Chapter 4

Motherhood

Between Mammy and a Hard Place

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama announced that her most important role in the White House is “mom-in-chief.”¹

Some White feminists weren’t having it.

What was up with this Ivy League–trained, corporate legal powerhouse making like a political wifebot? As writer Libby Copeland lamented on Slate magazine’s Double X blog, “Why are presidential candidates’ wives all the same?”²

Except Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, from the South Side of Chicago, ain’t Laura Bush. Or even Hillary Clinton. (There is evidence First Lady 45 Melania Trump may want to be Michelle Obama. But I digress.) Michelle Obama is a Black woman. And her ability to prioritize motherhood—much less be the symbol of motherhood for a nation—was revolutionary.

Black women are not the inheritors of the cult of true womanhood’s picture of wifely domesticity. For them, the fight has not been to prove that they can be something other than mothers as much as it has been to have the myriad ways they mother recognized and cherished in a society whose family values rarely include them and those they love.

It has always been accepted that Black women can care for other people’s children. In slavery, many of them did the dirty work of homemaking—the cooking, cleaning, and mommying for masters and mistresses. Later, Black domestics helped make it possible for middle-class White women to enter a workforce of which Black women (and poor women of all races) were already an exploited part. In 2014, the number of “Black women pushing White babies around” on the Upper West Side of New York City prompted a photography exhibition by Ellen Jacobs called Substitutes.³ But modern Black mothers exist between this comfortable evocation of Mammy and a hard place.

Do Black Mothers Matter?

Serena Williams knew something was wrong. A pulmonary embolism had nearly killed her in 2011 and she was prone to the condition. When she began having difficulty breathing after delivering her daughter Olympia in 2017, Williams alerted a nurse to the danger.

“I need a CT scan and a heparin drip.”⁵

The medical team at the hospital was unconvinced; pain medication must have left Williams confused, they decided. They tried several other interventions before listening to the new mother. A CT scan eventually revealed several life-threatening blood clots in her lungs. By then, the embolism had triggered coughing that ruptured Williams’ cesarean section incision. During surgery to close it, doctors found a large hematoma, which required yet more surgery. Williams spent the first six weeks of little Olympia’s life bedridden. The tennis legend’s story could have had a tragic end.

Black motherhood attracts none of the gauzy sanctity afforded White mothers. Never is a White woman viewed as more fragile and worthy of protection as when she is carrying White life. Meanwhile, Black women are treated like livestock, requiring little care for what is surely just biological imperative to breed more valueless offspring. They are not protected from the toxic psychological stress of systemic racism or an indifferent medical system. As a result, Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as White women, and their babies more than twice as likely to die as White ones.⁶ And this is not solely a problem of class and access; even millionaire, twenty-three-time Grand Slam champions are at risk.

Because Black women’s ability to conceive and bring forth new life is not cherished or valued, they often receive medical care that fails to take their fertility and childbearing into account. Because Black femme humanity goes unrecognized, they face medical practitioners who ignore their pain and discomfort. If society does not believe Black lives matter, how then can Black life-bringers matter?

“I am now an exhibit in Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” Jamie Nesbitt Golden remembers thinking, as she lay splayed on an examination table while a succession of doctors gawked at the uterine fibroid that was leeching nutrients from her baby.⁷

“It’s like an SNL sketch, because the doctor’s like, ‘Wow! This is big! This is the big fibroid. Jim, have you seen this?’

“When I look up, maybe three or four people are in this exam room looking at my hoohah and the big-ass fibroid. I’m in my early thirties and I’m not as vocal as I am now. I’m scared shitless by this entire process. I am mortified that this is happening, but I don’t feel comfortable advocating for myself.”

Black women are more likely than White women to have fibroids, which are noncancerous uterine tumors, and to suffer from complications, including infertility and the inability to carry a healthy pregnancy.⁸ There are less invasive treatments, but a Black woman is at least twice as likely as a White woman to have her uterus removed through hysterectomy—often during childbearing years. Jamie had been assured years ago that her fibroid would not cause problems; now it had made her pregnancy high risk.

This had been Jamie’s worst fear. A journalist, she knew about the risks of being a pregnant Black woman: “I’m the girl who is Googling maternal death stats at midnight.” She had heard her friends’ harrowing stories. Plus, Jamie had already suffered one miscarriage, and the indifference of the attending physician still haunted her.

