Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community

by Riché J. Daniel Barnes

Overview

Winner of the 2017 Race, Gender, and Class Section Book Award from the American Sociological Association

Popular discussions of professional women often dwell on the conflicts faced by the woman who attempts to “have it all,” raising children while climbing up the corporate ladder. Yet for all the articles and books written on this subject, there has been little work that focuses on the experience of African American professional women or asks how their perspectives on work-family balance might be unique.
 
Raising the Race is the first scholarly book to examine how black, married career women juggle their relationships with their extended and nuclear families, the expectations of the black community, and their desires to raise healthy, independent children. Drawing from extensive interviews with twenty-three Atlanta-based professional women who left or modified careers as attorneys, physicians, executives, and administrators, anthropologist Riché J. Daniel Barnes found that their decisions were deeply rooted in an awareness of black women’s historical struggles. Departing from the possessive individualistic discourse of “having it all,” the women profiled here think beyond their own situation—considering ways their decisions might help the entire black community.
 
Giving a voice to women whose perspectives have been underrepresented in debates about work-family balance, Barnes’s profiles enable us to perceive these women as fully fledged individuals, each with her own concerns and priorities. Yet Barnes is also able to locate many common themes from these black women’s experiences, and uses them to propose policy initiatives that would improve the work and family lives of all Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813561981
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2015
Series:	Families in Focus
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

RICHÉ J. DANIEL BARNES is an affiliate professor of anthropology and the dean of Pierson College at Yale University in Connecticut. Her research has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and essay collections, including The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class and The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Black Career Women and Strategic Mothering
Chapter 1 The Role of Black Women in Black Family Survival Strategies
Chapter 2 Black Professional Women, Careers, and Family “Choice”
Chapter 3 “Just in Case He Acts Crazy”: Strategic Mothering and the Collective Memory of Black Marriage and Family
Chapter 4 Enculturating the Black Professional Class
Chapter 5 Black Career Women, the Black Community, and the Neo-Politics of Respectability
Conclusion
Epilogue: Whatever Happened To . . .
Appendix
Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Left of Black with Riché Barnes, interview with host Dr. Mark Anthony Neal

Left of Black

"Raising the Race makes several strong contributions to work-family scholarship and should serve as a call to action, encouraging us to broaden our conversations about work and family to ensure that they reflect the diverse experiences of people across race, class, and gender. Building on her work, we can ask new questions, eschew simplistic understandings of work and family, and uncover the challenges faced by people based on race, class, gender, and other social statuses."

Journal of Family Theory and Review

"In focusing specifically on black professional women who are also wives and mothers, Barnes makes a major contribution towards broadening sociological understandings of black families and the impacts of race across social class lines ... As a first-of-its-kind interrogation of important and timely issues, Raising the Race significantly advances our understandings of these complex social dynamics."

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

"An excellent, well-written work for scholars and laypersons desirous of either introductory or updated information about the lifestyles of educated and wealthy African American women."

Journal of African American History

"Barnes's thoughtful analysis is timely and relevant for today's Black professional women and will benefit readers from a variety of levels and backgrounds"

PsycCRITIQUES

"Raising the Race is a fascinating and original study of the lives of professional black women that contributes significantly to theorizing about women’s negotiation of family and career. Barnes expands sociological approaches to class mobility and feminist approaches to marriage, motherhood, and work by revealing how race profoundly affects the domestic strategies of these women despite their upward social mobility."
 
 

author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty - Dorothy Roberts

"Rich in narrative power and in theoretical complexity, this important book defines the terrain for a new generation in work-family studies that moves beyond the past focus on white women."
 

author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It - Joan Williams

"Barnes draws on interviews of 23 married professional mothers obtained through a snowball sample of women in the Atlanta area ... The method allows the author to fill a gap in the literature on black women’s work and family life and to challenge prevailing ideas about women’s strategies for addressing the work-family conflict ... Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate collections and above."

CHOICE

Left of Black with Riché Barnes, interview with host Dr. Mark Anthony Neal

From the Publisher