Abstract
This narrative traces the experiences of mothering a Black child coming to consciousness about the role and place of Blackness in the United States. Working from a pedagogy of pain and love, Pillow seeks out an endarkened, embodied praxis of mothering that allows Black youth places of “disidentifications” to imagine other spaces and futurities. Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s discussion of “strange encounters,” Pillow reviews how Blackness is intimately linked to stranger danger and stranger fetishization in the United States, the depths of which played out in Trayvon Martin’s death. She suggests that José Estaban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” offers a critique of hetero-patriarchy lacking in current research on Black youth racial identity and that such a critique is necessary not only to build new forms of resilience for Black youth but also to develop structural critiques of racialized systems, discourses, knowledge, and practices.
The secret is out: We are men! But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has frightened the nation to death. I never had a country, I had a hood, I had a slice of Brooklyn but I never felt like I had a country. So now (in France) I have a country.
For the past year, my 10-year-old Black son has been saying that he does not want to be an American citizen. Several times a month, his feelings make their way into whatever conversation is occurring: “I do not want to belong to America. I wish I could be citizen of another place.” Questions about his status and where he could belong began last summer, and at first his father and I took his words as fanciful young commentary. However, recently we have recognized that our son’s statements are more than that: They are articulations of his growing awareness and consciousness of his own Blackness and place in the world and a youth, his youth and his friends’ youth, forever marked by Trayvon Martin’s death. For our son, the results of the Zimmerman trial mark a distinct before and after place in his childhood, a witnessing of the pain, mourning, shock, and resolve of his family, peers, and African American leaders tinged with his first feelings of fear that young Black youth in America, in his lifetime, can be murdered.
Like mothers/parents of Black children across America, our family struggled with how to provide perspective and support after Trayvon Martin’s murder on February 26, 2012 and the resulting acquittal of Zimmerman on July 13, 2013. How do we talk to our then 9-year-old about complex layers of racial history in the United States and the belief systems and legalities that blind eyes and minds to that history? How do we share enough to make our son feel less afraid while also preparing him with lessons of safety he needs to know?
Although our son, who is a brown-skinned Black child, has in many ways been protected from experiencing hardships, increasingly, he is aware of both the overt presences and glaring absences of Blackness—the evidence is everywhere around him—in daily life, text, media, sport, stories, and our day-to-day family life and travels. As an inter-racial family, we carefully plan outings and vacations to avoid situations where we may not feel safe. Despite our efforts, our son has witnessed his parents stopped while driving and seen us make decisions to leave a restaurant, cross the street, ignore a jeer, turn away from stares, or choose to drive hours to the next town to spend the night. Like any Black child in America, at a young age, our child witnessed race, however much we tried to shield him.
The depth of our son’s grapplings hit me one night when I realized that in the 4 years since President Barack Obama took office, my child, between the ages of 6 to 10, went from celebrating HOPE to praying nightly that the President and the Obama family will be safe.
In addition to fears about safety, there is another side to the razor’s edge of Blackness. Our son has also witnessed and been the recipient of the inordinate attention that he and our family sometimes receive. When he was an infant and toddler, others who wanted to comment on how cute our son was, how beautiful he is, repeatedly stopped us. My youngest son, like my older children is beautiful, but the amount of attention was so excessive that by age 5, he asked why people stopped us, why did they comment so much? As a White-skinned mother, I began to recognize how, as a toddler and young child, my Black child was a commodity, a safe multicultural haven for Whiteness. Whiteness felt comfort and self-approval when it noticed my “brown” child, demonstrating its awareness by attempting to engage and often even touch my child. The comments directed to our young son were clearly mainly intended for the adults, the parents: “Look, we are acknowledging your inter-racial Black presence by commenting on your child,” thus situating any request on our part to “please do not touch our son’s hair” as being read as hostile or unfriendly.
As parents, we became skilled at reading situations and turning our son’s stroller away from attention or steering him toward another path or set of seats. While with his Father, these interactions and interruptions from Whiteness still occur—likely as a way for Whiteness to feel comfortable around the adult Black man—when with me now, at age 10, my son and I no longer receive positive attention or complements. Writing this article, I became aware that for several months now, Whiteness mostly actively ignores or stares at my youngest son and I. Images flipped through my mind as recollections of this shift unexpectedly arose and with a chilled shock of recognition, I realize I am witnessing other adults begin to treat my child like a young man to be wary of.
These are the daily occurrences and perceptions that break a mother’s heart, and it is painful to describe what my child and family experience, painful and exhausting because even when we are going out for fun—a birthday party, a dinner out, a day at the park, a movie, or hiking—we never know where our space or safety may be invaded. One role of mothering is to protect our children, and his father and I cannot fully protect our child from racism—and this recognition and the fear it renders is a weight we carry.
