Discourse Diversity in White and Black Mothering and Daughtering

Mothering is not unanimously a unitary relationship between mother and daughter while the concept and ideology of motherhood symbolizes a collective set of activities across cultures. It largely depends on social and cultural contexts framed by intertwining structures of race. Survival, power, and identity stand as the primary function of Black mothers besides nurturing, protecting, training, and transmitting cultural messages, traditions, and values. Redefinition of black womanhood leads to discovering new ways of understanding motherhood. Difference engenders multiplicity of resistance to varieties of domination. It is about difference within sameness. White mothers see staying at home as a misery and oppression while Black mothers feel blessed with stay at home motherhood for they can get rid of the unfavorable drudgery.

Black mother-daughter relationship differs from that of Whites due to in justices of poverty, history of Slavery, and patriarchal oppression of racial and gendered domination and exploitation as Morrison depicts in her novels. Extracts from her novel The Bluest Eye are analyzed and interpreted here. White motherhood is constrained by patriarchal society while Black motherhood is exempted from its boundaries and limitations; liberated, and empowered by resisting against White patriarchal socio-cultural stance