Hood Feminism Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot - Mikki Kendall Page 0,93

so on, then you cobble together what you can when you can, but you don’t have a good choice to make. You just have to make the best of your situation and hope you don’t run afoul of the law. This is especially difficult now in the era of the helicopter parent. Financially well-off, socially privileged, and almost completely ignorant of the lifestyles of those with less, they are among the most likely to call the authorities over perceived neglect as mundane as a child walking home alone.

Of course, you can argue that they are only trying to act in the child’s best interests, but if the child’s best interests are the only concern, then alleviating poverty for low-income parents would be a primary feminist issue. Instead, we find mainstream feminism hunkered down in the Hipster Mommy Wars, where at best the discussion is about the guilt you might feel for leaving your child with a nanny while you go to work. A long, navel-gazing paragraph about the guilt you might feel for being not feminist enough because you choose to stay home might be personally satisfying, but what does it do for marginalized parents?

Educating yourself on the issues that others are facing is perhaps the easiest way for a feminist to address parenting. I didn’t learn about Indigenous children and foster care by accident; I actively sought out more information on the Indian Child Welfare Act after a string of court cases were covered in the news. Does that mean I am an expert on ICWA? Of course not, but understanding the awful legacy of boarding schools for Indigenous Americans helped me grasp the importance of it—and thus the importance of listening to the activists who fight so hard to keep children in their community even when family situations are imperfect. It’s easy to say that “only love matters” when you assume that a culture has no value, and that erasing a child’s connection to it isn’t damaging.

Internalized bias may make it easier to believe in racist myths that dehumanize parents from severely disadvantaged communities, but the onus is on those with privilege, as feminists and as parents, to check themselves, to ask what they might be willing to do in order to give their children access to a life they never had. Would they also risk life and limb to immigrate regardless of arbitrary borders and laws? Would they sell drugs? Privilege, especially economic privilege, can make it easy to forget that while every parent faces challenges, not every parent has the same resources.

These days my oldest child is in college at my alma mater. My youngest is in middle school. I could pretend that being middle class–adjacent now means that I have forgotten where I came from, forgotten what it took to get me from “at-risk youth” to a published writer with two degrees. But that wouldn’t serve my community, wouldn’t be a good example to my children, and wouldn’t let me live with myself. This veneer of respectability that came from getting more education and being able to write professionally is nice. I like knowing that people will listen to what I have to say, but I’m always aware that people don’t usually listen to the Black girls like me, and that even now some will carve out a space for me that is separate from the other people like me. Because you’ll decide that me being able to get where they didn’t means they aren’t trying hard enough. In fact they’re trying just as hard, but they didn’t have the same luck, the same relatives, the same community. It’s not a question of “Why can’t they do what you did?” It’s a question of “Why can’t we give everyone else the same support and access?” That’s the battle feminism should be fighting. Without the extra obstacles of racism and classism, so many more people like me would be succeeding. That’s the future this liberal wants to live in.

ALLIES, ANGER, AND ACCOMPLICES

I used to be terrible about some trans and gender-nonconforming issues, specifically around bathrooms. It wasn’t in my mind a big deal to have separate bathrooms. Then a friend pointed out that not being able to use the bathroom in public is tantamount to being forced out of normal, everyday life. I had been a good self-identified ally to trans and nonbinary people, never once thinking that they didn’t have the right to