Olivia Perlow
THIS CHAPTER provides a personal account of my experiences as a mother and graduate student attending a historically black college/university (HBCU). I trace my narrative through the critical theorizing of black feminist scholars who have examined the ways in which whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism are interrelated systems of oppression that mutually reinforce one another on multiple levels (Collins 2000; Landry 2007). Societal institutions such as universities act as conduits through which the oppressive values of these systems are often transmitted to its members on macro-, meso-, and microscales (Landry 2007). It is my contention that although HBCUs were designed to provide black people with the opportunity to achieve upward mobility, my experience at the HBCU where I attended graduate school was that it perpetuated race, class, and gender oppression and thus became a hostile environment for me as a mother. Through face-to-face interactions with peers and professors and encounters with administrators who exercised an authoritative commitment to the university’s policies, I experienced how other academics internalized society’s racist, patriarchal, and capitalistic value system and thus oppressed students like myself. This chapter therefore demonstrates how my social location as a low-income, black female hindered my ability to navigate motherhood in this context and exposed me to multiple oppressions within and outside of the HBCU. I conclude by exploring the ways in which I and other women like me combated these challenges.
Intersectionality, as a feminist framework of analysis, is a powerful lens through which to understand how one’s social location is determined by various intersecting identities (i.e., race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability) that over time have cumulative effects (Davis 1981; Combahee River Collective 1982; Lorde 1984; Spelman 1988; Christian 1989; Collins 2000; Landry 2007). My race, gender, and class, for instance, interacted to create a unique set of challenges for me as a parent. Due to the history of slavery and the commoditization of black women in the United States and across the Americas, racist assumptions about black motherhood have been created (Lewis 2001). Pauline Terrelenge Stone states that black women’s experiences are different from white women’s in “the peculiar way in which the racial and sexual caste systems have interfaced” historically (quoted in Berry and Mizelle 2006, xv). Patricia Hill Collins agrees: “African-American women occupy this center and can ‘feel the iron’ that enters Black women’s souls, because while U.S. Black women’s experiences resemble others, such experiences remain unique” (2000, 39). My story is unique, but like all student mothers, I ultimately share in the struggle to achieve a successful balance between academic and family life. The difference is that I believed the individuals at my university, as an HBCU, would work in solidarity with me because they know all too well how interlocking systems of oppression have created barriers for black people. My intersecting gendered and class experience sadly demonstrates, however, that I was incorrect.
AFRICAN AMERICANS AND COLLEGES/UNIVERSITIES
HBCUs have historically appealed to African Americans because of their “supportive campus environments and open opportunity structures” for students of color (Boyd 2007, 547). It is well documented that many alumni, students, faculty, and administrators at HBCUs have been leaders in the fight against racial inequality and injustice (Reviere and Nahal 2005). I attended an HBCU with the expectation that the institution would shield me from racial oppression and live up to its historical legacy of embodying a commitment to social justice. To the contrary, I found that although my HBCU may be ahead of predominately white institutions in challenging racism, it has lagged behind in confronting sexism and women’s issues (Bonner 2001; Reviere and Nahal 2005; Gasman 2007). As at many other educational institutions, the black men (and women) at this HBCU also reproduced the larger society’s patriarchal power structure (Guy-Sheftall 1995; Collins 2000). Florence Bonner concurs: “In terms of barriers to promotion, exclusion from the curricula, a chilly climate in the workplace and classroom, and sexual harassment, African American women face the same obstacles at HBCUs as they do at [predominantly white institutions]” (2001, 188). Gender issues within black institutions are “swept under the rug” in order to highlight issues of racial inequality within the larger society (Gasman 2007, 760). Thus, the goal of racial solidarity requires black women to remain silent around issues of sexism, even within black institutions (Fordham 1993). One of the manifestations of this silence is that very little scholarly inquiry regarding black women at the HBCU exists despite the fact that they have historically been the majority at these institutions (Gasman 2007).
As a case in point, the absence of a women’s studies program until recently is an indication of my university’s neglect of gender issues (Reviere and Nahal 2005). Further evidence of patriarchy is the existence of a glass ceiling; positions of administrative power are heavily dominated by men, and women are most heavily concentrated in the lowest-ranking and typically pink-collar and service positions (Bonner 2001). Despite these and other inequities at my university, women, even those in high positions, have not significantly challenged the administration to redress gendered issues. Signithia Fordham explains that, according to Jo Anne Pagano, “women pawn their collective voice in exchange for success in the existing patriarchic structure. By engaging in such practices, she argues, women ensure the continued existence of authority in the male image and their (women’s) complicity in the lie that asserts that they are naturally silent. She concludes by asserting that women who either remain or become silent are instrumental in maintaining female dependency and invisibility in the academy” (1993, 10).
