Abstract
Sociology is still contending with its legacy of treating African Americans foremost through a framework of social pathology. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its handling of black families, where emphases on topics such as single-parent households and absentee fathers have supplied ammunition for blaming disproportionate rates of crime, unemployment, teen pregnancy, and other social problems on individual failings resulting from deficient upbringings. Riché J. Daniel Barnes’s Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community joins a body of recent sociological work that challenges this pathological model. In focusing specifically on black professional women who are also wives and mothers, Barnes makes a major contribution towards broadening sociological understandings of black families and the impacts of race across social class lines.
Raising the Race is the first ethnographic study of black career women and their relationship with work and family. Barnes spent four years in Atlanta interviewing and participant-observing 23 married (or heterosexually cohabitating), upper-middle-class, professional black women with at least one young child. To nonethnographers, this sample size might look small; however, as Barnes explains, both the richness of her data—which also included a survey, genealogy charts, and follow-up interviews—and the domain-specific nature of her sampling allow her to better grasp the complexities of her topic and to extend her analysis to people outside the study (p. 21). Indeed, among the numerous contributions of this work are several policy recommendations in support of working parents, black working mothers particularly (p. 182). Additionally, Raising the Race is significant for foregrounding black experiences and perspectives within the growing literature on women, work, and families.
Barnes’s analysis is anchored in a concept she calls strategic mothering, which is utilized to explain the myriad ways the women in her study navigate and redefine their roles as professionals, wives, and mothers. Strategic mothering serves as a mode of articulating a neopolitics of respectability, which Barnes describes as the “ongoing self-defense of respectability” (p. 12) in response to portrayals of black women as undesirable romantic partners and bad mothers.
The book’s five main chapters include a review of past scholarship on black motherhood, black families, and women and work (chapter 1); an introduction to the three types of strategic mothering—modified full-time career moms, modified stay-at-home moms, and available-flexible career moms—that emerge through Barnes’s research (chapter 2); an elaboration on how, against the prevailing wisdom that black women should maintain their independence from men, the women in Barnes’s study prioritize maintaining their marriages ahead of their careers (chapter 3); a discussion of the challenges surrounding raising upper-middle-class black children (chapter 4); and an explanation of the intraracial class tensions that underlie these women’s roles as black mothers (chapter 5).
Increasingly black career women are delaying having children, waiting until a stage in their lives when concerns for ageing parents are on the horizon. To compound this, professional black families often migrate away from their families of origin in pursuit of greater opportunities. Both these shifts have pressed black women, in particular, to come up with innovative ways of replicating their traditional communities of support. As Raising the Race effectively shows, their solutions are often fraught with tensions surrounding race, class, gender, and community. To illustrate this ambivalence, one can juxtapose the enthusiastic pursuit of “just-like-kin” daycare (p. 64)—that is, black in-home child-care givers who treat both children and parents like family—with angst-filled decisions to outsource domestic help (pp. 169–70), given the historical role of black women in providing such help to white families.
One of the most unsettling sections of Raising the Race is Barnes’s discussion of how these very accomplished black women appear to sacrifice their careers—making them vulnerable to their husbands—in pursuit of marriage stability. The explanation that, for black women, marriage is more precarious than motherhood or careers—so accordingly these women put greater efforts into maintaining their marriages (p. 105)—makes sense. Yet such findings appear to contradict both images of contemporary liberated women and the intergenerational lessons (i.e., “Just in case he acts crazy” [p. 96]) passed down from their mothers and grandmothers.
Like other recent studies of the black middle class, Raising the Race spotlights the pressure to promote positive black cultural values while simultaneously attempting to shield young people from the damaging images of “ghetto culture” as an authentic representation of blackness. Still, Barnes’s ethnographic focus on parenting infuses these discussions, which include choices surrounding communities of residence and schools, with fresh insights and compelling illustrations.
Finally, beyond its substantial academic contributions, Raising the Race offers on-the-ground perspectives on issues that are among the most pressing to college-aged and early-career black women. Accordingly, Barnes’s jargon-free text should draw a sizable general readership. As a first-of-its-kind interrogation of important and timely issues, Raising the Race significantly advances our understandings of these complex social dynamics.