She would have to spend her second trimester on bed rest, rising for appointments with a high-risk specialist whose crowded office in the birthing center left many of his mostly Black pregnant patients sitting on the floor. It was no better in the exam room, where Jamie says the specialist was dismissive. “They assume you’re Black, poor and you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Doctors induced Jamie’s labor when her amniotic fluid levels dropped. She remembers waiting for her husband to arrive at the hospital, watching the monitors that showed her baby’s heart rate. She had hoped for a supportive, nurturing, and natural birthing experience. Instead, “suddenly I’m high. The one doctor I do trust—[a Black woman]—is on vacation; they have to call her. I’m waiting and holding my breath because I don’t want to do this without her,” Jamie remembers. “Next thing, I’m getting wheeled into the operating room. They have you hooked up to these machines. You’re hearing your heart rate drop. And it’s like, ‘Is something [bad] happening to me?’ I’m sort of freaking out. My husband’s holding my hand and he sees everything. His eyes are growing wide as saucers; he looks like he’s about to faint because they’ve ripped me open and they’re sort of rummaging through like I’m grandma’s purse. No one is explaining anything to us or talking to us.”

Jamie labored for six hours. “I don’t know how women do this for longer.” She delivered a beautiful baby boy—Langston. Less than forty-eight hours later, she was home, held together by metal staples and still struggling to breastfeed. (The lactation specialist had been perfunctory and impatient.) The first year would be hard for the new mother. After three days home, Jamie’s temperature spiked. She had developed an infection in her C-section incision that sent her back to the hospital. (Black women are more likely to have complications like this.)

And then there was the postpartum depression. As a Black woman, Jamie struggled to find a mental health professional who was both supportive and culturally competent. One non-Black therapist violated Jamie’s privacy and also warned her against taking evening walks around her Hyde Park, Chicago, neighborhood to reduce stress. “You’ll get raped!”

Her marriage began to fray. She wanted to return to work but could not. She stopped caring for herself. She felt isolated when her husband returned to work. These situations are not uncommon for new mothers. But for Black women they are amplified and made worse by societal indifference driven by racism and stereotype. Strong women don’t have vulnerabilities. Beasts navigate gestation and childbirth alone. Mammies nurture naturally. And a society that hates Black people does not care to abet bringing new ones into the world.

Jamie loves her son, now eleven, to the moon and back. He is named for the brilliant Black poet Langston Hughes. She is enraptured by the way he learns new things. “When he learns something new, he’s so excited about it and he’s so ready to share it. And it just, it just melts you.” But she is firm that, after her experience, she did not want to have another baby. (She cannot, now, because her fibroid did eventually lead to the removal of her uterus.)

“Every time I read a story about a Black woman dying in labor, I go back to that place where I was a decade ago,” Jamie says. “This isn’t how it should be. None of us should be dying from giving birth in supposedly the most technologically advanced country in the world. I hope that things will get better. I hope that people are taking these stories and this data and are trying to truly make change [for Black mothers]. But I also know we live in a society that loves to devalue [Black women]—that loves to keep [its] foot on our necks.”

Attack of the Single Black Mother

Nearly 70 percent of Black births happen outside marriage.⁹ From conservative political candidates to Black clergy, folks will tell you that statistic is a sin and a shame. For a society that is mistrustful of sexually active, unmarried women and wedded to the superiority of male-led households, those numbers demonstrate unchecked aberrance and are used to confirm stereotypes about Black women’s femininity and sexuality. This statistic is positioned as the reason for every social ill plaguing the Black community and, once again, very likely the fault of Black women.

In 2013, conservative columnist George Will said on ABC’s This Week that single mothers are “the biggest impediment” to Black progress—bigger even than the loss of voting rights.¹⁰ (Stacey Abrams, no doubt, would like a word.) Jimi Izrael, then a frequent contributor to NPR, wrote in his 2010 book The Denzel Principle that high rates of Black divorce and single-parent families “really reflects less on Black men and more on Black women and their inability to make good choices.”¹¹

Dr. Sarah Jackson says that Black women’s sexuality and motherhood have been part of public discourse since slavery, when our reproduction was an integral part of the economy, like the livestock that kept the agricultural engine going.¹² People were as inclined to talk about Black women birthing babies as they were cows bearing calves. And, like those cows, Black women were viewed as uncivilized and unintentional breeders. The institution of slavery required a voluntary blindness to the idea of Black family. No doubt this history influences the medical care (or lack thereof) Black women receive when pregnant, as well as how they are viewed as mothers. “If you’re treating a group of people like animals, you have to believe that they’re not capable of making the same emotional bonds with their children that you are. Otherwise, you might feel bad about selling their children off down the river,” Jackson says.

