"Not This Big, Huge, Racial-Type Thing, but ... ": Mothering Children of Color with Invisible Disabilities in the Age of Neuroscience

This article, which represents part of a larger ethnographic study, asks how mothers raising children of color understand the medicalization of their children's issues as they navigate medical and educational systems. While biomedicine and the lens of neuroscience now predominate in defining children's troubles, the article primarily focuses on schools as sites that organize daily lives, provide services, and hold keys to future opportunities. It analyzes mothers' reflections on the intersections of race, disability, class, and gender in schools through sixteen oral history interviews. Women of color have long been suspect as mothers whose children are burdensome or costly, and their children have often been labeled with deficiencies. Currently boys and young men of color are disproportionately diagnosed with invisible disabilities and assigned to special education, although they are much less likely to receive psychopharmaceutical treatments than white children. I emphasize two suggestive findings: First, most of the mothers interviewed expressed complex ambivalence toward medicalization, selectively resisting it but also drawing on it to protect the progress of vulnerable children through school. That is, a majority acquiesced to at least some period of medication, yet they remained ambivalent as individual protection from school failure leaves larger cultural images of black male badness unchallenged or even reconfirmed. Second, I show the insights offered by the way some mothers linked race to gender and class, suggesting that medicalization may have a range of meanings according to class privilege (or its lack). Mothers of children of color may have less ambivalence toward medicalization if they can marshal sufficient class resources to supplant images of badness with those of respectability. © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.