Book: Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America
Author: Nefertiti Austin
Published: September 20, 2019
Pages: 290
Genre: NonFiction
Rating: ♥♥♥
Housekeeping
I was not requested by the publicists, author or agents to review this book. This book was selected because I was interested in reading and reviewing it.
Review
I am constantly searching for books on parenting and motherhood from a Black perspective so when I ran across Motherhood So White at my local library, I was immediately interested. I find that majority of the parenting books center the white experience and present it as the norm. While Black parents are left searching for books to help them navigate the common experiences of childhood and to provide culturally relevant information about parenting.
Motherhood So White is a memoir by Nefertiti Austin about her experiences adopting her Black son domestically as a single woman. It took months for Nefertiti to earn a license to foster/drop before becoming a mother to six months old, August. In his first months alive, August lived in two separate foster homes before he found his forever home with Nefertiti. On her journey to motherhood, Nefertiti explains in detail the adoption process including mounds of paperwork that needed to be completed and how she built her village. This village included male figures who would provide wisdom, guidance, and mentorship to August because as a single woman she felt that there were somethings she could not teach him.
This memoir is focused mainly on her personal adoption journey and less on the journey of parenting a Black boy in America. I wanted to learn more about how she navigated the world differently as a single Black woman of an adopted Black son. What is the broader meaning of Black Motherhood in the 21st century? But that was not the purpose of this book.
By the middle of the book, I found myself not liking the author because she came off as very judgemental and classist, especially towards August’s birth family. The author also continues to remind the reader that she is a professor, well-traveled, highed educated, middle class, and lives in a famous zip code. I will not judge her for changing August’s name from “Kemarye” but I will judge her for why she changed it. To her “August” stood for “arts, global travel, higher education, service to others and success” (108). Thus implying that “Kemarye” cannot stand for those same ideas and perpetuating the belief that white-passing names are better. I do judge her for closing August’s adoption because “there was too much at stake, and done unsupervised weekend could change the course of his life. I couldn’t have that. August was going places.” She assumed that her son would be going places meanwhile his siblings would not because “their zip codes denoted drugs, food deserts, storefront churches, gangs or jail” (138). At that point, I was done with her and could only pray that August is not negatively affected by her attitude and eventually will be able to establish a relationship with his siblings, who seem to love and adore him.
Motherhood So White does provide a detailed overview of the process of adopting domestically. I appreciate that Nefertiti decided to share her personal adoption journey with others because it could be beneficial. The topic of nonfamilial adoption is the Black community is not spoken or written about a lot, which is why I am glad the author included interviews with other single Black women who decided to adopt. These interviews provided a different less judgemental take, which is probably why they were my favorite part of the book.