Here again, the Moynihan Report and its support for the stereotypes of the Matriarch, Sapphire, and Jezebel play a role in ensuring that the public discussion of Black motherhood is relentlessly negative.

“If the male isn’t the primary breadwinner of the family, then the children of that family are forever deviant. It’s right there on the page,” says Jackson.

Ronald Reagan, in his 1976 presidential campaign, abetted this idea with his bogeywoman, the “welfare queen.”¹³ His frequently repeated anecdote about the Cadillac-driving Chicago woman who swindled government programs out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by using disguises, fake names and addresses, and possibly a stolen baby cemented the idea that Black female reproduction is unreasonable, is tied to lasciviousness, and reflects a desire to leech off the state rather than to be a loving parent and contributor to the future of society.¹⁴

The structure of the American family is undeniably changing. Just before the first edition of this book was released, the US Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in all fifty states, opening the door for a new picture of family.¹⁵ But overall, US marriage rates hit an all-time low in 2020.¹⁶ Cohabitation is on the rise.¹⁷ Women are having fewer babies and having them later.¹⁸ Nearly 40 percent of all American births happen outside of marriage.¹⁹ And women are more likely to be primary breadwinners than in the past.²⁰ According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, two-parent households are declining and “there is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S.”²¹

But Black women and their families are still seen as dysfunctional, and uncommonly so.

Opponents of single motherhood say they have Black children’s best interests in mind and point to decades of research that indicates that children do best when they’re raised in healthy two-parent families. But, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy, research results related to the offspring of single-parent households are often oversimplified and exaggerated.²² Most children in single-parent families grow up just fine, and it is still unclear how much of the disadvantages to children are caused by poverty or family structure or whether marriage itself makes the difference or the type of people who commonly marry.

Demonizing single Black motherhood does not improve the lives of children. On the contrary, the idea that 70 percent of Black boys and girls are congenitally damaged stigmatizes them.

“It’s messed up that we have to figure out how to keep our kids from being negatively impacted by generations of misinformation about the way that our households are run,” says Stacia Brown, thirty-five.²³ “I don’t want my child to feel that the way we live is something that we have to defend to the world.”

Stacia herself was raised by a single mother. And she learned from her mother to protect her own daughter from the stain of so-called illegitimacy.

“We didn’t use stigmatized language around our family structure when I was growing up,” she says.

And when a young Stacia was confronted with condemning language about her family, it felt foreign. “I thought, ‘We’re happy here.’ It didn’t feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t have a dad and my life is definitely really bad because of this.’ I mean, I do have a daddy, he just lived in another state. I have a lot of things that felt like bigger barriers to my long-term success than fatherlessness or whatever.”

Stacia, who co-parents with her child’s father, says, “We need to, in our households, set our standard for how we’re going to feel about ourselves. When your kids hear you say, ‘I don’t want to be a statistic,’ they feel like their household is … there’s something wrong with it. You’re bringing that into your house.

“Even if somebody at school dogs them about it, when they come home, you’ve got to be able to say, ‘Nah, we’re not accepting that.’”

The negative focus on single Black motherhood is also not about helping Black communities. If it were, those who rail against unmarried mothers would spend at least equal time calling for affordable family planning and reproductive health care, universal access to good childcare, improved urban school systems, a higher minimum wage, and college education that doesn’t break the banks of average people. They would admit that the welfare-queen image is a distortion and a distraction from addressing unrelenting systemic racism and White supremacy that has worn on Black families for centuries.

