“Who raised you?”: Black women’s indispensable conceptualizations of mothering for theorizing and researching DisCrit

Abstract

Traditionally, the academic field of special education has resisted critical perspectives. Despite their advanced skills, epistemological approaches, and ways of knowing, special education scholars enacting qualitative inquiry have often described inadequate support from their academic community. In a parallel manner, Black mothering in historical and contemporary spaces, especially in mothering disabled children, has often been dismissed for its valued expertise. This essay is a methodological, theoretical, spiritual, epistemological, and deeply philosophical intervention on the roles of Black mothers in all spaces who grapple with the tensions in the field of special education. The authors build upon Black Feminist epistemology and use Disability Critical Theory as a framework, documenting the journeys of two Black women mother and scholars through duoethnographic storytelling. Realizing that people who are mothering have their own agency and choose what they want to build with the nurturing Black mothers offer, we center multidisciplinary dialogues that lead to deeper understandings of qualitative research methods. Through these exemplars, we highlight how mothering and othermothering, whether through birth, ancestral, or academic kinships, are used to advance ways of knowing about how to best support disabled youth whose futures are pervasively threatened.

Keywords:

• Special education
• Black mothers
• Black feminism
• DisCrit

Introduction

Those who nurture others often reflect on how they were nurtured. We examine our respective and interconnected journeys, scholarship, and sense-making concerning the role mothering plays in our becoming (qualitative) researchers. As two Black Latinas with ties to the Caribbean, we examine the intersections of racism and ableism within (and beyond) the context of the United States special education programming (e.g. Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2022; Boveda & McCray, 2020). Our work highlights, for example, Black families’ and educators’ contributions to specialized educational services that uphold disabled youth of color’s dignity and humanity (Harry & Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2021; Hines et al., 2021). The academic field of special education, however, has traditionally centered whiteness and resisted critical perspectives (Blanchett, 2006; Drame et al., 2022). For example, a recent special issue of the journal Exceptionality includes numerous authors decrying Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) scholars like Annamma et al. (2018). Even in discussing our resistant “colleagues,” we must move strategically to not engage in oppositional dynamics that drain us (Boveda & Bhattacharya, 2019; Boveda & Allen, 2021) and distract us from our liberatory work (Morrison et al., 1975). We thus refuse to directly cite these authors to avoid their destructive gaze. Moreover, special education scholars enacting qualitative inquiry through a lens that is post-positivist, critical, and intersectional, report inadequate support from their academic community (e.g. Boveda & McCray, 2021; Boveda & Hernández, 2023).

Since our doctoral training, we witnessed the isolation, misrepresentation, and/or marginalization of faculty who draw on anti-oppressive frameworks like DisCrit within university-based special education programs, on virtual platforms (e.g. SPEDPRO listserv), at professional conferences, and in other shared academic spaces. Despite the hostility and often epistemically violent climate perpetuated within our field, our relationship to Black women mothering has sustained our critical perspectives and modes of inquiry. Black mothering imparted foundational seeds for our growth as Black women and scholars, but it is far more than a navigational tool. Black mothering and its progeny of sistering and daughtering are praxes enacting understandings and resistance to historical and material manifestations of anti-Blackness (Dumas, 2016), while radically recovering humanness and joy. In this analysis, we argue that Black women’s conceptualizations and embodiments of mothering are indispensable for DisCrit scholars whose research addresses P-12 schooling, who mentor emerging researchers, and who seek to dismantle racism, ableism, and other intersecting oppressive educational practices.

We use duoethnographic retracing to reveal mothering’s role in our becoming faculty and education researchers (Bhattacharya, 2020; Norris et al., 2012). We begin by briefly contextualizing how our Black ancestors engaged mothering throughout colonization and its establishment of racist hierarchies. We continue by unpacking the Black feminist theorizing and writings about mothering that informed our scholarly agendas. We then discuss our distinct entry points to understanding mothering in relation to DisCrit revealing our unique, yet entangled, positionalities (Boveda & Annamma, 2023). We discuss multiple sides of the special education and research arena through being mothered/othermothered and perpetuating motherwork inside and outside of the academy. Through our queries and theorizing, we carry forth the legacies of mothers who have laid down the groundwork for us to transform the field. In doing so, we relate how mothering is both a practice and epistemology situated outside of positivist paradigms and westernized ways of knowing. We conclude with provocations and considerations for critical and intersectional qualitative methodologists more broadly, and DisCrit scholars specifically, as those who embody the wisdom of Black feminist traditions.

Mothering despite the historical permanence of racism, ableism, and intersectionality

Our faculty roles in the academy require us to prepare emerging educators and scholars. Some of our current students will become teachers of Black and Brown disabled youth who, by virtue of their racialized identity and social positioning in this world, face everyday danger (Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2021; Aronson & Boveda, 2017); We support graduate students who intend to conduct research and generate knowledge about multiply marginalized communities. Acknowledging the weight of this responsibility, we not only equip our students with pedagogical or investigative tools, but also strive to imbue them with a sensitivity to social injustices leading toward an intersectional consciousness, which is an awareness of how schooling is implicated in multiple and intersecting oppression (Boveda & Weinberg, 2020). Just like our ancestral mothers balanced the responsibility of taking care of their own children while nurturing the children of those socialized to think lesser of Black women, we as Black women faculty enact this instructive task for students of all backgrounds at predominantly white institutions.

In 2020, video-recordings of George Floyd calling out for his mother while an agent of the state pressed on his neck forced the world to confront the realities of anti-Black racism and inequity entrenched in the infrastructures of every societal system.¹ A potent reminder of the dehumanization and expendability of Black bodies under white supremacy (Roberts, 2014), this was no novel circumstance but rather a reverberation of well documented history. Racist ideologies, which are woven into the fabric of Western society, have manifested insidiously across time and context. As Omi and Winant (1994) detailed in their extensive account of the history of racialization, the very discourse about race began with a colonial enterprise that demanded free labor.

