Black Strategic Mothering: Intersectional Feminism and the Opt Out/Lean In Movements

This talk draws from her book Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community (Rutgers 2016), an ethnographic study of Black career women in Atlanta, GA to discuss the historical development of what she calls “Black Strategic Mothering” as a conceptual tool to think through how Black women have continued to survive and thrive, despite raced, gendered, and classed, oppressions in the work force, in their homes, and in their communities. She applies “black strategic mothering” to three different areas of Black women’s lives: careers, health, and parenting to demonstrate the ways in which current work and family conflict data and debates fail to include Black women and other women of color, for whom work and family strategies have always been different. She also demonstrates how attention to the details of Black women’s lives and the strategies they employ contain lessons for all women in our current neoliberal, precarious economy.