We were in Target’s parking lot about to enter when my friend, Kwelayla, asked if I wanted to have kids. I smiled and took a couple seconds to respond because this question is something I’d been thinking about a lot the last couple of months. I sighed and said yes. She asked how many and I said five (which realistically might max out at three). I told her I didn’t know for sure though.
I’m in a class called Literatures of Slavery. This week we’re reading Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams. In brief summary, Dessa Rose is a historical fiction novel about a pregnant Black enslaved woman who kills her slave master for killing her lover, and is later caught, but allowed to live until she gives birth because she is carrying a future enslaved person. The book underscores that historically, Black women have been viewed as “mules”, their bodies serving no other purpose but to reproduce to provide more bodies for slavery.
Last semester, I designed a course and read about Black women, the environment, and reproductive justice; Reproductive justice is a movement that fights for the right to choose which breaks down into two options, “abortion (the right to not have children) [or] the right to have children and be able to raise them, to educate them, to keep them healthy and safe, and to provide them with opportunities to live meaningful and productive lives” (Di Chiro, 284)*. While I did not need these readings and films to tell me this, my coursework hammered into me that everything from our maternal care that allows Black women to die at 3 times the rate of their counterparts to our underfunded schools that leave decades of Black youth poorly educated, works against Black futures.
In the added forward to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower written by N.K Jemisin she writes, “The radicalism of ‘merely’ envisioning a future–while American, while Black, while female, had not become a part of my consciousness” (Parable of the Sower, Jemisin, viii). From the slow violence** Black populations experience from environmental pollutants, to the fast violence we experience at the hands of the state–police killings and medical racism, the future has been stolen from Black humans again and again and again.
But still, Black mothers prevail. Black mothers give birth to Black babies in a world where society is actively working against the future of our babies. I was scrolling on my explore page one day and saw a post on Instagram. It shows a Black woman and her daughter both with fros gazing into each other’s eyes and over the image, there’s a tan box that reads, “every mother is a futurist”. Having a child is an act of faith in our world, an act of investing in our future. Black motherhood is a radical act because we are daring to imagine a Black future.
Some part of me feels guilty bringing kids into a world that may implode in the next 20 years, and that’s not me just being dramatic about the “political” climate, our environment really isn’t doing too hot--well it’s pretty hot and that’s the problem, (read this outloud and class and nobody laughed, that’s okay not my best work to be fair) anyways. Is it fucked up for me to bring life into a world that said life might not even have a fair chance at experiencing? Is it fucked up to bring a Black life into a world where critical race theory is banned, DEI is the new N-word, and the Supreme Court has reppealed Affirmative Action?
But then I’m reminded of Savanah Leaf’s 2023 film, Earth Mama. The film follows a low-income young Black mom named Gia as she fights to regain custody of her kids while navigating a contradictory system that won’t allow her to work more than a certain number of hours a week, but also won’t give her kids back until she pays child support.
It encompasses the history of Black women’s kids being stripped away by first slavery and now legal systems that are impossible to get yourself out of once in it. In the film, Gia’s best friend Trina, who is also pregnant, gives a moving monologue about the state of Black motherhood in the US. It is arguably one of the most powerful parts of the film. She says,
“There’s a lot of people expecting us to fail. They tried to take our culture. They tried to take our homes. They tried to take our freedom too. And you know they’ll try to take our babies too. It happened to your mama. It happened to my mama. It happened to they mamas too. That’s exactly why we can’t stop fighting for our kids, G. It’s our God given right to have our kids.” (Earth Mama, 2023)
I told Kwelayla about the guilt I felt about bringing kids into this world, but also, thanks to Trina’s monologue in Earth Mama, that I have a right to have kids because I have a right to envision a future.
Dessa Rose ends with Dessa saying, “Oh, we have paid for our children’s place in the world again, and again, and again.” To be real with you, at first I couldn’t fully articulate what that line meant. It wasn’t until today when I was listening to Zulene Mayfield, a veteran in the environmental justice movement, speak. She says that she fights for the children that play in our communities right now and for the babies not yet born. So that another generation does not have to fight for the right to breathe.
Enslaved Black people, especially Black mothers, fought vehemently for the right for their children to be free. To be born free so that they would not be subjected to the horrors of slavery. Black leaders in the Civil Rights Movement fought so that generations of Black children would be given equal opportunity to achieve success and thrive. Black queer leaders fought so that generations of Black youth would be able to walk fully in their truth, to express the fullness of who they are, and live out loud openly and freely.
So the last line of Dessa Rose alludes to all the work done by generations of Black folk to solidify that Black children have no debt to pay to this world. It is our right, simply because we are alive to live our lives and envision futures for ourselves and children. Though the repetition of “again and again and again” implies that this is work that is not quite done and likely to repeat, I'm not sure I can concede the future to the dipshits that harm us, our communities, and Earth.
I am in no way thinking of having kids ANY time soon (Gotta be at least 35). Aside from the mess of the world, motherhood in and of itself is a feat I am in no rush to experience. But, whenever/if-ever I choose to do so (because no matter what these h03s aka our Supreme Court says, it will be MY choice) and my kids read this and curse me for bringing them into this world, they should blame Target.
To close, studying Black motherhood has become so interesting to me in the last year. So many Black mothers are on the frontlines of the environmental justice movement, so much so that my study of environmentalism has become intertwined with Black mothering. And not mothering solely in a biological sense, but the idea of community mothering--women that raise the entire block/neighborhood together and fight against environmental pollutants for the sake of all the children in the community. If you'd like to read my initial unpacking of this, here is an essay I wrote:
Thanks for reading :)
Works Cited:
*Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Living environmentalisms: coalition politics, social reproduction, and environmental justice”, Environmental Politics Vol. 17, No. 2, April 2008, 276-298
**Slow violence is harm that plays out over years rather than immediately from environmental pollution. Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210127-the-invisible-impact-of-slow-violence
Comments