Becoming, belonging, and the fear of everything Black: autoethnography of a minority-mother-scholar-advocate and the movement toward justice

ABSTRACT

The compartmentalization of (dis)ability from race and ethnicity, and other identity markers serves to maintain these constructs at a safe distance from one another. Beyond these broader socially constructed categories, there are also the subtler messages about normativity that manifest in gradients of ability, color, behavior, capital, expression and power. Even more restrictive is the creation of a narrow space for parent advocacy that is culturally-subtractive and bureaucratic, serving to privilege the already privileged while silencing the marginalized. In this paper, I use autoethnography with DisCrit as a framework in order to to trace my journey to becoming Minority-Mother-Advocate, un/belonging within community and academic forums. The centerpiece of my counternarrative is the transition of my own advocacy from valuing my son to addressing others’ fears of him as a Black male whose visible (dis)ability doesn’t fit neatly into prescribed norms. A reframing of parent advocacy is imperative, moving beyond the individualistic, unintentionally exclusive aims toward one of collective justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• DisCrit
• special education
• autoethnography
• advocacy
• Black mothers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pseudonym used.

2. DisCrit’s third tenet, ‘DisCrit emphasizes the social constructions of race and ability and yet recognizes the material and psychological impacts of being labeled as raced or dis/abled, which sets one outside of the western cultural norms’ (Annamma, Ferri, and Connor 2018, 46).

3. DisCrit fifth tenet states, ‘DisCrit considers legal and historical aspects of dis/ability and race and how both have been used separately and together to deny the rights of some citizens’ (Annamma, Ferri, and Connor 2018, 59).

4. DisCrit’s fourth tenet states, ‘DisCrit privileges voices of marginalized populations, traditionally not acknowledged within research’ (Annamma, Ferri, and Connor 2018, 58).

5. A reverse-mainstream classroom model, is described as a classroom with the majority of children with (dis)abilities and a smaller population of their typically-developing peers serving as classroom role models. In this model, the children with (dis)abilities are the ‘mainstream’ children while their typically-developing peers are the smaller minority.