Raising the Race

Riché J. Daniel Barnes

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813575384
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2017 Race, Gender, and Class Section Book Award from the American Sociological Association Popular discussions of professional women often dwell on the conflicts faced by the woman who attempts to “have it all, ” raising children while climbing up the corporate ladder. Yet for all the articles and books written on this subject, there has been little work that focuses on the experience of African American professional women or asks how their perspectives on work-family balance might be unique.
 
Raising the Race is the first scholarly book to examine how black, married career women juggle their relationships with their extended and nuclear families, the expectations of the black community, and their desires to raise healthy, independent children. Drawing from extensive interviews with twenty-three Atlanta-based professional women who left or modified careers as attorneys, physicians, executives, and administrators, anthropologist Riché J. Daniel Barnes found that their decisions were deeply rooted in an awareness of black women’s historical struggles. Departing from the possessive individualistic discourse of “having it all, ” the women profiled here think beyond their own situation—considering ways their decisions might help the entire black community.
 
Giving a voice to women whose perspectives have been underrepresented in debates about work-family balance, Barnes’s profiles enable us to perceive these women as fully fledged individuals, each with her own concerns and priorities. Yet Barnes is also able to locate many common themes from these black women’s experiences, and uses them to propose policy initiatives that would improve the work and family lives of all Americans.

1

The Role of Black Women in Black Family Survival Strategies

When Cory’s oldest daughter was born, she was working in the marketing department of a large multinational corporation, which required her to travel every week. She took three months off for maternity leave and then went back to work. Many of her coworkers expected that she would not return because most women in her position followed this model, but being a “stay-at-home mom” had never been part of Cory’s self-concept. Cory, expecting to be like her mother and the women who were a part of her mother’s cohort, noted, “My mom had a career in education, she did a lot of things she enjoyed doing, she never let having my brother and I disrupt her desires for herself.” But Cory’s busy work schedule was hard for her and her infant daughter. Cory explained her daughter’s reactions: “She hated it. She would get so worked up when I left. My husband would pick her up from the babysitter when I was traveling, and it’s like she knew when she saw him that Mommy was not home and she would basically cry and be upset the entire evening. Then if I still was not back when she woke up the next morning, she would give my husband a hard time. I knew I had to do something different.” Cory further described the toll her travel schedule was taking on her daughter and her marriage: “Brian was returning to school to get his master’s in divinity so I knew I couldn’t quit my job. He was working, too, but we still needed my income and I loved what I did.” Cory enjoyed her work and felt she would not like being a stay-at-home mom, yet she also wanted to support her husband’s goals of completing his divinity program and becoming an ordained minister.

Cory responded to these challenges, not by leaving her career, but by locating a different employer with different expectations for employees. After months of putting out professional “feelers,” Cory heard from a friend about a small Midwest-based, national marketing firm that was expanding and considering the Atlanta area. Cory’s expertise with her current company was just what they were looking for. She joined the firm with a major contact already in place that could—given her track record with her previous employer—become a contract opportunity. Cory was clear that she was fortunate to find this opportunity. She said, “It all came together and fit perfectly in place. I knew it was God! I don’t know how we would have managed without it.”

Cory is part of a long tradition of Black women creating mothering strategies. In this chapter, I discuss and analyze the literature on Black motherhood and Black families that have centered the adaptive strategies Black women have employed for the survival of their families and communities. Highlighting the lived experiences of Black women like Cory, this chapter also expands the previous literature on Black mothers and their families with the goal of helping us understand how the race, class, and gender of professional Black women alongside communal expectations of Black educated women influence their decisions concerning marriage, motherhood, and community. Chapter 1 also engages the ways Black women’s reliance on the collective memory of Black motherhood complicates their work and family decisions in a way that differs from white women who have traditionally faced the same choices. Finally, the chapter ends with my analysis of Black professional women’s strategies and how they interrupt the pernicious discussions within mainstream discourse that continue to force a dichotomous relationship between “working” and “stay-at-home” moms.

