revolutionary mothering love on the front lines

YOU for example, both on your Facebook page and in your book, Letters to My Black Sons: Raising Boys in a Post-Racial America. If we are ever going to have the society that we need (like one where humans get to keep living on this planet, for example) everyone needs to learn from the world-changing daily work that we call mothering.ĪG: There are so many people who have written amazing work about mothering. The people who aren’t supposed to have a chance to mother-like black/queer/poor people, people like us and the people who mothered us, are recreating the world every day in intimate, intergenerational, creative and collective ways-should be given a space to tell their stories. KW: Why did you decide to write this book?ĪG: The short answer is that we believe that mothering is revolutionary. Gumbs about her forthcoming anthology, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. This month, I explore revolutionary mothering and more in my interview with Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs takes on this challenge and studies and writes about what this has looked like in the lives of revolutionary mothers.

With the help of some guideposts set up by sister writers and scholars, the path is one that each revolutionary mother must carve and scratch out daily. Revolutionary mothering is not for the faint of heart. I had no idea of what this looked like in practice, I just knew that in order to raise happy, healthy, and whole children, I needed to consciously speak love into their lives, to speak hope into their spirits, and to birth and nurture a sense of self and of belonging into their soul. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. They are the sons and the daughters of Life’s longing for itself. I wrote out the words to Khalil Gibran’s poem “On Children” and hung them on my wall as a daily reminder of what it meant to practice revolutionary mothering: When I realized that I was going to be a mother, I decided that I was going to be a #blackmommyactivist and practice the art of revolutionary mothering.

Revolutionary mothering love on the front lines