Female, White
Why some people just need to shut up
This week Black Sheep Mom skyrocketed in online popularity following the announcement (and pictures) of my son’s release from prison. We met over 500 new subscribers in two days (welcome, new friends!) and I have received more notifications and messages than I can reasonably answer.
It has been an amazing ride because this community continues to be full of the helpers Mr. Rogers’s mom told us to look for—there are so many good and gracious and kind people in the world and I think most of them are on Substack. Forget Facebook. Lose Instagram. Substack is where its at.
But, unfortunately, even Substack has a village of sad little trolls. And not the singing, sparkly Justin Timberlake kind.
Exhibit A:
TLDR; This lady woke up on Wednesday and chose to be petty and by petty, I mean downright rude to me—a person she's never met.
As they say in the south, Bless Your Heart.
This woman took time out of her one, precious life to accuse me of being selfish, unhelpful, and “suburban.” She then admitted that my post prompted her to Google if there are ‘black people on Substack’ and she went on to surmise that I have used my son’s incarceration as click-bait—my only motivation, according to her, is to become a rich and famous author. How dare I exploit other people for personal gain.
The odd part is that she is responding to a post I wrote about the plight of a man inside of a Michigan prison, about whom I had received a phone call that day. I do not know him from Adam, and I was simply asking for people to be aware of a gross mistreatment by MDOC.
My usual response to this type of comment is perspective-taking, a deep sigh, empathy skill, and a calm click of the block button—thank you, now go away please.
Normally, I do not feel it necessary to defend my life nor my posts. Women have had to explain themselves and their choices for far too long to jerks not walking in their shoes, and I’m not playing those games anymore.
So, why am I giving this even more air time today?
Because she bothered me.
Like really, really bothered me.
Maybe it was plummeting estrogen or the heat this week or the general amount of shit on my plate right now or maybe it is because…
She’s white.
She’s liberal.
She’s a business owner.
She lives in one of the highest rent districts in our country where median home prices exceed $900,000.
And she had subscribed to my newsletter of her own volition.
Before I could reply to her nonsense, good people came to my defense. Many readers messaged me to tell me what they thought of her comment and where she could shove it. I thanked them, messaged her how she could help the man in my post and asked her to unfollow me, made sure she saw my message, blocked her, and tried to move along.
But I can't.
For clarity, I am white.
I am also middle class (whatever that means these days).
I happen to have a nice remodeled kitchen and I grind my own coffee, but she got everything else wrong. I don't work on an Apple computer. I'm not in the suburbs, and most egregious of all—I don't own a Best Mom Ever mug.
Here's the deal, I haven’t exactly hidden my demographics in my writing but to the best of my conscious ability, I don’t lead with them either. This blog centers on my personal experience of the American “justice” system, most notably how my family has lived through my son’s prison time. I would like to leave it at that, but some other women would prefer to flatten me into a one-dimensional caricature on a page. So let's go.
Perhaps it is time for me to discuss more difficult things.
Demographics
I speak out precisely because I am white and middle class.
In my experience, most white middle class folk with a child sentenced to prison time hide in shame and don’t say anything, don’t advocate, don’t show their faces nor allow the world to see their ugly reality. Relatives of ours told people that my son was just on a long ‘vacation’ in another state.
For several years, I myself, Miss Black Sheep Mom, didn’t say a word to most people. We are taught to hush up. We only whisper about it with close friends at book club. We quietly half-raise our hands for prayers at church when others have their eyes closed. I've had family tsk-tsk (and distance themselves) from this blog.
For valid reasons, many moms I know have chosen not to get into this arena and expose the truth about their own black sheep inside the penitentiary. And that’s their business—I don’t fault them at all. The truth is that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
A white woman in a justice-impacted discussion sits squarely in the frontline of fire from all sides. Either you are fragile and don't really know the struggle or you are using people to sell “an agenda.” There seems to be no middle ground for us.
But this is the middle ground.
I refuse to let Other be Other.
My pain is part of the collective pain in this country, and I don’t need permission to share what I share. I fully own my family’s poor choices, addictions, cycles of abuse, and generational dysfunction. I'm out here willing to link arms with anyone (of any race and gender and persuasion) who has been impacted by prison life and needs to feel less alone in the world. I'm choosing to stand up and tell the truth—a truth you would not hear if I stayed safe in my kitchen over a steaming mug.
If you don’t want to read about it, that's okay with me, because frankly I'm not sure most people are ready to go deep here—
My ACES score is 8.
I was raised by my grandparents for several years.
My biological father skipped on child support, and I didn’t see him for eight years of my upbringing.
I was sexually abused by my stepdad.
My mom went to jail and to trial and we had supervised visitations.
I remember using food stamps to get groceries in an era when that was rare and mocked. We lived in subsidized housing for all of my high school years and my jeans had the designer tags cut out of them by the secondhand stores we had to shop in.
I was put on jury trial myself as a teenager for negligent homicide. I was then put in an adult mental hospital later that year.
I became an unwed mother at 20.
I went to college on a Pell grant and then to grad school in my 30’s on scholarships that I wrote for until 3am while raising three kids and working two part-time jobs.
I was a single, working mom for some of those years.
Nearly everyone I have ever loved has been addicted to something.
