Black Families Research Articles

Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker

Reviewed by: Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Benton-Walker, Terry J. Blood Debts. Tor Teen, 2023 [416p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250825926 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781250825933 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 Still reeling from their father’s sudden death, twins Clement and Cristina Trudeau are actually relieved to discover their ailing mother has been hexed—at least after they remove the spell, they can nurse her back to health. More troubling, however, is the likelihood that their entire family is the target of some nefarious plan, and in a New Orleans scarred by battling magical families, struggles between magic users and nonmagical people, and continued racial oppression of Black families, such as Clement and Cristina’s, the suspect list of who might be responsible is long. The estranged siblings must come together to track down clues and figure out if their recent tragedies have anything to do with a decades-old event that led to the lynching of their grandparents and the displacement of the Trudeaus from New Orleans’ magical Generational Council. Soapy melodrama and overwrought exposition unfortunately eclipse what is an otherwise fascinating world ruled by complicated magic and even more complicated people. Narration shifts between Clem and Cris, both grieving a personal loss as they navigate the traumatic secrets of both their family and community history cloaked in secrets; while both siblings are sympathetic, they tend to get mired in self-pity, stalling the narrative and muddying their voices. More successful are the third-person chapters focused on the power struggle among the magical and nonmagical groups in the city and how the past informs the current toxic dynamics. A final showdown between an army of undead and the queenly villain brings some much-needed action, and readers can hope that the cliffhanger ending will lead to a sequel that more fully explores the world and its forces for good and ill. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

An Evaluation of the Implementation of the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Farmers Market Nutrition Program at Four Chicago WIC Sites

The Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP), a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides coupons to individuals/families enrolled in the Special Supplemental Nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to purchase fresh produce from approved farmers markets. While some studies suggest FMNP may improve nutrition for WIC clients, there is limited research on program implementation in practice. A mixed-methods equitable evaluation framework was utilized to: (1) better understand the FMNP in practice at four WIC clinics on Chicago's west and southwest sides that serve predominately Black and Latinx families; (2) detail facilitators and barriers to participation in the FMNP; and (3) describe the potential impact on nutrition. In this manuscript, we present qualitative findings from Aim 1. We identified six steps for how the FMNP has been implemented in our study setting and opportunities to improve the implementation of the program. Findings suggest that well-defined and consistent guidelines on: (1) how to seek state approval for farmers markets; and (2) coupon distribution and redemption, are necessary to optimize utilization. Future research should explore the impact of newly offered electronic coupons on redemption rates and fresh fruit and vegetable purchasing behaviors.

The Role of Work as a Social Determinant of Health in Mother's Own Milk Feeding Decisions for Preterm Infants: A State of the Science Review.

In the United States, 10% of infants are born preterm (PT; <37 weeks gestational age) each year and are at higher risk of complications compared to full term infants. The burden of PT birth is borne disproportionately by Black versus non-Black families, with Black mothers significantly more likely to give birth to a PT infant. One proven strategy to improve short- and long-term health outcomes in PT infants is to feed mother's own milk (MOM; breast milk from the mother). However, mothers must make decisions about work and MOM provision following PT birth, and more time spent in paid work may reduce time spent in unpaid activities, including MOM provision. Non-Black PT infants are substantially more likely than Black PT infants to receive MOM during the birth hospitalization, and this disparity is likely to be influenced by the complex decisions mothers of PT infants make about allocating their time between paid and unpaid work. Work is a social determinant of health that provides a source of income and health insurance coverage, and at the same time, has been shown to create disparities through poorer job quality, lower earnings, and more precarious employment in racial and ethnic minority populations. However, little is known about the relationship between work and disparities in MOM provision by mothers of PT infants. This State of the Science review synthesizes the literature on paid and unpaid work and MOM provision, including: (1) the complex decisions that mothers of PT infants make about returning to work, (2) racial and ethnic disparities in paid and unpaid workloads of mothers, and (3) the relationship between components of job quality and duration of MOM provision. Important gaps in the literature and opportunities for future research are summarized, including the generalizability of findings to other countries.

Paths to Equity: Parents in partnership with UCEDDs fostering Black family advocacy for children on the autism spectrum

Paths to Equity: Parents in partnership with UCEDDs fostering Black family advocacy for children on the autism spectrum

Perceptions of grief reactions in family members of incarcerated individuals: A vignette-based experiment

We examined perceptions of individuals grieving the loss of a family member to incarceration. Participants (N = 1095) were randomized to a vignette that varied by race-ethnicity, crime type, and grief trajectory to assess their perceptions. Results indicated: (1) participants perceived prolonged grief as less appropriate than resilience; (2) Black family members grieving someone who committed a violent crime as more appropriate compared to White family members; and (3) women endorsed both grief trajectories as more appropriate and indicated greater comfort supporting the family member. Lastly, participants indicated prolonged, White and Latinx grievers should seek therapy more than resilient or Black individuals.

