“Mothering while brown means all the times I’ve been told, not asked, to leave white spaces while with my child—university classrooms, academic conferences, exhibits, museums, cafes, restaurants. So you mother while brown anyway. You don’t have the luxury otherwise. You mother while brown in white spaces and white buildings and white walls and white statues and all you can see is the whiteness of their white teeth telling you to please kindly just shut your kid the hell up, go away, and leave it all for them again. Mothering while brown in white spaces means that my son Alonsito is a liability, a distraction, a nuisance, an irritant, an aberration of a little brown boy with brown eyes that they refuse to look into because they will only see the emptiness of their nice, polite, white policies reflected back to them, their rules and regulations printed on official white sheets of paper.”
~Cecilia Caballero