Writer Mother Monster: Riché Barnes, “Black women have had to come up with strategies for the survival of their children, families, and communities. It’s a toolkit passed down through the collective memory of Black mothers.”

(April 15, 2021) Riché J. Daniel Barnes, a socio-cultural anthropologist who studies Black families, is the author of Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community. She has a 20-year-old daughter and twin 18-year-old sons, and she describes writer-motherhood in three words as: “Supporter. Creative. Industrious.” In this episode, Riché talks about raising kids while pursuing a PhD, redefining “family time,” and Black Strategic Mothering. And, she reveals the talent she performs at her family talent show!

Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors.

Transcript

Writer Mother Monster: Riché Barnes

April 15, 2021

Riché J. Daniel Barnes is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. A socio-cultural anthropologist, Riché focuses on a broad range of issues concerning Black families and is the author of Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community(2016), in which she coined the term “black strategic mothering” while investigating what she refers to as the “neo-politics of respectability.” Riché is the co-founder and director of the Association of Black Anthropologists Mentoring Program, the President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and winner of the 2019 AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology. She is a scholar-activist committed to social justice action including the Movement for Black Lives and #SayHerName. Riché has a 20-year-old daughter and twin 18-year-old sons, and she describes writer-motherhood in three words as “Supporter. Creative. Industrious.”

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Riché Barnes. Before I introduced Riché, thank you all for tuning in. You can watch this interview as a video, listen to it as a podcast, and read the transcript on writermothermonster.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. For just $3 a month, I’ll send you a pin. And new to announce today is our first Writer Mother Monster workshop, called Prioritizing Your Craft for Writer-Moms. It is conveniently scheduled the day before Mother’s Day on Saturday, May 8. Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into the conversation. 

And now I am excited to introduce Riché Barnes. She is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. A socio-cultural anthropologist, Riché focuses on a broad range of issues concerning Black families and is the author of Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community(2016), in which she coined the term “black strategic mothering” while investigating what she refers to as the “neo-politics of respectability.” Riché is the co-founder and director of the Association of Black Anthropologists Mentoring Program, the President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and winner of the 2019 AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology. She is a scholar-activist committed to social justice action including the Movement for Black Lives and #SayHerName. Riché has a 20-year-old daughter and twin 18-year-old sons, and she describes writer-motherhood in three words as “Supporter. Creative. Industrious.”

Riché Barnes 

Hello.

Lara Ehrlich 

Hello. Thank you so much for joining me.

Riché Barnes

Thank you for having me. 

Lara Ehrlich 

Tell me about the three words that you chose for writer motherhood: supporter, creative, industrious.

Riché Barnes  

A supporter, I feel like that’s what’s happening all the time. I think it was fresh on my mind, because in the COVID moment, and with all that’s going on in the world right now, I feel like a lot of my time is spent offering support to my kids, just being a listening ear or trying to anticipate what kinds of struggles they might be having. I can’t fix them, because they’re pretty much adults at this point, but there are little things I can do. They’re all home. My daughter is a junior in college, so she’s been home since the pandemic. And my sons, who are twins, are still in high school, which has been in-person pretty much consistently since maybe November. Before that, they were online a lot. I felt like in a lot of ways, I was just paying attention to how they were being affected by the pandemic and by other things that are going on in the world and just trying to be supportive. We’re past the point where I’m making lunches and breakfasts, and sometimes even dinner, because they’re able to fix things for themselves. But if I’m paying attention, I realize, he’s going through a lot right now, let me make breakfast, because he’s not going to eat if I don’t make breakfast. So, you know, things like that. That’s what made me think of supporter.

Creative, you’re just on the fly, like, what do I need to do right now with this situation? I think for me, I’m creative anyway, so it really falls in line with that. Again, I was thinking of things I have to do and how I respond to them. I almost put “entrepreneurial,” because I’m also thinking about very practical things. Both of my boys are over six feet tall, so, when they were smaller, it was them growing out of clothing very quickly and me being very industrious to keep up with the budget and do things to keep us within our financial means. I’m also thinking about that right now, because they’re getting ready for college. They’ve gotten some really good packages, but we’re also thinking about how much we are going to have to put in the pot—and it’s two of them, and my daughter hasn’t graduated yet, so there’ll be three of them. All of that is on my mind right now.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, that’s a lot. With those logistical things that you have to be thinking about, how does that impact the creativity side? When you’re thinking about lunches and finances and buying new clothes so your child’s ankles aren’t showing, how do you maintain your creativity?