In my experience, many of the black women in upper administrative positions within the university refused to challenge their own gendered subordination and failed to support female students, including student mothers. The needs and interests of this particular population (i.e., child care, family housing, flexible schedules, mentorship, etc.) were not met as a result of a male-centered ethos that did not regard student–mothers as a priority for the university. In fact, the fiercest opposition to motherhood that I received within the university came directly from black female administrators. I was surprised and shocked by what I perceived as a high level of internalized sexism.
In addition, instead of adhering to traditionally African-centered principles of cooperation, interdependence, and collective responsibility, my HBCU promoted the dominant ideology where hegemonic ideals of success are based on Western capitalistic notions of liberal individualism, conformity, and a staunch commitment to an impersonal bureaucratic structure (Johnson 2003). In an effort to challenge this ideology, bell hooks argues, “Collectively, Black folks could progress in our efforts to achieve Black self-determination if we repudiated bourgeoisie values. The bourgeoisie knows this, which is why it wants all Black people to believe that material success is all that matters” (1995, 258). According to James Teele’s analysis of the writings of E. Franklin Frazier, the first black president of the American Sociological Association, the HBCU’s real goal, instead of empowering black communities through a commitment to social justice, is in fact the shaping of a “Black bourgeoisie,” and the educational tradition is “to mold [students of color] in the image of the [owning-class] white man” (2002, 146). For example, HBCUs have been a significant pathway for blacks into the U.S. business elite (Boyd 2007). Thus, despite a stated mission of empowering students to recognize and fight against their oppressions, the main goal of the HBCU at which I attended graduate school was to create, consistent with capitalistic principles, an avenue of upward mobility into the middle and upper classes for black students, but with little or no regard for how to use their education or new positionality to effect social justice.
According to Collins, “In some fundamental ways, moving into the middle class means adopting the values and lifestyles of White middle-class families” (2000, 196). In terms of being a good mother within white, middle-class, traditional American culture, this means adopting what Sharon Hays refers to as “intensive mothering,” an idealized gender role that expects women to be selfless, investing an extraordinary amount of time, emotional and physical energy, and financial resources into their children (as cited in Lynch 2008, 586). The dominant cultural portrayal of motherhood is one of sacrificial commitment, and even white middle-class mothers struggle with such level of engagement. In the same vein, the dominant script for what it means to be a good student, especially a graduate student, is also one of selfless commitment. In this regard, the dominant cultural expectations of graduate school and motherhood place these two roles in direct conflict with each other because each one requires so much attention and effort.
Race, class, and lack of mentoring also exacerbate the challenges of mothering in graduate school (Koro-Ljungberg and Hayes 2006; L. Patton 2009). Because academe is a microcosm of the macrosystems of oppression, black students are forced to deal with various factors such as others’ perceptions about their scholarly ability, which then impacts their academic achievement (M. Williams et al. 2005). For black female students, these issues are further complicated by their social location. As Himani Bannerji states, “One can only think of racism, sexism and class as interconstitutive social relations of organized and administered domination. It is their constantly mediating totality which shapes people’s perception of each other.… They see her as a Black woman, in the entirety of that construction, about whom there are existing social practices and cultural stereotypes … [and] racist sexism … [that] have had an overwhelmingly negative impact on her economic and personal life (1995, 127–128).
Angela Davis ([1971] 1995) further argues that African American women bring to academe a unique history of womanhood that strikingly contrasts to that of white women. For one thing, black women have historically been forced to work outside the home in large numbers and have thus had less time, energy, and financial resources to devote to motherhood (hooks 1981; Collins 2000). More important, black motherhood has historically been inextricably linked to the sexual politics of black womanhood in which black females’ sexuality and fertility has been controlled to enable the systems of whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation to operate more effectively (hooks 1981; Collins 2000). As a consequence, the white male elite created and reserved the definitions of womanhood, in particular the “cult of true womanhood,” for white women, who were perceived as inherently good, including in their role as mothers. In contrast, black women have been regarded as the antithesis of womanhood, historically devalued as persons since slavery, and considered bad mothers (Christian 1989; Collins 2000, 79; Jordan-Zachery 2008). It is not surprising, then, that negative hegemonic images of black mothers as the Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Matriarch, Welfare Mother/Queen, and Teen Mom describe them as promiscuous, sexually uncontrolled, abundantly fertile, irresponsible, immoral, and lazy. According to Collins,
These negative images provide ideological justification for the dominant group’s interest in limiting the fertility of Black mothers who are seen as producing too many economically unproductive children.… The image of the welfare mother fulfills this function by labeling as unnecessary and even dangerous to the values of the country the fertility of women who are not White and middle class.… [S]tigmatizing her as the cause of her own poverty and that of African-American communities shifts the angle of vision away from structural sources of poverty and blames the victims themselves. (2000, 87–88)
Therefore, such images of black mothers benefit the white elite’s political, economic, and cultural interests (Morton 1991).
