“Yeah momma what’s up” Michael B. Jordan, academy award acceptance: Black Motherhood and the Courage to Acknowledge It.
- jnwashington0905
- Mar 16
- 3 min read
The real tribute in the recent moment of Michael B. Jordan publicly honoring his mother is not simply about a successful actor thanking his parent. The deeper tribute is to Black motherhood itself a form of leadership that nurtures, orders, disciplines, and champions excellence.
Michael B. Jordan’s success does not belong to him alone. It stands within a long and global tradition of Black mothers who hold families together, who stretch resources, who insist on excellence even when the world expects mediocrity. Black women have long been the lead cast members in the drama of survival and achievement navigating families and communities toward possibility, often making a way out of no way.
But while we celebrate moments like this, we must also acknowledge the darker backdrop against which they occur.
In many ways it feels as though America is once again filming a familiar horror story: the systematic attack on Black excellence. This attack appears across several fronts from economic displacement to cultural erasure. It has been estimated that 700,000 Black women have recently lost jobs, a reminder that Black women often sit at the intersection of economic vulnerability and cultural expectation. At the same time, we are witnessing an ongoing effort to challenge, suppress, or erase Black history that is not merely “Black history,” but American history itself.
And yet another uncomfortable reality must be confronted.
Recent analyses of voting patterns show that a majority of white women supported Donald Trump in the most recent election cycle. A most recent survey from High Point University exploring the motivations behind these political choices suggest that many respondents viewed the advancement of people of color as undeserved and believed the struggles of marginalized communities were the result of laziness rather than systemic inequality.
Even more troubling were responses indicating resentment toward the success of other women. For some, the accomplishments of others particularly women of color were experienced not as inspiration but as threat. The majority of respondents to the survey were white women who lacked college degrees.
This raises a difficult moral question.
How does a society forget the labor of the very women who sustained it?
How do people overlook the generations of Black women who raised children that were not their own, who worked in homes that were not theirs, who sacrificed wages, dignity, and often their own families to care for others?
Black women have cleaned homes, raised children, nursed the sick, and held communities together sometimes wearing hand-me-downs while ensuring others had the best. That labor was not simply economic; it was maternal, sacrificial, and deeply human.
And yet we live in a moment when many of the very systems Black women helped sustain now appear willing to deny them healthcare, economic security, and equal opportunity.
One must ask: Can resentment run so deep that people forget the care that made their own lives possible?
This is precisely where the concept of Motherism becomes important. A Motherist ethic centers nurture, generativity, and collective flourishing. It understands that care is not weakness it is civilization itself.
Motherist leadership insists that communities thrive when we recognize interdependence, not when we deny it.
So when Michael B. Jordan publicly acknowledges his mother, it is more than celebrity gratitude. It is a recognition of a deeper truth: behind many stories of excellence stands a Black mother who refused to let the world define her children’s possibilities.
And that recognition matters.
So yes, congratulations to Michael B. Jordan.But more importantly, honor to Black mothers everywhere who continue to nurture excellence in a world that too often refuses to see it.
#michael b. jordan
#highpoint university
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