African American Families Research Articles

African American Alzheimer's Caregiver Training and Support Project 2 (ACTS2) pilot study: Outcomes analysis.

The purpose of this study was to conduct an initial evaluation of the quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the African American Alzheimer's Caregiver Training and Support Project 2 (ACTS2). Quantitative objectives focused on assessing changes in caregiver depression and health status, as well as the severity of caregiving and self-care problems from pre- to postintervention. Secondary quantitative analyses examined posttreatment changes in social support and caregiver burden. Qualitative objectives included examining caregivers' perceptions of the effectiveness of in-session training activities, quality of relationships among group participants and their facilitator, and appraisals of spiritual elements of the program. Nine African American family caregivers of older adults with dementia completed the ACTS2 lay pastoral care facilitator-led, telephone cognitive-behavioral intervention. The 12-week training program included seven skills-building groups and five individual problem-solving sessions. Significant improvements were found on the majority of dependent measures, including caregiver depression, health status, problem severity, and social support. Qualitative analysis highlighted the value caregivers placed on relationships with coparticipants and group facilitators, the role of spirituality in the program, and the importance of goal setting for improving caregiver distress and self-care. Convergence was found between quantitative and qualitative findings, particularly improvements in caregiver distress, health status, and social support. Overall, the findings of the pilot study were promising. Replication using a randomized controlled design with a larger sample size is needed to test the reliability of the findings. The benefits of tailoring intervention to caregivers' sociocultural preferences and spiritual values are also addressed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Easing the burden of dementia caregiving: Protocol development for a telephone-delivered mindfulness intervention for rural, African American families

BackgroundThere have been few interventions targeted for rural African American (AA) caregivers of persons with dementia despite their unique cultural, geographic, health-related and socio-economic needs, including relatively less access to—and willingness to engage with—formal supports and resources. One effective intervention, Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), has been found to be culturally acceptable in AA populations; however, no studies have assessed feasibility, acceptability and impact of an adapted mindfulness intervention targeting rural AA dementia caregivers. AimsThe purpose of this study is to 1) determine the feasibility and acceptability of a telephone-delivered mindfulness training intervention in decreasing caregiver burden among rural, AA, informal caregiving teams of people with dementia; 2) to explore the effects of the training on caregiver burden and relevant secondary outcomes for both caregiving team members, including emotional regulation, tolerance of uncertainty, emotional and physical health, family conflict within the informal caregiving team, and self-efficacy; and 3) to explore comfort with and willingness to adopt technologies to access mindfulness practices and existing caregiving educational resources. MethodsOur study utilizes a single-group, uncontrolled design to assess the feasibility and acceptability of telephone-delivered mindfulness training designed to alleviate burden for rural caregivers of AA individuals with moderate to severe dementia. A care partner—the person who provides additional help —is included in the intervention. The primary outcome is feasibility of the telephone-delivered mindfulness intervention as assessed by an 85% retention rate with completion of at least 6 of the intervention sessions. Pre- and post-participation interviews assess acceptability.

Racial and Community Wealth Disparity the Bane of HBCUs - A Wealth Ecology Model Relational Perspective

Racial wealth disparities in the U.S. continues to persist despite community, state and federal governments programs to arrest the slide. Contemporary community wealth creation approaches using anchor institutions concepts to bridge the gap assume the wealth improvement duality of the community and the anchor institution coming together with external agents of support. For an HBCU (Historical Black Colleges and Universities) as anchor institution, the improvement duality assumption links its fortunes with that of its community served. The study performs a regression analysis to determine the degree of the relationship and its direction. Measured African American family wealth status using the SCF data on median US household wealth and HBCU school choice by annual enrollment numbers from NCES digest of educational statistics, the analysis yields significant positive effects of student wealth status on HBCU school choice.

