Response to Andrea: Annette Laureau's "Watching, Waiting, and Deciding"

This is Andrea's post, a reflection on Laureau's work: "At first the discussion of Mrs. Marshall in the Annette Lareau piece “Watching, Waiting, and Deciding when to Intervene: Race, Class, and the Transmission of Advantage” was a bit irritating. The first couple of examples of her intervening just seems a bit much, and appeared to showcase a sense of entitlement that she had and that she was potentially instilling in to her daughters. However, as the article went on I began to question whether that was truly a sense of entitlement at all. A middle-class Black mother may feel as if she can speak up when she feels her children are possibly being discriminated against, her feeling as if she has a voice that can be listened to may be something that’s been socialized thanks to her class standing. But, the act of speaking up in this case does not highlight a sense of entitlement at all. If anything, it speaks to a situation of dispossession. Her children are potentially being discriminated against simply for existing in Black bodies and the middle-class Black mother probably only sees a few choices. Either allow this potential discrimination to continue and potentially case trauma to the child (or expose the child to a racist world that the mother does not want to child to see quite yet), or speak up and run the risk of being deemed the “Angry Black Woman” or overbearing mother. The mother in this case is more than likely just trying to protect her child for as long as possible from the cruelty that exists in society. I only wish that the article was able to explore gender a bit more deeply. There was a brief discussion of the fact that for the families studied the mothers always had their hands in their children’s education far more than the father. It was interesting that this existed across race lines. I could have missed when this was discussed, but is it also the same over class lines? When we find something so prevalent that crosses several lines of “classes” (in the ‘group’ sense) does that make it easier for us to pinpoint the root of the issue? In this case the argument could easily be made that it’s clearly an issue with roots in gender difference/gender roles, because of the way in which the phenomena exists across race lines and potentially across class lines."

I'd like to respond to a couple of different points here. Firstly, I hear Andrea's point on the "sense of entitlement" issue, however, I'd like to play devil's advocate. I think it's common and justified for minorities to take a more radical stand against oppression, whether they do it from an internalized place of oppression or do it consciously to set an example for younger people, specifically women, around them. Personally, I know that I've done some pretty outrageous things in front of my ten year old sister even when it's put me in harms way against some kind of sexism/violence, consciously hoping that I'll set an example for her that tells her she has more agency than I've had in my lifetime. Does that make sense? Although I hear the point that perhaps this is socialized, and can be moot. In the case of discrimination, specifically, I think that the children experience a sense of trauma regardless of the actions of the mother and her response to that discrimination- experiencing oppression with or without language for it is traumatic on some level no matter what the circumstances.

I agree with Andrea and think it's an excellent point regarding the maternal/paternal involvement in education of children transcending lines of race and class. Andrea, do you refute Kahlil's ideas about being Black being the center of oppression? Issues such as this, rape and domestic violence make me wonder sometimes about that. While I identify as an intersectionalist and believe all oppressions are systemic and cannot be put into a hierarchy or separated out, sometimes I consider issues such as this and think to myself: women make up more than half of the planet, yet we live in patriarchy almost universally and mothers experience some of the most intimate oppression there is across race and class lines...given this...if this oppression was abolished, doesn't it only make sense that other oppressions would be forced to become untangled because of the massive size of the oppressed population? After all, it impacts the most amount of people on the planet...thoughts?