Becoming, belonging, and the fear of everything Black: autoethnography of a minority-mother-scholar-advocate and the movement toward justice

The compartmentalization of (dis)ability from race and ethnicity, and other identity markers serves to maintain these constructs at a safe distance from one another. Beyond these broader socially constructed categories, there are also the subtler messages about normativity that manifest in gradients of ability, color, behavior, capital, expression and power. Even more restrictive is the creation of a narrow space for parent advocacy that is culturally-subtractive and bureaucratic, serving to privilege the already privileged while silencing the marginalized. In this paper, I use autoethnography with DisCrit as a framework in order to to trace my journey to becoming Minority-Mother-Advocate, un/belonging within community and academic forums. The centerpiece of my counternarrative is the transition of my own advocacy from valuing my son to addressing others’ fears of him as a Black male whose visible (dis)ability doesn’t fit neatly into prescribed norms. A reframing of parent advocacy is imperative, moving beyond the individualistic, unintentionally exclusive aims toward one of collective justice.