Black maternal grief and grievance against the liberal state: visionary pragmatism and politics otherwise

How does Black feminist thought dialogue with political liberalism to reveal its racial practices? Focused on this question, this chapter argues that Black mothers whose children are murdered in racial states constitute a community of bereaved politicized subjects; in this capacity, they challenge normative views about ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ since they were always excluded from these ideals. It proposes that Black women’s entanglement in the political economy of slavery, in ways that denied them sentimentalized motherhood, meant that they sought other means for justice and freedom for themselves and their children, sometimes resorting to infanticide. Drawing on the concept of visionary pragmatism in Black feminist scholarship, the chapter further discusses how bereaved Black mothers insist on justice for their murdered children in the afterlife of slavery and in liberal racial states that remain invested in Black people’s deaths.