Black and Native women are America's original parenting experts, but rarely have the platforms. It's time for that to change.

I’ve always noticed how rare it is for Black women to be seen as experts in parenting and family education spaces. But I wasn’t aware of its impact on my life until I was pregnant with my first child. At 22, I believed I could question and expertly quote my way to an affirming birth experience. The weeks leading up to my birth revealed that beliefs Black women require intervention, not autonomy, don’t just shape birth; they shape our ability to raise our families in ways that align with our culture. The invalidation I experienced motivated me as much as it frustrated me. I used those traumas to build an award-winning career that centered Black perspectives in national and international publications. But it was an uphill battle.

In 2018, when I started my first staff writing gig with a well-known motherhood brand that has over 2.5 million Instagram followers, there was a clear racial divide in the conversations Black and other mothers of color were having about parenthood compared to white mothers. Even when our editors tried their best, the heavily white reader base didn’t support racial literary or justice content like “general” lighthearted topics that didn’t mention identity.

It would take years and another staff writer and editor role, where a higher-up decided Black family perspectives weren’t worth preserving, before I understood that the lack of support and investment in content that supports Black perspectives wasn’t unique. It was the American tradition to ignore, invalidate, and overshadow Black epistemology—until it’s time to extract from it.

I put the pieces of this puzzle together while working on my Master’s in American Studies. The more I read, the clearer it became that Black women, especially mothers, had keen insight into power, oppression, and survival. Yet often, we had to use this knowledge to benefit white families. Once that benefit ended, so did our presence. We weren’t alone. An interdependent exploration of reproductive exploitation in America revealed that Native women faced similar historical oppression and even more erasure and invisibilization.

A truth spoke to me: Despite being America’s original parenting experts, our voices still are overshadowed by white perspectives. And it’s hard to witness a conversation of American parenting that doesn’t center on white constructions of history, family, and culture.

On the journey, I found countless reasons Black and Native women should lead the charge, not have our lives shaped by those who copied our customs.

Reason 1: Black women were the original “parent coaches.”

For generations, Black women were forced into holistic care-taking for individual white families and the entire nation.

Enslaved Black women cared for white children and carried white women’s mothering labor after birth, including feeding. Even after slavery, Black women continued this work in white households to avoid legal and social violence despite “administrative freedom.”

Example:

In 1918, a Greenville city council ordinance said all negro women must be employed “regardless of whether they want to or not,” or put in jail or fined.

Reason # 2: Black and native women know parenting injustice and expectations because they’re tested and perfected on us.

Black women are the face of maternal mortality in this country. Native and Black women have comparable rates of maternal death. But racism in data collection rarely includes Native women, which reflects trends of invisibilization. Black and Native families are most impacted by the family separation system and painfully familiar with reduced parental autonomy through state surveillance.

The fetal personhood laws that fuel today’s maternal criminalization through abortion bans, fines, and prison were developed and perfected on our bodies.

Reason #3: Black and Native Mothers introduced today’s mothering “trends.”

We emphasize our kids’ humanity in a world that treats them as nonhuman due to anti-Blackness and colonization. We learn and pass the lessons of survival, hope, and joy anyway.

This shows up in black and Native mothering traditions, which emphasise communal childrearing, baby wearing, nonhierarchical, autonomy-based parenting, use of traditional medicine, and midwifery-based care.

Reason # 4: Black women birthed social change that shapes the world today.

The reproductive justice framework was coined in 1994 by a group of Black women.

They knew white women’s “pro-choice” platform was incomplete without work to ensure mothers and have the right to have children, and have the resources to raise those children in healthy communities alongside our right NOT to have children.

Reason # 5: Black women are still continuously and consistently “mammified.”

Our nation’s expectation for Black women to “mother” and care for everyone around us began in slavery. Even today, we’re expected to advise and emotionally support the world.

We’re at the forefront of cultural development and influence, but the last to be cited, credited, or spotlighted in media, workplaces, and communities.

Reason # 6: Black women led the charge in calling out the insufficiency of gender liberation in our analysis of racism in motherhood scholarship.

When Patricia Hill Collins offered a “Black Woman’s Standpoint on Mothering,” she showed that foundational conversations on the Institution of motherhood have failed all women as we attempt to mother our children, but have produced particularly harmful criticisms for Black women. In her work Black Feminist Thought, she wrote:

Black motherhood as an institution is both dynamic and dialectical. Ongoing tensions characterize efforts to mold the institution of Black motherhood to benefit intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation and efforts by African-American women to define and value our own experiences with motherhood.The controlling images of the mammy, the matriarch, and the welfare mother and the practices they justify are designed to oppress. In the context of a sexual politics that aims to control Black women’s sexuality and fertility, African-American women struggle to be good mothers. In contrast, motherhood can serve as a site where Black women express and learn the power of self-definition, the importance of valuing and respecting ourselves, the necessity of selfreliance and independence, and a belief in Black women’s empowerment.

Generations of us build off this and other legacies by contributing essential knowledge to family, mothering, and society.

We’re excluded from a multi-billion-dollar industry that uses our inherited knowledge and cultures to teach families, especially mothers, how to parent their children. In the meantime, Black and Native women continue to face institutional injustice, surveillance, and limited access.

The Call to right this wrong: Give Black and Native women the credit (and money) they are due.

The Threads Keeping Me Sane

Music

• Stay as You Are - Msaki, Tubatsi Mpho Moloi

I’m passively watching:

• My podcast episode: “My brain works differently,” On ADHD and Black Motherhood

What now?

• Reflect: What mainstream mothering traditions are rooted in Black and Native culture but not credited?

• Remember: Black mothers don’t lack knowledge; we lack structural support, investment, and space to put that knowledge to work.

• A Black feminist quote: “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again” - Sojourner Truth

- In search of liberated mothering, Amb, the aspiring Free Black Mama