The internalization of this macrosystem of oppression is apparent within black middle-class institutions that have struggled to establish cultural boundaries between themselves and the lower class. By serving as juxtaposition to middle-class values, the aforementioned negative images of classed sexuality and fertility are examples of what black women should not to be. The moral policing of black sexuality can paradoxically be seen even within black institutions in that they often attempt to counter these negative images by imposing conservative restrictions on black women’s sexuality—that is, by promoting a “politics of respectability” (Collins 2005, 139).
In keeping with the internalization of hegemonic images of black women and of the middle-class value system, black student motherhood is highly frowned upon because it plays into notions of irresponsible and unrestrained black sexuality and is an aberration in the normative middle-class sequence of education, financial stability, and individual achievement promoted at the HBCU I attended. Black student mothers are often demonized as irresponsibly producing children that we cannot afford (Collins 2000). Many professors communicated their disapproval of me and other black student mothers through both verbal and nonverbal insults. For example, I can recall the negative glares I received from some professors as I strolled my infant daughter through the hallway. Some were notorious for having strict “no children allowed in class” policies. I can also recall one professor forcing a student to leave class when she brought her infant son because she didn’t have any child-care options. Professors would often make snide remarks to student mothers, such as, “You shouldn’t have had a kid if you can’t take care of it.” Because we were seen as responsible for our own plight and thus unworthy of assistance, very few professors showed compassion and leeway in terms of attendance or due dates for assignments if our children were ill. Instead, we were often accused of making excuses or being incompetent.
Although peer support has been shown to be essential for student mothers, research shows that the “chilly climate” they experience can contribute to unfair treatment by peers (Van Stone, Nelson, and Niemann 1994; Colbeck, Cabrera, and Terenzini 2001). Many of my peers consistently expressed their disappointment in my decision to have a child while attending graduate school. Within my program, I can recall my closest peers’ reactions when I first told them that I was pregnant. Instead of viewing my pregnancy in a positive manner, they made comments such as, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” and “Wow, this is a really bad time to be having a kid” and “How are you possibly going to manage?” Instead of offering me assistance as well as much-needed emotional support, my closest peers within my program all but disappeared after my daughter was born. Thus, I often felt stigmatized and isolated within my program (Kurtz-Costes, Helmke, and Ülkü-Steiner 2006). Consistent with the internalization of the middle-class value system, my HBCU peers were concerned that motherhood would interfere with the completion of my degree, and in their eyes I embodied the irresponsible, bad black mother.
The abject criticism and opposition I received from administrators, professors, and even my peers for my decision to have a child while attending graduate school demonstrate how negative hegemonic images of black women converge with the white, middle-class value system to oppress black women, even within black institutions (Archer 2010). One multifaceted experience particularly stands out as a beacon of my oppression in graduate school. I was the recipient of a fellowship from the graduate school that required me to work, which became challenging to me as a new mother with an infant. I therefore sought the assistance of a black female administrator with significant power in hopes that she would empathize with my situation and assign me a flexible work schedule to accommodate my circumstances. She responded to my request by stating condescendingly, “You have a prestigious award. What do you want to do, just be a floater? It was your decision to have a baby in graduate school!” She was apparently imposing her middle-class values of individualism and self-reliance on me by further perpetuating the notion that I was irresponsible for having a child and thus undeserving of assistance. I once again found myself being labeled as a black welfare mother looking for handouts. She treated me as if I were looking for an easy way out or trying to get over on the system. As the protector of this system, this female administrator was not going to help me out. This sort of treatment, bell hooks argues, occurs because “American women have been socialized, even brainwashed, to … uphold and maintain racial imperialism in the form of white supremacy and sexual imperialism in the form of patriarchy. One measure of the success of such indoctrination is that we perpetuate both consciously and unconsciously the very evils that oppress us” (1981, 120).