Creating the Professional Black (Women’s) Middle Class

Cory’s decision to continue working while locating an alternative solution is part of the cultural model at the root of Black women’s mothering strategies. According to sociologist Bart Landry (1988), not only have Black women historically had to work, but they have also wanted to work, particularly when they chose “meaningful” professions, far removed from domestic and service positions. In fact, historian Stephanie Shaw’s seminal work What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do (1996) shows that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Black community pushed young African American women to get educations and obtain jobs as teachers, lawyers, doctors, and professionals in other prestigious occupations. These occupations not only served the purpose of racial/community uplift but also protected women from domestic and low-skilled work, where they were vulnerable to economic and sexual exploitation.

Sociologist Elizabeth Higginbotham continues the historical trajectory but adds social analysis with her study of Black women living in northern states who entered college during the integrationist era of the North and the desegregation efforts of the civil rights movement in the South; that is, she conducted the study in the 1970s when these women were either enrolled in or recently graduated from college. In Too Much to Ask Higginbotham develops, conducts, and analyzes the research of her twenty-year project. The women in her study, although not actively fighting segregation, were often the first to integrate predominantly white colleges and universities in the late 1960s.

Higginbotham, like Shaw, details the struggles their families of origin endured in their pursuit of education for their daughters and reveals the fact that the parents of each of the fifty-six women she interviewed wanted their daughters to achieve their full potential. For most families, full potential meant having nontraditional postcollege goals, as compared to their white classmates, who envisioned lives primarily as wives, homemakers, and childcare-providers. When she asked the women about their postgraduation career and family goals Higginbotham found that 43 percent of the women she interviewed said they wanted to combine marriage, work, and family, and 23 percent envisioned marriage, children, and periodic or steady part-time work (Higginbotham 2001, 225). Landry grounds the discussion by asserting the importance of higher education and career in the lives of Black women with longitudinal statistical data in his study Black Working Wives. With the statistical analysis and the history of Black women in the workforce, Landry contends that a difference in ideology resulted in Black women’s different practices: “Just as a particular ideology of white womanhood influences white wives’ employment decisions, so too a particular ideology of Black womanhood, developed within the Black community shaped by Black wives’ orientation to paid work. In the course of their activities for racial uplift, as they spoke their minds and lived out their lives, Black upper-middle-class wives developed and promulgated their own unique conception of true womanhood” (Landry 2000, 30–31). Developing a framework that included work—often featuring work at its core—meant that middle-class, working-class, and working-poor Black women’s strategy historically focused on what was “best” for their families and the Black community.

As a professional class developed within the Black community around the turn of the twentieth century, two schools of thought, “saving” Black women and “uplifting” the race, converged. At the time, racism, articulated through gender and class, was exemplified, according to historian, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, through the trope of “the lady,” signified by not merely gender but also class. In this vein, certain white women could be left out of the construct (namely prostitutes and poor or working-class women), but no Black woman, regardless of education, income, refinement, or character, could be conferred the status of “lady”: “While law and public opinion idealized motherhood and enforced the protection of white women’s bodies, the opposite held true for Black women” (Higginbotham 1992, 257). In response, Black women developed their own ideology. This ideology was clearly articulated by philosopher Anna Julia Cooper, an early twentieth-century Black scholar, who believed that elevating the status of Black women would uplift the entire race (Cooper 1892).

Then as now, attention to Black women’s morality as a route to the Black community’s liberation was fraught with critique. The politics of respectability was deemed elitist as middle-class (read: white) notions of culture, class, and deportment became the norm at the expense of “folkways” that might be attributed to rural (read: African) vestiges from the South (Wolcott 2001). In addition, many believed that a strategy supporting and articulating the dominant discourse about African Americans only reified, not dismantled, the racist, classist, and sexist hegemony (Gaines 1996). Instead of following the cult of domesticity that relegated white middle- and upper-class women to the private sphere, Black women of the nineteenth century championed a threefold commitment to family, community, and careers (Landry 2000). It is important to note that for them this strategy for survival, resistance, and advancement joined those strategies most prominently suggested by Black men of the day, including Booker T. Washington’s call for self-determination and education in practical trades, W.E.B. Du Bois’s desire for the “talented tenth” to gain higher education in the liberal arts, and Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa campaign (White 1999).

