![]() The Washington Post reported that Facebook (which owns Instagram) knew its algorithms were biased, disproportionately harming Black and Brown users, and subjecting them to derogatory and racist language. ![]() Leslie Jones, Duchess Meghan, Naomi Osaka, and countless other Black and Brown women have been subjected to online abuse for years. “We’re living in a time where it’s so easy to be laterally violent to each other, to have bad thoughts about each other, to judge and minimize each other, and I think social media makes those thoughts and that energy more susceptible to people,” Landry says.īlack and Brown women existing fully as themselves online face constant scrutiny of their womanhood, surveillance, and online abuse. Landry also expresses similar sentiments as Mitchell about sharing the news of her pregnancy on social media. How we nurture this baby, how we bond with our baby is between ourselves and Creator,” she says. … It’s the same with having a newborn baby. Andrea Landry, a life skills coach and First Nations University instructor, chose to share with only those closest to her and her partner to honor the sacredness of the pregnancy, traditional kinship systems, and practices of the Anishinaabe people. The privacy also gave these mothers the ability to share their news with those physically around them and present in their everyday lives. The Internet is a wonderful place of connection, but it could also be a horrible place of projection The quiet around her pregnancy made her more intentional about the kind of parent she was going to be and allowed her to focus her energy on prioritizing her well-being. “I needed space for myself if I was going to be able to fully grow new life,” Packnett Cunningham says. It felt very personal and it felt sacred, in that it was happening at that time where life was being lost and I was growing this life,” she adds. “It was a conscious decision to not give that to the world, because there are so many people that follow me that I don’t necessarily know. “I needed to wrap my head around, ‘What does being a mother mean?’ Because you see all these definitions, and you see all these people … and I hadn’t attached it to myself,” Mitchell says. “Beyond that, even if it wasn’t COVID, I had heard so many stories of Black and Brown women dying when they were giving birth or losing their child before birth even happened, and so I really wanted to make sure that that journey was mine to own with my partner and my family in case those things happened, so that they were the first to receive that information,” she says.īoth Packnett Cunningham and Mitchell knew they needed space to define mothering on their own terms. We’re living in a time where it’s so easy to be laterally violent to each other But announcing her pregnancy felt strange in the midst of the pandemic. Prior to pregnancy, Mitchell shared her travel adventures and her photography on social media. Whitney Mitchell, a social strategist, explains that her pregnancy became motivation during a time when she felt stagnant. “Being able to tell people in person and not being expected to make some kind of Internet announcement to friends, strangers, associates, former friends, high school classmates … once I relieved myself of that, I relieved myself of undue stress,” she says. She was surprised that sharing the news allowed her to release some of her fears for her baby’s survival. “The last thing I wanted to do was add the stress of other people’s expectations, because I had been under the weight of other people's expectations all year long.” Privacy was about honoring the space she created to ensure a healthy pregnancy.Įventually, she shared her pregnancy with some of her closest friends on a trip. “To avoid those conversations, to avoid more heartbreak, and frankly to avoid more stress coming off of a wild year, I just wanted to hold it, keep it to myself for as long as possible to make sure that this thing really was sure.”Īs a Black woman in social justice and a public figure, 20 were stressful, Packnett Cunningham explains. “I was so thrilled and so scared, all at the same time,” she says. Packnett Cunningham’s decision to keep her pregnancy private was a choice, one affected by a miscarriage at the end of 2020. ![]() (It's a) mix of birth, parenthood, and the intense criticism that is the norm for social media interaction
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