No abstract

This essay explores the logic of capitalism that shapes the experiences of a precarious Black Miami teen in the OWN television series David Makes Man. Analyzing seven episodes of the first season, we develop the concept of home-schooling to describe hustlin’ as a capitalist logic operating within Florida public housing and meritocracy as a capitalist logic celebrated at an elite magnet school to reveal imaginative possibilities of survival in Miami. In this essay, we engage the circuit of culture to interrogate issues of racialized-class in the television series and within a broader social context.

In this essay, I engage with and extend the work of Black feminist scholars and poets Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Patricia Hill Collins, and Patricia Williams by examining the ways that Black mothers use anger to make sense of their lives amid the continuous law enforcement sanctioned killing of Black men by White police. Using poetry, I interweave with the Black feminist voices of the past and present to reconstruct a narrative about Black mothering and Black boyhood amid the spirit murders in communities of color in the United States. I use a conversation with my 5-year-old son as the genesis of this intellectual stimulation to construct a poetic autoethnography of Black mothering experiences as a generative rescripting of Black lives. This work is an impassioned, critical, and necessary mode of inquiry that speaks about the daily realities of Black mothers raising Black sons in America.

Black feminist thought and Black feminist autoethnography are the theoretical and methodological tools that I use to explore transnational identity construction as a Black, Trinidadian–American woman who has experienced hyper(in)visibility. Three letters capture my epiphanic moments as the outsider-within. I stage an interaction with the late literary-activist–scholar, James Baldwin, to address identity-making through race and transnationality, and to problematize interpersonal, structural, and disciplinary forms of power that shape my identity. My critical autoethnography is a self-story—a story that is always navigating between dual citizenships and culture. I place my epiphanic moments in conversation with those of James Baldwin to highlight Black experience from the past and present to provide new ways of narrating difference.