Black people throughout the Americas continue to experience the repercussions of Africans’ trans-Atlantic enslavement and of enslavers’ intentional disruption, corruption, and exploitation of enslaved women’s ties with the children they birthed. Patricia Hill Collins (1993) described the patriarchy of slavery; bringing Black women under sexual and reproductive control was essential for its economic success. The global influence of Western empires and their knowledge systems were sustained through the wombs and labor of Black women who, “despite captivity and trauma” persist(ed) by for the sake of their progeny by leveraging their “powers against captor and captivity” (James, 2016, p. 257). In the U.S., Black resistance ranged from mothers who transformed the home of white owners to domestic learning spaces (Cornelius, 1983), to educators and community othermothers who sustained the freedom schools in the U.S. south (e.g. Walker, 1996), to Civil Rights activists who challenged the unconstitutionality of legalized discrimination in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).

Evidence of the permanence of racism, despite concerted Civil Rights litigations, served as an impetus for the conceptualization of Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1995). Just as Jim Crow laws sustained segregation and exclusion after emancipation, racialized hierarchies persisted post-Brown, through tracking, attendance policing, and the school-to-prison nexus, with Black children adultified, criminalized, suspended, expelled, and arrested (Annamma 2014; Edwards, et al., 2023; Morris, 2016). Deficit narratives and stereotypes of Black and Brown² children and their families proliferated as schools “desegregated.” School personnel perceived Black and Brown caregivers as uncaring and uninvested in their children’s academic pursuits and their children, especially disabled children experiencing economic inequity, were deemed biologically inferior, unintelligent, deviant, and less deserving of opportunities (Artiles, 2013; Dudley-Marling & Gurn, 2010; Harry et al., 2005). An analysis of Black rappers’ lyrics, for example, demonstrates how schooling—and predominantly white teachers’ assessments of Black and Brown children—often contributed to conflict between youth and their families (Boveda et al., 2020). Despite laws that mandated school integration, racist hierarchies have persisted in consequential ways (Solorzano et al., 2000), such as the destructive shaping of how Black parents and their children engage and perceive each other.

Similarly, because of its inextricability from the ideological and material realities of racism, ableism has also entrenched itself in school infrastructure. Ableism is defined as the discrimination or bias against disabled people, positioning nondisabled people as superior and manifesting in attitudes and social processes (Friedman & Owen, 2017). Even with provisional services and protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004), a disability hierarchy emerged within the special education context, serving to perpetuate norms of a white, able-bodied, middle class ideal. White, middle-class mothers lobbied for the creation of disability categories that separated their children from the perceived underclass of Black disabled students (Blanchett, 2010; Ong-Dean, 2009; Sleeter, 1987). Throughout history, actions such as these have repeated, as educators continue to disproportionately refer Black and Brown students to special education. These racialized students are overrepresented in the more socially stigmatized categories of intellectual disability and emotional and behavioral disturbance, while underrepresented in the less stigmatized category of autism (Harry & Klingner, 2022; Mandell et al., 2009; Ong-Dean, 2009; Pearson & Meadan, 2018; Skiba et al., 2008). In addition to being educationally underserved from preschool to school exit, the realities of hypersurveillance, undereducation, and criminalization-to-punishment cycles are magnified for Black disabled youth (Hines et al., 2021; Epstein et al., 2017; Thoma et al., 2016).

An (un)settling aspect of mothering is coming to a wearied understanding that we must proceed with caution when articulating visions for the future of those we nurture. Those positioned outside of these realities might perceive this as pessimistic. Being mothers—specifically, the mother of a disabled Black child (Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2021), and a Black child who navigates ableist, deficit assumptions (Boveda, 2019a)—we confront the historical permanence of racism and its entanglements with other oppression. Mothering in an ableist society must reject an engagement with futurity “that casts disabled people … as obstacles to the arc of progress” (Kafer, 2013, p. 28). Moreover, mothering while Black is realizing we have as much control of the future of our children as did the mothers of George Floyd, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown. Black mothering engaged in futurity, however, consists of liberatory acts:

not a question of “hope”—though it is certainly unescapably intertwined with the idea of aspiration. To me it is crucial to think about futurity through a notion of “tense.” What is the “tense” of a black feminist future? It is a tense of anteriority, a tense relationship to an idea of possibility that is neither innocent nor naïve. Nor is it necessarily heroic or intentional. It is often humble and strategic; subtle and discriminating. It is devious and exacting. It’s not always loud and demanding. It is frequently quiet and opportunistic, dogged and disruptive. (Campt, 2020, p. 34)

To imagine that what we theorize, investigate, and write about today is for posterity’s sake is an enactment of our radical imagination.

Before presenting our duoethnographic narratives, it is imperative we discuss the philosophical assumptions and worldviews shaping our inquiries, and therefore influencing our mothering work. We thus acknowledge the frameworks we draw on.

Paradigmatic influences: Shaped by theoretical mothering

As co-authors, we share a paradigm of criticality, with a deep analysis of history and interrogation of hierarchical structures that continue to oppress and marginalize people. Through our theorizing, dialoguing, daughtering, and mothering, our goals are far from value-free—we are liberatory (Evans-Winters, 2019). That is, bringing Black feminist notions of mothering into the conversation about what counts as inquiry troubles dominant research paradigms and conceptualizations of “legitimate” knowledge production processes. In doing so, we are rectifying the erasure of women’s/nurturer’s ways. We disrupt the notion that the conquerors, colonizers, and their representatives are the only ones to make statements on what counts as knowledge. The generous, messy, and yielding ways of mothering defy the patriarchally cold, distant, and sanitizing notions of knowledge production dominating special education research.

Ontologies refer to the nature of reality. To that end we hold a consciousness of the material and tangible consequences of oppressive ideologies (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). Acknowledging the social construction of power, race, and disability—which also change meaning depending on the historical and sociopolitical context—we observe how they manifest in people’s (lack of) access to opportunities. Our ontological orientations require us to study these phenomena to understand multiply marginalized people’s lived realities. Simultaneously, we avoid the racist and ableist pitfalls of engaging inquiry through color-evasive lenses, failure to consider the dynamics of power, and rendering disability invisible (Annamma et al., 2017; Banks, 2018; Giroux, 1982). We study and research these realities as they have manifested in a true “educational indebtedness” (Ladson-Billings, 2006), that is further magnified among Black and Brown disabled children. We also have encountered these realities with our and our children’s schooling.

