradition of Black and Female scholarship, activism, and research. This groundbreaking book, not only sought to teach us about the social construction of Black Feminist thought, the controlling images of Black womanhood, and the importance of self definition as a means to empowerment for Black women, but Patricia Hill Collins also, discussed at length the necessity of re-examining the institution of motherhood, by utilizing an intersectional analysis. Realizing that women shared a history with one another, through the material conditions of sexuality and reproduction, and that African Americans shared a history with one another through systems of domination, Collins highlighted that Black women had a specific standpoint by which they viewed the world. This standpoint, rich in alternative epistomology, engendered a ritualistic practice of open-ended discourse within the academy and society about the place of Black women. Feminist work on motherhood from the 1970s and 1980s produced a limited critique of these views. Reflecting White, middle-class women’s angles of vision, feminist analyses typically lacked an adequate race amd class analysis (Black Feminist Thought 173). Conversely,

…many African American [male] thinkers tend to glorify Black motherhood … by claiming that Black women are richly endowed with devotion, self-sacrifice, and unconditional love-the attributes associated with archetypal motherhood-U.S. Black men inadvertanly foster a different albeit seemingly positive image for Black women. The controlling image of the superstrong Black mother praises Black women’s resiliency in a society that routinely paints us as bad mothers. Yet, in order to remain on their pedestal, these same superstrong Black mothers must continue to place their needs behind those of everyone eles, especially their sons. (Black Feminist Thought 174)

To Collins, the institution of Black motherhood was saturated with myth, self-policing, and too much outside influence over what it actually meant to be a Black mother in America. One of the major ideological roadblocks within the acadmic exploration of Black motherhood, to Collins, was the enduring popularized caricature of Black mothers—the Mammy.

The figure, born on the plantation in the imagination of slavery defenders, grew in popularity during the beginnings of Jim Crow segregation around 1876. The mainstreaming of the Mammy was primarily, but not exclusively, the result of the fledging advertising industry (Jewell). The Mammy image was used to sell almost any household item, especially breakfast foods, detergents, planters, ashtrays, sewing accessories, and beverages. The mythologized Mammy was so loyal to her White family that she was often willing to risk her life to defend them. Although the visual depictions of her body illustrated ample buttocks and breasts, the Mammy was seen as a non-sexual or asexual figure, whose body was shaped that way to convey her maternal nature and intrinsic ability to care for White children. The figure was strategically positioned this way to show the inherent unattractiveness of Black women and to justify the notion that Black women needed and wanted to be controlled by White families and inevitably, White men.

Although the intital conditions used to define the mammy figure have since been eroded, the perpetual use of the mammy image continues to naturalize itself within the American experience of family. These controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life (Collins Black Feminist Thought 69). The continued use of the Mammy image was and is found in both media and television shows, such as the popular show Beulah. The show was popular from 1950 to 1953, in which a Mammy nurtures a White suburban family. The Beulah image resurfaced again in the eighties television show Gimmie A Break in which, the late Nell Carter, a talented Black singer, played a Mammy-like role on the situation comedy. She was a dark-skinned, overweight, sassy, white-identified woman, and like Aunt Delilah in the film Imitation of Life (1934), was content to live in her White employer’s home and nurture the White family.

The Matriarch figure, the flip side of the Mammy figure, was used to symbolize the mother figure in black homes (Collins Black Feminist Thought 75) . The Matriarch archetype was also used as an ideological trope to define public policy when it came to Black women and Black families. The Black matriarchy thesis argued that African American women who failed to fulfill their traditional womanly duties at home contributed to social problems in Black civil society (Collins Black Feminist Thought 75). In 1965 a then sociologist and eventual U.S. senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The report concluded that the Black family existed as a tangle of pathology, which struggled to make progress toward economic and political equality due to its deterioration of the concept of the nuclear family. Since the release of the report, Collins and other Black feminists and motherhood scholars have elucidated the ways in which Moynihan’s conception of the Black family, in particular the Black mother, was couched in racist, classist, and sexist notions of the family and the institution of motherhood.

Spending too much time away from home, these working mothers ostensibly could not properly supervise their children and thus were a major contributing factor to their children’s failure at school. As overly aggressive, unfeminine women, Black matriiarchs allegedly emasculated their lovers and husbands. These men, undersatndbly, either deserted their partners or refused to marry the mothers of their children. From a dominant group’s perspective, the matriarch represented a failed mammy, a negative stigma to be applied to African American women who dared reject the image of submissive, hardwroking servant. (Collins Black Feminist Thought 75)

Contrary to the polualrized images of The Mammy and The Matriarch, Collins saw the actual practice of Black motherhood differently when examining research that had been done for and by black women themselves.

Black women intellectuals who study African-American families and Black motherhood typically report finding few matriarchs and even fewer mammies. Instead they portray African-American mothers as complex individuals who often show tremendous stregnth under adverse conditions, or who become beaten down by the incessant demands of providing for their families. (Collins Black Feminist Thought 75-76)

Not only was the instituion of Black motherhood completely different than many theorists have previously argued, but Black motherhood was both dynamic and dialectical (Collins Black Feminist Thought 176). Not only had Black mothers resisted the hegemonic and racist notions of mainstream society’s idea of them, but they also formed and created different types of mothering within Black communities that were not only revolutionary but creative.

Community Mothering or Other Mothering has been defined as a form of mothering that is rooted in political activism and within a Black Feminist paradigm. It is the concept of accepting responsibility for a child that is not one’s own in an arrangement that may or may not be formal. Although motherhood is a contradictory institution experienced in diverse ways by different women. To Collins, Black women have functioned as community mothers and other mothers for centuries.

