When I began writing my book, one of the first things I started to research was how enslavers created narratives about enslaved mothers that they didn’t have the same feelings toward their children as white mothers did. As such, they weren’t really harmed when their children were sold away. Tracing these narratives was important because I wanted to demonstrate that the narratives we have today about Black mothers - stories about “welfare queens” who only have children to make more money - actually began centuries ago and persist today as a means of justifying how the state continues to forcibly separate their children from them.