“We Should All Be Welcome:” A Discourse Analysis of Religious Coping for Black Parents Raising Autistic Children

Disability for Black families raising autistic children is often inseparable from religious identity and experience. Black parents raising autistic children may rely on their religion to create meaning and seek guidance, but they may also experience unmet support needs from their religious congregations. In this study we analyzed group session transcripts and written responses using Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis to highlight the voices of seven Black parents raising autistic children in the context of a parent advocacy program. We aimed to understand the micro-, meso-, and macro-level processes that maintain stigma and barriers to communal coping. Implications for religious leaders and future research are noted.

Publicly housed Black mothers' experiences of structural racism in their everyday lives

AbstractObjectiveDrawing upon critical race and feminist theories, the objective of this qualitative study was to understand, through Black mothers' narratives, how structural racism operates within a public housing system located on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.BackgroundStructural racism has been identified as a root cause of racialized housing segregation, concentrated poverty, and health inequity—factors that disproportionately affect Black mother‐headed families living in public housing. Yet, more research is needed to delineate the underlying mechanisms of structural racism at play in public housing systems.MethodUsing a community‐based participatory action research (CBPAR) approach, the research team partnered with public housing residents and staff of a non‐profit organization to guide the study. From 2017 to 2019, community partners co‐developed the research protocol, recruited participants for in‐depth interviews (N = 15), and assisted with data analysis, interpretation, and local dissemination of findings.ResultsBlack mothers' narratives depicted in detail the structural manifestations of racism perpetuated in public housing systems, including: (a) systemic neglect; (b) economic oppression; (c) eviction threat; and (d) community surveillance. Findings suggest that structural racism is enacted and enforced by many dispersed agents of power, including street‐level bureaucrats (e.g., caseworkers and maintenance workers) and White and wealthier neighbors.ConclusionCritical perspectives and community‐driven research approaches can deepen understanding of how structural racism and institutional power relations operate to reproduce Black family marginalization within complex social systems like public housing. Directions for future research are discussed.

The impact of being Black while living with a chronic condition: Inpatient perspectives.

The impact of being Black while living with a chronic condition: Inpatient perspectives.

What Black Mothers with Preterm Infants Want for Their Mental Health Care: A Qualitative Study.

"I think that some culturally sensitive mental health information could have been provided": What Black mothers with preterm infants want for their mental health care: A qualitative study. In the United States, preterm birth (PTB) rates in Black women are 50% higher than in non-Hispanic White and Hispanic mothers. Existing discriminatory sociohistorical and contemporary health care practices have been linked to the alarmingly higher rates of PTB among Black families. While it is well-known that PTB is associated with increased mental health (MH) problems, Black women experience elevated MH burdens due to inequities along the care continuum in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Consequently, culturally responsive MH care holds promises to achieve maternal MH equity. This study aimed to explore the available MH services and resources in the NICU for Black mothers with preterm infants. We also sought to discover potential recommendations and strategies for MH programs through a cultural lens. Semistructured interviews were conducted with Black mothers with preterm infants using a Grounded Theory approach embedded in the Black feminist theory. Eleven mothers who gave birth to a preterm infant between 2008 and 2021 participated in this study. Eight women reported not receiving MH services or resources in the NICU. Interestingly, of the three mothers who received MH referrals/services, two did so one-year postbirth and did not utilize the services. Three main themes emerged: stress and the NICU experience, coping mechanisms, and culturally appropriate MH care with diverse providers are needed. Overall, our finds suggest that MH care is not prioritized in the NICU. Black mothers with preterm infants encounter numerous negative and stressful experiences that exacerbate their MH during and beyond the NICU. However, MH services in the NICU and follow-up services are scarce. Mothers in this study endorsed creating culturally appropriate MH programs that addresses their unique intersections.

Featured Poet Kiki Petrosino: “The Red Earth of Terra”

Featured Poet Kiki Petrosino: “The Red Earth of Terra”

Love Is Loud: How Diane Nash Led the Civil Rights Movement by Sandra Neil Wallace

