The affective power of the mothers’ group singing lullabies and standing before the police relies on white women’s innocence and the sancitity of white motherhood as its driving force. It’s like, appropriating the discursive/social/political potency of the 14 Words for good. https://twitter.com/benphillips76/status/1285480737798590464

Decades of post-Moynihan Report browbeating of [single] black mothers — and previous centuries of slavery dislocating black families + forcing black women into non-consensual mothering arrangements — prevents us from ever publicly respecting-revering black motherhood like this.

We’ve seen black mothers crying, imploring often. We do not prostrate ourselves and fall at their feet. Their grief and devastation isn’t held as a moment of reckoning and self-reflection, their anger doesn’t humanize.

I’m trying to figure out how that the literal deployment/reinscription of whiteness is the primary or even only way that so many white people understand anti-racism. I’m really sitting with what that means.