Black Motherhood and Labor Day
It’s Labor Day. It is also an election year. Today, this week, for the next two months, we will see political hopefuls walking factory floors with hard-hatted mascots peddling the myth that white men built America.
Meanwhile, over 700,000 Black American women are navigating two to three gigs to provide for their families while carrying the entire mental and emotional load for said family. Donna will need to piecemeal childcare for her children today so she can go to work because she cannot afford to miss a shift. She will work both jobs today and then go home and make sure that each of her children completed their homework. She will work. She will read. She’ll do wash. She’ll pack snacks. She’ll lie awake criticizing herself for forgetting something. Donna will measure herself by America’s myths. Donna will never pride herself in being the backbone of the nation—the marrow of the body.
Her labor will not be recognized today. It is expected. It will be assumed that she does not have the day off because she made poor life choices. Her inability to pay for childcare is treated as her fault; employers are not obligated to pay livable wages or provide benefits to part-time employees. I’ve dedicated my research to women like Donna. The Donnas of our nation keep it running. That is what the Myth, Marrow, Market thesis is all about.
I have spent very little time online these days. Audacity abounds, and my spirit can only take so much. Nolan Wells’ parents are targeted for simply asking why their teenage son is no longer alive. Southern police departments are declaring more “suicide by tree hanging” cases of African Americans than I have ever seen in my lifetime. It has indeed been a summer of strange fruit—bitter fruit from a bitter, blood-soaked soil never cleansed of its consecrated evils. America was never the country it told itself it was, and we are living through the repercussions of all its myths.
The myths are what make us bold. The myth that we are a true democracy. The myth that our government protects us. The myth that we care about our neighbors. The myth that billionaires earned their wealth through sheer hard work. The myth that we have surpassed racism and classism. The myth that we (Americans) are fundamentally good. Social media and smartphones have placed a flood of information, disinformation, and misinformation in our hands at all times. Like the citizens in Huxley’s Brave New World, we consume the lies and the truths simultaneously.
For millennia, the male mind has existed in a world designed to protect its ego at all costs—asking for minimal, if any, accountability. But global consciousness has expanded. We see it in the rising worldwide demand for Transatlantic slavery reparations, the emergence of prominent women leaders globally, and the shifting baseline of our cultural conversations. Twenty years ago, on America’s Next Top Model, we watched a young woman be date-raped as part of a broadcast game show, and it took us two decades to collectively name that horror for what it was. Violence against women is both escalating and increasingly being exposed. The myth that women are merely “hysterical” is cracking. Even TradWife influencers are trying to distance themselves from male domination.
Nobody thinks it’s cute anymore—or at least, women don’t. More women are opting out of heterosexual relationships entirely, choosing to move in with their best friends rather than endure traumatic, male-centered dynamics. The male response has been swift and violent, marked by spikes in enrollment in online “rape academies” and daily increases in reported abuse. It is simply not safe to be a woman.
What, then, of the women raising boys who will become men? We must parent our sons while they are actively bombarded by an echo chamber telling them they deserve dominance and control, while viewing women as lesser. A male friend once told me he wanted to find his “Michelle Obama.” He was self-employed at the time, living an aimless existence. When I asked him why he deserved Michelle Obama if he wasn’t offering a Barack-level partnership, he exclaimed that’s just what he deserved. It didn’t even occur to him to ask if he was worthy of her. To him, his desire was qualification enough.
It was at this point I started questioning “boy mom” culture. Socially we accept this idea that boys are coddled and men are mothered by their wives. We laugh about it, joke about it, don’t really do much to change it. I did not want to be a boy mom that produced a man like that. The audacity in the male mind is cultivated early. Our culture protects the fragile egos of boys, and our laws protect the fragile egos of men. Look at our Supreme Court bench for proof.
The women in my own family fiercely enforced this male-centered worldview. At twenty years old, as a junior at the University at Albany, my aunts and mother sat me down to talk about marriage. They told me I would need to drop subtle hints to “nudge” my future husband in the direction our family should move, making sure he believed every good decision was his own idea. Supporting his ego was framed as the cornerstone of being a successful wife.
It was during that precise conversation I realized I could never be married to a man. According to my mother, I was “too emasculating.” My grandmothers lectured me so relentlessly about shrinking my dreams for the sake of a family that I almost stopped speaking to them altogether. I was raised in a culture that demanded we cater to the male ego at all costs. When I finally openly admitted my romantic attractions lay elsewhere, I had no one to turn to. There was no safe person to help me process the shift, so I just felt it—raw, big, and intensely lonely.
When I had my son, I made a vow: I refused to produce a fragile man who required the world to shrink just to make him feel secure. I set out to raise a liberated Black man rooted in God rather than the culture. I reasoned that if his foundation was built on the Fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, discipline, kindness, goodness, faithfulness (Galatians 5:22-23)—I couldn’t go wrong. Beyond that, I wanted a Black man who would actively stand up for Black women, advocate for the marginalized, and operate with emotional intelligence and regulation.
When I looked for resources to help me raise a man like that, I found a void. Despite the endless sea of mommy blogs, none addressed the nuanced reality of raising Black children with emotional intelligence and resilience in America. While there is plenty of commentary about the flaws in our culture, there are very few practical blueprints showing us how to do something different. Too much of the Black American experience has been funneled into a knockoff version of white middle-class ideals, backed by a historical system designed to suppress alternative ways of being. Raising Black children from a place of possibility rather than scarcity feels daunting under those conditions.
While Afrocentric liberation curricula are beginning to emerge across the country, my family needed a daily, intentional framework that cuts through the cultural noise and confronts societal hypocrisy head-on. It needed to be a solid roadmap for how we move through the world individually and collectively. With a high school senior, a middle schooler, and first-grade twins, we have put this framework to the test—and it works. It doesn’t cost a dime, yet it elevates our entire lifestyle. This is how we are heading into the 2026-27 school year.
We call it the A.F.R.O. framework:
- A – Active Brains & Bodies: Learning does not happen in stagnation. Reading and physical movement are daily, non-negotiable foundations.
- F – Focused Art: Afrofuturism expands the imagination by portraying Black people liberated from legacies of trauma and bondage. Surrounding our home with Afrofuturist imagery transforms how our children dream.
- R – Real Experiences: Engaging all five senses through real-world exploration is the only way to move from surface knowledge into deep synthesis.
- O – Opportunities to Express, Explore, or Empower: Putting thoughts and feelings into tangible action that impacts the community.
Whenever my wife and I evaluate an activity, routine, or event, we run it through the A.F.R.O. criteria. Living by this framework over the past year has transformed our household culture, grounding our family in intentionality and joy.
We use A.F.R.O. to keep the noise out and protect our peace. What is the #1 non-negotiable value holding your household together right now? Drop your family values in the comments—let’s talk about how we keep our homes grounded in this season.
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