Riché Barnes

It’s hard. I used to write poetry and short stories. I used to do a lot more creative writing. I used to say grad school pushed it out of me, but I think it’s because you have to think differently when you’re doing social, scientific, scholarly work, but I think as an ethnographer, I still get to use some of my creative juices. But I think the creativity in terms of my writing really suffered in a lot of ways once I had kids, because there just wasn’t time and there wasn’t space. I think so much of creativity happens because you’re able to be alone or be in spaces that are going to inspire you. That’s not happening when you have three kids under three. My kids are all very close in age. There’s just not a lot of time. Lately, I’ve been trying to get back to the creative juices, so I’ve been doing simple things like coloring. I actually have a coloring book.

Lara Ehrlich

So do I! It’s OK. 

Riché Barnes 

I had mine in my bookbag, which is sitting right next to me, but I took it out because I needed to make room for some papers I needed to grade. So that’s what happens to my creativity. I think that’s a great metaphor. And I love to dance. As part of my workout regimen, instead of doing lots of things that I don’t like to do, I’ve been doing more dancing. I think all of that inspires my creativity. I’ve been going for a lot longer walks to be out in nature. But all of that is because my kids are older. It’s all because I don’t have to spend so much time, you know, with the day-to-day, minute-to-minute stuff with them. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get back into the creative part of my writing, maybe once they’re gone. I still journal. I’ve always journaled.

Lara Ehrlich

You mentioned that the creative side of the things that you love to do—the poetry and the short stories—have been on hold, but you’ve been very, very productive, right? I mean, you have an amazing book that you’ve written, among many, many other writings, and dean of university and now, tell me again about your role at Mount Holyoke.

Riché Barnes

I should probably give a little bit of context to for how this happened. I realized that I like being an administrator, but I missed the research that inspired my writing. I wasn’t getting as much time to do that as an administrator. I was teaching at Yale, and it was very difficult to carve out time to do the real kind of research and writing that I wanted to be doing. I think I might get back to administration later in my career, but right now, I still want to be doing research and writing. I got the opportunity to be in conversation with Mount Holyoke College about a position that they had open about 18 months ago in gender studies, and they were looking for a scholar who was focused on Black feminism, and that’s me.

Lara Ehrlich

Let’s focus on Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Communityfor a second. When did you write the book? Were you writing the book when your kids were younger? Talk me through the process of the research and writing that went into this book with small children.

Riché Barnes

Yeah, that’s a great question. I had all three of my kids while I was in grad school, and my book is based off of the research that I did for my dissertation. They were little people. My daughter must have been 3 or 4, during my concentrated time of interviewing, what we call participant observation, where you just kind of hang out with people and see what they do. I would go with the moms that I was working with for my research to pick up their kids at doctor’s appointments and soccer games. My kids were still too little to be involved in those kinds of activities, so I actually learned a lot from the women that I interviewed about balancing out motherhood and work and all the other things that they were doing. 

But in terms of negotiating—doing that research and raising my family—I leaned on husband a lot. He was a trooper, as far as I’m concerned. There’s one story that we still laugh about. I was a part of this research group that met in the afternoons once a week. It wasn’t the part of the research where I was actually collecting research, but it was a group of scholars that I was in conversation with, as I was collecting the interviews with the women that I was working with. 

It was once a week in the evening, when my husband was a public-school math teacher. He would get out of school and be done with his workday at around 4:30 or 5. We had a Volvo and a pickup truck, and he would drive the pickup truck to work, and I would have the Volvo with the kids. On the days when I had that meeting, I’d put the kids in the Volvo and drive to his school, and he would meet me in the parking lot and take the kids. He would take them back into school with him, or he would just go home, and I would take the truck and go to my meeting. So, he would have them for the rest of the evening—getting them their dinner, getting them ready for their bath—but even with that, there would be days when I needed to go meet with someone because that was the time they had to talk with me, and he would watch the kids, or my parents would watch the kids. It was a lot of balancing with them. 

