You Can’t Understand The Pain of Black Mothers

*But You Should Still Try

You can try, but unless you yourself are a Black mother, you won’t and can’t understand the collective pain of Black mothers and the persistent fear that comes as its attendant. I can’t help you understand it. You may try to wrap your brain around it, and you should try to because to try is to bolster your own humanity, but no, it will remain elusive.

You can read a thousand books on the subject. You can pour over Beloved, Toni Morrison’s scorching, illuminating writing on this very topic, based on a real Black mother, Margaret Garner, who in this pain did the single most excruciating thing to protect her child from the harsh world and the realities of slavery. You can read it a million times. You could memorize every line in the movie and word in the book and while it may foment requisite anger in you, the intergenerational trauma that courses through the very veins of Black mothers, the knowingness around the socially assigned meaning of the immutable characteristics of our children and how they are still received in this world because we have felt it directed at our own beings will still be foreign to you.

Likewise, you can love The Color Purple. Your copy may be worn out and soft, with the pages loose. You may have seen it on Broadway 14 times. Perhaps it is your…