Epistemology builds upon ontology and is perhaps the most dynamic part of our work, to consider the way of knowing for this we turn to the liberation of theory and practice contributed by the Black feminist tradition. Bringing intersectionality into its house of Black women’s thought and ways of knowing, Black feminists push beyond considerations of phenomena such as racism, ableism, and power inequities as occurring in singular and discrete ways, to consider the lived experiences of multiple marginalization. Embodying multiple ways of knowing should be indispensable for interrogating the historical and hierarchical processes of education. Special education is indeed a “paradox” as described by Artiles (2011, p. 431). While it was created as a civil rights response to the exclusion of disabled children from public schools, is has also replicated inequities in the disproportionate representation of children of color and deficit views of their caregivers (Blanchett, 2010; Harry & Klingner, 2022). Instead of reckoning with these realities, many special education researchers hold narrow views of what counts as research in the field; while clinical and intervention studies are centered, inquiry that seeks to include multiply marginalized voices, lived experiences, or equitable outcomes are discounted.

Still, it would be too reductive to relegate this to the ongoing paradigm wars or the polarization of methods (Evans-Winters, 2019). For researchers who continue to push past the imposed boundaries of who knowers are, there are harmful and purposeful actions perpetuated in a phenomenon known as epistemic violence (Dotson, 2011; Spivak, 1988). This violence can take many forms, such as the direct written publications to attack one’s theoretical contributions, through testimonial silencing, or distributive, as Bunch (2015) described, denying researcher the opportunities and resources for conducting special education research. While this can be experienced among equity-focused scholars, upon disabled scholars and scholars of color, it is most profoundly visited upon Black women scholars (Porter et al., 2022). Crenshaw (1989) adds, “With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis” (p. 140).

Beyond methods, our methodologies reflect inquiry of the “transformative intellectual as advocate and activist” as described by qualitative researchers Lincoln et al. (2011, p. 112). Using a duoethnographic approach for this collaborative analysis grants us the freedom to honor our expertise and to interweave history, our work, and the examination of our cultural and socialized lenses as Black women and mothers who are mothered (Winfield et al., 2024). We emphasize the high value of reflexivity, as noted by Lincoln and colleagues, the impact of this work on ourselves, “a conscious experiencing of the self as both inquirer and respondent, as teacher and learner, as the one coming to know the self within the processes of research itself” (p. 143). The embedded storytelling within duoethnography aligns with our ontological assumption of what reality is through the interrogation of phenomena and self, our intersectionality as Black women mothers, and our resistance to reductive narratives about us. Critical autoethnographers Boylorn and Orbe (2016) put it this way:

By using stories to confirm and resist stereotypes and looking at stereotypes to frame and tell our stories, Black women can move beyond the emotional ambiguity that one-dimensionality causes. Stories may not always successfully challenge the myths and stereotypes of Black women, but personal narratives guarantee that Black women have agency about how they are represented beyond stereotypes. (141)

Mothering aligns with storying. Storying and storytelling are provocative ways of knowing and communicating with deep roots in African and Indigenous traditions, In America, for example, oral histories have been passed down from enslaved ancestors across generations, in a manner of both remembrance and resistance. In critical studies, storytelling and counterstorytelling in particular, have been used as powerful tools to disrupt dominating ideas and belief systems to center the voices and people who have been traditionally marginalized, thus opening a window of understanding (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002). Stories are also mothering in their life-giving capacity, holding within them seeds of wisdom that grow to exceed our wildest imaginations, yet are connected to histories at their roots. Reflecting on who has mothered us and on how we mother our own biological children reminds us that those we nurture have agency and will develop their own agendas with the nurturing we offer.

Black Feminists’ Framing Matters for DisCrit and Mothering

Intersectionality, a foundation and tenet of DisCrit, is becoming targeted as a radical lens in our current sociopolitical context (Boveda, 2023)). The theories of Black women scholars who interrogate, analyze, and make meaning of our social world are under attack in states like Florida, where we each attained our doctoral training and educated our biological children. Yet Black feminist lenses have always been under attack in some way or another, particularly in educational research and special education. While it serves the interests of traditional educational researchers to conceive of studies about people belonging to multiply marginalized groups—even as members of oppressed communities are often in no position to research the very phenomena affecting their livelihoods—it is well within the very standpoint of Black women to offer a comprehensive view about such realities (Boveda, 2023). Collins (1989) powerfully emphasized the precision of the lens of marginality:

While African-American women may occupy material positions that stimulate a unique standpoint, expressing an independent Black feminist consciousness is problematic precisely because more powerful groups have a vested interest in suppressing such thought guides our work, practice, and being. (749)

A critical legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) drew from the freedom of Black feminist thinkers to propose intersectionality and understandings of the confluence of multiple oppressions. Since its introduction as an analytical tool, intersectionality has been co-opted, reframed, politicized, and removed from the context of the experience of Black women. Crenshaw, however, initially conceptualized the term in her critical analysis of court documentation on Black and Latinx women’s claims of discrimination, and how frequently the court addressed sexism as if it were somehow separate from the racism they experienced.

The scholars who initially conceptualized DisCrit consistently acknowledged its Black feminist influence (e.g. Anna Julia Cooper and Patricia Hill Collins). DisCrit developed in response to Disability Studies shortcomings in examining the experiences of racism, as well CRT’s shortcomings in examining the experiences of ableism (Annamma et al., 2018). Black disabled scholars have critiqued their erasure from the historical accounts of the disability rights movement, since Black disabled activists were central to its action and Civil Rights advocates to its strategies (Schalk, 2022). DisCrit is a fitting lens to examine the experiences of Black disabled children and their families who navigate the maze of schools and service delivery (Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2021).