I worked for years in community mental health and the public school system where scabies, lice, bed bugs, psychosis, and people peeing their pants was a daily reality in my office.
And yeah, my white son went to prison for playing with guns and drugs.
So you better bet that I sit on my ass in my remodeled kitchen with a mug of freshly brewed coffee and thank God every day that I can—because I damn well know what it is like to NOT have safety and NOT have money and NOT have a voice when bad stuff is happening to me and those I love.
And then, I get up with the energy I have left and fight injustice wherever I find it out here. Next week, I'll be in our Capitol on Tuesday to speak with legislators. I am still writing letters to people inside. Though my son is home, I am still taking collect phone calls from the incarcerated.
I’d like to know if my comment-happy friend is doing the same.
PROVE IT
I don't need to prove to anyone that I grew up with close black friends (in their homes and in their churches), that I was the girl other parents didn't want their kids around, and I don't need to tell you that I speak with people from diverse cultures every week.
But I will tell you all of that—because the black people I know don't do this shit. It's always the white lady running her mouth (or typing furiously online) about what other people should be doing with their time and their resources. It’s always the white lady convinced she is helping the ‘less-fortunate’ (with whom she has never broken bread) by pounding on her keyboard in fits of self-righteousness.
Enough.
Our life experiences are not up for debate nor should they be cherry-picked and stomped on by people who woke up to mainline CNN and stay miserable today.
The world changers are giving thumbs up and sparkle emojis. They are in the comments with a simple thank you for sharing or how can we help?
Heroes, all of you.
Life givers, difference makers, honest and brave people just walking other people home.
Thank you so much for being here. 🖤
Irony
After I cooled off a bit about this whole thing, the irony hit me while talking with my son.
This type of backhanded comment toward another person would not fly in prison. She would have immediately been punched in the throat, and as nonviolent as I try to be—well, I’ll just leave it there.
There is still a world where saying stupid shit gets your eye blackened or lip split. Or gets you killed. People in prison learn real quick how to keep their comments to themselves. They also learn to defend their own positions when it is called for.
And today, I felt it was called for.
So—to my fellow white women who behave this way, stop it. You and I do not corner the market on outrage. You and I (as damn clever as we are) do not know everyone's backstory. You and I have no idea what other people—including other white women—have been through and if you don't like something you read here, keep scrolling. Unfollow. Unsubscribe. Better yet, unplug from your damn screens and take a walk in the real world.
In related news, I am cooking up some merch ideas for Black Sheep Mom loyalists and I think a Best Mom Ever mug might be a nice addition. *Let me know if you'd be interested in winning one.
For those in our Misfit Lit Book Club, the next Live Zoom meeting will take place next Wednesday, June 17th at 1pm EST. Message me if you're wanting to join and I’ll send you the link! We've been reading Bone Valley by Gilbert King and WOW WOW WOW. No matter where you are in this one, please feel free to join the discussion.
And hop over to the Misfit Lit section on the blog for more book club info and a reading schedule!
Otherwise, things are going really well here. Thank you to everyone for your kind messages and comments on Substack about (and for) my son. Stay tuned for news from parole-land!
Bridget, we are standing with you publicly because what happened in your comments deserves a public response.
At the Appleberry Prison Foundation, we walk alongside families navigating incarceration and reentry every day — mothers, grandmothers, wives, children, fathers. What we have learned in this work is that the families who carry this experience are not a monolith. They are white, Black, Brown, rural, suburban, urban, wealthy, poor, college-educated, GED, religious, secular. The one thing they share is the crushing weight of a system that punishes them alongside their loved one, and a culture that tells them to be quiet about it.
You broke that silence. At the exact moment most white middle-class mothers in your position hide their sons in shame — bury the story, scrub the social media, lie at dinner parties — you sat down and told the truth in public. That is not clickbait. That is the work. It is the work because you are who you are, not in spite of it. The stigma we are trying to dismantle lives loudest in the communities that believe incarceration only happens to “other people’s” sons. Your voice reaches rooms ours cannot.
The comment leveled at you is the exact divisive logic that keeps families like the ones we serve isolated. When we decide in advance who is “allowed” to grieve a child’s incarceration, who is “allowed” to write about reentry, who has “earned” the right to speak — we do not protect marginalized families. We abandon them. We tell the Black mother and the White mother and the Brown mother that they cannot stand in the same room together, cannot recognize each other, cannot build the coalition that is the only thing that has ever moved the meter on criminal justice. Them-versus-us thinking does not redistribute power. It guarantees the people in power keep it.
Your ACEs score, your stepfather, your mother in jail, your teen jury trial, the part-time jobs you worked through graduate school while raising three children — none of that was owed as proof. You should not have had to lay it on the table to earn the right to speak about your own son. But, the fact that you did, with that much clarity and that little self-pity, is exactly why your writing matters.
To the families reading this who recognize themselves in Bridget’s story and are scared to speak… you are not alone. There is a growing community of us who refuse to let shame be the price of admission to the conversation about our loved ones. Your story belongs to you.
By the way… this is coming from some of those “black people on Substack”.
Bridget — enjoy your son’s homecoming. Reentry is sacred, hard, beautiful work, and it deserves your full presence. We are cheering from Washington State.
*Ahem*
F**k 'em