photo credit: Essence
Are the choices that black mother’s make–such as working outside the home–different from white mothers? It depends who you ask.
Last week Bonnie Erbe, U.S. News & World Report contributing editor, in response to a Mother’s Day editorial published by Melissa Harris-Lacewell in the Sacramento Bee, ignited another battle in the never-ending mommy wars. What’s different about this recent war of words and ideals about whether motherhood or career should come first is that unlike in the past, the woman at the center of the controversy is a black woman-Michelle Obama.
Mrs. Obama first caught heat from feminists when she declared last fall that her primary role as first lady was going to be “Mom-in-Chief.” Some wanted her, a Princeton-trained lawyer who gave up a high-powered job to campaign for her husband and care for her kids, to carve out more of a leadership role.
Black Mother’s More Likely to Work than Other Women
But as Harris-Lacewell argues in her piece, as a black woman, the first lady has made a revolutionary choice and is “subverting” negative stereotypes of black women as bad mothers. She also rightly points out that unlike white, middle-class women, most black mothers never had the luxury of choosing whether to stay home or seek employment. Read the rest of this entry »
