It would be easy for me to allow you to assume that someone with my educational history - Montclair High School Award Recipient; Smith College Graduate in Sociology with Highest Honors; my matriculation to University of Michigan-Ann Arbor - that I have never gotten in trouble at school, but I have come to appreciate this experience with discipline for its social significance. It is safe now to admit that I learned the weight of social burdens my parents - particularly my mom - dealt with in the school system as she helped me navigate the school district. Feeling very seen by Pushout, as well as Monique Morris's research program, the Minority Motherwork Project considers the Mothers and Caregivers who directly confront discipline and other manifestations of white supremacy in educational settings.

When I received the Mellon Mays Fellowship in 2014, and later fellowship/research opportunities from C-3 and IRT, I articulated my research interests with an emphasis on the educational inequality Black young adults are vulnerable to in the process of college preparation. As I started pursuing the work, I realized the invisible labor of Black women participating in education, helping their children prepare for college, and even enduring their own discrimination for example, needed to be articulated and analyzed. The Minority Motherwork Project creates a counternarrative to negative perceptions of Black working mothers' educational involvement with historic evidence of their involvement from antebellum to present; and supporting contemporary data that exposes the multiple forms of discrimination Black and other caregivers of minority children resist with diverse methods.

I have the pleasure of being apart of, and holding former leadership positions in research networks with impressive scholars including The Gender and Sexuality Workshop; RacismLab; and the Program for Research on Black Americans. The Minority Motherwork Project has been supported by grants from the Mellon Mays Fellowship; The Institute for Research on Women and Gender Boyd Award; a University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Mini-Library Grant, and generous support from the Department of Sociology. I received additional support from Rackham to participate in the ProQuest: Historical Collections internship, where I had access to centuries of multimedia data on Black women's activism and educational contributions. Some of these primary source materials may be featured on this site, but largely informed the historic foundations of my research. I also attribute my awareness of the urgency of this issue to insights from minority and mothers and caregivers who shared their experiences with me informally at the Summer School on Black Feminisms in Brazil. I generally have approached my research methods with an interest in proving the universality of Minority Motherwork, regardless of the unique personal and contextual factors that may distinguish individual efforts. In short, my work seeks to prove not only that Black Lives Matter, but more specifically, people care about and for minority children.

Courses: Representations of Black Motherhood (Self-Designed); Race and Educational Policy (Yale); Student Undergraduate Research Opportunity (2 Student Researchers); Project Community; Sociological Research Methods;