Tag Archives: parenting

Barriers to Breastfeeding: Disappointing but Not Surprising

Debbie says:

I was born in 1951. My mother wanted to breastfeed me, but breastfeeding was completely out of fashion among affluent white people. Her doctor said, “Well, go ahead, I guess, but I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about it.” So when she ran into issues, she asked the the Black women at the bus stop, waiting to go home from their jobs as cleaning ladies and maids in the Jewish neighborhood of Baltimore where I was born. They apparently thought she was kind of dumb, but were very helpful. (I never asked her why she didn’t ask her mother …)

Breastfeeding_paolopatruno9Photo by Paolo Patruno.

Things change. Now breastfeeding is what affluent White mothers do, and harder for working, unemployed, or impoverished Black mothers. And bearing in mind that not every mother can breastfeed, and not every  mother wants to breastfeed, there’s no doubt that parents and babies are well served by having breastfeeding as an option.

According to the United States Breastfeeding Committee, one of the leading experts
on the current state of breastfeeding in the U.S., breastfeeding is the “most effective
global public health intervention for child survival.” Breast milk provides critical
nutrients to babies when they need them the most, supporting a variety of early
developments in the body, including brain development. It also transfers necessary
antibodies from mother to child that protect against disease, and wards off other early
childhood dangers such as SIDS and asthma.
The Center for Social Inclusion has released a long, detailed report in .pdf form, detailing the issues that contribute to making breastfeeding challenging. Two things make this report especially important: first, the focus on structural racism:
Often, when we think about racism, we focus on individual attitudes or behaviors,
which is important. Sometimes, we look at how particular institutions treat people of
different races differently, which is also important. But to truly understand the root
causes of racial inequity and thereby produce solutions that work for everyone, we
need to take a structural race approach. That means looking at the First Food system
through the lens of policies, institutions, and people—together.
and second, the storytelling style, focusing on three fictional mothers:
Sarah is White and lives in a suburb of Detroit. Her husband is a doctor at the nearby
hospital, and she volunteers full-time for a local nonprofit. Nicole is Black and lives in a
small town in Alabama. She is a teacher at the middle school and her husband is earning
his MSW through online classes at the University of Alabama. Lara is Latina and lives in
Los Angeles with her husband and mother. She and her husband both work for (and met
through) the city’s transit agency; her mother runs the home and receives Social Security.
The report follows all three women through their breastfeeding journey, interlacing their stories with statistics and information about breastfeeding in their various communities. The information is detailed, clear, and excellent, and the conclusions are convincing.
At each stage, smart policy interventions with robust implementation can make it easier
for all women to choose to breastfeed if they want to.
We seek policy interventions that truly address the root causes that are linked to
breastfeeding outcomes, especially lower rates for women of color. We know that
no single policy alone can dismantle structural inequity. This takes reform, including
diversification of the medical sector and those providing services, as well as changes to
and better implementation and promotion of existing policies like the ACA breastfeeding
provisions. But it also takes transformation, including directing funding streams to
challenge all barriers at the neighborhood level. We therefore need a variety of policy
and practice interventions that support women and communities of color to truly achieve
higher breastfeeding rates for all mothers.
The report goes on to detail these interventions; read the whole thing.
Why is breastfeeding a body image issue? For me, it’s because breasts have been fetishized, banned, turned into objects of the male gaze, commodified, judged, and generally objectified, often at the expense of remembering their biological function. So it’s important to me to remember what breasts do and more important that anyone who wants to be able to provide food for their babies from their breasts should be supported in doing so.

Black Dolls: Trapped in the Tangles of Racism

Debbie says:

Alexandra Brodsky at Feministing points to a superb piece in the Paris Review, Addy Walker, American Girl by Brit Bennett.

index

For seventeen years, Addy was the only black historical doll; she was the only nonwhite doll until 1998. If you were a white girl who wanted a historical doll who looked like you, you could imagine yourself in Samantha’s Victorian home or with Kirsten, weathering life on the prairie. If you were a black girl, you could only picture yourself as a runaway slave.

As Bennett recounts, Pleasant Company gave Addy a realistic, horrifying history, made age-appropriate, perhaps, but not prettified. Her story made a huge impression on Bennett as a child. And it was a controversial choice.

Since 2013, a Change.com petition has gathered nearly seventy signatures demanding that the Pleasant Company discontinue the Addy doll. “Slavery was a vile, cruel, inhumane, unjust holocaust of Black Americans,” the petition reads. “Why would this subject matter ever be considered entertaining?” The petition accuses the Pleasant Company of “diminish[ing] the cruelty of slavery and instead glorif[ying] it as some sort of adventurous fantasy.”

Bennett is conflicted about this petition (as am I, from a much greater distance).

I’ve never found Addy glib and insensitive, as the petitioners do—but she does trouble me. She is a toy steeped in tragedy, and who is offered tragedy during play? Who gets the pink stores and tea parties, and who gets the worms? When I received an Addy doll for Christmas, I was innocent enough to believe that Santa had brought it to me, but mature enough to experience the horrors of slavery.

“I didn’t even think about that,” my mother told me. “I just thought it was a beautiful doll.”

(from later in Bennett’s piece)

In 2011, the Pleasant Company launched their second black historical doll, Cécile, a girl growing up in 1850s New Orleans. She has a white best friend and dreams of finding a gown for the Children’s Ball at Mardi Gras. Many black parents were relieved when Cécile was introduced. Shelley Walcott, a Milwaukee reporter, wrote that although she “believes learning about the history of slavery in America is critical and should in no way be hidden from our children,” she had also wished that the Pleasant Company would release another black doll, one that “celebrated a more positive time in African American history.”

“As a parent,” she writes,

I find Cécile’s story a lot more appropriate for playtime than plantation scenes and a bullwhip-cracking slave master … Much of African American history is painful. And I’m glad to see the folks at American Girl have introduced a new doll that can allow children’s fantasies to be … less intense.

But Cécile was discontinued in 2014, along with the only historical Asian American doll, Ivy Ling. Cécile is light-skinned with long, beautiful ringlets. She dreams of pretty dresses. If I had been offered Addy or Cécile as a girl, I wonder which I would have chosen.

The article goes on to describe the history of racist black dolls (British golliwogs, American pickaninnies), which Laurie and I have discussed before as well as the social history of black children identifying with white dolls. Bennett comes to no conclusion about Addy or Cécile, dark-skinned and deeply oppressed or lighter-skinned and lighter-hearted; she just raises the hard questions.

Here’s what I think: black dolls can’t be viewed outside the context of American racism and the oppression of black people, because the only thing a doll can do is reflect a cultural understanding, belief, or myth. As long as America (along with the white-dominated world in general) remains tortured by our inability to accept black people as full citizens, human beings, lives that matter, black dolls will be a center of confusion. How much truth do we tell children? How much is right about “teaching racial pain to the next generation” (Bennett’s phrase)? When do we protect and when do we reveal? These questions are every bit as important for white parents to confront as for black parents to confront–and realizing that is one of the crucial steps toward change.