If you are a school-aged Black kid, and unexamined internalized racism makes your teacher perceive you as a threat when you act out in the same way as a white classmate who will be seen as troubled and in need of counseling, what is your recourse? What happens when your empowerment is a threat to the status quo? If you don’t fit in as one of the “good kids” because of your skin color and your hair texture, how do you become a part of the community? None of these questions have easy answers, but it is not up to the kids to come up with the answers. Nor, to be honest, is it the duty of adult Black women to convince white feminists of their humanity or the right of their children to exist and have access to the same opportunities as anyone else.
Mainstream white feminists will have to confront the racism of white women and the harm it does, without passing the buck to white men. Whether it is the way that white women in schools can wield institutional power against youths of color, or the message sent in New York when teachers in Staten Island wear shirts to support the police officer who killed Eric Garner, the conversation is long overdue. Calls for solidarity or sisterhood have to begin with the idea that all women matter, that all families matter, that issues around caring for children don’t just come down to who is doing more work inside the home, but also to how children are being treated by society. If the idea that a Black girl could be innocent enough to do the wrong thing and still deserve a future is anathema to you, then you don’t belong in a classroom, and you don’t belong in the feminist movement either. Not until you can look at little Black girls and envision the same possibilities you do for little white girls.
And that isn’t a responsibility that stops with Black girls. Every girl of every race deserves access to opportunity, deserves to have her culture and community respected. For non-Black parents of color, the issues may be slightly different, but the underlying impact is often the same. When a presidential candidate seriously intimates that Mexican immigrants are rapists, and a white feminist comedian makes jokes along those same lines, what’s the difference in social impact? Yes, that candidate might promise to make a bunch of laws and build a wall, but the one who makes it sound less racist is the white feminist who normalizes that kind of rhetoric by undermining the seriousness of the racism inherent in it.
Fear of a Black man, boy, or genderqueer teen simply for existing isn’t about actual threat; it’s about the internalized racism and anti-Blackness that permeates our culture, and making light of that dangerous ideology normalizes the violence against marginalized communities.
After all, one of the things Black children have in common with Indigenous and migrant children is a higher-than-normal risk of being taken into foster care. We skirt around the edges of the issues that poverty creates for parents who don’t have the protection of privilege. Yes, the state stepping in to address issues of abuse or neglect is absolutely one that I support. But the most common narrative around is a white savior narrative, which feeds the idea that a child of color is intrinsically better off with a wealthy parent, even if that parent doesn’t share their ethnic or racial background. We assume that a lack of financial stability is an indicator of parental ability, despite knowing that the reasons for the wealth gap have very little to do with what might be best for a child emotionally and socially.
The crushing reality of poverty can force parents to make choices that put children at risk, such as leaving them home alone or with unsafe caregivers. Toxic stress can leave parents too numb to meet the emotional needs of their children. This matters a great deal because most of the children removed from their homes are taken because of neglect, not abuse. Poverty can look like neglect, even if a parent is doing their very best. When your income is substantially below what you need to raise your child, and every possible economic solution is unavailable, ineffective, or illegal, then what do you do?
When your child’s care costs more than you make an hour and subsidy programs are underfunded or nonexistent, but you have to work because of public aid requirements to be able to access TANF, food stamps, and so on, then you cobble together what you can when you can, but you don’t have a good choice to make. You just have to make the best of your situation and hope you don’t run afoul of the law. This is especially difficult now in the era of the helicopter parent. Financially well-off, socially privileged, and almost completely ignorant of the lifestyles of those with less, they are among the most likely to call the authorities over perceived neglect as mundane as a child walking home alone.
Of course, you can argue that they are only trying to act in the child’s best interests, but if the child’s best interests are the only concern, then alleviating poverty for low-income parents would be a primary feminist issue. Instead, we find mainstream feminism hunkered down in the Hipster Mommy Wars, where at best the discussion is about the guilt you might feel for leaving your child with a nanny while you go to work. A long, navel-gazing paragraph about the guilt you might feel for being not feminist enough because you choose to stay home might be personally satisfying, but what does it do for marginalized parents?
Educating yourself on the issues that others are facing is perhaps the easiest way for a feminist to address parenting. I didn’t learn about Indigenous children and foster care by accident; I actively sought out more information on the Indian Child Welfare Act after a string of court cases were covered in the news. Does that mean I am an expert on ICWA? Of course not, but understanding the awful legacy of boarding schools for Indigenous Americans helped me grasp the importance of it—and thus the importance of listening to the activists who fight so hard to keep children in their community even when family situations are imperfect. It’s easy to say that “only love matters” when you assume that a culture has no value, and that erasing a child’s connection to it isn’t damaging.
Internalized bias may make it easier to believe in racist myths that dehumanize parents from severely disadvantaged communities, but the onus is on those with privilege, as feminists and as parents, to check themselves, to ask what they might be willing to do in order to give their children access to a life they never had. Would they also risk life and limb to immigrate regardless of arbitrary borders and laws? Would they sell drugs? Privilege, especially economic privilege, can make it easy to forget that while every parent faces challenges, not every parent has the same resources.
These days my oldest child is in college at my alma mater. My youngest is in middle school. I could pretend that being middle class–adjacent now means that I have forgotten where I came from, forgotten what it took to get me from “at-risk youth” to a published writer with two degrees. But that wouldn’t serve my community, wouldn’t be a good example to my children, and wouldn’t let me live with myself. This veneer of respectability that came from getting more education and being able to write professionally is nice. I like knowing that people will listen to what I have to say, but I’m always aware that people don’t usually listen to the Black girls like me, and that even now some will carve out a space for me that is separate from the other people like me. Because you’ll decide that me being able to get where they didn’t means they aren’t trying hard enough. In fact they’re trying just as hard, but they didn’t have the same luck, the same relatives, the same community. It’s not a question of “Why can’t they do what you did?” It’s a question of “Why can’t we give everyone else the same support and access?” That’s the battle feminism should be fighting. Without the extra obstacles of racism and classism, so many more people like me would be succeeding. That’s the future this liberal wants to live in.