Care After Care is a long-term documentary project exploring how care circulates across generations. The project grows from a question that has followed me throughout my life: What becomes of care after it has been given? I return to that question alongside a conviction that has remained constant: Black single mothers need care that circulates back to them. So do their children.
I am the daughter, granddaughter, great-great-granddaughter, niece, cousin, and friend of Black single mothers. My understanding of care begins there. It begins, too, with the recognition that care is not only something we receive, but something we inherit.
For many children of Black single mothers, caregiving becomes part of who they understand themselves to be long before adulthood. Care is learned as attentiveness, responsibility, protection, sacrifice, and survival. This project asks what it means to inherit not only care itself, but the identity of being the one who cares, and how that inheritance shapes the ways we move through the world.