Conversations With My Son: A Poetic Autoethnography of Black Mothering Experiences

Abstract

In this essay, I engage with and extend the work of Black feminist scholars and poets Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Patricia Hill Collins, and Patricia Williams by examining the ways that Black mothers use anger to make sense of their lives amid the continuous law enforcement sanctioned killing of Black men by White police. Using poetry, I interweave with the Black feminist voices of the past and present to reconstruct a narrative about Black mothering and Black boyhood amid the spirit murders in communities of color in the United States. I use a conversation with my 5-year-old son as the genesis of this intellectual stimulation to construct a poetic autoethnography of Black mothering experiences as a generative rescripting of Black lives. This work is an impassioned, critical, and necessary mode of inquiry that speaks about the daily realities of Black mothers raising Black sons in America.