Published in 2019
272 pages
Dani McClain reports on race and reproductive health. She is a contributing writer at The Nation and a fellow with Type Media Center (formerly the Nation Institute). McClain’s writing has appeared in outlets including Slate, Talking Points Memo, Colorlines, EBONY.com, and The Rumpus. She was a staff reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and has worked as a strategist with organizations including Color of Change and the Drug Policy Alliance. McClain lives with her family in Cincinnati.
What is this book about?
What black mothers can teach us about raising happy, free, and fearless children.
“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun. We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.'” –Zora Neale Hurston
A longtime reporter on race, reproductive justice, policy and politics, Dani McClain is now also the mother of a baby girl. Like all first time mothers, she has countless questions about raising her child to be ethical and kind, but also to be healthy, happy, and safe in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust, even hostile society to people of color.
In Jump at the Sun, McClain interviews other mothers and experts, asking the tough, scary questions, but also celebrating the joys of motherhood and hope that children bring. Following a child’s development from infancy to toddlerhood through early childhood and the teenage years, the book touches on everything from the importance of creativity and the imagination to managing a functioning relationship with authority and the law. McClain shows that how we parent, perhaps even more importantly than how we participate in direct action and advocacy, will determine how we survive these turbulent times.
