Social justice lactators are eating their own.

or When the Breastfeeding Network found out that its place is in the wrong.

The doulas, breastfeeding counsellors and peer supporters, antenatal educators, and (student) midwives some of whom are at the vanguard of removing language from women are now engaged in eating one of its own.

The Breastfeeding Network (BfN), an organisation captured by gender ideology, is unable to mirror the mother’s language when quoting the self-described ‘mom’ below.

A woman with a breastfeeding child is now a breastfeeding ‘families’. Yes, mothers are ‘families’ despite what your eyes can see.

Once more, our eyes see women, but they are ‘families’, except for the photo in the top right were there is a ‘family’, which includes funnily enough a ‘mum’. And there is a visibly diverse family there. Yayyy!!

And this week is Black Breastfeeding Week so a great opportunity to focus on black breastfeeding mothers, yes? NOPE! families. Because ‘families’ is inclusive of mothers, the logic goes. Despite of course what we can see and what we know: That it is mothers who breastfeed.

In fact, The BfN’s Twitter account seems to lack the word ‘mother’ in the whole month of August.

Pity. Since mothers are the by far the vast majority of who it serves and who their mission statement, its raison d’etre, is centred.

And what is Black Breastfeeding Week, or any week without breastfeeding, right?

It seems like the BfN set out to support mo.. sorry, families, and it seems like its social media volunteers haven’t learned, educated itself, doesn’t recognise its privilege when they created this offending in-house graphic:

[Notice the image in the top right has been recycled from the 16 August post above.]

The offence, according to the BfN’s ardent followers, is that this week is about centring black ‘families’ and there is a white mother, or is it ‘parent’, in the photo.

Now everyone’s move will vary obviously but some will see a black breastfeeding family in the top right image. Some who are multi-racial and/or grew up in multi-racial families, multi-racial communities will see a family first. They will see a mixed race family and will see a family which has every right to be visible in Black Breastfeeding Week. There is a black baby at his/her mother’s breast. There is a black father who loves his partner and child. There is a white mother who loves her child and partner. There are racists who will vilify her for her partner and child. This mother will be comforting her son when he faces racism in the community.

There is a narrative in the critical race theory playbook that claims that black people cannot be racist. This thread presented a fascinating challenge to that claim.

Sorry? A mixed race child does not have a place in Black Breastfeeding Week? A mixed race family has got it in the neck for not being ‘black enough’.

A dirty secret that no one wants to acknowledge is that mixed race black children have historically suffered from racism from their black and their white peers. Mixed race families as the one depicted in the montage navigate difficult colour lines all the time. This quote is an example of those difficult intersections of colour. White mothers bringing up black children, who will face the garden variety racism and institutional racism as they move through society, are on a steep learning curve. Likewise white fathers with mixed race black children.

There is no empathy in evidence, anywhere in this long pile on, for the mother depicted in the photo. She has been othered because of the colour of her skin, and the rest of her family is ignored in the rush to show what fantastic allies they are. Three black and one brown mother have been ignored in the whole dire thread leaving the impression that the BfN had made a post about a white mother breastfeeding a white baby and held up as the image of Black Breastfeeding Week.

Some years ago, there were social media calls for mixed race and black families to share their breastfeeding photos. This mother may have happily volunteered this photo because she believes in breastfeeding. And there are not enough photos of women like her, in mixed race relationships, proudly sharing a real breastfeeding moment with her partner and child.

It is regrettable that the poster who stated that, “It is not white breastfeeding with a mixed race child week” has doubled down for her faux pas.

Her outrage over centring black women is rather ironic since she seems to have led the call to arms on the BfN’s page under her business name - a handy method in social justice circles to make your brand visible at another’s expense.

She and others reinforce her dubious point by deflecting to legitimate breastfeeding training and accessibility issues in the UK breastfeeding communities. These legitimate issues are used to deny that this woman’s place in a general feel good, awareness raising meme. This was not a specialist training post for breastfeeding support workers. That would be found in private, trained members only, Facebook groups and away from public pages.

The rationale about skin colour here is completely irrelevant to the context of the post which is about mothers and babies with multi-ethnic histories as with the woman in the lower left of the BfN meme. Were this a training infographic about the needs of women with black complected skin tones of course her photo would be completely out of place. The post was for the general public, however. It is irrelevant to bring training issues here and it looks suspiciously defensive rather than constructive discourse. The mother-baby dyad is intricately linked; it cannot be teased apart in this relationship. In the interest of denying her right to be included in Black Breastfeeding Week, the mixed race ‘people’ that is, the baby must also go.

Following her call to arms there is much berating of the BfN for deleting the original post and for not prostrating itself sufficiently in its apologetic response. You see, in the world of social justice breastfeeding, apologies and prostration aren’t enough. Grovelling and scraping with public self denunciations, oh and pay someone for an unaccredited course to ‘do your own labour’ and to learn to be a good ally while making a dour commitment to ‘do better’ is what is acceptable, possibly.

The phalanx of women, in their enthusiasm for pointing out to the BfN social media team how horrible they’ve been for ‘centring’ a white woman, have ignored her black baby and black partner. Conveniently so.

[Insert self-promotion, Dr, while policing laugh reacts and the remarks outside the groupthink.]

[Another attempt at telling the BfN volunteers what to say and do.]

Instead of the breastfeeding family, because ‘family’ is inclusive, remember? All these overwhelmingly white warriors see is a white woman. Why is that?

Mothering unites all these women regardless of where they stand on the political issue that is eviscerating the breastfeeding charities. We are mothers first. We have uniting experiences that are based in our biologies as women.

A final thought: The Breastfeeding Network (BfN) like all breastfeeding charities is mainly run by volunteers - all of them will be women and mothers, who are fitting in this work between their day jobs and caring work. Their social media pages will be run by volunteers with very little to no training in social media communications and none in the intersection of the politics of breastfeeding, queer theory, and critical race theory. The disdain shown to them, by those who are also women and mothers, shows an alarming degree of misogyny.