Our story is not different from the daily experiences of other inter-racial and Black families, and by our youngest child’s birth, his father and I had been together for over ten years, negotiating racialized spaces. And during those years, Parker and I were raising our older multiracial White-skinned children—who at young ages also witnessed their parents repeatedly stopped by police while driving, had to adjust to stares and invasive questions, and create a different consciousness—raising out youngest child is different. Although our older children could have freedom from surveillance away from their parents, our youngest son will never “grow out of” his Blackness and we know he only has more challenges ahead as he grows into adulthood.
Watching a Black child grow in her or his consciousness about Blackness in America is not easy. As Black writers and theorists have long pointed out, being Black in America requires dual consciousness and resilience, a resilience that can cause dissonance and yield physical and emotional scars—what colleague Dr. William Smith (2008; Smith et al., 2011) terms racial battle fatigue and Kai Wright (2014) describes as “the stretched lives of black men in America.” In Education, scholars have traced and demonstrated systemic differential practices that yield higher representation of Black youth in behavioral and special education; disproportionate rates of disciplinary referrals, which increase out of school absences; and desperately low graduation rates, creating what is acknowledged to be a “racially hostile environment of U.S. public schooling towards Black males” (Love, 2013).
Working, thinking, living, loving, and mothering out of these spaces, experiences and history have taught me hard lessons about the anxiety that Blackness still provokes in the United States. Thus, today, I am speaking from embodied experiences of mothering a brown-skinned, Black male child in an inter-racial family surrounded by interactions and assumptions from others who often cannot figure out where we belong, or whether we should be reviled or celebrated. Our young son’s words, “I do not want to belong to America,” have sent me on a journey of re-examining Blackness and citizenship in the United States and re-looking at how Blackness is particularly constructed and fetishized as the dangerous intimate “stranger in our midst.” This journey is driven by a mother’s pedagogy of love—for my family and for our communities—and toward re-imagining of the future present.
Encounters With Blackness: Stranger Recognition and Fetishization
Discourses and characterizations of Blackness as “the strangers in our midst” grew in prevalence during U.S. post-emancipation. Whether utilized as a compassionate phrase or a way of marking the need for separatism and a fear of the Black newcomer, Blackness = Stranger became ingrained in the very culture of America. Simultaneously, discourses of “stranger” are managed through fetishization—a containing of Black identity through constrained attributes and behaviors. Khalil Muhammad’s (2010) book, The Condemnation of Blackness, links the rise of stranger discourse to formations of Black pathology and “the emergence of distinctive modern discourses on race and crime” (p. 6). Muhammad’s text demonstrates that Blackness as the fetishized stranger has a long intimate, powerful history in the United States and one that continues today.
It is the ongoing discomfort experienced through a U.S. intimate connection to Blackness—to African American Blackness—the reminder of not only a colonial past but also a slave-based economy that marketed and benefited on the bodies of Black women and men, which continues to produce a specificity of racialized discourses about Blackness in the United States. These conditions lead Sharon Holland (2012) to argue that “the psychic life of racism can best be read in the context of the United States in the space where Black and White intersect” (p. 7). Here, Holland is not only referring to “White” as a racial identity but also White, Whiteness, as a state of mind that any person or nation can adopt.
Although Audre Lorde’s reminder that “there is no hierarchy to oppression” is on my office door, Blackness retains a particularly complex relationship in the conditions after: after slavery, after colonialism, and after and amid global markets. As racial and ethnic groups are re-made as citizens and “redefined as integral to the nation itself” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 97), Blackness, specifically African American Blackness, is the sore reminder of a past that the United States is stuck in a melancholic relationship with. Melancholia produces inertia, active forgetting, and “epistemologies of ignorance” (Mills, 1997), and creates a specific “racial contract” (Mills, 1997) of Black pathology perpetuating discourses of blame that actively (in)form research, knowledge, imagery, public opinion, and policy—whether that pathology is enacted as stranger danger or stranger fetishism.
Sara Ahmed’s (2000) writing on “strange encounters” articulates that “the figure of the ‘stranger’ is produced, not as that which we fail to recognize, but as that which we already recognized as ‘a stranger’” (p. 3). We hear this in Zimmerman’s description of Trayvon Martin to the 911 operator; Martin is described as out-of-place precisely because Zimmerman so easily recognizes and constructs him as a stranger.
Thus, the stranger most encountered and feared is not just anybody but a specific somebody: “The stranger then is not simply the one whom we have not yet encountered, but the one whom we have already encountered, or already faced” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 21). Again, we hear this in Zimmerman’s call to the police. Trayvon Martin had no chance—he was actively coded, marked, and known as the familiar fetishized stranger, the dangerous stranger who did not belong. In Martin, parents of Black youth witness again the evidence that their child can be “the neighbor who is also a stranger” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 26).
