This Sunday, all over America, little hands will prepare trays with bowls of cereal and small glasses of orange juice. They will leave trails of well-intentioned milk behind them as they approach tired, smiling moms in rumpled beds. It’s all pretty cute.
And very much a departure from the daily reality of motherhood in 2019, when many of us are experiencing existential dread over how climate change will affect our children and are all too aware of the scourge of inequality that shapes their lives.
“We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood,” by Dani McClain, quotes the activist Trina Greene Brown, saying, “People who are raising kids who were meant to survive have a lot to learn from us.”
Ms. Brown continued: “We can teach resilience. We can instill pride. We can instill values around compassion and love. We can also instill a sense of joy and play in horrible conditions.”
"You have a lot to learn from the magic of black mothering and black parenting,” she added. “Imagine what we could do if we actually had resources.”
In one unlikely setting, we don’t have to imagine how transformative those resources might be. Magnolia Mother’s Trust is a pilot project around what is called “guaranteed income,” in which individuals are given cash without any “means test” or work requirement. The financial scale is small: just 20 families in Jackson, Miss., each receiving $1,000 a month for 12 months. But the moral scale is grand.
Magnolia Mother’s Trust focuses on single, black mothers in the state with the highest poverty rate in the nation — a demographic of Americans who have been uniquely disenfranchised, vilified by bigots as “welfare queens” and forced to navigate notoriously bureaucratic and, some argue, untrustworthy systems to get help.
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