Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Parenting: advice & issues

WE LIVE FOR THE WE

Dani McClain

The Political Power of Black Motherhood

We Live for the We is a Black mother's vision for radical parenting, showing how raising free and fearless children is a political intervention in turbulent times.

A longtime reporter on race, reproductive justice, policy and politics, Dani McClain is now also the mother of a baby girl. Like all first time mothers, she has countless questions about raising her child to be ethical and kind, but also to be healthy, happy, and safe in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust, even hostile, society to people of color.

In We Live for the We, McClain interviews mothers and experts, asking the tough, scary questions, but also celebrating the joys of motherhood and the hope that children bring. Following a child's development from infancy to the teenage years, the book touches on everything from the importance of creativity to building a mutually supportive community to navigating one's relationship with power and authority.

McClain shows that how we parent is perhaps even more important than how we participate in direct action and advocacy. It will determine how we survive and what kind of society we build for the next generation.

Dani McClain writes and reports on race, reproductive health, and activism. She is a contributing writer at The Nation and a fellow at The Nation Institute. McClain's writing has appeared in outlets including Slate, Colorlines, EBONY.com, The Rumpus, and Guernica. She was a staff reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and has worked as a strategist with organizations including Color of Change and the Drug Policy Alliance. McClain lives with her family in Cincinnati.

Available products
Book Published 2019-04-02 by Bold Type Books
Book Published 2019-04-02 by Bold Type Books

Comments

Generations of parents and community members will use this book to make decisions, to revive our hope and to teach each other about the implications of difference in a stratified society

A guide to parenting in uncertain times, We Live for the We is writer and reporter Dani McClain's attempt to understand how to ensure her own daughter lives a life full of dignity and joy. It's also a powerful meditation on black mothering as an inherently political act that explores everything from segregated schools, sex and consent, the need for community, and more.

Dani McClain charts the rich territory of black motherhood, an element of American life that is overlooked and undervalued even as our society benefits from its tenacity and love. We Live for the We is deeply researched, compassionately reported, and soars with the beauty and urgency of McClain's truest expertise: her own life as a black woman raising a young daughter. Parenting is political and we all have much to learn from the work McClain chronicles in these pages. This book is a gift, and it is for everyone.

Dani McClain reminds us why Black women, specifically Black mothers, are the backbones of every single society. While we are often neglected and disenfranchised our labor is what has built democracies around the globe. This is a must read for all Black mamas and our allies. Thank you Dani and thank you Dani's daughter for showing us the way forward.

A crucial chapter in the history of Black motherhood as a political act. Enslaved mothers taught their babies to read without being discovered, now Black mothers must teach our children to stay safe from police, from sexual predators, from racist teachers. McClain shows that we must be strategic with our rage and still vulnerable with our love - our political work requires this range. This text showcases the harsh realities of Black motherhood and the best solutions currently available, while pointing to the ways we must still change everything for the sake of our children.

Dani McClain is one of the most lucid, insightful, and gifted critics working today: her work sings with eloquence and is driven by analytical fury. This is the book we parents need right now!

An important work that will show the world just how powerful and transformative radical Black motherhood is and always has been. This path can be very isolating at times but it's refreshing to see that I'm not alone in this process, and now other moms, dads and allies will have the tools to join the fight to make the next generation more self-possessed and feminist than those before them.

Many mothers of my generation lacked safe and effective birth control, survived childhood sexual abuse, or were prematurely sterilized. These experiences shaped our understandings of pregnancy and motherhood. Dani McClain both acknowledges and departs from these painful realities with her portrait of motherhood as an act of liberation. She offers a window into the granularity of the challenges millennials face when parenting. This book describes parenting choices as empowering and bewildering at the same time and, in doing so, portrays the heart of Black mothering.

Motherhood is one of the most contested and policed categories that black women occupy in American society. With her intellectual gravitas, gifted storytelling, and feminist insights, Dani McClain's We Live for We brilliantly chronicles how African-American women confront these contradictions as deeply political and personal acts. This book is a timely, compassionate, and eye-opening contribution to our most pressing debates about race and gender.

Dani McClain's We Live For The We is more than a reimagining of motherhood. It's an equally soulful and skillful immersion into the questions of how we go beyond survival in a nation intent on the suffering of Black mothers and their children. The book refuses to let us run, every paragraph seeking the contour of who we really are in the dark and how our children will be protected, loved and tenderly allowed to fail and grow by parents willing to revise what we've all been taught. This is the rare book that will change lives and public policy.

I read this book shouting 'YES!', throwing up praise hands, pacing the floor, overcome with gratitude! We Live for the We is a glorious exploration of how we outgrow the isolating terror of oppression and lean into the interdependent wisdom of love.

Dani McClain has written that rarest and most satisfying of booksone that illuminates a fraught political and cultural landscape through the pinhole aperture of her own mothering and the questions it surfaces. It is both intimate and epic, sweet and fierce. As a white mother, it read as inspiration and provocation for the kind of parallel questions I need and want to be asking. I'll be a better parent and citizen for having looked through McClain's dynamic lens.