Motherlines Conceived from Disparate Roots

Abstract

Abstract:In the 70 years since E. Franklin Frazier published The Negro Family in the United States (1948), black communities have witnessed the arrival of black immigrants in unprecedented numbers. Literature on this population suggests that, although African American, African, and Afro-Caribbean families are similarly marginalized by the resuscitation of antiblack practices, they fail to locate refuge in one another. Racial stereotypes work internally to distort and degrade their perception of the "other." African Americans doubt the authenticity of the foreign-born families that move into their neighborhoods or purchase local businesses, while black immigrants conceive of native-born parents as unmotivated and their children as self-destructive.A study of this intraracial, cross-ethnic dynamic, this paper attends to black mothers—those traditionally cast as the bearers of black familial pathology. Using original ethnographic research with native-born and foreign-born black mothers in the city of Hartford, Connecticut, the text posits that black mothers migrate across ethnic borders to yield a motherline—a collective of mothers that not only mutually rears their children but also sees them through the structural and ideological forces that reduce their lives to precarity. Their love for their children stirs a need and a want to align with those whose grievances mirror their own. Amid critical and reflective dialogue about the boundaries that separate them, these mothers jointly forge kinship structures that brace their children for external racial assaults. This close examination of black maternal boundary crossings captures the possibilities of black love on borderlands widely considered marred.