Encounters with a recognized but unknown “other”—the stranger—are “meetings, which are not simply in the present: each encounter reopens past encounters” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 8). Encounters can occur not only in person, face to face, but also across space and time, through media and other forms of cultural production. So, even if I never directly encountered Blackness—have seen, spoken, or sat with a Black person—I can still believe that I know Blackness because it is more prevalent as fetish in U.S. culture, knowledge, and media. Encounters then are not only physical but also emotional.
The social relationship formed out of stranger fetishism has psychological and material effects, yet the relationships and discourses that occur through stranger fetishism most often remain concealed. This silence Ahmed (2000) argues “cuts ‘the stranger’ off from the histories of its determination” (p. 5) and thus allows perceptions and emotions about who is the stranger to seemingly be natural, accounted for, and reinforced by each encounter (whether in the flesh or not).
If “stranger” always involves the recognition of who is “strange”—who is an outsider—then strange bodies must be overproduced, strategically overrepresented in certain patterns. This production necessitates inclusion of some strange bodies in our midst, those that can fit, that are coded as “different but not too different.” Ahmed (2000) argues that “‘stranger danger’ discourses expel the stranger,” or in the case of Martin, murder the stranger as “the origin of danger” while multicultural discourses welcome at least a small number of strangers as “the origin of difference.”
Blackness as an “origin of danger” and Blackness as a necessary “origin of difference” are integrally tied together. The ability to read when and in what spaces to “be Black but not too Black” is key to Black persons’ safety, access of life choices, and economic opportunities (Carbado & Gulati, 2013). Blackness must engage in practices of self-governance, for safety and well-being, and always pre-think, pre-plan how to enter a space. And, as recent high-profile cases demonstrate, the Black male who moves through space is always under suspicion, and this suspicion also marks those who move with him (Trujillo, 2009).
It is worth noting, this special issue and the conversations in it are occurring at the anniversary crossroads of several key federal and civil rights initiates—Brown v. Board of Education, Civil Rights, and Title IX. At the same time, demographic housing patterns and research indicate that many of our neighborhoods and schools have returned to segregated, unequal conditions and practices of strategic disenfranchisement of racialized youth continue (Cohen & Moffitt, 2009; Harris, 2011).
Colorlines (2014), a news blog, initiated a year-long series “Life Cycles of Inequity: A Series on Black Men.” The first installment, a video with eight Black male youth in high school, raised prevalent themes as young men describe how it feels to be targeted for disciplinary referrals; be faced with assumptions about learning and intelligence, including low expectations by teachers; and feel stuck by requirements to perform a certain kinds of Black masculinity while also being punished for it. The young men explicitly identified the strangeness of attempting to live across and with “boxes of race based upon color.”
When I’m with Black people, I’m acting White and when I’m with White people, I’m acting Black and I feel like I don’t really have a place. Where do I fit in? Where am I just myself, where am I just me? Don’t act your color . . . it makes me feel like my color is put down . . . it makes me feel a little angry with myself because I feel like I’m supposed to do something to try to change it, but I don’t know where to start.
Black youth deeply experience and can name the fetishized stranger danger associated with Blackness, which situates these youth as not only out of place in certain neighborhoods but also as strangers and a threat where ever they are. So: Where can we start? Where is homeplace for Black youth? How do we actively mother for another kind of community future?
“Disidentification” and Black Youth
As noted, Black writers have discussed and theorized, and mothers have witnessed Black youth questioning identities. In the hands of social scientists, however, this theorizing has been condensed to identifying stages of racial consciousness or racial dissonance. While useful, I want to trouble what it means to so easily address Black youth experiences as simply stages (that assume either growth thru or lagging stuck in a stage) or as a colleague said to me when I shared my son’s feeling of out of place in America: “Oh that is just a phase.” As a mother, I want to be armed with information about what my son may experience, face, and feel, but what does it mean that as a “phase” of identity development, we accept that Black youth feel out of place and even unsafe in their communities, school, and country?
Is there a way to use Black youth dissonance not only as places we need to provide support and strategies but also as cracks and openings that offer a deep, systemic critique of racisms and radicalization? Women of Color Feminisms and Queer of Color critique (Dillard, 2000; Lorded, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Pérez, 1999; Soto, 2011) provide radical ways of reimaging a futurity because these theories visualize and embody intersectional models demonstrating how racisms are always intimately linked with and rely upon normativities of gender, Whiteness, and hetero-patriarchy.
Listening to the young men on Colorlines and now mothering my second male child, I am acutely aware of the very limited gender behavior, mannerisms, and body bearing we place on male children. From an early age, we limit male’s experimentation and expression and surveil how they should sound, feel, talk, dress, express, walk, love, and play. The constructs and limitations are heightened for Black male children—At young ages, they are hyper-gendered and hyper-hetero-sexualized.
