Black Women as the Sacrificial Lamb

 Sydnei Jackson  

Dr. Harris  

ENGL2017-65125 

1 May 2025 

Black Women as the Sacrificial Lamb 

Black women have always been limited in expression. The ways in which black women have been un-gendered and policed, especially in western cultures, throughout so much of past  and current history only further solidifies the existence of an oppressive system. A restrictive  system that traps Black women in the cycle of accepting and repeating traumatic abuses. The  looming presence that encompasses black women, no matter what identity they decide to wear, is  one of a loveless path filled with systematic oppression and interpersonal violence. When met at  the crossroads of such a bleak situation, the ways in which Black women have forged a path, no  matter how tattered, for themselves and their families is a viewpoint that rarely is analyzed in a  meaningful and nuanced way. The “sacrificial mother” is a role often unknowingly bestowed  upon the Black woman when she decides to fasciate herself into a family unit. Despite the  “mother” part of the “sacrificial mother” label, anyone can take on the burdens and  responsibilities that the label entails wether they have children or are a mother (this dynamic can  exist interchangeable with the mother and daughter of the family.) Most observed and felt within  the matriarch of the family, when the mother decides to take on the “sacrificial” role, of course,  the immediate “positive” effects are at once apparent and felt. Undying love and devotion  (wether communicated or not), unwavering loyalty, and a love so deep and innate that these  mothers are willing to go against themselves and their own bodily autonomy to provide and 

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protect their children. This role is rarely challenged. It is never truly analyzed in a way that highlights the extent to which the sacrifice that these mothers ingratiate upon themselves can and  does fundamentally impact the entirety of the family. The burden of the pain that the mother  holds within her essence unknowingly casts a cloud of bitter neuroticism onto the family (most  commonly upon the children) that then the family, usually by themselves, is responsible for  working through and resolving. How does one create a sympathetic depiction of the dysfunctional family sacrificial mothers create without harboring the racist sentiments usually  encountered when Black women in this role are spotlighted? A depiction that also includes the  toxic dynamics that of love and care that keep the members of the family unit attached to the  mother, creating a parasitic bond between the mother and family that inflicts trauma while at the  same time licking at the wound to keep it from infecting. In Sula by Toni Morrison the  “sacrificial mother” label is tackled in a way that evokes an uncomfortableness that forces the  reader to observe and reflect the muddy waters of expression Black women experience when  involuntary thrust into a society that inherently promotes the “devaluation and hatred of black  females” while still expecting them to thrive for not only themselves but the others around them too. (hooks 62.) The mothers that Morrison writes about in Sula are moral gray characters that  expose the sensitive nature of the sacrificial role and the complex relationships that form between mother and child. No other character more accurately portrays the brutalism of choice  and effect the sacrificial mother undergoes than Eva. The first real impression of Eva in the novel  captures the catalyst that drives the innate desire for the sacrificial mother to strip themselves  bare for the family. Suddenly abandoned by her husband alone with three children to care for by  herself and nothing to her name, Eva has virtually zero time to process the unexplainable loss of  a partner and helpmate instead being engulfed by a responsibility “so acute she had to postpone 

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her anger for two years until she had both the time and the energy for it” (Morrison 28.) Eva represents how Black women are, without warning, pushed into circumstances that require a  “sacrifice.” Faced at the crossroads of a bleak path filled with hungry and sick children teetering  off the edge of survival, when Eva disappears for eighteen months and suddenly comes back  “from a wagon with two crutches, a new black pocketbook, and one leg” (Morrison 29.) One is  left with the looming unknown of what exactly she had to put herself through to provide for her  family. Just like Eva, Black women in the “sacrificial” role and the selfless obligations they  undergo often are not only expected from them but are vital for creating a loveless family sphere  that runs alongside the same systems that oppress them, only creating a repeating cycle of  generational dysfunction. Repression is a core hallmark of the sacrificial mother and within this  repression “turns pain to rage” (hooks 23.) When the black mother has no outlet to vent her  emotional frustrations, when she decides to repress in the heroic sake of unlimited strength, we  see the generational ways in which historically “black women survived by hardening their hearts,  by shutting down their emotions” (hooks 53.) While Black women and mothers are constantly  trying to work against a dominate racist and sexism framework it should not go unchallenged  that when the Black mother decides to cloak herself in indifference and coldness, the children of  the family are the ones left picking up the broken pieces and taking on the responsibility of  emotional labor for their mother. In a rare moment of vulnerability between Eva and her daughter  Hannah, we see how the refusal of a embracing a love ethic as a foundation for the family creates  a disconnect that first starts at the mother and then spreads to the children and rest of the family.  When Hannah is suddenly drawn to the idea of obligatory sacrifices after speaking with her  friend about the expectations of motherhood, she asks naively if wether or not Eva “ever loved  us” when they were little (Morrison 47.) Offended, hurt, and confused Eva retorts in a way that 

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truly highlights the way in which the Black sacrificial mother, when operating in the repression  of self, construct a different perspective to protect themselves from the realities of abuse. Eva  does not see lack of emotion she rarely gave throughout her children’s childhood instead  reiterating the fact that she had no time for play or for games because “I stayed alive for you”  (Morrison 48.) Through Morrisons intimate and personal character building, Eva casts a light  onto a larger struggle of Black motherhood and how that struggle against the “state” often leaves  the black mother little time to provide the emotional care and neutering children need in order to  truly succeed and achieve love in a way that is unconsciously communal. Although this  unfortunately very real and quite common dynamic exists and prevails within the Black  community and larger society, Morrison subtly hints at an underlying feminist framework that  gives hope to the Black mother and in junction the Black family. Through “womanism,” a  concept that dedicates itself on the betterment of the Black woman, hope can be given to the  sacrificial mother. A type of hope “that embraces everyone for the purpose of healing, change,  and liberation” (Nash 10.) When the Black woman/mother decides to embrace the forgiveness of  self love that seeps from the rhetoric of Black feminist, she starts to detach from the anti-black  and misogynistic stereotypes that have surrounded her for centuries. Embracing care is essential  for destroying generational curses because as Black feminist put it care is “a practice for tending  to what has already been lost and what might be lost” (Nash 21.) Accepting love is inherently  radical for the Black woman because she often occupies “spaces of incomprehension and  sanctioned ignorance” (May 36.) For the Black mother who is often in the crossfires of  experiencing particular types of discrimination, calling for and in acting change within oneself  does transformative work that can and will be felt within the entire family unit. Black women 

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and the mother can experience a catharsis of the self when she self actualizes and embraces love  and care.

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Works Cited  

Salvation: Black People and Love * Bell Hooks Books, bellhooksbooks.com/product/salvation black-people-and-love/. Accessed 1 May 2025. 

Anna Julia Cooper’s Black Feminist Love‐politics - May - 2017 - Hypatia - Wiley Online  Library, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/hypa.12275. Accessed 1 May 2025. 

Morrison, Toni. Sula. London Vintage, Nov. 1973. 

Nash, Jennifer C. “Practicing love: Black feminism, love-politics, and Post Intersectionality.” Meridians, vol. 11, no. 2, 1 Mar. 2013, pp. 1–24,  

https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.11.2.1. 

Black Feminism Reimagined, www.dukeupress.edu/black-feminism-reimagined. Accessed 1  May 2025.