Moynihan Report Still Connected to Racist Practices in Psychiatry

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ViewpointsFull AccessMoynihan Report Still Connected to Racist Practices in PsychiatryAnum Iqbal Baig, M.D., M.B.A., Ijeoma Ijeaku, M.D., M.P.H.Anum Iqbal BaigSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.B.A., Ijeoma IjeakuSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H.Published Online:27 Sep 2022https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2022.10.10.36Daniel Moynihan, assistant secretary in the Department of Labor during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, wrote a report in 1965 titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” better known as the Moynihan Report. According to an article in the June 24 Boston Review by Stephen Steinberg, Ph.D., distinguished emeritus professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Moynihan Report was written during the critical period when President Johnson planned to progress into “the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights” after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those two pieces of legislation desegregated American society and granted Blacks both civil and voting rights. Some observers have viewed the Moynihan Report as claiming that dysfunctional family structure and culture are the roots of Black poverty. We suggest that racist policies and institutional racism are responsible for inequities in the distribution of wealth and other socioeconomic commodities. As a result, these pervasive racist policies continue to have adverse effects on Black mental health.The Moynihan Report focuses on the “crumbling family structure and urban ghetto culture” in Black communities as fundamental causal factors of economic and health care disparities. While family structure can affect the economic status of Black households, it is only one of several social and political factors with such influence. Moynihan vaguely alludes to these factors by noting that “three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American.” He then states that “a national effort towards the problem of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.” Thus, the report oversimplifies this explanation and shifts the focus away from continued racist policies and cultural practices, which were chiefly responsible for contributing to inadequate Black employment.The Moynihan Report’s findings are undermined by the flawed argument that the “tangle of pathologies” are direct consequences of dysfunctional family structure, rather than a contributing factor to Black poverty. He concludes the report by stating that the U.S. federal government can attempt to solve this problem by creating programs “enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.” According to an article in the June 30, 2015, In These Times by Daniel Geary, Ph.D., M.A., the ambiguous language used in the Moynihan Report allows its use by some to justify racism and its resulting economic inequalities, leading to damaging consequences. Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor of U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin.The Moynihan Report is relevant today because of the continued presence of unresolved sociopolitical and economic issues mentioned therein. These matters continue to promote racism via racist policies that result in racial and health care disparities for Black people. Policies that perpetuate racial violence result in mistrust of the legal, political, and health care systems, thus leading to reduced access to mental health care. According to an article by Tahmi Perzichilli, M.S., L.P.C.C., posted May 7, 2020, in Counseling Today, the pervasive fear and mistrust of the health care system arise from historical reasons including the creation of “drapetomania” as a treatable mental illness that caused enslaved Blacks to want freedom, deinstitutionalization, use of the criminal justice system to control Blacks, and scientific racism. The unresolved sociopolitical and economic issues discussed in the Moynihan Report can be addressed through the enactment of anti-racist policies in every sphere of the American experience. Anti-racist policies are necessary to improve the overall well-being of Blacks as well as their access to mental health care. ■Resources“The Moynihan Report: The Negro Family, the Case for National Action”“The Moynihan Report at Fifty”“The Moynihan Report Is Turning 50. Its Ideas on Black Poverty Were Wrong Then and Are Now”“The Historical Roots of Racial Disparities in the Mental Health System”Anum Iqbal Baig, M.D., M.B.A., is a PGY-4 psychiatry resident and chief resident at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. She is also a second-year APA/APAF Leadership Fellow and a member of the Southern California Psychiatric Society (SCPS) Diversity and Culture Committee.Ijeoma Ijeaku, M.D., M.P.H., is the immediate past president of the SCPS and chair of the Diversity and Culture Committee. She is also an associate clinical professor at UC Riverside School of Medicine. ISSUES NewArchived

46.2 Building Alliance With Community Pediatricians to Better Engage With African American Families in Washington, DC

The goals of this presentation are: 1) to explore the intergenerational work within an integrated care model in primary care pediatrics serving underinsured and low-resourced African American families in Washington, DC; and 2) to identify barriers and solutions in the virtual setting in primary care pediatrics.