I never brought them with me though, like all of the women who I was researching. I didn’t want to break that line of researcher. I never wanted them to feel like I was their friend or something. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t cross any lines or do anything that would interrupt the scholarly process of collecting data from people. But yeah, it was a blur, a lot of it. People used to ask me how I did it all, and I would just say, “I don’t have a choice.” I mean, I guess I did have a choice—I didn’t have to pursue my PhD and raise kids at the same time—but it didn’t feel like a choice to me. It felt like I needed to be true to the kinds of work that I wanted to do and also true to the kind of mom I wanted to be.

Lara Ehrlich

What kind of mom did you want to be?

Riché Barnes

Supportive, creative, industrious. No, but all jokes aside, we all want to be good moms, right? I think the way that I was characterizing it then, and I think I still do, has a lot to do with time, being there for them. Not that I need to be there 24-7, because we definitely did use childcare providers, and they went to school and after-school programs when they were of age, and they were in rec this and dance that—all that stuff. But yeah, I think it had a lot to do with time listening and being present, showing love.

Lara Ehrlich

Talk to me about being present with so many other things going on. How did you do that?

Riché Barnes

I think it’s actually doing things with them. We made a point of having breakfast together every day. We decided it would be breakfast, because as they were getting older and involved in more activities, it was harder to have the same dinner time, but we could have the same breakfast time—like, everybody gets up, everybody comes in, comes to the table, and eats breakfast together. That was always a good time to be present and available, listening, and kind of setting them up for the day ahead. They had this moment in which we were all grounded together as a family that they could then take into their day—at least, that’s the way I imagined it was happening. I don’t know how they felt about it, like maybe it was a complete annoyance that they had to get up earlier than they would have if they were just having a bowl of cereal. 

Those are moments that I can remember of being present, just really spending time together. We always go on a family vacation, and we do a lot of things together on the weekends, but everybody’s on a device. Even to this day, and they’re 18 and 20, we have family movie night, we do talent shows—like, we all prepare talent and share it with the whole family, which is a lot of fun. So, I guess present day is having fun together, being together intentionally.

Lara Ehrlich

I love that. Finding things that are fun for you and your family to do together. I think there’s so much pressure on being present, dictated by kids and what they find fun, which is fine, too, but it’s probably a little easier to be present if you’re finding something that everyone really enjoys doing together. I find that if it’s something I would enjoy anyway, then it’s a lot easier to be present than doing something that is a little less in my wheelhouse, like playing blocks, for example, when I’m like, “Oh, God, do we have to do that again?”

Riché Barnes

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me more about the book, Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community. Tell me a little bit about the women that you followed and researched and what you learned from them.

Riché Barnes

The book is an ethnography, which, if folks aren’t aware of what that means, it’s basically when usually anthropologists, but other social sciences, too, go out and spend time with people to understand their everyday lived experiences. You do that with a set of guiding questions about what you’re interested in finding out about. The women I followed around, which is literally what I was doing, were professional women, career women, educated women who had at least a college education, but many of them had advanced degrees. They were doctors, lawyers, executives, engineers, marketing executives, finance executives, a journalist—those kinds of positions that would give one a degree of financial security and stability. They were women who were making decisions around whether or not they wanted to continue in a full-time career where they were very focused on being ambitious in the workplace, or they were continuing in a career but maybe not on full steam, or they were choosing to be at home or part time for a while.

 What was interesting about this question for me was, this wasn’t something, historically, that African-American women had the opportunity to think about as an option. For these women, it had a lot to do with the fact that they were professionals, but also their partners were professionals, so it allowed them a degree of freedom that, historically, Black women haven’t had. Then the negotiation becomes “if my husband can’t afford for me to be at home, do I stay at home?” 

A lot of the decision-making has to do with this history that I’ve been talking about. If the history of your experience as a race and gendered person is that you have always worked, and even when you have had success at work, you still worked, because that was doing something important for not only your own family but also your community, because that opportunity hadn’t been available to your community previously, what responsibility do you have to a larger community of people who may be, quote unquote, “counting on you.” 

