Of Black Mothers, Daughters and Grandmothers

Contemplating the new book, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.

What does it mean to be a mother? What does it mean to be a Black mother? Those two questions continue to yield entirely different answers in America today. As the biracial mother of a 4-year-old girl with both Asian American and African American roots, and a father from Spain to boot, I am constantly aware of the way her identity is being shaped by the sights and smells and sounds that she takes in every day — on television, at the playground, and in her preschool classroom.

“Her hair is curly like mine,” she’ll say when we see another brown-skinned girl with matching Afro puffs on either side of her head. I pray that she continues to see such mirroring images with pride. That she will not crumble, like I did, with insecurities about the way I looked. I pray that she will not care, as I did, that my hair wouldn’t lie down flat like the White girls I saw in school.

I pray about so many things, as my husband and I sometimes struggle to explain the inexplicable. The police are there to help us when we’re in trouble, I say, as we pass a friendly neighborhood officer in uniform on our way to the subway…