Shifting the Center

Intersectional explorations of the everyday lived experiences of BIPOC parents and families

By Faye S. Wolfe, Portraits by Shana Sureck

In her influential 1994 essay “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood,” sociologist Patricia Hill Collins asked, “What themes might emerge if issues of race and class generally, and understanding racial ethnic women’s motherwork specifically, became central to feminist theorizing about motherhood?” Collins is among the many women—think Grace Chang, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, bell hooks, Maxine Baca Zinn—who, over decades, have advocated for bringing the stories of those who have been ignored and excluded to the forefront.

Closer to home, School of Social Work Professor Brandyn-Dior McKinley, M.S.W., Ph.D., and two 2022 SSW graduates, Brandy Stewart, Ph.D., and Mari-Anna Bergeron Doherty, Ph.D., are carrying on the work of shifting the center. Focused on the lived experiences of people of color and grounded in extensive reviews of the scholarly literature, their research examines assumptions about parenting through an intersectional lens. It scrutinizes how those assumptions affect policies, structures and interpersonal interactions and records voices previously silenced.

“I’m interested in an expansive and interdisciplinary approach to research that draws upon multiple knowledge sources to build out culturally-grounded frameworks that reflect the fullness of Black women’s lives,” said McKinley. Informed by her own experience, Black feminist theories of mothering and clinical work with Black mothers, McKinley’s research has focused on the lived experiences and resistance practices of Black mothers whose families are navigating predominantly white and economically advantaged social spaces. A key interest is Black mothers’ relationships with their adolescent daughters and their interactions with the U.S. educational system.

Education is a fundamental part of family life and a key driver of social mobility, but there are signifcant gaps in the research when it comes to capturing the experiences of African Americans in predominantly white and economically advantaged school systems in the United States.

“There’s a long and enduring legacy of Black parents’ involvement at all levels,” McKinley said. “Attending school board meetings, advocating for school funding, monitoring teacher-student interactions— advocacy is a form of educational care.” She notes that educational care also “includes what Black mothers do at home and in community to support their children’s education. For instance, teaching their children about the intellectual achievements of Black people or preparing them to confront racially-biased teachers and peers.”

Yet for too long, definitions of parental school involvement have been based on U.S.-centric white, dominant cultural models of middle-class motherhood; other approaches are treated as deviations from the norm. As McKinley explains it, “There’s a checklist approach to school involvement, where certain activities ‘count’ more than others… PTA? No. Midday meetings? No. Chaperoning feld trips, no. That’s all that matters. There’s no empathy or curiosity about why. And no recognition of the systems that created both the expectation and disparity. And there’s no desire to interrogate whether those are even useful metrics.”

Challenges in Schooling

One of the aims of Brandy Stewart’s doctoral research was to reveal what African American parents were doing. Her qualitative study documented how 20 parents of public high school students in Los Angeles County saw their roles and responsibilities in regard to their children’s schooling and how race, class, culture and personal histories afected their participation. “I was curious about how these people would describe their own childhood, what stood out and infuenced their parenting, their experiences and interactions with school staf,” she said.

Brandy Stewart

Los Angeles County’s public school choice policies allow parents to send their children to schools either in or outside their neighborhoods. Stewart’s interviewees approached school choice very intentionally. They looked for academic rigor, AP courses, and a range of extracurricular programs. They went out of their way to protect their children from cliques, bullying and drugs. More than 80% were middle to upper-middle class, and most sent their children to schools outside their communities. The rest chose public charter schools, such as one geared towards college prep.

There were benefts for their kids, but also costs and trade-ofs. “It’s a commitment,” Stewart said. “It might mean a commute of one to two hours a day.” Some children struggled to make friends in schools with a 90% white student body. “Managing microaggressions was an issue,” Stewart said, “a teacher questioning if a child could keep up in an honors program,

for instance.” Responding to these situations, parents reafrmed their children’s values, culture, abilities and strengths. Speaking from experience, one mother told her daughter, “You have to work twice as hard. So as soon as you step in that door, you got to put that face on, whether you’re ready or not.”

Some parents reported that, crossing school thresholds, they too felt unsure they belonged and felt the need to code-switch, to assume a persona.