For example, there was one woman I followed whose family of origin was poor—the families of many of the women I worked with were poor or working class—and this is what made it even more difficult, because they were in this woman’s particular experience. Her parents had had her as teenagers, and she was raised by her grandmother and grandfather in a very small town in the rural South. The whole community had seen her as a very bright child that was going to go far and do great things. And so, she did. She did well in high school, went to college, went on to medical school, went into her career as a physician, got married to an attorney, and was living everybody back home’s dream, right? Like, wow, look at you. You’re doing such great things. We’re so proud of you. And then she starts having her kids.

 I think the combination of trying to hold down this very demanding role at work and being supportive to her husband who was, at the time, starting his own business, and raising small children was becoming a bit too much. So, she decided, because she could, she’d stay home. And not stay home in the sense of, and she actually said this, “sitting around eating bonbons.” She was helping her husband get the business off the ground. It wasn’t that she had devoted all her time to being a mom, not that there would be anything wrong with that, but she had decided that for her family, it actually was more helpful to everyone, in terms of her health and stress load and all that stuff for kids, because she would be more present. And her husband, because she could keep the books, wouldn’t necessarily have to hire more people, and things like that. They could build that thing together and make another successful type of thing. But her family and community at home, had no recognition of what that was right. They were like, what are you doing? Why are you at home? 

It was that kind of negotiation that I found many of the women in the study trying to figure out, how to make sense of having these new financial freedoms, wanting stability and presence in their households, seeing how this on ramp of “go, go, go, go, go” wasn’t really giving them many returns and deciding it’s okay to step back for this moment. And I say “for this moment,” because for many of the women going back, or going back part-time was something that was happening at different points in their decision making or different points in their children’s lives, different points in their marriages—there were a lot of things that were at play when they were making these decisions. 

I probably saved my children so much grief by learning from these women. I could probably write a manual about all the stuff taught to me that I was able to implement, because I was watching them go through it just a few years ahead of me. But what I really learned, and this is the part that I hope comes through in the book, is how challenging it is for families in general to figure out how to do all this stuff on their own. That’s what it came down to. These women would have loved to continue their careers, but there was no way to have it. We’ve all been trying to have it all, right? That’s what they’ve been telling us, like, oh, women, you can have it all, just go for it, right? I mean, we have so many people writing books telling us to do all sorts of things, about women having it all, being able to combine all these things and do it effortlessly and with no stress, all the sleep, and looking gorgeous. Well, it’s only true for a very, very, very, very, very small portion of the population, and everybody else who says that they’re making it work, I believe is a lying.

Lara Ehrlich

I agree with you. Thank you for saying that. Yes.

Riché Barnes

At the end of the book, in the conclusion, we say there are just so many things that our society needs to do. If it really cares about children, if it really cares about people about families, which we keep saying we do, there are so many supports that needs to be put in place, and what we’re seeing instead are supports being removed or made more challenging to get access to. That’s what I learned.

Lara Ehrlich

I want to go back for a second to something that you said you learned from these women, or that you noticed as you were following them, about how they felt they had to justify their choices to family and communities back home and all these voices that have been telling them they can do this, we expect you to do this, and then they decide that they’re going to do something different. Can you talk a little bit about the ramifications of that choice, and if you’ve had to make choices that don’t align with the expectations for you and how you deal with that?

Riché Barnes

Yeah, that’s such a good question. There was some ambivalence, there was some dissonance, there was even some partial speak, where a woman is telling me, “Yeah, I made the decision to come home, because I thought it was going to be good for my kids, and my husband was doing this thing and that thing, and I just thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could just focus and be at home for a while.” 

I follow them a bit longer and learn that, no, this woman got laid off from her job a month after she had her third, and with three small children needing childcare, at that moment, it didn’t make sense to look for another job, so she stayed home for a couple of years. Then it was the explanation, the thing that made sense to go along with that decision, which then became “this child needs these activities and this kind of school, and my being home allowed me to be able to get this child what this child needs.” 

At one point, her husband was diagnosed with a chronic illness. It wasn’t the kind that was going to take him out of work, but it made it more necessary for him to be more cognizant of what he was eating and things like that, so she was like, “And now that I’m home, I can make sure that we’re eating home-cooked meals every day, and it’s not like when I was at work, and I was running through the drive-thru.” 

So, she had this way of explaining and went along with the thing that actually wasn’t her decision. It was prompted by the fact that she got laid off. There were a couple of women who had those kinds of work-related things happen, that then led them to “it doesn’t make sense for me to look for a job right now.” 