Sleep SAAF responsive parenting intervention improves mothers’ feeding practices: a randomized controlled trial among African American mother-infant dyads

Background/ObjectiveParents shape children’s early experiences with food, influencing what is served, children’s food choices, and how much children eat. Responsive parenting (RP) interventions such as INSIGHT have improved maternal infant feeding practices, but have only been tested among predominantly White families. This secondary analysis of data from the Sleep SAAF (Strong African American Families) RCT tests the effects of an RP intervention designed to prevent rapid infant weight gain on African American mothers’ infant feeding practices.MethodsPrimiparous African American mother-infant dyads (n = 194) were randomized to an RP or safety control intervention delivered by community research associates at infant age 3 and 8 weeks. At 16 weeks, mothers completed the Babies Need Feeding questionnaire, the Infant Feeding Styles Questionnaire, and the Babies Need Soothing questionnaire. Logistic regression and general linear models examined the effect of study group on infant feeding practices. Moderation analyses explored whether effects varied by feeding mode (any breast milk versus exclusive formula), maternal age (≥ 20 years versus < 20 years), and maternal pre-pregnancy BMI (with obesity versus not).ResultsRP mothers reported more responsive feeding (p = 0.005, partial η2 = 0.02), lower likelihood of using beverages other than breast milk/formula to soothe their infant (p = 0.01, OR = 0.42, 95% CI [0.2–0.8]), and less pressure with cereal than control mothers (p = 0.09, partial η2 = 0.02). RP mothers also reported less pressure to finish/soothe than controls (p = 0.007, partial η2 = 0.04); feeding mode (B = 0.74, p = 0.003) and maternal age (B = 0.53, p = 0.04) moderated this effect. There were no significant group differences in bottle-feeding practices (e.g., adding cereal to bottle, using an appropriate nipple/bottle size), or in context-based or emotion-based food to soothe.ConclusionsResponsive parenting education influenced some feeding practices of African American mothers. Mothers reported using less pressure, a control-based feeding practice, and more responsive feeding than controls.Trial registrationSleep SAAF: A Strong African American Families Study. www.clinicaltrials.gov NCT03505203. Registered 3 April 2018.

Racial Socialization Provision in African American and Black Caribbean Families

Racial Socialization Provision in African American and Black Caribbean Families

The Privilege of Family History

Abstract This article situates the recent phenomenon of historians writing openly about their own familial and kin networks. After a brief discussion of the evolution of family history as a scholarly field, this article foregrounds the experiences and words of a number of African Americans who engaged in a diverse range of historical, genealogical, archival, and memorial “family history” work over the last two centuries. In the context of slavery, I approach family history as a form of enslaved resistance and anti-slavery argument. In the post-emancipation era, I consider African American family history within and beyond the nascent historical profession amid the racist national backlash to Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era. From the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance to the modern civil rights era, I explore the popularization of African American family history, the rise of the “new” social history, and the waves of men and women who entered the profession at the intersection of scholarship and social movement. In closing, I reflect upon African American family history in the post-civil rights era, from Roots to the rise of genetic genealogy, and the legacies of these transformations for the historical profession.

The Strong African American Families Program: Disrupting the Negative Consequences of Racial Discrimination Through Culturally Tailored, Family-Based Prevention

Racism continues to be a major source of stress for African Americans and can impair psychological functioning. Adolescents experiencing discrimination may engage in self-soothing, but risky behaviors, which leave them at risk for negative life trajectories. Black pride has been identified as a key factor in explaining the heterogeneity in responses to discrimination. Racial socialization, strategies parents use to promote Black pride and protect youth from discrimination, is an important focus of family-based prevention programs serving African American families. This study tests the efficacy of a culturally tailored preventive intervention for rural African American families to disrupt the negative consequences of discrimination on adolescent psychological functioning. Four waves of data from the Strong African American Families (SAAF) efficacy trial (Murry & Brody in Journal of Marital & Family Therapy 30(3):271-283, 2004) with 667 African American families in rural Georgia were used for this study. Structural equation modeling was used to test study hypotheses. Adolescent experiences with discrimination at age 15 predicted concurrent psychological functioning and multiple risk behaviors at age 16, including sexual risk behavior, substance use problems, academic failure, and juvenile justice involvement. Mediation analyses demonstrated that psychological functioning was a significant mediator of these relations. The SAAF program was associated with increases in racial socialization, which in turn fostered gains in adolescent Black pride. Black pride was indirectly associated with reduced risk behavior through adolescent psychological functioning, but Black pride did not moderate the effect of discrimination on psychological functioning. This study confirms that family-based prevention can support African American adolescent mental health in the context of discrimination. However, more emphasis on reducing exposure to discrimination is needed.

