MMO:
A central subject of your work is being a white mother of Black sons.
We seem to be living in a cultural moment when racism, like sexism,
has disappeared from the national dialog. But racism is still a pressing
issue in the U.S -- and it clearly impacts the lives of mothers and
children of color. What do you think is going on? How might a mothers’
movement play a role in encouraging an honest discussion about race
in America?
Jane Lazarre:
When you ask about racism, its increasing invisibility in public
discourse and its impact on mothers, I think not only of mothers
of color, for whom, as for any person of color, racism is still
pervasive and powerful, but of white mothers, and not only of white
mothers like myself, whose children are Black. I think about whiteness
as a historical/social/psychological phenomenon. The impact of racism
on mothers of color is often discussed and written about eloquently
by mothers of color in both fiction and non-fiction - (Alice Walker,
Toni Morrison, Patricia Williams, others.) But I would like to respond
to the question in terms of the impact of racism on white people,
including mothers.
For many years, in addition to teaching writing at Eugene Lang
College in New York, I taught courses in the African American autobiographical
tradition, from the narratives of enslaved Americans to contemporary
works by writers such as James Baldwin or Audre Lorde. In Incidents
in the Life of A Slave Girl, a famous narrative by Harriet
Jacobs, a woman enslaved in North Carolina in the 1800s describes
the particular conditions of mothers during that holocaust that
lasted over two hundred years. The problem of whiteness -- what
it was, as an idea, an ideology, a system of strict and ruthless
privilege -- is inseparable from Jacobs’ experience not only
as a slave but as a mother. For more than two centuries, children
were sold away from their mothers for the profit of slave holders,
while women and girls were forced to produce children through rape.
This is our history, a part of the history of American motherhood.
What is this whiteness that allowed such atrocities to continue
over so extended a period of time? I saw I had to include in my
course a curriculum of works, both classic (mostly by Black writers
such as Jacobs, Frederick Douglass and others) and contemporary,
by both Black and white scholars, that addressed this problem of
whiteness. It was difficult and enormously fulfilling to work with
young white students who were wrestling with the issue, learning
to separate their sense of themselves as individuals from the historical
injustice -- Baldwin called it a “lie” -- of whiteness
as an institutionalized system of skin color superiority and privilege.
As years passed and I grew older, my relationship to my students
included certain maternal aspects, and I experienced this effort
to help them understand race in America as, in part, a kind of maternal
work.
Another story: Recently, when I was giving a talk at a college
on this subject, reading from my memoir about being a white mother
of Black sons, a white woman introduced herself as a professor who
discussed race in all her classes, as she teaches courses in the
African novel. Her question involved her son, a student at mid-western
university, who had recently been mugged. What should I tell him,
she asked, identifying the situation in no more specific way. I
asked if she were saying the muggers were Black, and she nodded,
yes. I asked if the question could be turned around for a moment.
When my son was five, and we were vacationing at a famously liberal
beach town, he came home one day and said the little girl down the
block had called him a nigger. This was the first of many racist
experiences he and his brother would endure from early childhood
into adulthood and the present. What should I have told him, I asked,
that all white people were bad? She looked surprised -- perhaps
she got the point -- but I felt, as many times before, confirmed
in my understanding that racism is pervasive and powerful in our
country in every institution and in many personal interactions.
I agree with you that it is often erased now, either denied outright,
or distorted and diluted in wider categories such as “diversity,”
“multiculturalism,” “global studies.” These
categories are themselves, of course, worthy and important in many
ways, but racism against people of African descent has a very specific
history in our nation. This history belongs to us all and its continued
denial is virulent for all Americans interested in progressive change,
including mothers. White mothers and their children who tolerate
this denial, or worse, subscribe to overt beliefs regarding the
racial superiority of white skin (and this, I know, is common from
fifteen years of reading brave and beautiful autobiographical writing
by white students) are settling for a half life in many dangerous
ways, both political and psychological. Anyone interested in this
subject should read James Badlwin’s essay, “A Stranger
in the Village,” in the collection Notes of a Native Son,
and “Whiteness as Terror in the Black Imagination,”
by bell hooks in the wonderful collection Black on White,
edited by David R. Roediger.
MMO: You were politically active before becoming a mother, but you write
in “The Mother Knot” that you sometimes felt motherhood
made you invisible to other feminists. Many mothers today feel the
same way. Do you think there’s a way to make contemporary
feminism more mother-friendly without undermining the feminist argument?
Jane Lazarre: When
I was a young feminist, and a young mother, two life changing situations
that in my life coincided, there was a strong and destructive conflict
between the two, at least on the level of public discourse. I attended
many feminist meetings and conferences, even small consciousness
raising groups, in which mothers and the maternal experience were
trivialized, placed in contradiction to "women’s liberation,"
even treated with disdain. On the other hand, mothers, proud of
their traditional roles, dismissed feminists as "bra burners"
whose fight for equality had nothing to do with them. Since that
time, much has been written that exposes this polarization for the
false story it is. Works such as Sara Ruddick’s Maternal
Thinking, studies by feminist psychoanalysts such as Jessica
Benjamin, Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, revisions of
literature by and about mothers, historical reinterpretations --
all reveal the important links between motherhood and feminism,
often written by passionate feminists who are also passionate mothers.
It is infuriating and discouraging at times to read in the popular
press and elsewhere that the polarization continues, to hear so
many young women use the word feminism as an epithet, assert their
belief in gender equality with the caveat, I am not a feminist,
but… I can only say it seems to me feminist writers and scholars
have a responsibility to analyze and interpret the experiences of
motherhood as one crucial path in female identity, as fundamental
to some as sexuality, the need for creative work, the importance
of financial independence and political power. Many have taken on
this responsibility. And it seems to me equally true that women
and men who value liberty and equality, including all matters pertaining
to gender and sexual identities, sabotage their work and the chance
of expanding their own freedom if they do not attend to the feminist
analyses now available to us all. This analysis includes not only
a critique of conventional femininity as it has been associated
with passivity and submission, qualities which are certainly dangerous
for mothers, but to masculinity as it has been and continues to
be associated with violence and war, which are dangerous to us all.
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