That was the doublespeak. Ambivalence showed up when, talking to one woman, she was like, “When I was in college, I thought I was going to be a CEO. I thought I was gonna end up at the top of my profession and my industry.” She made this really funny comment, something like, “And I’m CEO of making the laundry work.” It was kind of like, I didn’t get anywhere near what I had expected for myself. 

I found women dealing with that, making jokes about it, but also recognizing that they weren’t doing exactly what they thought they would be doing or even what they decided to do. Some of them became clear about their husbands’ expectations, what it means when you’re not bringing in as much money, how he sees your role. When you’re both working full-time and managing the kids and all the household stuff together, there’s a degree of “we’re managing it all together.” He’s going to have days when he is doing baths and laundry. 

But when you’ve stepped out of that partnership configuration, then his expectations change. “I’m working all day, you’re home all day or home part time, you should now be doing the laundry, all the baths, all the meals.” Right? There was dissonance, like, this is not how it was when we got married. 

Then on the side of community expectations and family expectations, there was a lot of hurt. They were very hurt. Because they wanted support from their families, especially their moms and grandmoms. When they weren’t getting it, I would see in their body language, there was hurt there.

Lara Ehrlich

What were the expectations set by your own family and your own mother? What kind of model did she provide for you of motherhood?

Riché Barnes

My mom and my mom’s mom are very, very hard worker women and had very, very high expectations of me. They would not have been happy with me being at home. They would not have found that a good use of my talents.

Lara Ehrlich

Did you ever consider staying home, or did you for any period of time throughout your career?

Riché Barnes

I actually did consider it. I had a couple of different iterations of changing my relationship with work. When the kids were really small, I thought it would be easier if I just did all the stuff. At one point, we couldn’t find childcare. I was in grad school and wasn’t bringing in much money. Then I was teaching adjuncts sometimes, and that was supposed to be helping us in some way, but really, it was just going to pay for the childcare that they were getting when I was teaching. There were a few times when I was talking to my husband, like, wouldn’t it be cool if I just stayed home? And he was like, “Yeah, if you stay home, all this is gonna be you.” 

It was the thing I noticed from the other dads. I was like, I don’t know about that. That’s not what I want to be doing. I enjoyed my work. I wanted to do the work that I was working towards, I wanted to be a researcher, I wanted to be a professor, I wanted to be a writer and teacher, so for me, it would have meant really changing my goals for my life, and I hadn’t achieved them yet. It wasn’t like the women I was talking to, who were in their careers and then made a decision to step back from them or change their relationship with them. It was like, I hadn’t even gotten to it yet. 

There was another point when I was like, maybe I don’t need a PhD. Maybe I can be a high school teacher. I thought about that for a while. And I had tried my hand at substitute teaching, right after college, and I was pretty clear that that was not my age group. My age group is full-on adult. I need people who are going to take full-on responsibility for their own learning. Yeah, I’m gonna teach you, but I need you to be responsible for that. That was another moment when I thought about it. 

I think earlier, if I remember correctly, you’d asked me if there had been a time when I did have to make some sort of compromise with my career expectations and my relationship with work and family. It was when I was at Yale. When I took the job at Yale, my husband was teaching at a boarding school, so we lived on the campus of the boarding school, and the kids were approaching the age where they could attend the boarding school. I was thinking it was a good time for us to move. 

I got my job at Yale, and I thought, okay, everybody’s gonna move. And no one moved. I was the only one who moved. I was commuting about an hour and a half. I didn’t have to do it every day, because I was dean of the college, and I had some place to live there, but I needed to be there pretty much full-time because I was dean. 

So, there was a real sense of juggling when I had that position, and I think that’s also what made it attractive for me to leave administration. I didn’t have the same level of flexibility I’d had when I was full-time faculty. Being full-time faculty really helped me navigate being a working mom, because I had so much control over my schedule, when I wasn’t actually in the classroom teaching. That made it easier to show up for a performance at elementary school, or pick up after school if we were going to do something special that day. I had flexibility over my time. I was able to maneuver things better than a lot of parents are able to do the traditional 8 to 6—let’s be real, it’s not 9 to 5 anymore. Being an administrator may be even more challenging for me, because I’m someone who does like to be present, as we were talking about earlier, especially since we’ve been in this COVID moment. The kids come in from class, because I’m teaching fully online, and I might be in the kitchen getting a cup of tea or something, and they come in and just kind of hang out with me, and that’s cool.