Reviewed by: Love Is Loud: How Diane Nash Led the Civil Rights Movement by Sandra Neil Wallace Adam McConville Wallace, Sandra Neil Love Is Loud: How Diane Nash Led the Civil Rights Movement; illus. by Bryan Collier. Wiseman/Simon, 2023 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781534451032 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781534451049 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 3-5 Born into a loving Black family on Chicago’s South Side in 1938, Diane Nash moved south to Tennessee for college and saw first-hand the effects of segregation in her grandmother’s home state. There she was inspired to nonviolent protest, leading sit-ins and marches to successfully integrate Nashville’s lunch counters by age twenty-one, and she quickly took on larger causes, coordinating Freedom Rides to Mississippi and organizing student protests, despite bombings, attacks, and her own arrest. Though Wallace notes Nash’s absence on the literal national stage during the 1963 March on Washington, she clearly conveys Nash’s impact in both the civil rights movement and, later, in protests of the Vietnam War. Masterful second-person describes Nash’s life, with stirring internal rhyme that makes the prose read like poetry, as capitalized key words hone in on her emotional state: “CONFIDENT, COMPASSIONATE. Before class in a church each day, you and a group of students pray and learn about change in a peaceful way.” Collier’s collage and watercolor art unfortunately doesn’t match the highs of the text; compositions largely lack depth, with muted shadows and blurred shading that leave faces and backgrounds flat. The text, fortunately, supports readers throughout, evidenced by the shifting second-person on the final spread as a group of children greets Nash [End Page 204] on a speaking tour of the United States. This would pair well with Weatherford’s recent biography of Bayard Rustin (Song for the Unsung, BCCB 11/22) for a look at lesser-known heroes in the civil rights movement. Back matter includes author and illustrator’s notes, a thorough timeline of Nash’s life, selected resources for further research, and quote sources. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The role of values in enhancing longevity among indigenous black South African family businesses

Background: Values play a fundamental role in the longevity of family businesses. However, not fully understanding these roles threatens their long-term survival. Given their potentially large numbers and subsequent ability to reduce unemployment and poverty, it is critical that black-owned South African businesses achieve entrepreneurial success. While much research exists on family business values in a Western and European context, research on family business values in an indigenous black South African (IBSA) context is nonexistent.Aim: The aim of this research is to determine the role that family business values play in enhancing the longevity of IBSA family businesses.Setting: The study focused on IBSA family businesses that are independently owned and managed by one or more IBSAs and which are located in various major cities of South Africa.Methods: A qualitative methodological approach following a multiple–case study design was adopted. Semistructured interviews were conducted with several key participants using a combination of face-to-face, telephone and online interviews. The six steps of reflexive thematic analysis were used to analyse the data.Results: Four themes describe the role of family business values in enhancing longevity among the IBSA family businesses. Family business values were found to guide the behaviour of family business members, build the identity of the business-owning families and their businesses and build a sense of community in both the family and the family business. The continuity and success of their family businesses were also attributed to these underlying family business values.Conclusion: Family business founders and/or current leaders should articulate the value set they uphold and use it as a resource to build the identity of both their families and family businesses while moderating the behaviours of family business members.Contribution: The study responds to several research calls to investigate family businesses in African cultural settings and provides practical guidance to scholars, entrepreneurs and practitioners on how family businesses can use values as strategic resources to enhance business longevity and success.

“The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations”: Perceptions of Teacher Expectations Among Black Families in a Suburban School

Building upon literature that has shown that Black students hold definitive beliefs about their teachers’ expectations and knowing these notions have impact on Black student achievement, we explore the experiences within a school district where diversity and inclusion efforts have been ongoing. The participants of this study were high-achieving students and their parents, a nuance that provides depth to understanding Black families’ perceptions of teacher expectations. Critical Race Theory (CRT) served as the theoretical framework and the tenets of permanence of racism, interest convergence, critique of liberalism, and whiteness as property, were employed as categorical themes to centralize the focus on how the families made meaning of their educational experiences through a CRT lens. Findings revealed that the participants were subject to unjust, low expectations that created and maintained a racial hierarchy and an anti-Black ideation on the part of teachers and school authorities. Implications include the need for teachers to raise their awareness of how their actions are interpreted, their role in creating a culture of mistrust, and the need to counter individual level and institutional racialized structures.

Addressing intergenerational trauma in Black families:Trauma-informedsocioculturally attuned family therapy.

Increased attention to the prevalence and impact of traumatic experiences have been highlighted within the mental health field since Felitti et al.'s study of adverse childhood experiences. Black communities experience traumatic events at a higher rate than other racial groups. The phenomena of historical trauma, race-based trauma, and intergenerational trauma have been speculated to be reasons for this discrepancy. In this article, the authors explore factors that compound the traumatic experiences of Black communities, review socioculturally attuned family therapy and trauma-informed care, and propose an approach to addressing intergenerational trauma in Black families that integrates socioculturally attuned family therapy and trauma-informed care.

Screening, Diagnosis, and Intervention for Autism: Experiences of Black and Multiracial Families Seeking Care.

