Okay so let’s recap, Y’all.
It’s been four weeks since hundreds of women, most of them white, got dressed up in pink and gathered outside a Massachusetts courthouse to support Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children to death back in January 2023.
Two weeks have passed since her mistrial. We’ve heard public debates about postpartum mental health, her treatment, marriage, and her failed suicide attempt.
Clancy has been compared to LasShuan Harris and Leatrice Brewer, two Black mothers diagnosed with serious mental illness who also murdered their children. Harris threw her three young sons into the San Francisco Bay in 2005, and Brewer drowned her three children in a bathtub on Long Island in 2008. While Brewer was found not guilty by reason of insanity and institutionalized, a jury rejected Harris’s insanity defense and sentenced her to life in prison. Folks have pointed out that these Black mothers received no rallies, justice campaigns, prayer circles outside courthouses, or a million-dollar fundraising apparatus. Nor were these mentally ill mothers transformed into tragic national symbols of wounded motherhood.
And yesterday, the lone Black juror who prevented 11 other jurors from absolving Clancy of criminal responsibility finally spoke for himself. Michael Desronvil said he didn’t doubt her guilt. “Based on all the physical evidence, key witnesses and what the prosecution presented, I thought it was enough proof that she (Clancy) knew exactly what she was doing and planned,” he said. His words generated another avalanche of commentary.
Clancy remains in state custody at Tewksbury Hospital where she is receiving medical and psychiatric care as she awaits a hearing scheduled for September 29 when prosecutors will decide their next steps in this case.
Now, Y’all know that I am always child-centered in all of my thinking. So for me, I’ve been wrestling with the most disturbing question that remains conspicuously unasked: Why do so many white women seem to identify so strongly with a white mother who strangled her three children, but not with the children she killed?
That disturbs the hell out of me, Y’all.
Why is their empathy traveling upward toward the adult killer and not downward to the powerless Cora, Dawson and Callan who had to look into their mother’s terrifying face while expecting her to save them from her hands. Why are so many people treating these babies like they are just supporting characters in the story of their own murders?
Listen, I’m not trying to dismiss postpartum psychosis and I know that mental illness can catastrophically distort a person’s thinking. I am not in denial about how this country’s medical system too often sends desperately ill women back home with prescriptions instead of the sustained care they need. But I still believe that none of these facts requires folks to emotionally abandon three murdered children! I refuse to let murdered children disappear under the lethal power of adults.
And what scares the fuck out of me about the Clancy case is the intensity with which so many women identify with her. They’re not just showing her sympathy. They actually see themselves in her. Let me not put words in their mouths but sociologist Colleen Butler-Sweet described the public response as a palpable sense of “. . . ‘that could have been me,’” she said. “So many mothers look at that and they’re like, ‘That’s me, and I’m exhausted, and would somebody please just help me?’”
M’kay, so all these women can see themselves in Clancy’s exhaustion, isolation, resentment and psychic collapse. But none of them could look at young Cora, Dawson and Callan and think, “That child could have been me?”
So you’re telling all these women can see themselves waking up one day . . . look up how much time it would take to drive from their house to a pharmacy and takeout spot . . . and then telling their husband to go to these places so they can create a window of time to be alone with their children to strangle them? These women can see themselves taking their children into the basement and wrapping exercise-resistance bands around each child’s neck several times? They can see themselves doing this THREE separate times while telling them to “go to God?”
WTF! How could you read those details and still believe that Nancy Clancy is the principal victim in this story?
Yes, indeed, mental illness distorts thinking. But those hundreds of women standing outside the courthouse, and so many others arguing about this case online, seem too invested in making all those horrible disturbing facts about Clancy’s behavior emotionally inadmissible. If you show compassion for Clancy, then that somehow makes you morally sophisticated. But if you dare center the three children in any sustained way then you are just ignorant about postpartum psychosis and you must shut up.
We seriously need to examine the psychology of all those women who stood in solidarity with Clancy while displacing her three children from the emotional center of their own deaths. Because this conversation ain’t just about postpartum psychosis. It’s bigger than that. It’s about the extraordinary cultural power of white maternal identification, the longstanding presumption of white female innocence and the disturbing ease with which children’s terror can disappear beneath maternal abuse and murder. These three children are not being treated like autonomous human beings who had the right to live. And that’s because their deaths threaten the mythology of white maternal innocence.
Did Y’all see how the crowd applauded and cheered Clancy’s defense attorney? They stood at that vigil wearing “Justice for Lindsay” and “Peace for Lindsay” shirts and treated him like a hero. “We love you, Kevin!”
And race definitely matters.
Think about it . . . can you imagine HUNDREDS of white women rallying outside a courthouse to defend a Black mother who waited until her husband left the house and then strangled one child, then another, then another? Go ahead. Close your eyes and try to imagine that hypothetical scene.
Sure, they might acknowledge her illness, but only after she had been branded as a morally depraved negress beast monster who is evidence of Black cultural pathology. Hundreds of white women wouldn’t be out here trying to rename their solidarity with a confessed killer “maternal mental-health advocacy.” She certainly would not have been afforded the same presumption as Lindsay Clancy, which is that beneath her sadistic violence there’s still a fundamentally good mother who needed to be rescued and who deserves grace from the legal system.
Now, don’t try to twist words and accuse me of arguing that white mothers across America identify with Clancy’s desire to kill her children. That’s not my argument, even though I do believe that there are some evil-ass mothers out there who do take pleasure in abusing children and probably do think about literally strangling their kids. And I do think there are women out there who believe that if they ever broke under the exhaustion, resentment, isolation, and terror that psychologically consumes mothers, that they too would want to be understood as a good woman and not condemned as an evil child killer.
At the end of the day, what the Clancy murder case demonstrates, once again, is that we live in a culture where white womanhood carries a presumption of innocence, fragility, and rescuability. White motherhood is imagined as inherently nurturing. So when a white mother like Clancy destroys her three children, the culture has to relocate her crime into something else and search for something else to place on trial, be it the medical system, medication, motherhood, her husband, postpartum illness. Anything but the woman herself.
Clancy must become the principal victim in this murder story because acknowledging her agency would rupture the mythology of white maternal innocence. Because if she does not emerge as the primary victim, then this country will have to finally tell the truth about how children are not fully regarded as people possessing independent claims to life and justice, but as extensions of the mother’s emotional condition.
As a child advocate who survived an abusive adoptive mother who on multiple occasions held my head under water in the kitchen sink and once placed a plastic shopping bag over her head until I nearly lost conscious, I cannot get behind any politics of motherhood that isn’t child-centered and can rally for the woman who did the killing while leaving her dead children emotionally abandoned.
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THIS CONTENT IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