Lara Ehrlich

You mentioned intentionally carving out spaces to be together and having fun through various things like talent shows or movies. How did you, as a family, establish that tradition and set up those expectations?

Riché Barnes

When they were little, we would just say, on this night, we’re having family night, and it might be game night, or it might be movie night. The first thing we established was the day, and it’s not every week. That would be too much. It’s once or twice a month. Now that we’re doing the talent shows, I think it’s once every two or three months. It’s regular in the sense that, especially for the talent shows, you always know that it’s coming, so you’re always trying to get your talent together. Really funny, because then when it’s time for the talent show, it’s like, “Are you ready?”

Lara Ehrlich

Are these news talents? Like, do you have to come up with a new talent every time? Or are these established talents, like somebody’s always been a great singer, and they sing a song every time? How does that work?

Riché Barnes

Pretty much established talents. Every now and then, somebody does something new out of their wheelhouse—and, trust me, we’re not the Jackson Five. We’re not super talented individuals. We just have things that we enjoy doing. I think my husband and I also wanted to make sure that the kids enjoyed music and are in dance and stuff like that. We’ve always made sure that those things were a part of their lives. They’ve taken different instrument lessons. One of my sons has been in the a cappella group in his school and likes to sing. One uses instruments as his downtime. We started him on a viola when he was little, and he played that for a number of years, and then he wanted to join the band and played the trombone for a number of years, then taught himself guitar and the electric bass. Most of the time, when we have a talent show, he’s playing one of those instruments. The one that likes to sing is usually singing something. One time, I did a dance. I found a dance on YouTube or something and taught myself, because I love to dance. But I don’t have time to learn a dance every time we have a talent show, so lately, I’ve been reading my writing.

Lara Ehrlich

Whatever works!

Riché Barnes

I’m like, this is my talent, clearly. I am a writer, so I’m going to share with you some of what I’ve been writing. Not that it’s anything they’re interested in. But that is my talent.

Lara Ehrlich

Now, are you reading them scholarly writing?

Riché Barnes 

Scholarly.

Lara Ehrlich

I love that.

Riché Barnes

I had this journal article that I had just submitted, and I was like, “I’ll read the first part of this.”

Lara Ehrlich

That’s amazing. I might have to institute that at my house.

Riché Barnes

In terms of establishing it, when they were little, it was really easy, because we were just like, “Hey, we’re gonna watch …” whatever new Disney movie was out. My husband loves going to the movies, so that would be a family outing. We just converted that into something that we do at home. We’ve tried different things. At the beginning of the pandemic, we tried on Sundays, because we couldn’t go to church, come up with your own inspirational thing that you want to share with everyone. That went for, like, a month, and then everybody was like, okay, we’re over this. One thing that we did try that was really helpful was taking turns picking the movie.

Lara Ehrlich

I have to say it’s nice, now that my daughter’s almost 5, she can watch movies that are actually really enjoyable for grownups, too. When they’re 1 or 2, you have to watch Sesame Street, which is lovely, but it’s not the same sort of level of investment for grownups. Being able to watch movies together and engage and talk about the plot and the characters is really nice.

Riché Barnes

The running joke in our family is that my husband hasn’t seen that many of the movies because he fell asleep.

Lara Ehrlich

Well, they’re always new for him, then. We only have a few minutes left, and I feel like this is a big topic for just a few minutes, but I want to ask you about it anyway. Tell me about “Black strategic mothering.”

Riché Barnes

“Black strategic mothering” is basically a term that I came up with that actually just identifies something that’s already been happening, and that is that Black women, over time, especially in the United States, have had to come up with ways to basically strategize for the survival—and I mean real-time survival—of their children, their families, and their communities. 

When I talk about it as a strategy, I’m saying that Black women are recognizing that their different strategies are necessary at different times, and they can change according to the historical period and their life course. You can be a woman who use one strategy when your child was small and another strategy entirely when your child is an adult. Of course, you change as a mother as your child goes through different stages, but we’re talking about survival. 

