Joanne S. Frye
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 11-28

Building on the work and insights particularly of Patricia Hill Collins and Sara Ruddick, this essay focuses on questions of childrearing raised by Tillie Olsen’s 1956 short story, “O Yes,” in order to tackle the difficult challenge of antiracist mothering in the 1990s. Undaunted by the inherent conflicts involved in resisting white culture’s racial privileges from within, this essay wrestles with the problem of placing one’s children at the fulcrum of social change: between the urgencies of their own self-confidence, underpinned by privileges accorded by covert racism, and the opposing urgencies of parental and internal pressure to resist racial privilege. How does a mother teach a child to act on Ruddick’s “demands of conscience,” even as the child’s own comfort in the world will have to suffer? Through analysis of Olsen’s story, this article suggests some important alternative practices for a motherhood resistant to racism.