For the African American healing journey, it is essential for cultural strengths that preceded and followed the original injury of enslavement, and consequent racially based trauma, to be recognized and elevated. Historical trauma has offered an important framework for understanding how the structural determinants of health are related to mass group-level subjugation for Indigenous people across generations, with a growing focus on protective factors. Here, we expand the application of the historical trauma framework to African Americans, with a focus on intergenerational healing. This exploratory study examined historical evidence of healing among enslaved people of African ancestry on Southern plantations. Two themes associated with how healing practices and strategies were used by healers and seekers of healing-figuring out what to do and fighting back/resisting-were developed using a thematic analysis of a historical text. A conceptual model is introduced illustrating the intergenerational transmission of healing and well-being across generations of African Americans. Implications for policy, practice, and research are explored. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Social work’s (SW) goal of preparing a workforce more representative of the diversity of people served by the profession requires the use of theories that actively confront long-held assumption of White hegemony. This paper centers the discussion of race for its simultaneous invisibility and its power to transform SW educational spaces in the United States (US) context. An overview of the cultural competence (CC) model, a theoretical framework often used to prepare SW practitioners, is provided with a critique of its avoidance of any analysis of race and racism. The ways in which this “color-blind” approach severely limits the CC model’s ability to both recognize and meet the needs of Black SW students as they navigate their dual-identities as professionals-in-training and members of a racial group who has endured historical oppression are explored. Critical race theory (CRT) is offered as an alternative conceptual framework which centers discussions of race and racism, offering opportunities to both recognize and support the learning needs and experiences of Black SW students. Guidelines for adapting SW curricula and assignments to utilize CRT in ways that support the development of critical analytic skills for SW practice are provided. Global implications for this work beyond the American context are discussed throughout.

Child welfare-affected parents of color (CW-PaoC) are often described using language that is deficit-focused, their families depicted as fragile and living in a near constant state of crisis and need. This commentary challenges the stereotypes created by hyper-attention to these parents’ struggles and situates them, and their families, within the broader context of the American appetite for family separation, wherein specific types of families are targeted for scrutiny, intervention and regulation. The concept of fragility within families is dissected to illustrate the ways in which racism and classism demarcate certain families for separation. Excerpts from two separate interviews conducted with Black mothers in 2014 and 2020 are used to illustrate how the appetite for family separation is currently fed. Familial and cultural strengths that counteract the prevailing deficit-focused narrative of CW-PaoC, particularly Black parents, are discussed. This commentary ends with a call for the dissolution of the CW system in its current regulatory form and the rebuilding of family-centered supports that center familial strengths.