America is a place where one in a thousand Black men and boys can be expected to be killed by police in their lifetime and Flint, Michigan, officials infamously exposed nearly one hundred thousand mostly Black residents, including children, to lead-tainted water for more than a year.²⁴ But the plight of the African American community can allegedly be blamed mostly on the moral failings of Black women who do not marry the fathers of their children—no matter how hard those mothers work to build good lives for their families. Even the Queen of Soul is not immune from the stigma of single Black motherhood. A Georgia pastor chose the occasion of Aretha Franklin’s 2018 funeral to castigate single mothers like the activist and eighteen-time Grammy Award winner, who raised four boys. In his remarks “honoring” Franklin, Rev. Jasper Williams Jr. called raising a child without a father in the home “abortion after birth” and insisted that a woman cannot raise a boy to manhood.²⁵

Heidi Renée Lewis, forty, says condemnation of single-parent families also unduly shames mothers trying to do their best. She tells a story about attending a neighborhood outing with her oldest son and his father while she was pregnant with their second child.²⁶

“Our kids are only nineteen months apart. This one woman that I grew up with said to my cousin, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe Heidi is having another baby. Didn’t she just have a baby?’ My cousin said, ‘Well at least they’re both by the same man!’”

Heidi’s cousin had three children with two fathers. “She was kicking herself in the face to defend me,” she says.

“I grew up with more examples of nontraditional than traditional. Women on welfare, struggling. All the women I knew on welfare worked, just like most people on welfare work. There was still this ‘don’t be like them’ narrative. Why would I want to be like people who weren’t being affirmed? People hate to feel ashamed.”

Heidi’s parents were married when she was born. They grew up together and were high school sweethearts. When they married, her father built a house for his young wife, across the street from his in-laws in a small Ohio town. But it was the eve of the 1980s crack epidemic, and Heidi’s father became addicted. Her parents divorced.

Heidi always wanted to get married, in part to prove that she could do what her parents could not. A child of the ’80s, she was partly influenced by popular culture—“[Whether the families were] piss poor like Roseanne and Dan or upper middle class like Clair and Cliff, we were being indoctrinated with that traditional family model”—but she was also guided by her beloved grandmother’s conservatism. “My grandfather, even though he was a minister, was more forgiving than my grandmother. My grandmother was not for the shit like out-of-wedlock babies! Oh my God, no!

“What I really think I wanted was to have kids and for my kids to not have the family trouble that I had. They would not have to go through divorce, and they would not have to have a drug-addicted parent, and they would not have to have parents who married other people and made life uncomfortable that way.”

In graduate school and unmarried (though in a committed relationship), Heidi became pregnant.

“I was devastated … not devastated, but I was scared…. I’ll tell you how respectability crept its way back in…. I was like, ‘Well, I’m not married, but at least I have a bachelor’s degree! … I finished school, and I’m halfway through a master’s. Damn! Can I get a break for that?’”

Heidi and her husband have been together for more than fifteen years. She often forgets exactly when they made it “official.”

“I can’t even remember. What is this, 2014? I think we got technically married in 2009? I don’t know. Yeah, 2009. You know what? Our wedding anniversary is the same as the day we first got together. We didn’t change the day ’cause we felt like we wanted to honor the whole eleven years. Who gives a shit that it’s not on the official paper?”

If America were having an honest conversation about Black motherhood, the screeds about the scourge of baby mamas would also note that birth rates among African American women are lower than ever before in recorded history and that part of the explanation for the high percentage of out-of-wedlock Black babies lies with the fact that fewer Black women are marrying and many of those women are deciding not to have children. Married Black women are also having fewer children.²⁷

No. The conversation about Black single motherhood in America is driven by gender-and race-biased moral panic and is primarily a means to exonerate systemic inequality for America’s problems, while leveraging age-old stereotypes to scapegoat Black women and their children. The reduction of Black motherhood to concerns about indiscriminate fucking, emasculating Black men, draining the public teat, and releasing frightening, no-daddy-having offspring onto beleaguered American streets stains every Black mothering experience, no matter how much individual realities differ.

Despite their decades-long marriage, Michelle Obama was derisively called then-candidate Barack Obama’s “baby mama” in a Fox News graphic.²⁸ Yvette Perry, a married mother of twins, found her swollen fingers uncomfortable in her wedding rings after giving birth. But she wore the rings anyway to avoid being stereotyped as a single Black mother. It didn’t help. “A new graduate student in my program, who had seen me at a couple of welcome/orientation activities with my babies, kept going on about how much respect she had for me. It took me a while to figure out that she assumed I was a single mother.”²⁹

When life experiences collide with stereotypes, drawing a distinction can be even tougher, the burden heavier.