Troubled waters: Barriers to preparation for bias conversations across racially/ethnically diverse families

AbstractBackgroundParent–child racial‐ethnic socialization conversations are an important tool to cultivate a sense of pride and equip youth to deal with discrimination. However, conversations about preparation for racial bias can be particularly difficult for parents to deliver effectively. Little research has been done that illuminates the types of challenges parents within and across racial‐ethnic groups experience with this task. The current qualitative study addresses this gap.DesignThe study draws on focus group data collected from parents and children from African American, Chinese American, Mexican American, and Indian American (South Asian) families (N = 138 individuals; 30 focus groups). Coding was done by a racially and ethnically diverse research team using inductive thematic analysis (Braun &amp; Clarke, 2006).ResultsYouth and parents reflected on barriers to having effective preparation for bias conversations, including (a) parents' uncertainty in approaching the conversations; (b) tensions in identifying, understanding, and decoding racial discrimination; and (c) generational differences between parents and youth.ConclusionThemes are unpacked from a social learning perspective, approaching the barriers from a person‐based, context‐based, and behavior‐based point of view. Unique and similar experiences across the racial‐ethnic groups were noted, including perspectives from U.S.‐born and immigrant parents.ImplicationsThe authors share implications for racial‐ethnic socialization intervention strategies with parents are shared.

COVID-19 and crisis communication among African American households.

African American (AA) families are disproportionately burdened by COVID-19 resulting in morbidity and death. How pandemic risks and impacts are communicated to parents and in turn translated to children can have implications for familial mental wellbeing. Because culture shapes how information is received, processed, and utilized, there is need to understand how AA parents' experiences of COVID-19 information sharing and perceived vulnerabilities influenced communication with their children. Data was collected through semistructured in-depth telephone interviews conducted among 11 African American households with school aged child (5 to 17 years). Line-byline coding and thematic analysis were used to deduce meaning from professionally transcribed data. Preliminary Findings: Four themes on trust in information sources, risk perceptions, attitudes to prevention methods, and parent-child risk communication emerged. Although participants felt challenged by their inherent vulnerabilities and communicating COVID-19 risks at an appropriate comprehension level to their children, they leaned into cultural safety nets such as "the dinner table" to encourage conversation and foster resilience. Understanding how African American families with children were impacted by COVID-19 and how adequate crisis communication can help mitigate adverse health consequences, strengthen recovery, foster resilience, and promote family and community healing is important. Clinicians and therapists who work with AA families should be sensitive to their social vulnerability and culturally responsive to AA family systems when communicating about public health emergencies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South