The administrator who chastised me (along with many of the black female administrators in top positions within the university) ironically seemed to embody the prototype of a “black lady” or a “modern mammy,” a middle-class black woman who is “tough, independent, smart,” displays “undying loyalty to the job,” uses “standard American English,” and has a “dignified demeanor” (Collins 2005, 140–141). She had “arrived” and had done everything the “right” way, meaning that she had completed her education and obtained a well-paying job before having children. However, she failed to recognize how her careerist orientation perpetuated racism and sexism and how she was participating in the oppression of black women.
Carol Davies has coined the term condification to refer to black political figures such as former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and administrators like the one I encountered: “‘Condification’ defines the process of the conservative Black and/or female subject in power working publicly against the larger interests of the groups to which s/he belongs.… Thus, ‘con-di-fi-cation’ carries within it the ‘con’ of conservatism; the ‘con’ of being conned, along with the resonance of commodification, in the sense of being bought and/or sold for a particular interest. It also suggests the Fanonian self-alienating psychology of ‘conditioning’ and ‘confusion’ that is ultimately the product of racism” (2007, 395).
When I complained to a black male dean within the university about the incident, he casually dismissed my grievance. I felt beaten and betrayed by an institution where I believed the mission was to empower black students in ways that challenge the status quo as opposed to maintaining it. The eradication of patriarchy and class inequity was quite obviously not on the agenda.
The disregard for students with children extends beyond the personal judgments of individual administrators, professors, and peers. Rather, it is part of a larger institutional culture that follows the status quo of most university settings (Lynch 2008). Thus, although concessions are made for students with disabilities, student athletes, and other student populations, in my experience the special needs of student parents are often given inadequate attention within the administration. Student mothers at my university constantly expressed their frustrations to the administration about issues such as the lack of family-friendly restrooms on campus and the lack of flexibility in class scheduling. Karen Danna Lynch (2008) found that lack of financial aid and child care were the two most common issues faced by graduate student mothers. My university’s failure to assist students in meeting challenges surrounding access to affordable quality child care is another prime example of how it in general failed to provide support to students who are parents. Without financial assistance, there was no way that I could afford the great expense of child care. I can recall having to nurse my infant daughter in one hand while typing my master’s thesis with the other because I lacked access to affordable day care. Many of my peers who were mothers faced the same dilemma, so we often brought our children to school with us out of desperation, despite the negative consequences. My university was not child-friendly; infants and children were not allowed in many of the workspaces there, such as the computer labs, which created additional dilemmas for student parents without child care.
Even at the graduate level, education at the university is clearly geared toward traditional students: young, middle-class, single students who may receive assistance from their parents and are able to survive with few monetary resources or both. These students are able to cut costs by eating “college food” (i.e., cereal, noodles, etc.) and renting a room in a shared apartment or house. However, students who are parents are often not able to make these types of sacrifices without endangering their children’s health and well-being. The lack of resources available to students with children, especially those who are already economically disadvantaged, at the university (i.e., affordable family housing) places a great deal of strain on their ability to navigate academic life and parenthood successfully. Lynch found that most graduate student mothers felt that the structural avenues of support in graduate school were insufficient: “In the absence of these more traditional systems of support, female students with children face a tough and lonely road to degree completion” (2008, 603).
Black women are disproportionately low-income and single mothers forced to bear alone the burdens of mothering and therefore are also disproportionately impacted by the lack of resources available to students with children (Haleman 2004; Duquaine-Watson 2007). Recent welfare reforms have placed even more barriers in front of women in poverty who wish to participate in higher education (Duquaine-Watson 2007). Before the reforms, because there were few systems in place within the university, many black student mothers, especially those who were single, sought out government assistance in the form of food stamps, subsidized housing, cash assistance, Medicaid, and child-care subsidies (Adair and Dahlberg 2003; Duquaine-Watson 2007). I participated in several governmental and nonprofit subsidy programs in order to sustain my family and myself while earning my degree. However, some black student mothers refused to take advantage of this option due to the stigma associated with black women’s accepting public assistance. Some of these black student mothers internalized the patriarchal tradition of black mothers making it on their own (i.e., the hegemonic image of the black superwoman), which had a detrimental impact on their physical and emotional well-being (Collins 2000, 188). However, some student mothers who were not able to make ends meet were forced to send their children away to extended family members while they attended school, sometimes for the entire duration of their student career.
