08/22/2026
๐ OUR WORK IS IN THE IOWA LAW REVIEW. And yes, weโre bragging a little. Because this matters.
A while back, I sat down with Professor LaToya Baldwin Clark and talked about what it means to do this work as a Black mother, a professional special education advocate, and someone who knows firsthand that race does not disappear when a child walks into an IEP meeting.
That conversation, along with interviews with other Black advocates, helped inform her newly published Iowa Law Review article:
โCultivating Motherwork: Gender, Race, and Rights in Special Education Advocacy.โ
https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/volume-111-issue-5/cultivating-motherwork-gender-race-and-rights-special-education-advocacy
And WHEW. Seeing this work documented in legal scholarship hits different.
The article examines something Black families already know in our bones: having resources, education, or professional status does not magically protect Black children with disabilities from inappropriate placements, harsh discipline, misdiagnosis, or being underestimated.
And it recognizes the Black mothers who took what we learned fighting for our own children and turned it into professional advocacy for other families.
That is Advocating While Blackโข ... Weโve been saying it: you cannot talk honestly about disability without talking about race.
You cannot understand special education advocacy without understanding what Black parents have to navigate just to be heard.
And you cannot build better systems while ignoring the knowledge Black mothers have developed from protecting our children inside them.
Now that work is part of the scholarship.
Iโm deeply grateful to Professor Baldwin Clark for listening to our experiences, taking this work seriously, and giving language and scholarly attention to labor that is too often invisible.
The work Black mothers have been doing at IEP tables, kitchen tables, complaint hearings, and school district offices is knowledge.
It belongs in the research.
It belongs in the law.
It belongs in the conversation about what happens next.
And Advocating 4 Kids was in the room. ๐
Read โCultivating Motherwork: Gender, Race, and Rights in Special Education Advocacyโ in the Iowa Law at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/volume-111-issue-5/cultivating-motherwork-gender-race-and-rights-special-education-advocacy
AND stay tuned because we will be interviewing LaToya Baldwin Clark, JD, PhD, Professor of Law and Sociology (by courtesy), Faculty Director, Critical Race Studies Program, UCLA School of Law
111 Iowa L. Rev. 1903 (2026) DOWNLOAD PDFAbstractThe Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a landmark civil rights statute, bestows extensive rights to parents to protect their children against educational discrimination based on disability. Interpretations of the federal statute by lawmakers...