Othermothers can be key not only in supporting children but also in helping bloodmothers who, for whatever reason, lack the preparation or desire for motherhood. In confronting racial oppression, maintain community-based child-care and respecting othermothers who assume child-care responsibilities can serve a critical function in African-American communities. Children orphaned by sale or death of their parents under slavery, children conceived through rape, children of young mothers, children born into extreme poverty or to alcoholic or drug-addicted mothers, or children who for other reasons cannot remain with their bloodmothers have all been supported by othermothers, who…take in additional children even when they have enough of their own. (Collins Black Feminist Thought 180)

Community Mothering or Other Mothering then demonstrates a committed connection to black communities, attending to a socially responsible ethic that is imbued with the idea of political activism to the larger black community. Hill Collins argued that they were reflections of this concept within Black families, dating back to West African societies. To Hill Collins, although enslavement certainly produced profound changes to Africans enslaved in the United States (Collins Black Feminist Thought 181), enslaved Africans still continued their beliefs in the importance of motherhood and the value of cooperative approaches to child care continued (181).

After the publication of her book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Collins went on to publish several books that emphasized Black women’s subjectivity, recovered Black women’s particular and specific relationship to the state, and continued to write in all of her books with a spirit of justice when it came to Black women, Black families, and Black children. In her 1998 book, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, Collins investigates how effectively Black feminist thought, as a theory and standpoint, confronts the injustices that Black women currently face. Collins also argues that the institutions of poverty, mothering, and White supremacy are all reasons that a liberated social theory should also be infused with justice.

In 2005, Patricia Hill Collins wrote Black Sexual Politics: Africans Americans, Gender, and The New Racism. In the book, Collins examines the narrow Western view of sexuality and the various ways in which, these ideologues impact the intersectional experience of African Americans. Collins also cautions African Americans to be weary of the New Racism, new forms of racism that work to oppress Black people, but at the same time are imbued with messages of liberation and empowerment. Lastly, Collins stresses a liberatory politic for African Americans, removed from stereotypes of the past, and imbued with a subjective standpoint that is rooted within the African American experience. Only one year later, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, Feminism was released in 2006, and explored and analyzed various issues. In this book, Collins creates a historical genealogy of African American life from late 1960s to the 2000s, and how The New Racism has facilitated a myriad of challenges for African Americans who were seeking empowerment in their communities and lives. From Black Power to Hip Hop is the first book of its kind to explore the impact of nationalism, feminism, and racism, in the lives of twenty-first century Black Americans.

In 2010, Patricia Hill Collins wrote, Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilities, where she discussed the emerging sentiment of color blindness within our country.

Moreover, in the current, seemingly color-blind context where the next generation of Americans is increasingly of color, the United States must find a way to build a democratic national community with an increasingly heterogeneous population Rather than equating excellence with elitism—the posture that encourages keeping people out—we might define excellence as being compatible with diversity. Only by involving a range of points of view in the democratic process will the United States get the kind of innovation that it needs. (xv)

Collins discusses public education and schools as warehouses where theses ideas are played out. Public education has always been, to Collins, a space, where institutionalized racism, and the power of media have always been entwined. The inherent power of education, especially for young people of color can be a way for them to renegotiate their role as American citizens and revamp the democratic process altogether. On Intellectual Activism, which Collins wrote in 2012, challenges public intellectuals, scholars, and activists to rethink the ideological and ontological benefits from speaking truth to power and assessing the true meaning of their work. Further, Collins argues, how we as citizens come to understand, and make meaning out of public intellectual rhetoric, and how this rhetoric is presented. The volume, which consists of Collins’ public speeches, previously published essays, and interviews, illustrates her career throughout the decades, all the while, highlighting themes that exist within her many bodies of work.

Patricia Hill Collins is not just a brilliant scholar, public intellectual, and organic activist, she has been, and remains, one of the foremost Black feminist writers of our time. From the beginning of her writing and academic career, Collins’ perspective and approach to her work has made meaning of the experiences of women and men of African descent. Continuously emphasizing the bearings that race, class, gender, and sexuality have on Black American culture. As a feminist writer who has always gone beyond just focusing on a generalized category known as women, her research agenda and approach to her published work has always explored the many ways that relations of gender, intersecting with race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and spirituality, and other differences affect every aspect of identity; every aspect of society. In line with her Pan-African perspective, as a feminist, Collins has always argued that analyses of gender must be historically contextualized and challenge us as citizens to re-examine and further question the a priori fact of the subordination of women.

To follow this assumption, to Collins, is to ignore the phenomenology of womanhood as it manifests globally and cross-culturally and to further ignore the multiple sites of empowerment and agency exercised by women. Power, in her estimation, is negotiated and negotiable, should be assessed in relative terms, and should be framed within specific historical contexts. In this way, Collins encourages readers to recognize that both gender and power have the ability to take on variable meanings in variable contexts. Rather than focus solely on the ways in which gender serves as a tool of oppression, Patricia Hill Collins has always sought to offer her readers a balanced perspective, multifaceted analysis, and insist that as we speak of oppression we also speak of resistance.

Patricia Hill Collins’ interdisciplinary and intersectional work encourages other academics and public intellectuals to be more innovative, creative, and flexible, when approaching their own work. By engaging different lines of questioning simultaneously, students develop the skills to be focused while thinking outside of the box through interdisciplinary thinking. In preparing students to meet the greatest challenges of our time, interdisciplinary research and pedagogy allows