While the contributions of intersectionality in DisCrit are essential and well established, it also does not complete our meaning-making. DisCrit is an analytical frame and academic theorization that comes from and in response to a legalistic, western solution for the criminal (in)justice system. Indeed, its tenets are all powerful tools of analysis and understanding, which include tenet four, the centering of voices among people who are multiply marginalized, who are underrepresented in research (Annamma et al., 2013). Mothering, in the Black feminist tradition, however, addresses/redresses/corrects the familial ruptures that slavery and white supremacy have been enacted across families and generations. These options require an awareness of how one’s onto-epistemic stances are in contrast to dominant notions of whose humanity matters. Mothering also demands praxis such as othermothering, nurturing, hypervigilance, and overprotectedness of Black children, especially at the intersections of other vulnerabilities and systemic oppressions (e.g. ableism).

Additionally, while Black feminist thought, which perceives marginality as the seat of transformation—is well aligned with DisCrit’s tenet of valuing all forms of resistance (Annamma et al., 2013), we also understand the hegemony of anti-Blackness, valuing resistance without exceptionalism or reifying narrowed perspectives of Black women’s/mother’s relationships to disability. To that end, we put forth two concepts by Collins. One is motherwork, that is the understanding that Black mothers are engaging in essential personal, political, and intellectual labor within and outside of their institutions and workplaces, while also recognizing that the community and home are places where work continues. In many ways motherwork resists notions that the work within the community and family, the domestic space of learning is less essential and important than the workplace, when it has been essential, albeit costly, to the survival of Black women (Collins, 2016). A second is the concept of othermother, also developed by Collins (2009) describing the women in relation, kin, or community, who have supported mothers in the rearing of Black children. We will discuss both concepts in our stories.

Methods

In this work, we employ duoethnographic methodology, through and our methods dialectic. This process is consistent with our philosophical underpinnings seasoned by Black feminist thought, as our stories are both interwoven and in conversation with one another. In preparing this analysis, we took turns reading, absorbing, learning, weeping, hollering, and being in awe of each other’s words and stories. As a practice, Breault (2016) has emphasized how the richness of duoethnography is enhanced by the bonds of two in relationship, intimate conversational flow of two trusted and trusting critical friends” (p. 785). This is not new to the epistemologies of Black women, as Collins (1989) writes, “for Black women, new knowledge claims are rarely worked out in isolation from other individuals and are usually developed through dialogues with other members of a community” (p. 762). Still, Breault questioned whether or not the intimacy could thrwart the criticality needed in this exercise, asking, [do] they have an obligation to interrogate or challenge one another’s memory, or is it enough to help each other explore, clarify, and find meaning in recollections?’ (p. 787). To that we are gifted to have been given the tools and traditions within our own Black churches and Black families, for which the dialogue in the form of call-and-response is not only clarifying of our thoughts and memories but also evokes, as Collins (1989) adds, our knowledge and sense-making, now creating shared memories and emotions between us. Winfield and colleagues (2024) described their critical and intergenerational approach to duoethnography as researchers and storytellers documenting their mothers’ experiences of health. An iterative, constructive process of framing and freewriting, receiving and reviewing, simplifying, and synthesizing helped us to further evoke our emotionality, while theorizing in the process (Boylorn & Orbe, 2016; Charmaz, 2014). We present the curated selections of our co-constructed narratives.

Nurtured through mothering

Our positionalities and entries into the field of special education and its practices are nuanced, lived, radical, and lovingly Black.

Lydia’s entrance

I entered the field of special education as a former biologist teaching at a community college becoming the advocate and mother of a disabled boy by the name of Isaiah. I say this because his presence in my life has shaped my identity and career trajectory. I recall a woman friend of mine telling me that I didn’t need to change my physician-bound career path “just because” I had a child with Down syndrome. I felt pressure to pursue and follow through with my Aunt Emma’s dream for me, since she had groomed me toward medicine. I was in every pre-med organization in college and helped my Black peers toward their med school pathways. I saw medicine as using my gifts to heal, not realizing this was not the only way to become a healer nor were physiological problems the only things ailing our society.

Furthermore, because I had a child with Down syndrome, I was being introduced to a new world. I was becoming increasingly aware of the school-based inequities of my other four children were subjected to, clearly linked to racism. I had been fighting for their lives and I knew I would have to fight for his. I pursued another master’s degree when my son was a toddler, possibly for my family’s interest, this time in special education. In the middle of my second year, I called the University of Miami, entertaining the idea of a doctoral degree in special education. I emailed the chair of the department, a stranger named Dr. Beth Harry. I sometimes laugh at my own naïveté and innocence at the time, not knowing a single thing about this remarkable scholar who has left an indelible mark on the field of special education, and quite frankly, one of the most outstanding qualitative methodologists I have ever met. I overexplained, a residual effect and internalization of marginalization that I now recognize thanks to my sister Mildred (M. Boveda, personal communication, March 10, 2023). I described my role as a mother of a disabled child to justify my reasons for pursuing this degree knowing nothing of her motherwork. I could not believe she replied to my email.

Perhaps the simplicity of my words, purity of intentions, and complexity of my story caught her attention. She called me on the phone and said, “Well, Lydia, I just finished reading your email. And you know, I am the mother of a disabled child as well.” “I had no idea,” I said, so embarrassed and ashamed I did not know the academic game—you need to do your research on folks before connecting with them. She told me a bit about her story, so humbly, she didn’t even direct me to read her book, Melanie: Bird with a Broken Wing. I continue to marvel at her awareness of her brilliance and stardom, and how she is so unphased by it all, never seeking anyone’s accolades. She told me, “Well, go ahead and finish up your Masters. And I hope to see you soon.” And thus began her mothering of me.

Mildred’s entrance into the field

As a 19-year-old chemistry major at an Ivy League institution, I felt compelled to enter education after reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paulo Freire’s (1970) description of his work with Brazilian rural peasants echoed the stories I heard all my life. I was born in Miami, FL but always understood the roots I had in the Dominican Republic. Freire’s centering of the ability of the adult learners he worked with as he participated in literacy campaigns in some of Brazil’s most marginalized communities reminded me of Mami’s description of her elders. Although they could not read or write, she let me know about their ingenuity and cleverness. Freire, moreover, was my gateway to bell hooks, who in turn brought me in to Black feminist thought.

