The Importance Of Mocha Moms To Community Activism

Another distinction is the Mocha Moms’ attention to charity. One of the biggest platforms for the Mocha Moms is their contribution to community activism. On their website they state, “Community service clearly benefits society at large, but performing the service also benefits our members. By serving their communities, members are able to hone or cultivate skills that are not currently being used in their jobs as moms….” As a result of the Mocha Moms not working within the labor market, they are able to continue to nurture existing or newly formed skills that they would typically perfect in the workforce through charity work. However, in the 1800s, some black women who were a part of more economically stable families were also committed to …show more content…
They do not explicitly reference on their website that their contributions solely benefit African American families as a means to further the collective mobility of the black race. Organizations like the National Marrow Donor Program and America’s Promise, organizations they support, help all people no matter their race. Although commendable in their efforts, black women who traditionally took part in charity work in the past did so with their race in mind. In an excerpt from Bart Landry’s Black Woman’s New Definition of Womanhood, he stated, “Most college educated black middle class women also felt a unique sense of mission. They accepted Lucy Laney’s 1899 challenge to lift up their race and saw themselves walking in the footsteps of black women activists and feminists of previous generations. But their efforts were not simply “charity work”; their focus was on “racial uplift” on behalf of themselves as well as of the economically less fortunate members of their race.” They also felt no class division in the fight to help black people. For these women, they all experienced the same forms of discrimination and systemic racist practices that created a collective conscious of …show more content…
When the Mocha Moms first started in the late nineties, there were enough black stay at home moms to create an entire organization full of women who were affluent enough to not have to take part in the labor market. This dramatic shift away from the standard picture of a poor black family barely making it was compromised because these families were in fact making it. They were economically stable to live off one income, which traditionally was unheard of within most black families. The Mocha Moms made the conscious choice to stay at home and picked “parenting over paycheck;” a choice that has been met with criticism because of its indirect rejection of the typical black mother who was not afforded the same