It reflects on our experiences in the first years of her life and weaves together interviews with black mothers and grandmothers who are further along this journey and generous with their stories of triumphs and tribulations. This book is about my quest as a new mother to help my daughter understand as early as possible who she is and what she came to do on this beleaguered planet.

We need a kind of anthem, a melodic reminder to ourselves and each other that we are not who the wider world too often tells us we are: criminal, disposable, lazy, undeserving of health or peace or laughter. Black children and their families need this, I think. For her, I might build a ritual around Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” or maybe the Donny Hathaway version. She’s too young now, but I plan to do something similar with my daughter, Isobel, who has just turned two at the time of this writing. We weren’t much of a singing family, but in the mid-1980s, my mother made sure we shrouded ourselves in a kind of armor through song and remembered who we were before facing a day that was sure to challenge us. It could’ve been weeks or even months, but I remember it as a defining ritual of my childhood. We wrapped ourselves in the richness and power of Whitney’s voice, reaching for the high notes right along with her. We stood in the living room in those moments before we shrugged on our coats and belted out lyrics about self-reliance and refusing to let the possibility of failure keep us from trying. W HEN I WAS SEVEN OR EIGHT YEARS OLD, MY MOTHER PUT ON W HITNEY Houston’s recording of “Greatest Love of All” every day before we left home for school and work, and we sang along from start to finish. It is an essential handbook to help us imagine the society we build for the next generation. Following a child’s development from infancy to the teenage years, We Live for the We touches on everything from the importance of creativity to building a mutually supportive community to navigating one’s relationship with power and authority. McClain spoke with mothers on the frontlines of movements for social, political, and cultural change who are grappling with the same questions. What, then, is the best way to keep fear at bay and raise a child so she lives with dignity and joy? Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than any other race black mothers must stand before television cameras telling the world that their slain children were human beings. In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust - even hostile - society. A warm, wise, and urgent guide to parenting in uncertain times, from a longtime reporter on race, reproductive health, and politics

Angela garbes author