As I learned about Freire, one of my best friends was a special education major at Florida International University (FIU). She observed that Black and Latino boys were overrepresented in her field experiences and learned of the special education teacher turnover crisis. Given my emerging critical consciousness—and a bit of saviorism—I imagined I would make an important societal contribution by transferring to FIU. For clarity, I was on the Dean’s list at Dartmouth College; many people told me they thought I was too talented to become a special education teacher. Of course, that only strengthened my resolve to teach. The only person who unequivocally supported my decision to make this transition was Mami (Boveda, 2019b).

Lydia: Train them up

I am a Black and Puerto Rican mother and scholar. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and great-aunt, my othermothers, Black southern women, just one generation out of slavery. They were strong Black Christian women who hummed songs when life became too unbearable to produce words. As I child I did not understand what was being communicated, that their strength, like our ancestors, was derived from faith.

Have a little talk with Jesus

Tell Him all about your troubles

Hear our faintest cry

Answer by and by

They shared stories per diem of what it had been like for them living in the segregated South in Tennessee—only what I needed to know and when I needed to know it. It had not occurred to me that this is perhaps because those stories were too painful. In my own autoethnography, I wrote briefly about their journeys as descendants of enslaved people from Johannesburg, South Africa (Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2021). Family oral stories and ancestry records helped to paint a partial picture of generations. What was not captured or told, however, had such an impact on my imaginings of their experiences. In a 1993 interview for the Paris Review, author Toni Morrison explained about the power of things unwritten, “one has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm, and so on. So, it is what you don’t write, that gives what you do write its power” (Schappel & Lacour, 2014, p.4)

Growing up, I became aware of the complexity around the presence and roles of the men in my family. There were two generations of preachers and in this context, families—wives and children—were to be seen and not heard. Sacrifice was the way of the women in my family, however. My aunt Emma took it upon herself to become the new matriarch of the family after her mother’s passing. Although she was a brilliant and talented woman, she decided to forego her own plans to go to medical school to move her sisters to New York City in 1950. The three women, along with my grandmother’s two children (my mother and uncle) settled in a place called St. Albans, New York. St. Albans was a mecca for the Black middle class, an alternative to Harlem where celebrities such as Count Basie, Lena Horne, James Brown, resided. When we were very young, our mother decided to focus her energies on my father’s healing, leaving my brother and I to grow up in this small suburb, raised by these elder Black othermothers, who could do anything. “Watch your point,” Aunt Emma would always say.

To know mildred, you must know Mami

At the time of this writing, I have over 12 publications in which I directly referenced the stories, ideas, onto-epistemology, and encouragement my mother offered me (e.g. Boveda, 2017a; Boveda, 2017b; Boveda, 2019b); in these writings, I simply refer to Antelia Camberoas “Mami.” Born in the Dominican Republic of the 1930s, she was not afforded access to formal schooling due to her social class. Her mother did not learn to read, but taught her mathematics, sewing, and many other entrepreneurial skills that served Mami well as an adult (Boveda, 2022). Mami learned basic reading and writing fundamentals when she attended one year of emergency school in a rural schoolhouse with approximately 80 other children. An autodidact, she authored numerous poems. When she converted to Christianity, I witnessed firsthand how preachers with multiple degrees admired Mami’s scriptural analyses.

There is not a day that goes by without me sharing a lesson Mami taught me. Whether with my students at the university, girlfriends, or with my own daughter and son. If anyone claims to know me, but does not know about Mami, they are clearly mistaken. Her stories continue to sustain my work as a (special) education researcher. Her ideas and experiences prod me to complicate, for example, U.S.-based notions of what it means for children to have access to "the general education curriculum” or a “free and appropriate public education” (Boveda et al., 2020). Some children, like was once the case with Mami, do not have any access to public schooling.

Lydia and Zenobia

I do not have extensive memories of my Puerto Rican family members, although they were responsible for my first encounter with disability. I describe in other works how my family framed my cousin Malcolm, who had cerebral palsy as enfermo, too ill to engage with his cousins (see Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2021). My personal encounter with special education began in the 7^th grade, where I became aware of the factions and fear based on disability and racial groupings in a middle school cafeteria.

It was as if one day, amidst the noise and chaos, I could see everything from a bird’s eye view. I was suddenly making sense of the arrangements of the long rows of cafeteria tables. On one side of the cafeteria were the boys, girls on the other. No one offered an explanation for why we could not sit together. Students were enrolled in classes according to an assigned numerical system, 1-12. At the top were four classes of gifted-labeled students, followed by seven classes of students participating in the general education curriculum, cumulating in one class of students receiving special education services. The spatial arrangement, from the front to the back of cafeteria followed this hierarchy.

I also noticed that aside from a few Black and Brown students here and there, most of the students hailed from Southeast of Queens. These students, who took two buses with me back and forth to school, filled the middle and back of the cafeteria. The special education class, which took up two tables, defied the other arrangements. Here boys and girls were not separated, nor were they in a row like the other classes. Instead, these tables were on the perimeter of the cafeteria along the wall on the girls’ side. Not surprisingly, the school resource officers were always present next to the special education class and in the back on the boys’ side, specifically surveilling the Black boys.

I was in one of the gifted classes, questioning if it was utterly worth the struggle it took for me to get to school just to be reminded every day that I was one of only two Black students in my class and often referred to as the “n—girl with the puffy hair.” As I looked over at the other students of color across the cafeteria, I felt a surge of loneliness and wonder, curious about what it was like to share classroom experiences, group projects, jokes, exam pressures, or simply life. What was it like to just be a student of color without sitting in silence for most of the school day? What I did not realize was that they often sat in silence too. Even with the smaller proportions of students of color in the gifted classes, we were all situated within a predominantly white school, in a middle-class neighborhood that was not our own. We were the products of district compliance, schoolwide integration that maintained a within-school segregation.

