One month ago, today, Michael Brown Jr.
was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri.
I sat down to write this post several times within the last month, but
could not bring myself to do it. I was inundated with Facebook statuses,
tweets, instagram pictures and the like, about this tragic shooting. But what could I say? What should I say? I turned on the television and people aching
for justice were met with tear gas, tanks and other methods of brute force, as
if they were adversaries! As each day
passed, it became more difficult to process that it was 2014 and not 1964.
I still have so many questions. Two that remain are:
1. What about the mother of Mike Brown?
AND
2. How much trauma can one group of
people take?
(I do not know how to even begin to deal
with the second question, so I will focus on the first.)
While I am not yet a mother, I have the
capacity to become one. As a black
woman, whose body can produce black children, I could not help but wonder if
someday, I might stand in the shoes of Ms. Lesley McSpadden, mother of Mike
Brown. I wondered on the one hand, about
the courage it takes to raise a child in a land not created for them and on the
other hand, I commended the courage of black mothers to keep doing so. Black mothers keep mothering, even though
"every 28 hours a black person is killed by a police officer". Black mothers keep mothering, even though our
children are being killed while in handcuffs (Oscar Grant), for wearing a hoodie (Trayvon Martin), for
listening to music (Jordan Davis), for asking for help (Renisha McBride) or while walking down the street (Mike Brown). Black
mothers keep mothering black children, even though we live in a society, which fears black skin. I wrestled with
this feeling of hopelessness and wondered if I could ever become a mother,
given this reality.
It was during this time that I came
across an old (April 2014) Essence magazine article by Melissa Harris-Perry
entitled “Mother’s Day.” She recounts
the death of Jordan Davis, an unarmed African-American male shot and killed in
the backseat of an SUV in Florida for playing rap music. In this article, she mentions having met the
mother of both Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, in a close time frame. She writes,
“It
is impossible to be a Black Woman in America without wondering, at times, if
our country hates the ones we love. It
would be easy to allow the grief of our recent losses or the history of Black
life in America to make us shun the task of mothering. We have inherited the historic audacity of Black
mothers in this country. We have dared
to create families, to embrace our beloveds, to bear our children and to pour
our whole selves into them even when we know that a hateful world awaits. To love our children without reservation is
an act of courage—one that was passed down to us, and one that we must
continue.”
*Photo taken at Howard University: "Hands Up, Don't Shoot"
While I agree with Harris-Perry that we
must remember the historical narrative of the black mother’s audacity, and the
current narrative of the black mother’s continued courage, (especially in light
of these not-so-new racialized realities), I would like to add to her argument.
For me, there is also a theological narrative, which gives us hope. It is this: We (black women) are a part of God's story, because we are a part of human history. If God put us in the story, God surely put our children in the story. Therefore, we must also come to see black mothering/child-rearing
as the continued work of God. If this is so, in like manner, we ought see our children as indeed, bearing the image of God (Gen. 1:27). This means that the lives of not only black
parents, but also black offspring are and will always be valuable—even when the
world at large decides otherwise.
#MikeBrown #DontShoot #Godtalk #BlackMothers #blacklivesmatter #GodMadeTheSkinImIn
