The violence of the middle passage not only generates blackness and black womanhood as a dispossessed category but demands a reimagination of kinship itself. At the site of such tremendous violence and injury, fostering and reconceptualizing kinship bonds is a resistance strategy for black women that cannot be overshadowed. Black women throughout history have worked to subvert this link between kinship and commodification by building kinship networks and modes of being with one another that affirm black life and black futures. These kinship networks manifest through mothering, queer connections, and intimate relationships to name a few examples; no matter their form, kinship enables black women to self-define community networks, systems of care, and the very nature of black womanhood itself. I ultimately seek to understand and pay homage to the (re)making of kinship networks as a survival strategy for Black women and as a central Black feminist practice.
In her forward to Sula, Toni Morrison writes: “Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves”. Black women, as referenced by Morrison, have been consistently compelled to think about and create ways to care for each other in light of systemic and hierarchical violence that evacuates black women’s agency. Another way to interpret Morrison’s words are: when nobody minds black women, black women make each other kin. In responding to erasure and silencing, black women have been consistently called to reconceptualize modes of collectivity in order to combat what Saidiya Hartman describes as a state of exile. Although Hartman’s discussion of kinship has diasporic ramifications that move beyond the framework of interpersonal kinship networks among black women, the language she uses is remarkably fruitful as it causes readers to understand kinship as a dual site of injury and potential.
There are several prominent ways kinship networks have been reimagined throughout black social life. Black mothering, for instance, is a significant way to track black women’s formation of kinship networks. In terms of black women and mothering, it is important to turn to black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins work. Patricia Hill Collins refers to the institution of black motherhood as “a series of constantly renegotiated relationships that African-American women experience with one another, with Black children, with the larger African-American community, and with self”. The varying nature of these renegotiations are important as they point to the fact that black mothering is not solely a biological undertaking. Instead, mothering becomes a means of building structures of care that enable black women to more freely navigate systems of economic and political oppression. More specifically and most poignantly, Patricia Hill Collins is able to think about black mothering, biological or otherwise, as a subversive and revolutionary act. Through mothering and the support systems that black women build, kinship networks are not defined solely by heteropatriarchal standards and challenge the state of liminality. Black women are not meant to exist beyond the margins, but black mothering in all of its many forms, enables a survival ethic to flourish and for new forms of collectivity within the family to exist.
Just as importantly, kinship networks exist outside of the family. In discussing black women’s kinship bonds, one must also discuss the prominence of queer kinship and black lesbian relationships. Countless black women writers and scholars such as Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan remind folks that queer kinship and queer relationships are important means of resistance and survival. Womanism as developed by Alice Walker, for instance, foregrounds the importance of black women loving one another, both romantically, sexually, and non-romantically. These relationships, platonic or not, allow women to bond together and provide an invaluable form of support that is so often stolen from black women.
Although countless queer black women have written against the homophobia that is so deeply entrenched in white-cis-heteropatriarchy, organizing together is just as important. The Combahee River Collective, founded in 1974, is a prime example of black lesbian feminists collecting together to build structures of resistance, activism, and kin. The Collectives Statement as written by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, states, “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work” (Combahee River Collective Statement). The very invocation of community and a healthy love “for ourselves, our sisters and our community” is the language of kinship. Although this does not mean that all black women and all black queer women are kin, the very potential for radical change and resistance is in building kin-like networks
Just like self-naming, forming alternative kinship networks is a critical means of resistance and a black feminist practice. As Barbara Smith writes in the introduction to Home Girl: A Black Feminist Anthology “Unlike any other movement, Black feminism provides the theory that clarifies the nature of Black women’s experience, makes possible support from other Black women, and encourages political action that will change the very system that has put us down”. Underlying this work and the further development of black women’s standpoint is kinship. Whether it be through black mothering or queer relationships and communities, networks of connection, support and care allow black women to define themselves outside of the white hegemonic gaze. Alternative kinship networks allow black women to survive.
