Lanita Jacobs-Huey

This paper examines a statistics debate among African American caregivers raising children with disabilities for insights into the work of “African American mothering.” Using ethnographic, narrative and discourse analyses, we delineate the work that African American mothers do—in and beyond this conversation—to cross ideological and epistemological boundaries around race and disability. Their work entails choosing to be an “I” and, in some cases, actively resisting being seen as a “they” and/or part of a collective “we” in order to chart alternative futures for themselves and their children.

In this article, I analyze a series of breaches (Garfinkel, 1967) observed during an 18-month ethnographic study of an African American cosmetology school in South Carolina. Students, clients, teachers (and this author) committed endless verbal and nonverbal mistakes during everyday hair care encounters. They also employed an array of cultural and professional communicative strategies to resolve them. Their candid deliberations over what went wrong or was supposed to happen in client-stylist and stylist-stylist negotiations provide critical insights into the role of language in marking hair care expertise. Their evaluations also underscore the importance of speaker intentionality and accountability, as well as the virtues of forgiveness, within African American women's hair care practices. Moreover, their breach assessments clarify what is at stake in terms of professionalism and clientdom for African American stylists, their predominantly Black female clientele, and a vulnerable constituency of cosmetology students when mistakes are made at the level of language and representation.