Freedom lessons: black mothers asserting smartness of their children

Abstract

It is imperative to explore multiple approaches to intelligence and public education that fundamentally integrate the ideas and lived experiences of students – with particular interest to those who are most disenfranchised. Within various black communities, the oral traditions transmitted at home are life-affirming freedom lessons, engendered by lived experiences, which must be considered when teaching black children in the classroom environment. With consideration to black women, the freedom lessons they teach, and how they collectively shape smartness for black children, this article is organized in three sections. The first examines cultural constructions of history, knowledge and black women. The second explores the freedom lessons of three black mothers that were collected during a 2011–2012 ethnographic study and are presented as three sets of narratives: community smartness, world smartness, and individual smartness. The final section concludes with an analysis of smartness as a social critique and implications for teachers.

Keywords:

• African-American children
• Black Feminist Thought
• counter-narratives
• culturally relevant pedagogy
• mothers
• smartness

Acknowledgments

Thank you, Beth and Pam for both creating and sharing space. Thank you, Karla, Luis, and Lan for your vulnerability and transparency. Thank you, George, Kristal, and Renee for challenging me as a scholarartist. Thank you, Mary, Mothers and Othermothers – every single one of you. Thank you, Malari, for incredible partnership.

Notes

1. In this article, black, African American, Negro and people of African descent are used interchangeably due to both historical usage and how various authors refer to this population.

2. ‘Welfare Queen,’ a trope of Former President Ronald Reagan, was first used during his 1976 presidential campaign in reference to a woman on the South Side of Chicago (Douglas and Michaels 2004).

3. It is worth noting, particularly with respect to the activism of black women that the plaintiffs in this case included 12 women: Darlene Brown, Lena Carpenter, Sadie Emmanuel, Marguerite Emerson, Shirla Fleming, Zelma Henderson, Shirley Hodison, Maude Lawton, Alma Lewis, Iona Richardson, Vivian Scales, Lucinda Todd; and one man, Oliver Brown. Mr Brown was the primary plaintiff not because the names were listed in alphabetical order. To present the case before the Supreme Court, the NAACP insisted a man – of good standing in the community – lead the docket to provide more substance and credibility to the case, thus rendering the 12 women invisible both politically and historically.

4. ‘Othermother’ is a role as old as Africans time in America, rooted in African ways of knowing (Hill-Collins [1990] 2009) Othermothers are women who are concerned with the holistic care of their children, whether by birth or community right.

5. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), by Amy Chua, presents a mother who examines her practices of a traditional, strict, Chinese upbringing in raising her two daughters. While the memoir in large part was intended to be a self-mocking revelation of her techniques, mixed reviews of the book regarded it as a ‘how-to’ guide as well as an exhortation of non-Western values.

6. Parent Universities are designed as a theoretical space to instigate parent involvement. Ideally, the school works closely with the parents to establish a ‘credit system’, awarding credits for various activities (e.g. lunchroom duty, class mom, trip chaperone). The parents with substantial amounts of credits are recognized at various school ceremonies and may be awarded with items donated by community sponsors. The Parent University has grown popular across the country in various communities; there are some that have a physical space for parents that serve as a library and technology resource center.

7. All names of school, faculty, staff, parents, and programs are noted with pseudonyms. The pseudonyms of the mothers are those of contemporary black female poets. While the children were not interviewed for this project, they were certainly part of the conversations. Their pseudonyms are names of African ethnic groups (daughters) and emperors (sons.).

8. I define ‘we’ through the lens of Sofia Villenas (1996) who writes from the perspective of the colonized and the colonizer, challenging researchers of color to control their multiplicity of identity, history of complicity and mark their own points of marginalization.