My university administration’s neglect of the circumstances of students with children and failure to address our complaints led me to become extremely vocal in my attempts to challenge them, which ostracized and placed me within the category of “troublemaker.” Whereas rabble-rousing has traditionally been rewarded as championing black issues outside of the HBCU, I was expected to remain silently in my place within the university when it came to gender and motherhood issues. Yet this silencing of black women is counterproductive to social change. Within the chilly university climate, black female students and student mothers have typically turned to women-centered networks (M. Williams et al. 2005). I, too, found much-needed support in such networks within the university that did not include black women administrators. For example, I joined an informal student-run support group for student mothers (which was not funded by the university). Through the group, I received information regarding resources ranging from child care to activities for children. I also found support from several peers who were mothers in graduate school and had experienced or were experiencing the same types of issues as I. These groups of women became “safe spaces” (Collins 2000, 111) that served the important function of providing the opportunity for black mothers to have their voices heard in an environment that otherwise ignored and belittled them. Expressing concerns, frustrations, and even positive experiences validated our worth amidst hostility.
The National Center for Education Statistics found that mothers in graduate school are at one of the highest risks for attrition and that faculty support or lack thereof can impact these rates positively or negatively (cited in Lynch 2008, 585). Research also continues to demonstrate the positive impact that mentoring has on black graduate students (M. Williams et al. 2005). Beth Kurtz-Costes, Laura Helmke, and Beril Ülkü-Steiner state: “In addition to influencing the quality of training the student receives and access to professional opportunities, the mentoring relationship often shapes motivational and affective aspects of the student’s progress, such as his/her level of self-confidence, commitment to the field of study and whether the student persists” (2006, 139).
Arwen Raddon (2002) further demonstrates that female mentors may be particularly significant for women who have children or plan to have children. Evelynn Ellis (2001), however, found that black women often did not have mentors or faculty who took an interest in their well-being. Although I feel that the majority of the faculty at my university did not support student mothers, I did find some to be extremely helpful in both my academic and my family endeavors. Rather than viewing student mothers as failures or as statistics, they admired our ability to succeed despite the many obstacles that we faced. Over time, a few of my professors (both men and women), most of whom had children themselves and empathized with my circumstances, made allowances to help me combat challenges by allowing me to bring my daughter to class, being more lenient with me in terms of deadlines, and allowing me to complete some of my work from home.
Because my relatives lived far from me, some female professors who served as mentors and some of my peers assumed fictive kinship relationships with me and my daughter, placing her picture in their offices, inviting us to functions outside of school, and even becoming “othermothers” and sharing in her care. Collins states, “The resiliency of women-centered family networks and their willingness to take responsibility for Black children illustrates how African-influenced understandings of family have been continually reworked to help African-Americans as a collectivity cope with and resist oppression” (2000, 197). Without the support of these networks, combating the opposition that I received and the challenges that I faced as a student-mother would have seemed unbearable. However, the abundance of time and energy it takes to seek out external resources detracts from academic endeavors and causes unnecessary burdens to student–mothers that the university might alleviate by providing supportive services to students with children.
In conclusion, I have no doubt that HBCUs have been highly successful in producing an outstanding number of black (male) leaders and remain an important source of cultural capital and economic development for black communities (Freeman and Cohen 2001, 586; Boyd 2007). However, the HBCU still has a great deal of work to do in its fight to end all forms oppression, especially with regard to gender and parenting, in order to achieve equality for all students and people overall. As Shirley Chisolm put it, “In the end, anti-Black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing—anti-humanism” (quoted in Collins 2000, 47). By neglecting the needs of black student mothers, my HBCU squandered the opportunity not only to support and strengthen black student families, their communities, and the larger society, but also to fight against oppression and injustice within their own walls. Black liberation cannot be realized without addressing whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation within black institutions. Cole and Guy-Sheftall posit that black “communities are not served by any of us keeping racial secrets. We will fare much better when we commit ourselves to dealing openly and honestly with what harms us—whether it is racism in the majority culture or sexism in our own backyards” (2001, 101). Thus, the HBCU cannot achieve justice if it continues to overshadow issues faced by black student parents, especially mothers. Likewise, all men and women in the academy, including HBCUs, must mobilize to provide supportive environments for women, especially those with children, and advocate for much-needed social change. Only then will our intersectional positionalities be viewed as strengths rather than as burdens to society or to the university.