Lower-income women who were often not afforded the opportunity for higher education and financial security developed their own strategies. Their mothers and other female kin taught black women that they could not depend on either bourgeois practices or Black men to protect and support them. Discriminatory practices meant that the odds of Black men finding stable, consistent, well-paying employment were slim. Black men, frequently discouraged while searching for and being denied stable employment, often relieved their pain through abandonment, abuse, addiction, or adultery. Sociologist Bonnie Thornton Dill concurs: the American family has been defined, developed, and protected in a number of ways, but African American women and their families have never quite met the mark; Black women have historically been left far outside the articulation of women as wives and mothers (Dill 1988b).

The Problem with Marriage

The long-standing economic conditions in the Black community often made it difficult to begin or maintain marital unions if they did not provide enough economic support due to employment conditions for both Black men and women. Although the number of children growing up in married-couple homes midcentury was close to 75 percent (compared to barely 25 percent today), marriage was not considered a viable gender strategy, particularly in a patriarchal structure that privileged the male “breadwinner” model. Many scholars, notably E. Franklin Frazier, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Carol Stack, Joyce Ladner, Linda Burton, Harriett Pipes McAdoo, Robert Staples, Robert Hill, Wade Nobles, and Shirley Hill, have sought to explain both Black family life—its form, structure, and function—and the role of marriage.

Anthropologist Carol Stack’s influential study of the economic and childcare networks of kin, fictive kin, and extended kin demonstrated the ways in which Black families worked together to provide economically and socially for their children (Stack [1974] 1997). While her ethnographic study focused on the life experiences of poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised primarily female-headed families,1 she illustrated the fact that African American families’ strategies for survival included relying on one another for the necessities in life, a strategy grounded in the historical communities created by slavery (Davis 1972).

Likewise, sociologist Joyce Ladner’s study, which placed more emphasis on the effects of racism in the creation of an isolated Black community, illuminated how racism affected the development of Black womanhood. Focusing her attention on Black female adolescents in a housing project in St. Louis, Ladner suggested that the harsh realities of living in a racist and sexist society where there are few “protections” for Black girls and Black women required a certain type of “strength” to ensure survival; consequently, “Black girls are encouraged, in their quest for womanhood, to be the hardworking backbone of the family, and to have children” (Ladner [1971] 1995, 102). If these adolescents are to marry, then marriage follows later (Ladner [1971] 1995, 102).

More recent studies have further considered family patterns and interdependency within families. According to Carol Stack and Linda Burton (1993), kinscripts ensure family survival as members are assigned roles or scripts they must follow through the family life course. Family needs take precedence over individual needs. One hopes that both family needs and individual needs will be mutually beneficial, but in some cases kinscripts become more beneficial to those who hold the most familial power. For Black poor and working-class families, which tend to be multigenerational, that power usually rests with the oldest generation of women who consistently focus on family survival and reproduction.

These and other studies have sought to refute the images and myths about the pathology of the Black community and Black womanhood that developed as a part of public policy and public perception following the infamous 1965 Moynihan Report. Authored by sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the report follows in the theoretical footsteps of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Both began their analysis of African Americans by emphasizing the importance of unemployment as a cause of family disorganization among lower-class African Americans, and both confused the cause with the effect and thereby stigmatized the Black family and the Black community since the 1960s. According to Moynihan’s controversial report, the deterioration of Black society is caused by the deterioration of the Black family. From his perspective, the culprit was the slave household, through which enslaved people developed a fatherless matrifocal/matriarchal pattern that was carried through the generations because of the harsh effects of slavery on individuals and their children. Moreover, extreme urban and rural poverty meant that the Black family made little progress toward the “middle-class” pattern, and the migration to the North reinforced social and familial disorganization. Moynihan further asserted that the Black family was at the center of the pathology of the Black community, and he called for a national effort to strengthen the Black family. While Moynihan penned the report to garner support for structural solutions rooted in creating jobs programs in urban areas throughout the country, his focus on employing men and relegating women to the sidelines did not match the realities of African American economic and social life.