Despite advances in screening and awareness, Black and multiracial families continue to experience challenges when seeking an autism diagnosis for their children. We surveyed 400 Black and multiracial families of young children with autism from an existing research database in the United States about their retrospective diagnostic experiences. We gathered quantitative and qualitative data and engaged in iterative coding to understand timing and content of first concerns, families' experiences of care providers and systems, and the impact of race and culture on accessing care. Families provided examples of early developmental concern and described provider, systemic, and cultural barriers and facilitators to care. Families also provided insight into the influence of culture and made recommendations on how the medical system could better care for Black and multiracial families of children with autism. Results add to a growing body of literature supporting the need for culturally sensitive and accessible care related to developmental monitoring, diagnosis, and follow-up care for Black and multiracial children.

Black and Pregnant in America: A National Health Care Crisis

North Carolina’s maternal mortality rates for Black women are significantly higher than those for White women. To address this alarming health inequity, three nurse-midwives developed a unique program to train and certify Black doulas to attend the births of Black families in the Triangle region.

Structural Competency: A Framework for Racial Justice Intervention in Student Affairs Preparation and Practice

Higher education practices and policies are rooted in racism and imperialism. This causes physical and emotional harm to BIPOC students. Yet, student affairs practitioners and higher education leaders struggle to stay conscious of the relationships between macro structures of oppression and their deleterious educational, economic, health, and social consequences, when it comes time to assess, understand, and intervene in campus crises and racialized violence. Borrowing from the medical field, this paper offers “structural competency” as a framework for student affairs education and practice toward supporting practitioners prepared to mitigate systemic racism and to identify the social determinants of inequity. Structural competency in student affairs means having the capacity to understand and take actions toward addressing the root causes of BIPOC students’ marginalization in historically white campus contexts. It requires deep attention to how these causes—polices, institutional norms, infrastructures, and the hegemonic beliefs embedded in our economic, social, and political systems—interact with students’ lived experiences on campus. Guided by a Critical Race Theory lens, structural competency moves us toward confronting the downstream consequences of upstream decisions such as admissions standards that disenfranchise BIPOC students, or how the federal financial aid formula fails to account for equity in home ownership which disproportionately harms Black families for the benefit of white ones, because of antiblack U.S. policies such as redlining, making college less accessible for BIPOC students. This paper argues that such a structural competency framework and mindset in policy and practice is crucial for higher education leaders confronting systemic institutional policies that have a cumulative and ongoing oppressive impact on BIPOC students.

Toni Morrison’s Politics of Feminist and European Literary Tradition: Discerning Feminist Matricentric Streaks in Morrison’s Work

This research investigates the Morrison’s novels, Sula and The Bluest Eye that how it depicts patriarchal explanation of motherhood in the Afro-American context and observe some Western / European dominant patriarchal literary tradition to explore a thrust of a feminist world view in every wake of life. The article establishes a relation of Toni Morrison’s writings with the feminist perspectives and mothering issues (particularly in black families) that led the change of minds and was highly applauded in European society. &#x0D; The article deals with the Morrison theory on mothering to explore the experiences of black marginalized mothers that were absent in the white European patriarchal narratives on the motherhood. Drawing on Patricia Hills Collin’s concept of Black feminist Motherhood and Andrea O’Reilly’s theories on feminist mothering the study will investigate the impact of Morrison’s works that deconstruct the patriarchal discourse in western writings. Morrison’s novels playing a viable role in liberating mothering experience from suppression to rather intellectual and emotional development. This kind of mothering empowerment became a political and social act. The research follows the narrative approach and techniques of content analysis.

Respecting the Manning Family: Jane Manning James and Her Family in Wilton, Connecticut

Respecting the Manning Family: Jane Manning James and Her Family in Wilton, Connecticut

The Racial Origins of Foster Home Care

AbstractBlack family values and behavior have long been at the center of policy solutions to intergenerational poverty. But in the early twentieth century, the Black family took on paradoxical significance as a solution to child poverty and neglect through the foster family. This was part of a broad realignment in child protection that upheld the “Home” as the best place for children—yet the concept came to mean something different for White and Black youth. Using New York City as a case by which to study broad transformations in child protection ideology and local child welfare response, I find that in the 1930s substitute care underwent a dramatic transformation with many White children cared for in their own homes or in therapeutic institutions, while previously excluded Black youth gained disproportionate access through race-matched foster families. Though a seemingly progressive approach, I argue that the prioritization of the foster home over the biological home illuminates how the family was envisioned as a solution to poverty in the context of racial inequality. Child welfare workers imagined that patterns of placement in race-matched foster families could be manipulated to overcome segregation and exclusion from the emerging welfare state. But as more non-White children entered substitute care, the conditions of poverty and distress in segregated communities necessitated a return to congregate care for “hard-to-place” minority youth as Black families seemingly failed to take care of their own. This case is important because it highlights the way in which official foster care systems emerged not as an extension of Black kinship care strategies, but as an experimental solution to dependency and neglect that mobilized the Black family to resolve the many consequences of state abandonment.