Toni Morrison’s Radical Model of Care for Black Single Mothers
In a 1989 interiew with Time reporter Bonnie Angelo, the late Pulitzer Prize winning author Toni Morrison was asked about her thoughts on “improving the present-day racial climate.” Morrison, in her eloquent and pointed way, navigates through a series of racially biased questions dressed up as “serious journalism.” Eventually, after a number of inquiries about “Black on Black crime” and the high number of Black high school drop outs, the journalist lands on a question about the “depressingly large number of single-parent households” and the crisis of teenage pregnancies.
A single mother herself, Morrison responds:
“Well, neither of those things seems to me a debility. I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.”
When pressed about teenage pregnancies and the “lost potential for living a different kind of life” full of “special abilities, talents,” Morrison declares,
“They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them all in my arms and say, ‘Your baby is beautiful and so are you, and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me — I will take care of your baby.’ That’s the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don’t want to pay for it.”
“Pay for it,” I thought.
“I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they’re black — or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money.” [emphasis mine]
And just like that, Morrison says the quiet part aloud.
The political, social, and even religious qualms about single mothers is not, as we try to make it, a question of morality.
Despite society’s best attempts to disparage the experiences of single mothers, to create policies fueled by misogynist ideals, anti-Blackness, and long-held historical stereotypes about Black mothers who are depraved of common sense, motherly tendencies, or in its lamest forms, simply sexually promiscuous, it’s never been a matter of morality.
Or the Church’s best attempts to diminish the lived experiences of the single mothers in her pews as if her savior was not born out of wedlock to a teenaged girl, and preach doctrine that condemns the sexual and familial choices of women through dubious readings of scripture, the public discourse about the lives and outcomes of Black single mothers is not, and has never been a matter of morality.
Why does Morrison suggest that the issue is an economic one and not a moral one? Because for Black single mothers, and Black womxn in general, our thriving is a cost society is not willing to pay. Making meaningful financial investment in our lives means that Black single mothers can, in fact, become brain surgeons — or business leaders — or in-home beauty salon owners. It would mean that Black womxn and mothers, who have been bent over in the proverbial and literal servitude to this world for centuries, could actually stand up straight, and live thriving, meaningful lives.
But this world does not want us to stand up straight.
Our uprightness is their downfall.
Our access to capital is what they do not want us to have.
Angelo’s final question in this interview asks, “How do you break the cycle of poverty? You can’t just hand out money.”
“Why not,” asks Morrison. “Everybody gets everything handed to them.”
The journalist’s question had to have been tongue in cheek, no? Though explicitly absent, the question tells us that “handing out money” is, in fact, how you break the cycle of poverty. What models have shown, especially in the recent years of Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs for single parents in Mississippi, Birmingham, Alabama, and Oakland, California, and now In Her Hands, a Guaranteed Income program in Georgia, is that direct aid to these families proves to not only help sustain a quality of life, but empowers families to make their own decisions about the wellbeing of those within their household.
Capitalism thrives on the notion that money and access to money must remain within a select group in order for it work as designed: if everyone has access to money, then those in power lose their leverage to dicate the life outcomes of others.
When I set out to start The Current Project, it was in direct response to the blaringly obvious shortcomings in the social welfare policies we say are designed to strengthen families. At its core, The Current Project aims to close the social and economic gap for Black single mothers by temporarily alleviating their cost of living while they engage in one of three activities: complete a post-secondary degree, earn a work-related certificate, or start a viable for-profit business. Exasperated by the COVID-19 crisis, the data shows that female-led households not only carry the burden to ensure the safety and wellbeing of their families, but identify cost of living as the number one reason they cannot complete life changing opportunities like completing post-secondary degrees.
This model addresses a longstanding challenge with the upward mobilization of one of the largest household types in urban cities across the country; female-led single parent homes account for 22% in the U.S. with 80% of households led by mothers. On average, female-led homes earn $48,098 annually, and while many local and federal programs provide resources to address wage gaps, e.g. WIC, housing vouchers, etc., these programs utilize antiquated and often anti-Black, misogynistic measurements for eligibility, making the possibility to engage in activities that have historically proven necessary for economic mobility, e.g. earning college degrees, work-related certificates to boost earning potential, etc. impossible to accomplish.
Morrison offers a model of care that aims to address the social, communal, and financial wellbeing of Black single mothers in the most radical way. The “attitude toward human life” she proposes is one that challenges the notions of patriarchy and familial dynamics.
It is one that rejects language that calls single parent homes deficient or depraved and reclaims the very ancestral reality that female-led households are rightly divine. To borrow from Morrison, to be Black and female “doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.”
It is one that calls for a community of reliable others that are willing to take on the burden of care to ensure the thriving of others. Morrison paints a dynamic picture for the fictious teenage mother who aspires to be a brain surgeon, one of the most complex types of medical surgeons that takes years of study and comes with great risk. But Morrison imagines that Black single mothers can do and become anything, the hardest of things, if given the space and support to do just that: become.
And it is one that says that in order do right by these mothers, after we’ve reimagined language, shifted social understanding, and created community that promotes dreaming, we have to cut a check. Or send a Cashapp. Or offer a “holy handshake” with a crisp $20 bill on the way out the sanctuary.
Morrison does not miss the moment to name that money is the line of delineation between dreaming and being. Morrison names “everybody” as the recipient of handouts and, if you know her politic (and read the rest of the interview), she means white folk.
In order to transform the lives of Black single mothers, we must understand what Morrison understood: that an “attitude toward human life” that gives room for folks to thrive requires us to put our money where our mouth is. This is why direct and mutual aid on social media for LGBTQIA+ and other marginalized folk work so well — it puts the money directly into the hands of those who need it. Capitalism tells us that the poor and disenfranchised cannot be trusted with access to cash; they want us to believe that our innate Blackness or single motherness or queerness or ableness or otherness disqualifies from knowing the intimacies of a thriving life.
A lie don’t care who tell it.
Black single mothers have strong work ethic, a deep commitment to community, and a particular kind of innovative know-how; the line of differing determinants is that we suffer at the hands of systemic oppression, expected to “make do” with living wages that do not equip us to tap into equitable living, e.g. saving money, access to healthcare, safe, affordable housing, etc., while still supporting and rallying for the social, economic, and political liberation of others.
It’s time we innovate around the barriers to create the conditions for Black single mothers to thrive.
Morrison’s radical model of care for the Black mothers who write at 4 AM, much like she did, whose passion for baking pies or teaching children or crunching numbers or tinkering under the hood or parting cornrows or leading agencies is simple: pay the cost for us to thrive then add tax.
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You can learn more about The Current Project and its initiatives at www.thecurrentproject.org
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