Marital conditions have worsened for the majority of African American families over time. Scholars have sought to understand the unprecedented persistent drop in Black marriage rates since the 1960s and the relationship between female-headed households and the rising rate of childhood poverty in the Black community. William Julius Wilson’s controversial research pointed to a lack of “marriageable” Black men and the corresponding decline in Black marriage rates, and these findings led to public policy initiatives that have focused on getting poor and working-class parents married.2 From the Clinton administration’s “welfare reform” that used marriage as a way to both end welfare dependence and encourage the formation of two-parent families (1995) to President George W. Bush’s 2004 initiative to promote “healthy marriage,” particularly for low-income couples, to President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative,3 which focuses on boys and men of color, the focus is clearly on marriage and men.

Scholars responding to Moynihan’s report have provided much-needed corrections and nuance through quantitative and qualitative analysis, yet public perception and policy implementation continue to privilege the idea that Black families are deviant and correctable only through a heterosexual marriage model with men at the helm. For example, law professor Ralph Richard Banks’s 2011 book Is Marriage for White People? offers a popular treatment of the topic of Black marriage. His overall analysis suggests that Black women, even professional Black women, are responsible for the decline in marriage rates because there are more college-educated Black women than Black men; therefore, Black men assert more power over the dating and marriage relationship than Black women, and Black women must exercise their power to date and marry outside the race to regain Black men’s attention. Even though fewer women are getting married and more women are postponing marriage across race and class, primarily owing to shifts in the education and economic market, Banks, by trying to “help” Black women, actually shifts responsibility for the health of Black marriage and family squarely onto the shoulders of Black women.

The impact of the Moynihan Report was and has been tremendous primarily because much of what he predicted for African American families seemingly came true (Hymowitz 2005). For Moynihan and many others, both then and today, the answer to all social ills related to the African American experience is the proper placement of the Black male in the Black community structure. The assumption is that Black men have been placed at a disadvantage; not only does the system discriminate against them in employment, promotion, and wages, but also Black women exercise reverse male-female roles, achieve higher rates of education, and often earn higher wages in white-collar professional and labor positions. These discrepancies purportedly leave the Black male feeling inadequate and alienated and encourage physical or mental desertion. Moynihan’s attention to children being raised without a father in a society that saw the male head as normative and stable took center stage and worked to further demonize Black women as domineering and promiscuous, the root of impoverished conditions, low education rates, and high incarceration rates in the Black community. By describing these conditions as a “tangled web of pathology,” Moynihan developed an argument that gained and maintained widespread currency. These “pathologies,” all a result of the breakdown in Black families, were linked to an earlier categorization termed the “subculture of poverty” introduced by anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1959) and shortened to the “culture of poverty” in Moynihan’s report.

Although the categorization received harsh criticism among social theorists, it has been consistently used to describe the persistence of poverty among certain groups despite active policies to eradicate poverty. According to historian Mimi Abramovitz, the culture of poverty thesis has been a prominent factor in upholding “the glorification of Anglo-American motherhood, the belief in childrearing as exclusively women’s work, the narrow vision of proper single mothers as widows and the identification of worthiness with assimilation [into white-Anglo middle class society and] condemned other mothers who did not live up to these ideals as immoral and unworthy of aid” (Abramovitz 2000, 59).

Moynihan was not the first to criminalize Black family structure and Black women. This perspective developed during slavery and permeated the abolitionist and Reconstruction periods when white women and Black women were defined differently. A double standard of protections for Black and white women developed, one that continues into the “choice” debate. Protections for stay-at-home moms have been designated and enforced for white women both in the law and through the white male patriarchal system; for Black women, however, those same protections have been either nonexistent or accompanied by loss of privacy and constant surveillance. Alongside the lack of protections has been the development of a barrage of stereotypes to label Black women.

Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has written extensively about these pernicious stereotypes that work to control Black women’s bodies and ultimately their sense of self. Collins (2000) writes about four...