Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin

Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin

The story every mother in America needs to read. As featured on NPR and the TODAY Show. All moms have to deal with choosing baby names, potty training, finding your village, and answering your kid's tough questions, but if you are raising a Black child, you have to deal with a lot more than that. Especially if you're a single Black mom... and adopting.

Nefertiti Austin shares her story of starting a family through adoption as a single Black woman. In this unflinching account of her parenting journey, Nefertiti examines the history of adoption in the African American community, faces off against stereotypes of single Black moms, and confronts the reality of what it looks like to raise children of color and answer their questions about racism in modern-day America.

Honest, vulnerable, and uplifting, Motherhood So White is a fantastic book for mothers who have read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, or other books about racism and want to see how these social issues play out in a very personal way for a single mom and her Black son.

This great book club read explores social and cultural bias, gives a new perspective on a familiar experience, and sparks meaningful conversations about what it looks like for Black families in white America today.

Nefertiti Austin, an author and memoirist, writes about the erasure of diverse voices in motherhood. Her work around this topic has been short-listed for literary awards and appeared in a number of media outlets, including the Huffington Post, Essence.com, Mutha, and adoptive families magazines, PBS SoCal's To Foster Change, and PBS Parents. She earned degrees in US history and African American studies. She is a former certified PS-MAPP trainer, where she co-led classes for participants wanting to attain a license to foster and/or adopt children from the foster-care system. She is an alumna of the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and her first two novels, Eternity and Abandon, helped usher in the black romance genre in the mid-1990s.