The 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 and courts suggest that all parents can use those rights to protect children living with disabilities equally. While previous literature has established that class affects a parent’s ability to advocate, few have looked at the Black parental experiences across the class spectrum, with very little attention paid to Black class-privileged parents. This is surprising; the sociological and legal literature suggests that class-privileged parents have all the resources—economic, social, and cultural capital—to actively “cultivate” their children as they move into adulthood. 

But class-privileged Black children with disabilities in predominantly White schools are still, after fifty years, being miseducated through disparities in diagnosis, inappropriate placements, and harsh discipline. Black class-privileged parents have turned to a crop of professional Black mothers working as non- attorneys with children in special education who have translated their experience advocating for their own child into businesses. I conceptualize their advocacy work through the frame of what I term “cultivating motherwork.” “Cultivating” draws on the sociological literature that recognizes a parenting style that works to actively mold children into adulthood. In special education law, cultivation is the goal; an individually tailored education program that follows a child from elementary education through the transition to adulthood. “Motherwork,” a lens developed by Black feminists to describe the ways in which Black women have always been both workers and mothers, recognizes the connection between raising a Black child and Black people as a group. Black motherworkers advocate for Black children within a structure where Black children’s flourishing is inextricably connected to anti-Blackness. Black motherworkers understand and navigate the dialectic connection between race and disability and engage in racialized and gendered identity work needed to overcome stereotypes that may affect their advocacy effectiveness.