Brandi Clay Brimmer's Claiming Union Widowhood examines how African American military widows fought to receive federal pensions in the decades after the American Civil War. In her deeply researched and persuasively argued book, Brimmer offers a grassroots view of how Black women asserted their claims to citizenship, civil rights, and “worthy widowhood” in the face of persistent racial and sexual prejudice (1).Brimmer builds on the works of historians who have documented how the Civil War pension system foreshadowed the social welfare programs of the twentieth century. Originating in 1862, with substantial revisions in 1879 and 1890, the pension system commanded up to 45 percent of the federal budget at its apex. Although popular with Union veterans, the pension remained politically contentious throughout the late nineteenth century. As Brimmer notes, though, the federal pension system was not designed with emancipated African Americans in mind. Denied access to legal marriage in slavery, Black widows faced challenges documenting and legitimizing their marital relationships. They also often lacked access to the kind of medical records necessary to document their husband's war wounds. Moreover, Black conceptions of marriage and family did not always fit into the Pension Bureau's narrow definitions. Brimmer argues that African Americans saw marriage as a hallmark of freedom and key component of their claims to citizenship, yet also continued to embrace a malleable understanding of marriage and family, shaped by the brutality of slavery and by the need to mitigate the impact of poverty in freedom. The federal pension provided only very modest payments, but for poor widows, they offered a necessary lifeline.Brimmer's study draws on a close reading of thirteen hundred pension files from Craven County, North Carolina. Occupied by Union forces under Ambrose Burnside in 1862, the city of New Bern and the adjacent community of James City (which grew out of a wartime refugee camp) became sites of intense Black politics and community activism during and after the Civil War. During Reconstruction, it was the epicenter of the “Black Second” congressional district, which elected four African Americans to seven terms until a violent white supremacist campaign in 1898 intimidated and disenfranchised most Black voters. This political and social community provides an important backdrop for the Brimmer's examination of Black military widows.Brimmer's approach allows for the experience of a few individual Black women to come into focus. Using their pension records and other records, Brimmer illuminates the lives of Charlotte Banks, Mary Lee, Louisa Powers, and Fanny Whitney. These women (and dozens others like them) struggled to persuade pension bureaucrats about the legitimacy of their claims and their worthiness to receive modest pension payments. To help them navigate the complex bureaucracy, Black women in New Bern turned to a pair of pension professionals, Edward W. Carpenter and Frederick C. Douglass. Carpenter, a white lawyer, and Douglass, the son of a US Colored Troops widow, helped them craft applications to meet the Pension Bureau's requirements and file appeals when their applicants were denied or their pensions withdrawn. Brimmer emphasizes the role of the broader community in the pension process: friends, neighbors, and veterans provided important testimony to document the widows’ family relationships, their husbands’ military service, and their worthiness for a pension.Black widows faced constant threats that their pensions would be taken away. Fears that the system would be abused dominated the political conversation over the federal pension throughout its history, and Black pensioners faced more than their fair share of fraud accusations. Brimmer documents extensive surveillance of Black women in New Bern by pension agents. If they remarried, had children after the death of their soldier husband, or engaged in behavior that the Pension Bureau officials deemed immoral, they risked losing their pension. Black military widows fought vigorously to preserve their pensions, turning to the broader community to support their claims.In the book's conclusion, Brimmer provocatively draws connections between the struggles of Black women to secure pensions in the late nineteenth century and those faced by military widows and welfare rights activists in the twentieth century. She argues that persistent “racialized gender inequalities and class biases that stigmatized black women” have shaped federal policy and limited Black women's civil rights and citizenship (213).Claiming Union Widowhood is an important contribution that speaks to several significant historiographical conversations. Historians interested in the long history of emancipation, the African American family, the Black military experience, and Civil War veterans would benefit from reading this excellent study. It sheds new light on the relationship between race, gender, and poverty in Reconstruction and afterward that should inspire future research.

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Fatherhood and Changing Patterns in the Roles of Black Fathers

The Afro-American writers of the slavery- era like Harriet Jacobs, Douglass, etc reflect the absence of the black males as fathers of their children. Over the period in the late 19th and early 20th century, the change in this situation can be noticed in the writings of James Weldon and others. In the modern era, the concept of fatherhood has become uniquely important both in the white and black communities. The increased ratio of divorce, birth from unwed mothers, acceptance of cohabitation, has forced many children to live without their fathers. Though the whole country faces the problem of absent fathers, it is acute in the black communities. Concentrating on how the concept of fatherhood is constructed and why it matters so much now, this paper explores the changing roles that the black fathers play in the families. It primarily focuses on whether their role is present or absent in the everyday life affair. It studies why African American fathers are invisible or absent players from behind. It makes a thematic analysis of the selected texts of three different eras: slavery, post-slavery and modern using by using racism, an African American perspective. The study suggests that the black fathers stay in a supportive network of their families in contrast to the stereotypical fathers. Excavating the reasons for the changing modes of the roles of fatherhood in the African American family structure it recommends the necessity of reducing the gap between fathers and children.

Neighborhood disadvantage is associated with biological aging: Intervention-induced enhancement of couple functioning confers resilience.

The accelerated pace of biological aging predicts mortality and morbidity later in life. The current study examines whether a change in supportive couple functioning buffers accelerated aging associated with stressful community environments among Black Americans who live in rural, Southern, disadvantaged neighborhoods. We examined 348 Black American middle-aged adults assigned randomly to receive the Protecting Strong African American Families (ProSAAF) intervention or a control condition. The program was designed to enhance supportive couple functioning among Black Americans. We used DunedinPoAm to quantify the methylation pace of aging and employed the Area Deprivation Index at the census block group level to measure neighborhood disadvantage. Neighborhood disadvantage was associated with the accelerated pace of aging. Further, participation in ProSAAF enhanced supportive couple functioning, and improvement in couple functioning protected participants from the harmful effects of neighborhood disadvantage on the accelerated pace of aging. These findings supported mediated moderation and suggested that family-based prevention programs that enhance couple support may decrease the erosive effects of neighborhood disadvantage and improve prospects for healthy aging among rural, Southern, Black Americans living in difficult circumstances. This may provide a supplemental strategy for decreasing health disparities due to neighborhood disadvantage by enhancing family systems.

