Mothering a Black Son Who Dreams of Another Country

Abstract

This narrative traces the experiences of mothering a Black child coming to consciousness about the role and place of Blackness in the United States. Working from a pedagogy of pain and love, Pillow seeks out an endarkened, embodied praxis of mothering that allows Black youth places of "disidentifications" to imagine other spaces and futurities. Utilizing Sara Ahmed's discussion of "strange encounters," Pillow reviews how Blackness is intimately linked to stranger danger and stranger fetishization in the United States, the depths of which played out in Trayvon Martin's death. She suggests that José Estaban Muñoz's theory of "disidentification" offers a critique of hetero-patriarchy lacking in current research on Black youth racial identity and that such a critique is necessary not only to build new forms of resilience for Black youth but also to develop structural critiques of racialized systems, discourses, knowledge, and practices.

Letter to my children from a place called Land

“…Land is where you as children and all our childhoods are loved, respected, and admired for their brilliance and their visions. This place called Land is a form of remembering, a return to our mother's and grandmother's insurgent praxis, which emerges from their materiality and sustains and amplifies our vitality, intimacies, and survival as it remains vigilant of the everyday colonial warfare we continue to endure (Dillard, 2000(Dillard, , 2012Gaudry, 2011;Lugones, 2007Lugones, , 2010Pillow, 2015).…”