I went to throw my lunch tray away, and Zenobia, a girl I recognized from the special education class stood up. She walked up behind me and stepped on the back of my sneakers. I ignored it, but immediately recognized the fighting signals. This was Queens. And the second time she stepped on me, I turned around. You see truancy, attendance, disability, conduct—and being Black or Latina, all landed you in the same special education class. It had never occurred to me until then that some of these students probably didn’t belong in the same class, nor that I should have been afraid of Zenobia because everyone else was afraid of her. She was always known for fighting. Fighting her way through school, fighting to be suspended from school, fighting so she did not have to be in school. I looked into her light brown eyes and was then distracted by the shine from her gold fronts. I could not believe the words that fell from my lips,

“You got a problem, Zenobia?”

Zenobia studied me for a minute. She looked me in my eyes, and we did not break our connected gaze. Now I was tense because I guessed I’d have to fight her. Although I had several confrontations with other Black girls, the only prior physical altercation I had was with a Black boy. I stepped off a school bus that day with a busted lip after fighting him. While the bus driver expected my mother would be devastated to find her daughter in such disarray, my mother’s face was expressionless. She didn’t even make eye contact with the Black man who clearly didn’t understand. “I hope you whooped his ass,” my mother said to the disgust of the driver. She prepared me for a world that was often unsafe for Black girls and her lessons taught me to make quick assessments to determine when it was appropriate to use my words or fists. Her self-protection-first-and-consequences-later approach was not everyone’s way, but these were her methodological tools. And with that imparted in me, it didn’t matter whether I might be suspended from my little gifted class.

As we stared at each other in the cafeteria, I understood Zenobia better than anyone. We were both imprisoned in spaces and made to feel as if we did not belong. I put my tray down and my hands were free. I watched for her movements but was confused because her face began to relax into a slow smile.

“You ‘ight, shorty. Respect.” She put her hand out and clasped mine. And she sat down.

Most people would frame this interaction as violent. I would describe this interaction as communicative. A shared understanding among Black girls polarized by the school’s inequitable policies and structures. Although I benefitted from the educational enrichment, it was at the expense of not being valued or visible and having to tolerate the blatant racism from my classmates and teachers. Zenobia was not benefiting from her educational placement, and her situation at the margins of the cafeteria was symbolic of her placement in the school and what they thought of her through a racist, ableist, and misogynistic lens. We struggled to have our voices heard through both abstract and concrete tools. My tools were compliance, volunteering, creativity, and test scores; hers were absences, resistance, confrontation, and fashion. In that moment, we unleashed in each other the need to be both fearless and understood, things that weren’t mutually exclusive. Undoubtedly, we saw each other that day in the cafeteria.

I think about the messaging of those early encounters with disability and special education and their purpose in my own life as a mother to my son and advocate for “other people’s children,” in special education (Delpit, 1988). An oscillating pendulum between hypervisibility and invisibility of Black children in special education exists, ranging in actions from surveillance to removals. I (re)experienced the symbolic and real marginalization in that middle school cafeteria when I served as advocate, parent proxy for students navigating the foster care and special education systems simultaneously. I fought for those students, whose traumas, identities, and disabilities were weaponized against them in profound intersectionality (Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2022). I fought for them as if they were Zenobia, as if they were Malcolm, as if they were my own children. This was othermothering.

I write about mothering, my son’s inequitable experiences in the health and school contexts, and my own dismissal as his mother, my “backstory and Black story” (Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2021). My son, a Black disabled boy, has been othered, surveilled, ignored, underserved, written up, and vilified. I have been talked about, talked down to, ignored, surveilled, silenced, and dismissed. What I have learned most as a Black mother is that it matters not my knowledge or professional status when I am in an Individualized Educational Planning (IEP) meeting or asked to come to the school to remove my son. Special education research has both documented and been responsible for the disregard of Black mothers’ advocacy efforts, particularly because they do not align with the ways of the white middle class (Harry & Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2020; Ocasio-Stoutenburg & Harry, 2021; McGee & Spencer, 2015; Morgan et al., 2023). I have learned to unlearn the ideologies that have shaped research and practitioner attitudes in special education, the insistence that Black mothers’ intuitive knowledge is wrong. My elder-given mother’s intuition is never wrong. Watch your point.

A humbling IEP moment for mildred the teacher

Like Lydia, I was tracked into “high achieving” courses. In contrast to her experience, I attended honors and gifted classes in my neighborhood school. Consequently, my teachers were just as Black and Brown as my peers and me. Despite having culturally and linguistically responsive educators teaching my honors classes, ableist tracking and respectability politics prevailed at my schools. When I became a teacher within that same community, I was confronted with the divisive consequences of tracking.

During an IEP meeting for a first-grade student, I faced a very resistant mother who did not want her daughter to become one of my students. She agreed that her daughter had a tough time learning to read, but did not want her in special education classes. The mother and I happened to go to the same middle school; we even shared some of the same teachers. While those teachers deemed me college bound, she did not receive the same affirming messages. She explained the stigma and challenges she had as one of the few girls in special education classes.

My sincerest intentions to serve the community I came from were not enough. During this IEP meeting, a Black mother made it clear that she did not automatically see me as her peer. Even though our daughters were the same age and played together after school, she rightfully challenged my assumption that she should trust me. She saw me as a representative of the same special education system that failed her as a student, and I had to work to convince her that the specialized services I would offer her daughter would make a difference.

I have shared this story with preservice teachers and doctoral students to emphasize that being an anti-racist or culturally responsive teacher is not sufficient. Educators must have an intersectional consciousness to dismantle how schooling reinforces ableist and disparate outcomes, even between members of the same community.

Revisiting academic mothering

While being mothered in our homes, we also recognized the need to be mothered in the academic space, especially as we faced resistance and gatekeeping from faculty and peers. The academy replicates society; hierarchical in structure and operation, the academy upholds the status quo of whiteness and white supremacy. Just as racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression impact students P-12, they also have material and experiential impacts for students in institutes of higher education. Multiply marginalized students from the undergraduate to the doctoral level are subjected to various forms of systemic inequities that affect admissions, funding, campus climate, opportunities, and grading.

