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offers a new look at the lives of women stereotyped as derelict mothers living and raising children in drug-infested urban neighborhoods. Using rigorous first-hand interviews with five mothers, Dr. Tivis gives a voice to women whose complex lives fly in the face of stereotypes. In reading Barbara, Bethena, Desirea, Ladonna, and Sharonda’s stories, the reader feels as though they are there with each woman—a hallmark of good, qualitative work. These are stories of women who demonstrate agency and resilience in the face of multiple barriers. Moreover, despite the very real chaos of drug addiction, we see women who are loving mothers with high hopes and dreams for their children’s futures. Listening to women’s stories should encourage policy makers to develop strength-based solutions that can have a profound effect on women and their children.
makes important contributions to our understanding of African American motherhood, parenting, and family life, and the larger neighborhood, social, historical, and political contexts that mothers’ lives are in. Readers will walk away with a renewed belief in the ability of women to overcome the trauma of addiction to create lives of meaning, purpose, and hope."
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"Crack ho'. Junkie. Welfare queen. In Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions: Counternarratives of Black Family Resilience, Tierra B. Tivis exposes the fraudulence of these controlling images by letting us into the lives of the women who are called these names. Through care, nuance, and sisterhood that are all too lacking in scholarship, Dr. Tivis renders an intimate portrait of caretakers, advocates, survivors, and champions."
—Emery Petchauer, Associate Professor, Michigan State University
"Tierra B. Tivis' book takes us into the daily lives of Black women previously addicted to crack cocaine and heroin and provides a powerful analysis as to how controlling images reproduce their criminalization. By foregrounding Black women’s voices, as well as historically and politically contextualizing them, Dr. Tivis reveals the realities of their resilience—and in the process, humanizes them. This book is both timely and important in disrupting how Black women have been dismissed, distorted, misunderstood, and essentially silenced.”
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"Tierra B. Tivis’
offers a fresh perspective on the experiences of families struggling to overcome structural barriers to health and wellbeing. Her emic perspective provides a sympathetic hearing from African American mothers from a strengths-based perspective. Not only do we hear from mothers themselves, but Dr. Tivis provides tools for understanding illicit drug use and addiction from an intersectional perspective that considers both race and gender. Building on the work of black feminism and critical race theory, Tivis argues from a humanistic perspective that realities of the lives of triply oppressed poor women of color should lead to provision of better treatment options, and that criminalization is short-sighted. Dr. Tivis provides an update to Patricia Hill Collins’ controlling images of black womanhood by examining the “crack ho'” stereotype that dehumanizes the women who are caught-up in this life circumstance, but she does not stop there. In Tivis’ structural analysis, she examines the impact of the drug wars on the chocolate inner cities of Detroit and Atlantic City, and points to the limited educational and employment options, as well as limited access to appropriate health and drug treatment, that are available. We celebrate this important contribution to the literature concerning black women’s resilience and agency, and we recommend this book to students in the social sciences as well as policy makers seeking a deeper understanding of these issues."
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