In thinking about my son’s dissonance and fear with being an American citizen, I see how stranger fetishism works always through White hetero-patriachical systems, beliefs, practices, and discourses. Neighborhood watches, such as Zimmerman participated in, are particularly gendered through masculinity and normativity—requiring that the watcher look out for and protect the community from any non-normativity, any difference, any “strangeness.” We have seen this lens result in the murder of not only Trayvon Martin but also Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena, and the hyper-patriarchical masculinized youth on youth violence that claims so many of our African American children. Zimmerman and these cases remind us that you do not have to be “White” to operate under and with a White hetero-patriarchy that fears, fetishizes, produces, and contains Blackness.
If Whiteness is everywhere—what do we do as mothers? 1 How do we develop “armor” for our youth to protect, guide, and provide strength as we send them into the world knowing they need to be prepared? As a mother, I understand the desire to provide, feed, and build our children up with resilience—and we practice this in our home. We provide counter histories and counter narratives to all that is around us and seek out “Black” spaces to be in for ourselves and for our family.
However, I also believe we need to provide ourselves, our children and youth with additional tools—tools that equally understand, counter and challenge hetero-patriarchy as intimately connected to economies of racism. Unless we challenge structures and discourses of hetero-patriarchy, racisms and Blackness as danger and fetish will flourish. Attending to where hetero-patriarchy exists and its corresponding economies of racism requires an active engagement of rethinking and openness—what I think of as an endarkened, embodied praxis of mothering (Dillard, 2000, 2012) that actively challenges oppressive constructions and seeks spaces of opportunities to practice what José Estaban Muñoz describes as “disidentification.”
Muñoz (1999) defines “disidentification” as the “survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic . . . public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (p. 4). Although Muñoz is thinking from and talking about the queer of color body, research on Black youth culture and Black masculinity would benefit by attending to the “disidentification” required of Black youth to survive.
Muñoz (1999) extends the “both/and,” “insider/stranger” discussion within race theory into places of queer imaginings. For Muñoz, disidentification is nimble, it necessarily fluctuates “as quickly as power does within discourse” (p. 19). It is “a process of production, and a mode of performance” (p. 25), and always entails a “utopian” possibility through a “rethinking of encoded meaning” (p. 31).
Disidentification provides something my son needs: ways of seeing and counter-performing race, gender, and sexuality not simply against present day constructs but always toward some imaginary futures. In this way, disidentification offers ongoing critique of the tight connections between racism and hetero-patriarchy that deeply contribute to the violences committed against Black youth and the limitations of potential performances of Black identities. Recently, on campuses, I have seen a few Black youth performing disidentifications, and it seems as adults and as a society, we do not know what to think or do, but I wonder . . . and hope these disidentifications can create dissonance in our society, so that society has to mature in its racial stages; society has to adjust and grow up and enact different forms of discourse, practice and policy.
My son recently told me that in 20 years, he will be traveling/exploring in space. That may be his “an-other country”—how might he and his fellow travelers reimagine identities in a post-Earth futurity?—but meanwhile . . .
My youngest son’s desire to be a citizen in another imagined country is his act of “disidentification,” a survival strategy of hope and imaginary . . . so his father and I and other mothers have decided we will let him dream and imagine as a way to face his and our family’s everyday existences, while continuing as mothers, adults, educators, researchers, and community members to actively name, resist, and alter Black racisms and fetishizations perpetuated through White hetero-patriarchy.
With my co-mothers—Parker and the other adults invested in our son’s growth and well-being—I will support and raise our child to be a responsible citizen. We are also trying to support his imagination by actively considering, researching, learning about, and hopefully visiting other places he could be another kind of citizen. Our son has the beginnings of understanding of the economic and human impact of colonialism and slavery, and the story of the places his roots are from—Africa, France, Indigenous America, and Black Caribbean—are connected by love and force to the places he could potentially be citizen of. Our family tree tells a painful and complex history of settler colonialism, forced movement of bodies and patterns of hope and immigration—but at the same time, our son dreams of these other places and other times, past and future, as spaces where he might belong differently.
And for now—at his still tender age—we will allow him to dream and (re)imagine, (re)envision such spaces, in the hopes that out of such dreams, he and other youth will show us the way to another country, other futurities.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Dr. Joy Pierce who invited me to be on the Qualitative Inquiry panel that led to writing this article and to panel participants for an engaging discussion. I am particularly grateful to have crossed paths with Dr. Bryant Keith Alexander and thank him warmly for encouraging me to publish this piece. This article is dedicated to my children, L. Parker, and the women friends who have always been there in loving unconditionality—to the future we dream of for our children and communities.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.