In our respective doctoral experiences, we became cognizant of how the proverbial myth of meritocracy plays out in the academy. As we followed the path to becoming changemakers in special education, we were aware of the resistance to our presence, by virtue of our own identities, coupled with differential and preferential sharing of resources. While some of our white/white adjacent counterparts denied that they benefited at all from the structures of the educational system and claimed themselves to be “equity scholars” on paper, we held the perspective of participant observer, witnessing how everyday gatekeeping upheld the very inequities they claimed to adamantly oppose. It would be too easy to say they were simply mimicking the behaviors modeled by most of the faculty, whose decisions on who to advise, mentor, fund, support, or hold back had long-lasting consequences. As Lisa Delpit (1988) so poignantly stated, “pretending that gatekeeping points don’t exist is to ensure that many students will not pass through them” (p. 292).

Academic mothering is resistance.

Lydia as an emerging critical intersectional qualitative researcher

It was the second year of my doctoral program. I had just learned the term intersectionality but also living it. I was making sense of my experiences while also wondering how I had gotten through an incredibly difficult first year. The wounds were still fresh, and I was still untangling the ambiguity of the words “intellectual disability” on my son’s evaluation. In addition, the oppressive behaviors and overtly racist, ableist comments made to me by a white woman professor cast a shadow over me. Her questioning my hair texture and inappropriately asking, “How did you get into this university with all of your five children?” were not disconnected from her clear disdain for my inclination toward critical and intersectional qualitative research methods or my interests in dismantling oppressive systems that harm disabled children of color. She held my grade and her power over my head that first year, in acts of sprit-murdering (Williams, 1987). I had to hold this all in, of course, to keep my countenance as a Black woman, conscious of the racist perceptions of me as angry. These limitations and restraints were contradictory to who I was, as Collins (1989) noted, since it is well within the culture and power of Black women to exude “individual expressiveness, the appropriateness of emotions, and the capacity for empathy” (p. 767).

But this year, she had returned from her sabbatical. In one of our departmental brownbag seminars at the start of that fall semester, Dr. Beth Harry shared some of the data she collected when she revisited the staff and families at the Immortelle School she founded in Trinidad. She shared a video of Daniel, a young man with Down syndrome, playing the steel pan. As much as Daniel’s playing showcased his gifts, identity, and culture, it also contradicted many stereotypes about people with Down syndrome (e.g. a compromised working memory or limitations in motor skills). Recognizing how people often romanticize the assets and strengths of disabled people, she also emphasized that disabled people need not possess a special talent to be valued. In fact, Beth stood strongly against this utilitarian view, reminding her colleagues and students in attendance to be ever humanizing in a deficit-focused world. I was completely captivated by the coolness of her Caribbean accent, her beautiful brown skin, and her prominent cheekbones. But her words. Her words were fire!

Throughout my journey, Beth had been an academic mother. One of my favorite courses was her Qualitative Methods II. The intimacy of sitting with her, coding with her, analyzing with her, theorizing with her. I cannot speak for my classmates, but I felt the privilege to be learning from the best, a methodological genius. As the only person in the class in special education, learning from a Black woman pioneer in my field was critically important. Beth’s work in the academy is radical. And much as we described earlier, far be it for her contemporaries to accept this Black woman describe, let alone research the lived experiences of disproportionality of students in schools, to the point where she still charges the field with the question, Why Are So Many of Students of Color in Special Education? (Harry & Klingner, 2022).

Many publications over the past thirty years have reflected a back-and-forth discourse, as the intellectuals in special education resisted this woman’s anti-oppressive work that centered the voices of Black and Brown families and challenged practitioners to first reflect upon themselves. Such is the radical, beautiful, Black motherwork that is Beth’s legacy. Many scholars owe their very consideration of culture and studies of Black and Brown families in special education to Beth, whose intellectual generosity helped shape the trajectory of their academic careers. Scholars committed to equity work in special education do their due diligence by citing her. She has served as an academic mother to many.

In the othermothering sense, she not only poured into me intellectually, but she poured into me temporally, emotionally, and spiritually. Her love and mentoring were a healing balm, a counterstance to the racist rhetoric and undertones from some of her colleagues. She led from an ethic of love and care, like any great teacher, as any great mother. When she announced her retirement, she told me, “Lydia, we have a one-year exit plan. I need you to set the date for your defense.” Because of the pandemic, the moment was bittersweet, for although I dreamt of that day, I did not get to be hooded by her. But we did take a picture together. I cannot write this without tears. Her mothering, my daughtering, filled a hole in us both.

While I spent years of my life longing for the kind of loving mothering in my birth mother that Mildred has in Mami, I am also grateful for what she did give me. Though she could not carry love for me further than her womb, she prepared me for war. I am blessed to have been provided for by othermothers, my grandmother and aunties. Although it came decades after their passing, Beth entered my life as an academic mother and othermother, lovingly referring to me as her “daata” in Patois. In writing this, Mildred and I have shared our collective and sometimes tearful reflections on the best of what we had. The effects of mothering and daughtering have resulted in our powerful, spiritually bound sisterhood.

Mildred’s seeking of academic mothering

Early in my career, I was fortunate to have older women who saw my potential and encouraged my academic aspirations. These white women encouraged me to connect with the scholarship of scholars like Alfredo Artiles, Beth Harry, and Lisa Delpit. While helpful, I longed for the type of mothering I had from Mami and my Black elementary teachers in the academy. Outside of special education, I connected with scholars like Donna Ford and Venus Evans-Winters who poured into me. Inside special education, it was far more difficult to find this type of guidance (Boveda & McCray, 2021). There are only so many of us in the academy.

For over two decades I have followed and admired Beth Harry from afar. While our paths did not bring us together, I diligently read her scholarship and shared her work with my students. I recognized, for example, how her connection with Lydia affected her writing. I am not only grateful for how Lydia influenced Beth Harry’s work, but for how Beth Harry supported Black women like Monika Shealey, Benekia Kressler, and of course Lydia, my sis. All these women have helped to make the field of special education more inclusive of the provocations that come from Mami’s youngest daughter.

