Black women have had to come up with strategies for the survival of their children, families, and communities. It’s a toolkit passed down through the collective memory of Black mothers.
Riché J. Daniel Barnes is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. A socio-cultural anthropologist, Riché focuses on a broad range of issues concerning Black families and is the author of Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community (2016), in which she coined the term black strategic mothering while investigating what she refers to as the neo-politics of respectability. Riché is the co-founder and director of the Association of Black Anthropologists Mentoring Program, the President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and winner of the 2019 AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology. She is a scholar-activist committed to social justice action including the Movement for Black Lives and #SayHerName. Riché has a 20-year-old daughter and twin 18-year-old sons, and she describes writer-motherhood in three words as: “Supporter. Creative. Industrious.”
FROM THE EPISODE: READING LIST & REFERENCES
Riché J. Daniel Barnes’s website
Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community
SOUND BITES
“Creativity in terms of my writing really suffered in a lot of ways once I had kids, because there just wasn’t time and there wasn’t space. I think so much of creativity happens because you’re able to be alone or be in spaces that are going to inspire you. That’s not happening when you have three kids under three.”
“People used to ask me how I did it all and I would say ‘I don’t have a choice.’ I needed to be true to the kinds of work that I wanted to do and also true to the kind of mom I wanted to be.”-@DrRJDBarnes
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“We made a point of having breakfast together every day. We decided it would be breakfast, because as my kids were getting older and involved in more activities, it was harder to have the same dinner time. They had this moment in which we were all grounded together as a family that they could then take into their day.”
“I found many of the women in the study [for Raising the Race] trying to figure out how to make sense of having new financial freedoms, wanting stability and presence in their households, seeing how this on-ramp of ‘go, go, go, go, go’ wasn’t really giving them many returns and deciding it’s okay to step back for this moment.”
“People tell us women can have it all, effortlessly and looking gorgeous. That’s only true for a very small portion of the population and everybody else who says they’re making it work, I believe, is a lying.”-@DrRJDBarnes
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“If our society really cares about families, which we say we do, there are so many supports that need to be put in place. What we’re seeing instead are supports being removed or made more challenging to get access to.”-@DrRJDBarnes
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“Black women have had to come up with strategies for the survival of their children, families, and communities. It’s a toolkit passed down through the collective memory of Black mothers.”-@DrRJDBarnes
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“I remember when it occurred to me that my sons were no longer viewed as cute little boys and were seen as potentially scary men. How do you parent differently when you have that realization?”-@DrRJDBarnes
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