When Black mothers face the decision between staying with a violent partner or embarking into single motherhood, they are choosing between two grim realities: violence or poverty.

Read more from this series: Part I: On Violence · Part II: On Poverty

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Capitalism only imagines new methods of cruelty

This Anglo-Saxon, Christian society is built on ideals that shape our reality. These outdated, rigid “values” have conditioned many to place more social worth on married women than single women. Western media reinforces this by pushing harmful narratives that reduce Black single mothers to negative stereotypes or exaggerated displays of “resilience” that are both humiliating and dehumanizing. These repeated images brainwash the public to believe that Black single mothers are skillfully, sassily, and happily “doing it all”; that there’s a “way” Black single mothers should be (mis)treated (read: left alone to “take care of business”); and that their plights are singular, one-dimensional, and their own fault.

She represents the coalescence of layers of violences perceived as tolerable–so long as she bears the weight in silence, hidden from society’s view. She is a scapegoat mother; and the cruel byproducts of her exploited isolation will either make a profitable Netflix drama, earn a policing social worker a promotion, line a music producer’s pockets or fill a bed in a private prison.

Violence is the tax she pays for existing.

It is an optional, observed violence, yet one that continues unchecked unless we actively create solutions within our communities. In community, we must confront the dystopian indifference we have unconsciously adopted–the way we observe Black single mothers from a distance, withdrawing ourselves from the turbulence of violence that tortures, obstacles, and punishes them on a daily basis. If we wish to see the abolition of systemic racism, fascism, capitalism, and other forms of violence that impact us all–so often pushed to the periphery by our own lack of awareness and empathy— then it is essential that we begin by seeing, empathizing with, and bringing resolutions to the Black woman raising her children alone.

This is where we begin to imagine and create blueprints beyond the violence capitalism demands.

This is where we begin to love beyond violence and poverty.

And this is why Black single motherhood forms the critical starting point for everyone’s liberation.

Supporting Black single mothers reveals the presence of social fractures, gaps, and pipelines, offering us a roadmap for healing.

Many today are calling for revolution–demanding the dismantling of capitalism’s inhumane systems that suffocate, exploit, and control. In resistance, we have witnessed the steady increase of community-oriented practices: communal fridges, mutual aid projects, homeschool pods, co-ops, and other imaginative economic alternatives. More are calling for abolition, for the redistribution of corporate wealth and governmental power, and the blueprints for a world that can emerge when capitalism is undone.

At this juncture of awakening and solution-building, the optional plight of the Black single mother–rendered an invisible pariah by society–stands as an open invitation. If we understand and remedy her struggles, we create the path for a freer world to follow.

It will require our imagination

Generally, it’s “easier” to attend a wedding, help others register to vote, or join a school board than to allocate resources, time, funds, and other energies to supporting an unpartnered Black mother with children*.

This avoidance is why poverty is often the singular choice for Black mothers seeking to leave violent situations. Many people eagerly envision a future free from capitalism’s constraints yet struggle to imagine tangible ways to support Black single mothers now. This failure of imagination is why Black women continue to navigate the rip tides of vicious cycles alone. Too often, even radical visions for the future still hinge on violence being enacted upon Black people, especially Black women. Creating new methods of support and care for Black single mothers already living in a dystopian reality creates new blueprints for support and care for the future.

It’s not a lack of options that directs Black mothers to the outcome of poverty by default, but instead the unwillingness of those around her–around us– to derail from capitalist propaganda that the Black single mother is the product of what has been deemed her own “irresponsibilities.” Their partner choice. Their decision to leave a "steady" home. The number of children they have. And then, whatever socioeconomic violence that snaps, presses, deprives, bludgeons, severs, yanks, gouges, she is expected—required— to endure alone. All while raising her children.

Our lack of imagination is why poverty is Black women’s sole option when fleeing violence.

What must we render as false to begin constructing a new world that supports instead of severs? That cares instead of shrugs?

