The alternative is Othermothering. Challenging western conceptions of family and care, enfolding it into social and political activism is only possible through a shift of framing what ‘care’ is.

The rise of racial capitalism also brought with it new gendered relations of power through an idealized distinction between so-called men's productive and women's social reproductive labors—a split that was never a reality for poor and racialized families (Glenn, 2012). Indeed, scholars have argued that capital accumulation was only possible through the invisibilized labor of women and enslaved people, in terms of both the biological reproduction of the labor force and in the everyday labor of social reproduction (scholars have called this an ongoing form of primitive accumulation) (Federici, 2014; Mies, 2014; Weinbaum, 2019). The latter half of the 20th century saw a hardening of capitalist logics, globally. During this period, structural adjustment programs, which were rolled out in response to the global debt crisis of the 1980s, destroyed the last vestiges of the commons and further devolved social reproduction to individuals and their families (Federici, 2014). In turn, much of the labor of social reproduction—the “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (Katz, 2011, p. 711)—shifted more deeply onto 6 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ under-paid, over-worked, and highly exploited care laborers as more and more women entered the workforce. Yet much of the mainstream scholarship on care and care ethics is Euro- or Western-centric (Green & Lawson, 2011; Raghuram, 2016), lacking an intersectional analysis (Hankivsky, 2014; Raghuram, 2019), and ignoring the long history of Black feminists attention to care. Black feminist care analysis has always been intersectional and accounted for racial capitalism. These scholars and activists recognize racial capitalism as the structure against which an ethic of care must be mobilized in order to exceed the care-less-ness of what Patricia Hill Collins (2002) calls the “matrix of domination.”3 Often grounded in othermothering and revolutionary mothering, Black feminist care ethics is rooted in the practices of women caring for children intergenerationally and across the community—a practice that stretches back to West Africa and to slavery. Othermothering is the revolutionary act of challenging western conceptions of family and care, enfolding it into social and political activism (Butler, 2019; James, 1993; McDonald, 1997). Black feminist care ethics begins from culture work, or “the entire way a community organizes to nurture itself and future generations” (Reagon, 1996, pp. 168, 170; see also; Barry & Grady, 2019). As an expression of culture work, othermothering is “the bridge work that requires confronting the very real barriers that oppression places in our way and also finding love and power by facing the barriers that divide us from each other across geopolitical divides” (Gumbs et al., 2016, pp. 5, 6). As such, it refuses the insistence on the gender binary, offering, instead, potentiality (Spillers, 2003) by defying neoliberal temporalities and individualization that are grounded in hetero-normative, patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism (Crawley, 2020). As Sosa-Provencio (2016) writes, “...caring is necessarily political, transformative, and rooted in the collective uplift of those struggling to overcome these forces of oppression in their daily lives” (p. 306). Care ethics is a politics of relationality and as such it is necessarily multi-scalar, moving beyond neoliberal capitalism's insistence on the atomized individual and family and a vision of care-as-protection. The global protests against anti-Black violence in the summer of 2020 and increasing interest in police abolition were a direct recrimination of the pervasiveness of the masculinist formation of care-as-protection. “Care,” in this frame, is violence. Abolition movements are a call to shift this framing toward building communities of care and support, toward a Black feminist vision of care (Okechukwu, 2021). Black feminists offer an approach to care that always recognizes the influence of racial capitalism. With this framing, care ethics pushes for an attention to “mutual vulnerability,” transformation, and mutual responsibility (Nash, 2018). For a feminist care ethics to fulfill its promise as a transformative ethos, it must center race, racism, and racial capitalism as the ground from which care and relationships emerge. As Christina Sharpe (2016) puts it, this care is bound up in “wake work,” where “care in the wake [is] a problem for thinking of and for Black non/being in the world...[it] is a work that insists and performs that thinking needs care (‘all thought is Black thought’) and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake” (p. 5). This wake work necessarily entails “multispecies assemblages” of care that move beyond the “the racial and colonial logics of the abstract universal anthropos” upon which the current ecological crisis is pinned (Davis et al., 2019, p. 3). This notion of the “Anthropocene,” scholars argue, flattens humanity to a singular monolith and fails to account for the uneven impacts of the climate crisis, and we would add, global pandemics. It also fails to consider whose labor and lives were, and still are, enrolled in these processes under violence, oppression, exploitation, and expropriation (Davis et al., 2019; see also H.; Davis & Todd, 2017; Karera, 2019; Pulido, 2018). Indeed, as Françoise Vergés argues (2017, p. 74), the Anthropocene and the politics of climate change rest on “the politics of nonraciality beneath which…lurk more sinister shadows of the racial everyday and persistent institutional and structural racisms—and racial capitalism.” As with PEH, this attention to non-human entanglements, especially in the context of racial capitalism, helps us understand why certain people (marginalized care givers who disproportionately have preexisting conditions) get sicker from COVID-19. When combined, the literature on PEH and racial capitalism helps to explain the pandemic in the context of anti-Blackness, while, as we turn to next, Black feminist work on care offers us a possible new way forward.