Moynihania: Penny Rolle and the Criminalization of Black Motherhood in the era of Mass Incarceration
The Black Matriarchy as National Problem
“In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” — The Moynihan Report, 1965
To apply a feminist framework to the modern day issue of mass incarceration, we must recognize that the American black mother has consistently been held in contempt by systems of power which demonize and criminalize her. Starting with sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” in 1965, one can chart the emergence of a patriarchal endorsement of black-woman-hating as a means of expressing “concern” for the black community. The black pregnancy and the resultant black family, problematized as a national issue, became concrete in American ideology through various coded discourses. We made reference to it in the “Welfare Queen,” the “Crack Whore,” and the “Teenage Mother,” all masked terms for the Jezebel whose perceived irresponsibility made her deserving of suffering and punishment.
This is all to say that we live in Moynihania: a nation where the black pregnancy is assumed to be a mistake and where the black mother’s love is not recognized. We have thrown drug-addicted black mothers in jail for the crime of being pregnant. We have shamed and ridiculed the under-educated black woman who has the tenacity to request welfare assistance to raise her children. We have placed black women’s children in the school-to-prison pipeline. The United States Female prison population is 30% Black, though Black women constitute for only 13% of the female population in general. In a world such as ours, where the only motherhood respected and endorsed by the state is the toxic competition of “refined” whiteness, love in black mother-daughter relationships is torn asunder by a police state. For a black daughter to love her mother, especially in cases where the mother has been incarcerated, is for her to adopt a radical anti-state love.
Penny Rolle and The Radical Love of Black Motherhood
Enter Penny Rolle, a fan-favorite protagonist from Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s landmark feminist comic book Bitch Planet. Penny loves to fight and is unapologetically big and black, landing her on the titular prison planet of the book’s hyper-patriarchal future. Debuting in Issue #1 of the series, Rolle’s backstory was detailed in Bitch Planet #3 when it was revealed that she had originally been raised by her loving Grandmother Bertha, who taught her to cherish and love herself as a large black woman. This is the radical love which racist patriarchy seeks to destroy both in Moynihania and Bitch Planet, and Bertha’s raising of Penny is ended when heavily-armed police troops raid her home and carry Penny away to be raised by the state.
Penny’s experiences in BP #3 — both in a state home and under the vindictive judgment of the men who sentence her for off-world incarceration — testify to the unbearable scrutiny levied upon black mothers and daughters in a Moynihanian technocracy. Her hair painfully combed over by the thin and blonde Mother Seibertling in the state home, Penny is told to ignore what her “fat” and “ugly” grandma had told her and to see herself “through the fathers’ eyes.” Standing as an adult before a tribunal of video screens, Penny is lectured about her mother’s “delusional” and “dangerous” nature. The matriarchal composition of Penny’s background is consistently used by the state to delegitimize and disenfranchise Penny.
It is Penny’s profound commitment to loving her black self and her black mother that allows her to fight back against the self-hatred which racist patriarchy seeks to instill in her. She insists on paying tribute to her mother’s fortitude even in the smallest and tenderest of moments, and she displays her full violent rage when her mother’s identity is attacked. At the end of BP #3, agents of the state hook Penny Rolle up to a machine which is supposed to project an image of her “ideal self,” presumably thin and white and submissive. The Fathers — the racist patriarchal collective that governs the world of Bitch Planet — want Penny to turn on her mother and grandmother, to hate their blackness and size. But when the machine is turned on, Penny’s ideal image of herself is no different than who she already is. Penny is sent to Bitch Planet because she has refused to give up the defense of black motherhood and black self-love in a world where both are criminal.
From Moynihania to Bitch Planet: Incarcerating Love
Penny Rolle helps us connect the dots between mass incarceration and patriarchy. It is not enough to simply throw our statistical lens over to women’s prisons and declare verisimilitude in the atrocities of over-policing and imprisonment between male and female populations, we must recognize the particularity of black womanhood that has always operated at the center of the war on the Black family in the United States. In the shadow of Moynihan, black motherhood remains as always an occasion for power. An increase in academic studies on the relationship between mass incarceration and black women is necessary, but art like Bitch Planet can help us all see the profound injustice of criminalizing black motherhood, as well as the radical potential of black mother-daughter love.
