Getting through breast-feeding versus formula and when to vaccinate was the easiest part of learning how to be a good parent. The hard part was having to admit to myself that as far as other people were concerned, their own racist assumptions trumped all of my efforts to keep my family on track even as the obstacles ranged from the mundane to the major. I had to deal with leaving a bad marriage with no money, going to college with a child, and creating a path for us to move forward.
In the Mommy Wars version of parenting, my inability to provide an organic diet might mean I didn’t care enough. In reality the occasional pack of Oreos meant he could have almond milk and fresh veggies while I lived on a diet of caffeine and cheap fast food. Moving out of my apartment and into public housing might have looked like a failure from the outside. But from the inside it meant that I could eat regular meals too. Years of having to make hard choices without good choices taught me some lessons about what kind of parenting issues really matter.
As my sons have matured, my concerns have been less about the kinds of things that seem to be held up as the first priority by outsiders. Like most Black parents, I have to teach my sons about race and how it will impact the way people perceive them. We don’t spend a lot of time stressing about whether their school has the right playground materials. Instead, we’re concerned with whether their school is going to survive the latest round of closures and stay open. Whether the teachers are getting paid, and of course, whether there are police officers in their building. It’s not a question of helicopter parenting or bulldozer parenting; it’s survival parenting.
For parents in marginalized communities, it’s keeping kids out of gangs, out of the crossfire, and out of jail that are paramount concerns. For some communities it is avoiding deportation of the parents or of the children. There’s no thought of being able to direct every aspect of their life or of clearing the way for things to be easy for them. You’re prepping them for a life where they will need to be resourceful, resilient, and still able to dream.
We know that sexism is a problem, we know that misogyny is a problem, but we don’t always want to address the way racism plays a role in how those things can manifest between groups of women. In a country with a massive wealth gap that is directly tied to race, what does it mean to frame good parenting as making choices that are only accessible for those with excess income? What does it mean to assume that to be poor and not white means you are less capable of being a good parent? Especially when you factor in the power that white women can have over women of color and their children.
Insisting it is harmless fun to pander to racist stereotypes or feigning a complete lack of knowledge about why parents of color are concerned about obstacles that are specific to their communities requires a level of shortsightedness that is intrinsically dangerous to all children. We didn’t create child labor laws simply because we thought it was a good idea; we did it because kids need to be protected in ways adults don’t. For marginalized parents, every decision carries the additional risk of their children being impacted by someone else’s bias.
The fear of losing your child because of problems like chronic tardiness, because you chose to use a friend’s address to get them into a better school, or because you had to work and didn’t have childcare is ever present. Yet you can’t let that fear dictate your decisions. Not if you want to keep your child fed and clothed and housed. Being a marginalized parent is an emotional and social tightrope over a hard floor without a net.
I don’t pretend to know what it would be like to raise a child on a reservation, or to be a migrant worker who has to worry about deportation and access to education. I do know that I need to listen to the women in those positions, follow their lead on what would help the most and what would be detrimental. They are the experts in their own needs, and I can recognize that those needs being different doesn’t make them less important.
More people are talking about police brutality. Unfortunately, it is often framed solely as a racial issue, one that disproportionately impacts Black men, erasing its impact on young Black women. Or on those who are trans or genderqueer. Or on other communities of color that are not Black. Different risk factors aren’t the same as no risk factors. We don’t talk about over-policing or police brutality as feminist issues, yet for women of color, policing can be a major source of structural oppression. In fact, the second most common complaint against police officers is sexual misconduct. That doesn’t start at adulthood. Teenagers are at risk, often in the very places that should be safe, because the default assumption is that adding more cops will fix the problem.
We know fewer names of Black women, cis and trans, who have been victims of police brutality than we do any other group. There is little discussion about their risk of sexual assault, arrest, and even death. The fact that fewer cis Black women die from police brutality supports the erroneous idea that to be a Black woman is to be safer from oppression than a Black man. By the same token, erasing the ways that police misconduct can be sexual by framing it as only being about physical violence contributes to the risks faced by women in marginalized communities. It also ignores that for young people, the risk of being exploited by authority figures is higher. It isn’t just children of color at risk; ignoring police brutality and misconduct puts all but the most privileged and insulated children at risk.
The grace you show to white kids? Try showing it to all kids. Our girls aren’t grown at five and our boys aren’t weapons at birth. I can tell stories of being harassed by cops, of dealing with predatory adults through puberty, and they are all hard to tell and harder to hear. But if they only make me human to you, and not the rest of my community, not other communities, then what good is your feminism? What good are the clucking and the head shaking that don’t challenge the racist paradigms in place?
So why aren’t we talking about parenting while marginalized as a feminist issue? Why aren’t we looking at parenting less as a competition and more as an aspect of our society that needs serious intervention directly with white women and racial bias? The awkward reality of the school-to-prison pipeline is that Black youth are most at risk from the conscious and unconscious biases playing into the decision of involving police in school discipline. Teaching is a profession that is predominantly white and female. How do you discuss over-policing and discrimination as a feminist issue when women who fit the mainstream idea of feminism are most likely to be complicit in a particular form of oppression?
The answer, of course, is to confront the problem—for feminism to examine the biases that contribute to school administrators seeing a white girl’s vandalism as a prank resolved with restitution, and a Black girl’s vandalism as a crime requiring judicial intervention. Yes, it is important for women to work together against gender oppression. But which women? Which forms of gender oppression? After all, cis women can and do oppress trans women, white women have the institutional and social power to oppress women of color, able-bodied women can oppress people with disabilities, and so on. Oppression of women isn’t just an external force; it happens between groups of women as well. While the oppressed can and do fight oppression, what happens when the people who are supposed to be your allies on one axis are your oppressors on another?