1 Creating Racial Safety and Comfort
CLASS-, RACE-, AND GENDER-BASED PARENTING CONCERNS
I interviewed Maya in the living room of her home, which was located in an upper-middle-class enclave in a city noted for its high crime rate. Now an academic, Maya was raised in a two-income household by working-class parents. Her own family is blended, comprising a child from her spouse’s previous relationship, children from her own previous relationships, and one child she and her current spouse had together. Describing how her approach to parenting compared to her parents’ approach, she said,
[We do a lot] more middle-class parenting in a lot of ways. We do the shuttling, you know, soccer and [this and that], and who has to be where when, and we both do some of it, in a way that my parents didn’t. . . . [Growing up working class, my parents told us] go play, go outside and play, whereas our kids are much more sheltered and shuttled, but they do have chores. . . . It is not coddling, but in many moments, it is child centered in a way that . . . for my parents, it wasn’t a child centered life. . . . [Our parenting] is much more nurturing and looking at their talents and thinking about what to put them in [activity-wise].
Like Maya, the vast majority of the African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers in my research enrolled their children in a range of extracurricular and academic enrichment programs, including Little League, soccer, swim class, ballet, karate, and music lessons that lower-income mothers often do not have the same economic resources to do.
Conforming to the images of other middle-class families portrayed in mainstream media and academic sources, the mothers in my research and their families led busy and highly scheduled lives.1 Their family lives were often child centered and their routines were often tied to weekly calendars. Indeed, during my interview with Maya, she retrieved a weekly calendar posted in her kitchen to use as a visual aid while she described her children’s weekly activities and the parental division of labor in the drop-off and pick-up schedules.
FINDING THE BALANCE
On the surface, Maya’s account sounds similar to many popular depictions of middle-class parenting. Compared to her own upbringing, she described her children’s lives as “sheltered and shuttled.” Nevertheless, Maya’s description of how she made decisions about the schools her children attended and their extracurricular activities revealed additional layers of concerns. Her decisions were motivated by her desire for her children to acquire additional skills to address challenges related to intersections of race, class, and gender. These concerns recurred not just in her account but also in the accounts of the other mothers in my research. The concerns and the skills these mothers underscored are generally not the focus of discussions of middle-class mothers, who are often presumed to be white and, thus, have the luxury of not needing to prepare their children for the distinct and explicitly racialized and gendered societal reception they will encounter throughout their lives. Although African American middle-class mothers have more resources than their lower-income counterparts, they also continuously navigate parenting challenges that are of a different character and consequence than white middle-class mothers.
Existing research on middle-class families typically does not account for mothers who deliberately and, at times, necessarily, weave themselves and their children in and out of communities marked by different configurations of race, class, and gender, and how that weaving requires different types of social and cultural capital. This research often ignores the class diversity within African American middle-class families’ social and community networks, which demands this weaving and the skill sets that accompany it. This scholarship also tends to focus on the experiences of race and/or racial stigma as it intersects with lower economic status.2
The accounts of the African American middle-class mothers in my research suggest how racial stigma continues to influence their experiences, regardless of having more resources at their disposal. Despite having similarities to white middle-class families, the accounts of these African American mothers show how considerations of race, class, and gender have continuously influenced their parenting. Their accounts connect experiences within the family with structures outside of the family and describe how their families experience those structures.3 Maya explained,
I think about balance in their lives as a whole. Because there’s always this compromise about schools, right? There are not schools that exist in the Bay Area . . . where you can send your African American kids and know they will have African American teachers and . . . be treated with that kind of community love and be well educated. You just can’t do both. You have to choose. . . . When I think about the outside activities, I want to balance out what I see as an imbalance in their school experience. So, my other child is in a preschool, but there’s only one other black child in his class, but the teachers are black and that’s why I still have him there. My other child is at a school where it is maybe 20 percent black, but it is culturally very white. . . . There’s maybe one black teacher. . . . And, so, when I think about activities, I want them to be around other black people.
For Maya and the other mothers in this study, ensuring a balance in the racial and economic composition in their children’s peer groups in educational and social contexts was a recurrent consideration in their parenting. A mother might believe that her child’s school did not have the ideal level of diversity, so in response she would work to balance that through extracurricular activities. Unlike lower-income mothers, these mothers had additional resources that enabled them to have more control over their children’s neighborhood context and peer groups.4
The definition of the “ideal balance” was not the same for all mothers, but racial, gender, and class identity played key parts in determining that ideal. This balance related to creating racially comfortable environments for their children, and, as I will detail in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, it also informed these mothers’ approaches to the development of their children’s racial identity. Mothers varied in whether they were raised in families that were solidly middle class for more than one generation, became middle-class through upward mobility and had substantial economic diversity in their families, and the racial diversity in their families and social networks. These factors also informed their definition of the ideal balance.
A parent’s decision to take a child to singing practice at a church choir comprised of children from a range of racial and economic backgrounds is influenced by different concerns and motivations than a parent’s decision to take a child to a high-priced violin lesson in a predominately elite, white neighborhood. Similarly, enrolling a child in an athletic league in his or her middle-class neighborhood rather than one across town in a more economically and racially diverse or low-income community served different purposes. Opting to live in a more racially and economically diverse neighborhood rather than in a less diverse one (either white or nonwhite) is also connected with different concerns and motivations. Mothers’ specific concerns related to race, class, and gender, and to fostering specific kinds of identities in their children influence how they use their economic and social resources, time, and involvement in organizations within African American and mainstream communities. Although the African American middle-class mothers I interviewed used strategies that scholars describe white middle-class mothers as using in raising their children,5 they also used additional strategies and modified others to address challenges related to race, class, and gender that they believed their children would face.
Maya described having an ad hoc community of African American parents with whom she talked about school and childcare choices and whom she described as sharing her experiences and outlook:
[We are in a network with several families that] are all navigating these spaces at the same time and we are able to be a resource to each other. [The network is comprised of] people that I went to college with who are all professionals in the Bay Area [and with whom] I can have those conversations. . . . “What are you thinking about for your child for middle school?” And we can talk about the choices.
These mothers collected and shared a valuable body of knowledge to help each other find and make choices about the best settings for their children. When I asked Maya