The vilification of Black mothers: Why didn’t Latarsha Sanders get the compassion Lindsay Clancy received?
TheGrio...
OPINION: Two Massachusetts mothers mounted defenses centered on severe mental illness. Their cases have been met with very different public narratives.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
A judge has just declared a mistrial for Lindsay Clancy, mother of three, standing trial for the deaths of her children. Her defense did not dispute that she killed them. Instead, her attorneys argue that she should not be held criminally responsible because she was experiencing severe mental illness, specifically, postpartum psychosis.
Four years before Clancy’s trial, another Massachusetts mother, Latarsha Sanders, stood trial after killing her two young sons. Sanders’ defense also centered on her mental state, arguing that she was suffering from severe mental illness, including psychosis, when she killed her children. Sanders was convicted and sentenced to two life terms.
The parallels are difficult to ignore: two Massachusetts mothers, two sets of children killed by their mothers, defenses centered on mental illness, and the same judge presiding over both cases.
But the public response could not be more different. Clancy’s case is a national story, covered by major news organizations and multiple podcasts, sparking widespread conversation about postpartum psychosis, maternal mental health, and the failures of the health-care system. Sanders’ case has resurfaced largely as a reference point for Clancy’s.
Clancy has benefited from something Sanders did not: white privilege. It allows Clancy’s actions to be understood through mental illness while Sanders is defined through criminality. This shapes who is presumed deserving of context, compassion, and understanding.
The vilification of Black mothers is so deeply woven into this country that Black women are blamed for societal problems far beyond their families. The “welfare queen” stereotype transformed poverty into a moral failing and placed blame for children’s circumstances squarely on Black mothers. During conversations about crime, drugs and violence, the questions often become: Was she home? Was she involved? Where was she?
That same framework is rarely applied to white women. As mass shootings continue to disproportionately involve white male perpetrators, we do not routinely see national conversations interrogating white motherhood in the same way we interrogate Black motherhood.
That expectation has roots in chattel slavery. Black women were expected to labor, care for and rear children on plantations—including white children—while remaining responsible for their own. That legacy of responsibility without authority has followed Black motherhood into the present. Black mothers continue to be held responsible for nearly every measure of their children’s success: appearance, manners, education, behavior, and choices.
Black fathers can be held accountable, too. But the responsibility for the “everything else” of parenting often falls disproportionately on mothers.
When my brother was murdered, the paper printed “son of school board member murdered.” Though my parents were married, the headline reflected the narrative biases I had already come to understand.
Tanya McDowell, a Black mother experiencing homelessness, received a five-year sentence as part of a plea deal after enrolling her son in the wrong school district. Felicity Huffman, the white actress who participated in the college admissions scandal, served 11 days of a 14-day sentence after pleading guilty to falsifying her daughter’s college entrance exam. These cases are not identical, but the contrast illustrates how racial bias can shape who receives context and who receives punishment.
Society is obsessed with punishing Black women. When there’s no “justice” to be meted out, we now let social media do the talking.
In late July, 18-year-old Nolan Wells went missing and was later found dead. He had last been seen boarding a boat with white classmates for a Fourth of July celebration. Almost immediately, parts of the internet turned toward his mother, Christine Wells-Wonsley, blaming her for his death. Former classmates have blamed Wells-Wonsley for the online harassment they received, while others found her nursing profile and bombarded her professional page with one-star reviews.
The dangers of postpartum depression and psychosis are real. Maternal mental illness deserves compassion, treatment, and serious public attention. Conversations surrounding Hayden Panettiere and Naomi Osaka have underscored how complicated and stigmatized maternal mental health remains.
Narratives matter. The issue is not that Lindsay Clancy deserves compassion in the court of public opinion. As a mother who suffered from postpartum depression, I understand the severity and the lack of help that exists in the system. But the compassion, acknowledgment, and care that Clancy have received are the same things Latarsha Sanders deserved. She deserved mental health advocates to rally around her. She deserves them around her now as she appeals her conviction.
Yet even now, Sanders is often reduced to a descriptor rather than named. In coverage of the new-trial ruling, she is introduced as the “Brockton mom,” while Clancy’s name has become synonymous with a national conversation about postpartum psychosis. Visually, Sanders’ coverage has negative bias as well. Her coverage often leads with an arrest or courtroom image, while photographs of Sanders as a mother are harder to find. The contrast is especially striking because the media coverage surrounding Lindsay Clancy has spent considerable time documenting who she was before the killings: her pregnancy and affectionate photos with her now ex- husband.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Using a mugshot tells us criminal. A courtroom photograph tells us defendant. A photograph of a mother holding her child tells us mother.
Narratives matter because they determine who is afforded the possibility of a lifetime of treatment and support, and who is left to face the consequences of mental illness through incarceration. Latarsha Sanders deserves to be seen as more than the crime she was accused of.
She deserves to be seen as a mother, a woman, and a person whose mental illness deserved to be understood—just like Lindsay Clancy.
Julienne Louis-Anderson is a Black mother who writes about the intersection of culture and politics with education and human development.