Forty-one-year-old Brandee Mimitzraiem is not the woman people imagine when they hear about single Black mothers.³⁰ She is working on her PhD in theology and philosophy and is a member of the clergy in the AME Church. She gave birth to two sons, becoming a single mother by choice after realizing at twenty-six that marriage would never be for her.

“I do see myself reflected a lot in the stereotype and it bothers me,” she says. “You know, I’ve had to go on food stamps. My babies are on Medicaid right now, because I cannot afford insurance for the three of us.

“People say, ‘You’re getting a PhD. It’s not the same. You’re not like them.’ But I am, and my kids go to school with ‘them.’ I take those issues of class very seriously. I’m not going to look down on somebody else because they don’t have the same education as me. I don’t have a baby daddy, but at the same time, I’m a Black single mom, whose kids are on Medicaid. And I get talked about horribly for actually raising my kids, too.”

All Black mothers are forced to expend energy (as if being a parent isn’t hard enough) trying to outrun the idea that they are bad mothers who birth and then neglect bad kids with uninvolved, bad daddies.

Now, that is a sin and a shame.

The Purposeful Mother

Most single Black mothers are not postgraduate-degree-holding pastors, but neither are they the pariahs of the public imagination. The negative perception of Black mothers flattens the experiences of single mothers and ignores single mothers by choice, single mothers whose partners are involved in their children’s lives, unmarried mothers who live and parent with their partners, lesbian mothers, and married mothers in traditional families. It also obscures the fact that most Black mothers, no matter their family structure, attempt to thoughtfully and successfully raise their children.

“Black parenting is never theorized as something that has intentionality,” says Heidi Renée Lewis. “It’s like we’re just … popping out babies.”

But many single mothers take care to create strong support systems before their children enter the world—something that Brandee points out is important for traditional families, too. “Raising kids without a village is impossible. Period. If you’re only dependent upon what’s in your house to raise your children, your children are failing and you’re failing as a parent.”

Because Black mothers are positioned as “other,” it is easy for people to miss the elements of universality in parenting experiences—the worrying, the work, and the joy.

Stacia says the things that keep her up at night have less to do with single mothering than mothering full stop. Her four-year-old suffers from hearing loss and has experienced some developmental delays. Stacia and her co-parent worry about how to best advocate for her. For four years, Stacia parented long distance with her child’s father, who this year moved closer to be a bigger presence in his daughter’s life, challenging the assumption that unless they are married, fathers always remain uninvolved.

The push and pull of co-parenting is not much different from what married parents do, Stacia says, pointing out that the burden of childcare is rarely shared equally even between married parents. There are negotiations over finances and quality time, whether one parent will stay home, how childcare will work, and who will fetch the children from school.

The commonalities of parenting are also apparent when Black mothers express their love for their children.

Brandee marvels at “how the world amazes them and the things that come out of their mouths.” Stacia loves little girl hugs and affection and the new way being a mother makes her see the world, but also the mystery of conceiving and nurturing another human being.

Heidi says, “I get to teach my kids things. I get to make an impact on the world. I get to teach them values that I learned and also teach them things differently.”

Brandi Summers becomes emotional while speaking about her baby daughter: “I didn’t know I had the capacity to love anything as much as I love her. I couldn’t draw or write how much I love her.”³²

It is clear that Black mothers are no different from other mothers in terms of their devotion and concern for their children. What is unique is how they are obligated to, from an early age, teach their children how to navigate their minority status and the racism that accompanies it.

“Being Black has demanded that I parent my children regarding race, gender, socioeconomic problems, and issues even when I wasn’t ready, in the mood, whatever,” says Heidi. “I did not ask to have to tell my daughter why she was the only brown girl in ballet. The world demanded that I do that, because she is just the kind of kid who picks up on that kind of shit.

“With the Trayvon Martin verdict, I had to tell my son that if you’re in a situation where somebody is about to do something to you, don’t just scream. Scream your address or your middle name or something to let somebody know who the hell you are. … I will never forget that fucking debate over who was screaming: George Zimmerman or Trayvon Martin. I said, ‘Well, I got an answer for that! Scream some shit that nobody but you knows. Scream, ‘Help me! This man is attacking me and my middle name is Aaron Patrick!’

