I'm Chocolate, You're Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World by Marguerite Wright

Author:Marguerite Wright
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2009-02-21T11:59:00+00:00

A New Trend: Missing Mothers

Like their peers of other racial and ethnic groups, black mothers are the mainstays of their families. In many years of working with families, I have learned that I can almost always count on a mother or a grandmother to be there for a child who is experiencing problems growing up. I've known many black mothers who have made enormous sacrifices to bring their children up right, with or without the support of their children's fathers.

Although today most mothers continue to be central to their children's lives, some are shirking their responsibilities. In the past decade, some mothers, like too many fathers, have succumbed to pressures and temptations and consequently absented themselves from their children's lives. The crack cocaine epidemic-a modern form of slavery-that began in the mid-1980s is mainly responsible for this devastating phenomenon. As a result of this scourge, some black children have little or no contact with their mothers. Some of these children have been placed in the foster care system. Sometimes they are placed with a relative, usually an overwhelmed grandmother with limited financial resources and declining health. Here's a disturbing thought to ponder: what happens when today's missing mothers become tomorrow's irresponsible grandmothers?

Traditionally, blacks have relied on their extensive kinship networks in raising children. But under such an arrangement, the children's biological parents, especially their mothers, usually continued to play a central role in their children's lives. Mothers didn't simply abandon their children to lead lives of self-indulgence. Instead, their separation from their children was usually undertaken to improve the financial conditions of the family.

My work with children in kinship care and foster care makes me particularly aware of the life-altering impact the absence of birth mothers can have on the lives of their children. Although some of these children are fortunate to find loving homes with relatives or foster or adoptive families, too many of them are allowed to languish in the system, pining to be reunited with mothers who seldom, if ever, contact them. Many absentee mothers have turned to drugs or alcohol to cope with their troubled lives. Most love their children but are unable to free themselves from the grip of their addictions despite numerous attempts at recovery. Mothers who cannot get themselves in shape to care for their children can doom those children to miserable lives.

Another serious problem is that although some of these addicted mothers can't or won't get their lives in order so that their children can be returned to them, they refuse to agree to the termination of their parental rights. Thus children who are not fortunate enough to have fathers (often the father is unknown) or relatives who are interested in raising them end up being shifted from foster home to foster home until they reach adulthood. Many of these children move out of the foster care system straight into the juvenile justice system; that is, they pass from dependency to delinquency. In 1997, a federal law was passed that reduces the

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