Mothering and dreaming: lessons learned

As the number of scholars who turn to DisCrit and other equitable frameworks grows, we appreciate witnessing how mothering, such a pivotal aspect of our scholarly identity, is becoming incorporated into its discourse. The reader may have noted that we take up different amounts of space in sharing our respective stories. Speaking to the exercise of duoethnography, because these were co-constructed (re)memberings of our distinct experiences, it was less important for us to perform equal or parallel narrative structures, and more important to center what was most critical about our collective sense-making of being mothered and mothering in racist and ableist contexts. The former would be a narrowed expectation for our writing and perhaps another example of where Black mothering provides an incomparable affordance of taking up as much space is needed for conveying meaning. An illustration of DisCrit’s valuation of underrepesented and multiply marginalized voices, Lydia’s narratives shed light on the contributions Black mothers bring to the literature about the experiences of disabled students and their families, as well as the many challenges they face in the academy. We are also encouraged to see how Black feminists from other fields are taking heed to disability justice activists. As Mildred’s IEP narrative demonstrated, even within all Black spaces, the entanglements of racism and ableism can snare up and divide many Black mothers. As such, we remind those doing motherwork to proceed humbly and to strive to dismantle ableism just as diligently as we confront racism, sexism, and all other intersecting oppressions.

DisCrit has also acknowledged how norms of whiteness and ability as property are reinforced in K-12 and higher education contexts. Diving deeper, when talking about the dominance of white men (and their white women counterparts) whose power, presence, and control govern the university’s operations, scholar Patricia Hill Collins (1993) asked the critical questions:

[I]f you are from an American college or university, is your campus a modern plantation? Who controls your university’s political economy? Are elite White men over represented among the upper administrators and trustees controlling your university’s finances and policies? Are elite White men being joined by growing numbers of elite White women helpmates? What kinds of people are in your classrooms grooming the next generation who will occupy these and other decision-making positions? (p. 31).

We consider these questions as colleagues working at the same institution and within a resistant field. Black mothering is praxis. It shows up in our lived experience of being mothered/othermothered, mothering our children, the mothering of our own academic “children,” as well as what we bring to (special) education research and teaching. Who but us? We offer enlightened understandings, despite the dismissals of our work, time, and professionalism as Black women mothers. There is not a moment where we are not simultaneously fighting a battle inside and outside of schools, as well as the institutional and structural walls that marginalize students and families. We have held emic and etic views distinctly and simultaneously when sitting along all sides of the decision-making table. Our motherwork transforms the world and the field. We know when to sit as quiet participant observers and when to use our voices. Navigating the climates of politics and policing is essential for Black mothers dreaming a new dream for our children.

Who raised you? We could leave this question a rhetorical one but cannot allow its multiple meanings to be lost on the reader. For one, this questions the grifters. Many scholars who self-describe as “critical” may operate in ways that still embody oppression. They can list the canon of Black feminist scholarship, utilize equity-based critical frameworks like DisCrit, and pragmatically employ more post-positivist qualitative research genres to focus on the “voices” of research participants. Such scholars also claim allyship, solidarity, and an equity focus—on paper. However, in their continual appraisal, transactional behaviors, gatekeeping, and co-opting of Black women’s intellectual genius, we are perceived as nothing more than an enterprise, rather than the indispensable creators and curators of knowledge. These behaviors are observed among many white and non-Black scholars of color in the academy, and to our disappointment, even some Black scholars who have internalized the ways of white supremacy. For those who believe white supremacy can only be operationalized by white folks, please read the work of Cheryl Harris (1993)—a Black woman scholar.

More importantly, who raised you? is the provocation for us as authors and creators of knowledge about multiply marginalized communities to pay homage to the hands that went into mothering/othermothering us, the people who broke the traditional blood, kin, and gender-bound concepts of mothering. No matter how short or long the distance they carried us, their work was procreative; they laid down the soil for us to mother our children, modeled motherwork, and imparted values within us to nurture our familial and academic progeny. Intellectual curiosity on its own is but one dimension. However, intellectual generosity—the collective, dialectic, intuitive expertise—is a tool passed down from our ancestors, fostered through love. It is abundant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg

Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg is an Assistant Professor of Special Education at Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarly works address the compounding inequities experienced by individuals within institutions, systems of care, research, and policies. As a qualitative inquirer, her scholarly work focuses on generating counternarratives, building holistic and asset-based student supports, empowering communities, and highlighting the diversity of family-disability lived experiences. Driven by her own mothering, professional, and community-based experiences, Ocasio-Stoutenburg reconceptualizes advocacy for multiply marginalized children and their families.

Mildred Boveda

Mildred Boveda is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Pennsylvania State University. In her scholarship, she uses the term “intersectional consciousness” to describe educators’ understanding of diversity and how students, families, and colleagues have multiple sociocultural markers whose intersections result in nuanced and unique experiences. Drawing from Black feminist theory and collaborative teacher education research, she interrogates how differences are framed across education communities to influence education policy and practice. Boveda makes explicit how her mother’s stories about the Dominican Republic and life in the 20th century continue to shape her academic and professional trajectory.

Notes

1 George Floyd’s final call out for his mother before his death has been highlighted across media sources and scholarship. Floyd, and many other Black youth and adults forexample, Tyre Nychols, Daunte Wright, have called upon their mothers, both living and deceased, just before drawing their final breaths (see Seiger, 2023). There is a striking, haunting dissonance between this pure human expression and the dehumanizing manner in which their lives were regarded and then violently taken. Tyre Nichols offers another example of the historical reverberations of police killings of Black women’s son. “He calls out three times for his mother. His last words on this Earth were, ‘Mom, mom, mom.’” (Seiger, 2023).

2 We capitalize Black and Brown, with the understanding that the former has been a reclaimed, identify affirmed description of people within the African diaspora with political, social, and cultural meaning. We use Brown in the sense that there is solidarity among people of color in the struggle and experience of oppression due to white supremacy, although we recognize it as a socially constructed term without the same political meaning.