For Black women in particular, because of our relationship with this country historically, it has meant that we could be in real fear for our lives and for the lives of our children and the lives of our partners at different times. 

I can just give you an example from my life. I remember when it occurred to me as a mother that my sons were no longer being viewed as cute and adorable little boys. They had crossed some invisible line, where they’re not seen as cute little boys anymore, and they’re seen as potentially scary men, even though they’re still cute little boys. How do you parent differently when you have that realization? When they start driving, there’s another point in which you’re strategizing differently. Up to that point, you haven’t really needed to talk about that realization you had when they turned somewhere around 12 or 13. Now that they’re 16, 17, 18, and they’re driving, and you’re not there, then there’s a new conversation—it’s not new for you, because you’ve been thinking on it since they were 13, but now it’s new for them. And how do you have that conversation with them? How do you parent them to see them walk out the door and not fear that something could go wrong while they’re out there?

Lara Ehrlich

I think it’s very important to distinguish between the fear of a mother when their child walks out the door and the fear, as you’re saying, this is Black strategic mothering. This is specific to the mother of children who are Black. Can you say a little bit more about the survival aspect? Can you talk a little bit more about the survival aspect of that strategy and how it changes?

Riché Barnes

For the example I just gave, the survival is real time: how do you make sure that your kid gets back home? What do you need to teach them so that they survive the encounter with whoever? We know from the news, I’m not making up things that couldn’t actually happen. The survival could be you survived a person seeing you having a good time with your friends and deciding that your music is too loud. How do you make sure your child is able to come back from that encounter? Or it’s being stopped by the police. How do you make sure your child is able to survive that encounter? Or it’s a run in with another young person. How do you make sure your child survives that encounter? 

And the truth of it is, you can’t make sure, so the strategies are what we have learned over time from this toolkit, which is basically passed down through the collective memory of Black mothers, that we share with our children who think the world has changed and they don’t need to be concerned about it anymore. You’re nowhere that you can’t keep it from happening. And so even that is a strategy. How do you do it, knowing there’s nothing you can do?

Lara Ehrlich

Take it for a second back to writing and why it’s important to write about this and to put it out there. I think it’s so important, what you said, that there’s a community, a wellspring of knowledge, behind these strategies. How are you continuing to further them through writing them down?

Riché Barnes

I try. It’s hard. I’m actually supposed to have written two different pieces for two different public facing news outlets about all that’s been happening over the last year, specific to COVID and to what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and recognizing that George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are just two names among many that have not been named and have not had justice in any form. I haven’t been able to finish them. But I keep trying, because it needs to happen. 

I appreciate you for asking me, for having me in an interview format to have these conversations. But I am a writer, and I try to write them, and it’s hard. I was thinking earlier, one of them, I just need to say, “I’m not going to be able to get this done.” Because I keep trying to get it done, and I keep not being able to. I don’t know if I’m still too close to everything, because we’re still in the thick of things, and new things are unfolding every day. 

One thing I didn’t mention was both my parents had COVID last summer, and they’re fine, now they’re better, they’re not long haulers, they’re doing great, but they are also getting older, and we’re still in this very difficult moment. I have children who are going off to college, and we’re still in this very difficult moment. I think I’m still personally struggling to write out all that I want to be able to say, partly because I’m creative, but I’m also a scholar, so part of me is like, I need more information. I can’t put this out yet. I need to interview more people. I need to do more reading. That part of me is like, you got to have this right before you put it out. But there’s the creative in me, and the one that is committed to telling the stories of Black women, especially Black women who haven’t been heard, and using my platform to say, here’s what you need to know about what these experiences in real time, from the people that you don’t usually listen to. That’s another year. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m gonna make a decision. I’m either gonna get it done or say I can’t do it.

Lara Ehrlich

And either one is OK, right?

Riché Barnes

Yeah, I’m learning to give myself more grace.

Lara Ehrlich

I think that’s a good lesson for everyone, especially for mothers and mother writers. That’s a good piece of advice to end on, although I wish we could keep talking. Thank you so much for joining us, Riché. It’s been such a pleasure. 

Riché Barnes

Thank you, and thank you to the audience that was here.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you all for joining us.