Loss-of-function variants in SAT1 cause X-linked childhood-onset systemic lupus erythematosus

ObjectivesFamilies that contain multiple siblings affected with childhood onset of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) likely have strong genetic predispositions. We performed whole exome sequencing (WES) to identify familial rare risk...

Head Start in Low-Wealth, Rural Communities: Evidence from the Family Life Project

ABSTRACT This study utilized data from the Family Life Project (FLP) to examine Head Start children’s school readiness skills at the end of preschool in comparison to two other care groups: home-based care and other center-based care. The FLP study enrolled a birth-cohort of 1,292 children born in two historically low-wealth, rural regions of the U.S., with oversampling of children from low-wealth families and African American families. Propensity score weighting adjusted for differences in baseline child and family characteristics between the Head Start participants and children in the two alternative care groups. Research Findings: The results indicated that the Head Start group had higher literacy skills at the end of preschool in comparison to the home-based care group (β = 0.36), but no other reliable differences emerged between these groups in school readiness skills. No reliable differences emerged between the Head Start and other center-based care groups in school readiness skills. Practice and Policy: Implications for educational practice and policy were discussed in relation to Head Start programming in rural America, including potential targets for program improvement and strategies for program expansion.

Racial centrality mediates the association between adolescent racial discrimination and adult cigarette smoking outcomes among Black Americans

ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to investigate racial centrality as a mediator of the association between Black adolescents’ racial discrimination experiences and their cigarette use in early adulthood. MethodsThe data were drawn from the Family and Community Health Study, which is a longitudinal study of Black American families that began in 1996. Families with a child in 5th grade who identified as Black or African American were recruited from Iowa and Georgia. At baseline, there were 838 Black American children. Hierarchical regressions and bootstrap tests of the indirect effects were used to investigate whether racial centrality at Wave 5 (mean age = 21.6 years) mediated the association between adolescent discrimination at Waves 1–4 (mean ages = 10.5–18.8 years) and adult cigarette use at wave 6 (mean age = 23.5 years). ResultsBivariate associations indicated racial discrimination was significantly associated positively with racial centrality and adult use of cigarettes. Racial centrality indirectly affected the association between racial discrimination and cigarette use such that greater racial centrality was associated with less cigarette use. Further, racial centrality predicted cessation among those who had smoked. Finally, racial centrality was higher among those who never smoked and those who had smoked and quit, relative to those who currently smoke. ConclusionsThese findings suggest that having strong Black racial centrality is a mediator that reduces the risk of cigarette use among young adults who experience racial discrimination in adolescence. In addition, racial centrality also predicts smoking cessation among young Black Americans who smoke. Translational implications of these findings are discussed.

Leyendo Beloved de Toni Morrison en Salvage the Bones y Sing, Unburied, Sing de Jesmyn Ward

Drawing on Harold Bloom’s concept of factility or the unavoidable influence of texts that run through the cultural legacy of the African diaspora, this article examines the intertextual relationship between Morrison’s Beloved and Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. In Salvage the Bones, Ward engages with Beloved to retell the myth of Medea and to rethink black motherhood to keep on interrogating questions of self-definition and the sense of community aiming to offer a more nuanced understanding of black women’s reality under sundry layers of oppression. In Sing, Unburied, Sing Ward rereads Beloved to plunge into the importance of diasporic memory and its role in fostering familial bonds and healing. This is done by using the Morrisonian trope of the familial ghost(s) with the resulting traumatic wounds to exemplify the manifold ways in which collective memory has historically kept communities of African Americans together. This intertextual exercise exposes the way in which Ward’s novels continue to examine Morrison’s account of the violent legacy of slavery and its new practices on African American families and communities from past to present.

A Recurrent ADPRHL1 Germline Mutation Activates PARP1 and Confers Prostate Cancer Risk in African American Families.

This study highlights a potential strategy for ADPRHL1 mutation detection in prostate cancer-risk assessment and a potential therapeutic application for individuals with prostate cancer in AA families.