Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions: Counternarratives of Black Family Resilience: 106 (Black Studies and Critical Thinking)

Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions: Counternarratives of Black Family Resilience offers a unique perspective on the complexities of being a Black mother addicted to crack, powder cocaine, heroin, and crank. Qualitative interviews provide rich narratives from five Black mothers challenging negative controlled images and stereotypes of Black motherhood and drug addiction. Using Black Feminist Thought, Critical Race Feminism, and Resilience as conceptual frameworks, this book confronts hegemonic constructions of Black mothers and their children within the context of drug addictions. Particular attention is focused on using the mothers' self-definitions of struggles and family resilience to dismantle the negative controlled images of the junkie and the crack ho' and her crack baby. The mothers in this book speak truth to their experiences with motherhood and addictions to some of the most powerful street drugs that explicitly defy the junkie, crack ho', and crack baby images. The book also addresses tensions existing within researcher-participant relationships and nuances unique to research with Black mothers in recovery. Personal lessons learned and challenges experienced during the research process are highlighted as Tivis shares dilemmas of self-reflections of positionality, accountability and use of language. Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions contains important implications for research and practice in education and across other disciplines concentrating on mothers and children from racially diverse backgrounds. This book will be relevant for both undergraduate and graduate students and academics within these disciplines. Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions will be of interest to advanced pre-service teachers and other disciplines engaging in clinical and professional practice with addiction and with families. Review Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions: Counternarratives of Black Family Resilience offers a new look at the lives of women stereotyped as derelict mothers living and raising children in drug-infested urban neighborhoods. Using rigorous first-hand interviews with five mothers, Dr. Tivis gives a voice to women whose complex lives fly in the face of stereotypes. In reading Barbara, Bethena, Desirea, Ladonna, and Sharonda's stories, the reader feels as though they are there with each woman--a hallmark of good, qualitative work. These are stories of women who demonstrate agency and resilience in the face of multiple barriers. Moreover, despite the very real chaos of drug addiction, we see women who are loving mothers with high hopes and dreams for their children's futures. Listening to women's stories should encourage policy makers to develop strength-based solutions that can have a profound effect on women and their children. Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions makes important contributions to our understanding of African American motherhood, parenting, and family life, and the larger neighborhood, social, historical, and political contexts that mothers' lives are in. Readers will walk away with a renewed belief in the ability of women to overcome the trauma of addiction to create lives of meaning, purpose, and hope. -- Robin Jarrett, Professor, Human Development and Family Studies, Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Crack ho'. Junkie. Welfare queen. In Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions: Counternarratives of Black Family Resilience, Tierra B. Tivis exposes the fraudulence of these controlling images by letting us into the lives of the women who are called these names. Through care, nuance, and sisterhood that are all too lacking in scholarship, Dr. Tivis renders an intimate portrait of caretakers, advocates, survivors, and champions. --Emery Petchauer, Associate Professor, Michigan State UniversityTierra B. Tivis' Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addic