“Mama mean business.”

The official theme of a December episode of “4th&1 With Cam Newton” was about “letting your support system serve you,” the former NFL quarterback said. But it was his statement about mothers that was the take-home lesson.

Newton’s specific example was a postgame interview with Lamar Jackson in which the Ravens QB was asked whether he should have run more during the team’s loss to the Philadelphia Eagles.

“My mama just told me that,” Jackson said. “She cussed me out.”

That right there, Newton said, was proof the potential three-time MVP wasn’t just a man who “beats to the rhythm of his own drum” but someone listening very carefully to the direction of one special conductor. “It stops and starts with his mom, a strong Black woman.”

Nailed it! Much has been written about Jackson’s relationship with his mother, Felicia Jones, a widow whose hard work and nurturing as a parent and professional adviser helped propel her son to the top of his sport. But one can imagine, after that particular loss Dec. 1, Jones wasn’t speaking calmly in a manager/client fashion but with the impassioned disapproval of a mom watching her kid supremely blow it in front of God, country and her neighbors.

No kid would want that smoke. And, as a Black kid who is now a Black mom, I feel that cussing out in my soul. Better to just say “Yes, ma’am” and get to running, which Jackson did the very next week — and every week since. Lesson learned! Mama mean business. She’s not my mama, and even I was ready to strap on my shoes and start sprinting.

Black motherhood has been uniquely characterized and stereotyped. That no-nonsense “You heard me, boy!” attitude holds in pop culture, whether it’s Florida Evans trying to help her family survive the projects in “Good Times,” “The Cosby Show” lawyer Clair Huxtable losing it on Vanessa when she snuck out to have “BIG fun in Baltimore” or ghetto fabulous hip-hop label chief Cookie Lyon snapping her bejeweled fingers at her trifling offspring on “Empire.”

The persona of these fictional mothers is couched in a fierceness that’s propped up by an undercurrent of love and an understanding that it’s their responsibility to drive their kids to success, whether the kids like it or not. Our history is based in a darker era when our foremothers had children ripped from their arms, so when they got a chance to keep them there, they weren’t letting go no matter who they had to fight. Historian Kellie Carter Jackson described it to the Atlantic in 2021 as “violent joy” — the duality of pride and protectiveness.

What appears to the outside as a preternatural strength is sometimes really based in fear, one that can be weaponized against Black families by people who insist that our lives exist only within their narrow, biased parameters. I am reminded of Toya Graham, who was seen on nationwide television physically disciplining her teenager because he was throwing rocks at police officers during 2015’s Baltimore uprising.

A lot of white pundits applauded her in a “That’s right! You keep these kids in line” kind of way that was more about policing another would-be thug than about a mother’s fear that her baby could become another Freddie Gray. “He could have injured one of those police officers. They could have retaliated just by instinct, not because they are police, but because they are human beings, because he had a big rock,” Graham told WBAL TV in 2020.

Generations of stand-up comics have paid their bills by pointing out the difference between what Black and white mothers tolerate from their children. Netflix has a 15-minute compilation of Black comedians talking about motherhood, with the common thread the need to do whatever they have to do to keep your little butt clean, happy and alive. D.L. Hughley has a hilarious bit about being afraid of letting firemen into a burning house because his mother said “no company!”

It’s a laugh that’s painted in a particular history of pain. The Black mothers these comics reference weren’t necessarily trying to be mean. They just understood that they could not protect you in the way other mothers might be able to without strict rules about who and what come in and out of your house. Also, your non-Black friends might get away with stuff you never could out there in these streets, and that’s why they want to put the fear of God in you.

Lamar Jackson is a profoundly talented athlete in a position that decades ago was rarely filled with Black players because the rancid prevailing wisdom was that they weren’t smart enough to do the job. When I look at Felicia Jones, who I have never met, I see a woman who took on everything to raise her kids because there was nobody else to do it, and who is proud of her superstar son but will cuss him out if she has to. On his podcast, Newton referred to this role as “the deflator. When you think your head getting big, they deflate your head and make you come back to life, back to reality.”

Cementing that reality seems to be our job as Black moms, treading a tricky line between deflating egos and crushing dreams. The humor I find in the “my mama cussed me out” story comes from knowing this woman loves her kid so much that she wants the best for him and will embarrass him in front of his little friends or the entire viewing public if it’s gonna push him.

“Your mom knows best,” Newton said.

Even if she gotta cuss you out.