“Why do I have to do that? Because I’m raising Black children in the United States of America in the twenty-first century.”

Brandi says she has a lot of fears about “raising a Black girl in this world. My race still becomes very, very clear even in the fact that I’m a mom. I stopped noticing when I’m alone, like it’s just me in a room full of White people, but if I’m with my daughter and we’re in a room full of White people and White kids, I just notice it right away. I want her to be with some kids of color or I’m wondering what these parents are teaching their children about Black kids. I’m paranoid about all that. How is she going to see the world?”

But Black mothers find little support in addressing problems of race or the routine challenges (and joys) of parenting because the way people think about Black parenting is so limited.

Ain’t I a Mommy?

In a 2008 Bitch magazine article titled “Ain’t I a Mommy,” Deesha Philyaw lamented the exclusion of Black mothers from the “mommy memoir” boom.³⁴ As a married Black stay-at-home mom, Philyaw found her experience virtually missing from parenting literature. Also, the stay-at-home mom versus working mom argument that the media seemed obligated to rehash ad nauseam was presented only through the eyes of upper-middle-class White women, ignoring that throughout the history of Black women in America, most of them have had no choice but to work.

“I really needed to see myself in those pages. In other memoirs, I saw college-educated, stay-at-home moms who felt equal parts gratitude, mental fatigue, and boredom, but I didn’t see any women who were Black like me,” Philyaw wrote.

Michelle Hughes, a single mother through adoption, says it is nearly impossible to find books about Black parents adopting Black children.³⁵

“The only support you get is with other single Black-adoptive moms,” she says. “I’m an organizer. If I don’t have what I need, I put it together. I founded an African American adoption room because I couldn’t find one on Facebook.”

Stacia launched a blog called Beyond Baby Mamas “to talk about some of the feelings that I was having and the experiences and stigma and all that stuff like that, but then also some of the unique triumphs of being a co-parent or solo parent.”

Many Black mothers find themselves having to create their own support systems online and elsewhere because the belief that all Black mothers are single and that single mothers are dysfunctional messes leaves the real needs of African American mothers unaddressed.

It is within this social context, with its poisoned view of Black motherhood, that our African American First Lady of the United States existed. Feminists that were eager to see Michelle Obama strike a blow against stereotyped roles for women should have known that she was doing just that. Far from commonplace, her presence as a mother in the White House defied conventions about Black women as mothers, wives, and caretakers for their families.

I imagine that a woman as accomplished as the former FLOTUS had the strength to make her needs known and that if she, for a time, chose motherhood, that was the role she wanted. That choice alone is a privilege not afforded most women in our modern economy, much less Black ones.

The pushback against the role Michelle Obama chose for herself is illustrative of the way Black mothers’ needs, desires, and experiences are ignored in favor of the stories others would prefer to tell about them. It is no more noble to demand that a Black woman flex her Harvard Law degree instead of her role as a wife and mother than it is to insist that her family is illegitimate unless she is wearing a wedding ring. Just as it is devastating to ignore a Black mother’s understanding of her body. All of these things are part of a sad history of acts against Black female agency and a case of public interference in Black women’s private choices.

Those who wished to brand Michelle Obama a dangerous radical may have had it right—just not in the way they thought. My forever First Lady’s most incendiary act of bomb throwing was when she stood on stage, the descendant of slaves, in front of millions, at an arena in what was once the Old South, and said unapologetically: “At the end of the day, my most important title is still ‘mom-in-chief.’ My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.”

Forget what you’ve heard. That proclamation was not business as usual. Many Black women, who struggle each day to have the glorious complexity of their motherhood noticed and valued, saw it for what it was—an act of rebellion.

And one not unlike the private resistance Black mothers across America enact daily, just by being.

“I didn’t create the struggle. I didn’t ask for these myths about the welfare queen and the mammy and the junk,” Heidi says. “We’re just trying to do as Black mothers the best we can with what we’ve been given, trying to be as radical as we can in a world that doesn’t allow for radical anything to thrive.

“This is what I was born into, so I’m navigating that and trying to be true to whoever it is that I am, within that context, in the best way possible.”