“When I walk into the room …I’m always trying… to present in a way where I’m not looked down upon,” said one mother. Another asked, “Why should I have to feel like, ‘Oh, if I missed this phone call or if I missed this, you’re all going to think I don’t care,’ when it could have been…I had a work call, a work emergency.”

From her research, McKinley knows these are common frustrations: Black moms are simply not extended the same level of respect. “Black mothers’ involvement, and in particular educational advocacy, is often misinterpreted as combative or confrontational; it’s seen as harmful, not supportive. But if we remain silent or do not show up for a meeting or event during the school day, we are stereotyped as uncaring. This plays into anti-Black logics that devalue and disregard the carework knowledge and resistance practices of Black mothers. It’s a lose-lose situation.”

Misconceptions in the NICU

Some women of color come up against misconceptions from their earliest moments as mothers, as Mari-Anna Bergeron Doherty’s doctoral research attests. A biracial mother herself, she investigated the experiences of women of color whose babies had been in a NICU. Among the poignant stories she included are those of two Chinese women. One recalled trying to abide by zuo yue zi or “sitting the month,” when a new mother rests at home: “I wasn’t even supposed to leave the house…I got the impression that they [nurses] thought maybe I was detaching myself…that I was neglecting her.” A nurse asked the other if she was taking the “correct” baby home because the baby had blue eyes.

Mari-Anna Bergeron Doherty

Before enrolling in SSW, Bergeron Doherty had been a clinical social worker in a hospital, providing therapy to children and families. “Mothers would talk about their babies’ time in the NICU, tell me stories, show me the photo album. Years out, they still hadn’t processed the experiences. For many it had been very traumatic, and it sometimes afected their relationships with their children and led to problems of attachment.”

She wanted to get at what definitions of mothering were operating in NICUs and how those definitions affected mothers’ interactions with hospital staff. Like Stewart and McKinley, when Bergeron Doherty dug into the literature on her subject, she found it came up short in capturing the experiences of women of color.

Her qualitative study focused on a diverse group of 17 self-identifed women of color, ages 22 to 43, from across the United States. The recollections of these Black, Hispanic, Asian and Asian American women were also diverse, with participants reporting both empowering and disempowering moments. Yet, she wrote, “Almost all participants revealed that they at least questioned whether their race, ethnicity or cultural identity had an infuence on their experience.”

At a time of extreme vulnerability, when they might be sufering from postpartum health problems as well as the emotional trauma of having a fragile newborn, these mothers also worried that they and their babies were being treated diferently because of their identity. Was a male doctor talking down to her, not sharing essential information and assuming he would make the decisions because she was Hispanic, female, less educated— or all three? One woman Bergeron Doherty interviewed remembered wanting to say, “Don’t sugarcoat anything with me because I’m her mom.”

Similarly, Stewart’s interviewees weren’t always sure if race infuenced their interactions with schools. Still, wrote Stewart, “fndings indicated that all these participants and their children had been exposed to some racial inequality.”

For Black parents, McKinley has found that while greater means may translate into access to spaces and opportunities from which Black people had previously been excluded: “There’s an idea that class insulates, that it is an escape from the spatial and psychic efects of anti-Blackness, but it’s more complicated than that. When middle-class and uppermiddle-class Black families move to predominantly white and economically advantaged communities, we must ask: What do they leave behind? And what are they arriving to?” McKinley said. “What kind of reception do they get? Are they able to create a culturally afrming community? Will they fnd schools that support their children’s social, cultural, spiritual and academic wellness?”

Brandyn-Dior McKinley

McKinley says, “It’s so important to make visible the work of African American parents, to change the narratives that erase the labor of Black mothers and ignore the fact that anti-Black racism is baked into structures and institutions, no matter how many Black kids get into Harvard.”

At the same time, she said, “It’s important not to lose sight of the ways Black parents are engaged in bringing changes to pedagogy and curriculum that hold out new possibilities. And to celebrate what Black women have done in their role as mothers, to imagine something better in a lot of diferent ways, something liberatory, joyful, freedom-generating.”

At the end of her interviews with Black mothers, McKinley was asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to share?” She recalled, “What kept coming up was a longing for the full recognition of Black people’s humanity.” Theirs is a simple yet profound plea, born of struggle, fatigue and, perhaps, hope: ‘I wish they’d see our humanity. If we could just get there, we could take a rest.” ◆