Community, understood as an ecosystem, breaks this damning social fact. It is the holistic mechanism that creates seamless transition for Black mothers, valiantly removing themselves from violence, facilitating instead their path to… wholeness, reorientation, recovery, healing, and full recuperation. It is more than proximity. More than kindness. It is a collective effort to abandon the mindsets that reduce single mothers and their children to stereotypes created by a patriarchal society that thrives on marriage and reproduction as tools of male control.

A collective that understands that all become liberated when the Black mother is protected, invested in, and supported– when her children are able to heal and reconcile with the violence their mother was brave enough to remove them from so they could have a healthier upbringing (a heroic feat!). Too many still mistake supporting single mothers as “enabling” them, when in reality, it is a recognition of the fact that their survival—their refusal to stay in harm’s way—has saved us all. Supporting Black single mothers reveals the presence of social fractures, gaps, and pipelines, offering us a roadmap for healing. But the more we allow stigma and stereotype to frame our ideas of tolerable violence that a single mother is worth enduring alone, the less likely we are to encounter the world we claim to be (re)imagining.

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An Invitation to Practice Loving Beyond Violence and Poverty

It’s quite ironic that any conversational description of the SAW franchise receives a more revolting, flinching reaction than the discourse on the concert of violences experienced by a Black single mother. It’s a grisly, glaring indication of how Black single motherhood has been trivialized at the cost of a reimagined society.

In the fifth installment of the SAW films, two lawyers end up in the very last of a series of locked rooms, each with a torture device that has cost a different lawyer’s life in order to open the door that leads to the next room, and ultimately to the lawyers’ escape. The final room requires a certain amount of blood to fill a tank, which would then open the last door and set the surviving lawyer free. The audience assumes it will be only one.

Terrified, the two surviving lawyers gaze down at the vile contraption before them and see a box with multiple holes where arms would be rotary-sawed until the amount of blood required to unhinge the chamber door was collected. In a moment of mortifying realization, one of the two surviving lawyers recognizes that the number of arm slots in the machine indicated that all of the lawyers were meant to absorb the pain of the tortures in each room as a collective so that the doors would open and none of them would have to die. Selfishly, they’d eliminated one another until now when two would have to experience in prolonged agony what five were meant to do as a community in brief “discomfort”.

How many of us would rather a single mother endure prolonged violence over a lifetime when a few of us could afford to step in for a brief season and help absorb the shocks?

Loving Black Single Mothers is an **ecosystem of care** designed to help *absorb the shocks* of ***violence and traumas*** facing Black single mothers so that all of us can live and thrive in a better, reimagined set of communities.

Partner with us today to practice loving *beyond* violence and poverty.

Partner With Us

Note: Imagination is required for Black single mothers—specifically.

Just as the media relentlessly recycles negative stereotypes of Black single mothers, it simultaneously floods audiences with narratives that affirm white single mothers as deserving of care, community, and rescue (see: any Hallmark movie featuring a white single mother).

Western media upholds the ideology that white single mothers—and white women more broadly—are inherently good and innocent. Their struggles are framed as noble, their resilience celebrated, their adaptability and resourcefulness admired. The community always rallies around them. A heroic masculine figure inevitably arrives to restore them to "normal" life, offering stability and, crucially, a reassuring white male father figure for their children. White single mothers are portrayed as lovable, desirable, and always worthy of protection.

The stark contrast between how white and Black single mothers are depicted in media makes one thing clear: society has no shortage of narratives in which single mothers are supported and saved from the violence of single motherhood—but only when they are white.

Western media insists that white children deserve stable homes (see: Freaky Friday, where Lindsay Lohan gets a father when her successful, upper-middle-class single mother remarries; Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar, where a caring partner completes the family). They deserve positive father figures to prevent them from becoming "statistics" (The Parent Trap, Princess Diaries). And even when children are unexpectedly conceived or orphaned, the narrative ensures they will still belong to a loving family (The Backup Plan, Star Wars: Episode I, Children of the Corn).

Over and over again, script after script, film after film, the message is reinforced: single motherhood and all its accompanying violence are reserved for Black women.