Living Archives, Fictive Kin, and Black Family Resilience

Unknown Speaker

Welcome back, everyone. I'm Emily Carter. Today we’re diving into a conversation about the Black Parents and the Intergenerational Family, and what it really means to build legacy through connection.

Jason Miller

And I'm Jason Miller continuing a series on Nurturing Legacy, Love, and Liberation as part of the Parenting While Black recap.

Unknown Speaker

This podcast summarizes a full conversation held as part of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center's Family to Family Real Talk Program in March 2025. That conversation was hosted by Kimya Barden, a parenting scholar and associate professor of Urban Community studies at Northeastern Illinois University Chicago.

Jason Miller

...Kimya was joined by Hassan Daniel and Doctor Dewana Thompson. Hassan is the founder and CEO of the Father Factory, a fatherhood program focusing on parenting, biblical literacy, and counseling for fathers who have experienced childhood trauma. An ordained minister, Hassan is also the author of the faith-based book, Where is the Man of the House?

Unknown Speaker

Dewana is the Director of the National Training Team at the Brazelton Touchpoints Center at Boston Children's Hospital. With over 25 years experience as a trainer, researcher, and educator in the field of family engagement.

Jason Miller

Dewana began with the topic of the intergenerational Black family. How the Black family is steeped in culture, in resilience, in faith and steadfastness. She mentioned her own grandfather, born in 1904 — a descendant of enslaved people. Her kids' great grandfather was a descendant of slaves. That history is not distant. It is two generations away.

Unknown Speaker

And Hassan came at it from a warm, nostalgic place — talking about Sunday dinners, grandmothers with secret recipes, grandfathers teaching the grandkids how to fix a car. He explained the Black family as a range, stating that 'we are not a monolith.'

Jason Miller

The first major theme of the conversation was the historical and sociopolitical context of the Black family. Dewana laid out a history lesson:

Unknown Speaker

She talked about a graduate school project her mentor- the late Dr. Harriet Pipes McAdoo, a pioneering Black family scholar — assigned to her class at Michigan State. Every student had to trace their family roots as far back as they could.

Jason Miller

Dewana emphasized how the white students in the class — Irish roots, Swedish roots, European roots — could trace back to 1618. One student brought in an actual kilt their ancestor wore.

Unknown Speaker

But when the Black students presented? Most could only go back two or three generations. Because enslavement deliberately severed those records, those names, those connections.

Jason Miller

And Dewana connected that historical rupture to specific laws and policies. She talked about AFDC — Aid to Families with Dependent Children — and the so-called "man in the house" rule from the 1930s. Where if a woman was raising children and there was a man in the home, she lost her welfare subsidy. The government literally created a financial incentive for Black fathers to be absent. And then she brought up the Moynihan Report from 1965, which blamed Black families themselves for poverty because of single-parent households — without acknowledging that the system had been engineered to produce that outcome. Flash forward to today, where we often don't connect these laws and policies to the narratives about Black fatherhood and singe-parent households.

Unknown Speaker

Hassan added to this from a personal angle. He talked about his family having about 50 acres of land sitting in probate — and how the legal process to resolve it is so convoluted and inaccessible that land can slip away before families even understand what's happening. He connected this to the broader documented pattern: Black farmers have lost 90% of their farmland since 1900. He said Black families have been shaped by intentional systems — slavery, redlining, mass incarceration — and that restoration has to begin with awareness. But he also made this really sharp distinction between victimhood and victimization. Victimhood, he said, immobilizes you. Victimization is part of your story — not the end of it.

Jason Miller

The second big theme of the conversation was something that felt very personal and very relatable — the role of chosen family, or what researchers call fictive kin. Kimya set it up beautifully: she ran into an older Black woman at a store, and when they parted, her eight-year-old daughter asked, "Who was that?" Kimya said, "That's my play aunt, Cheryl." And her daughter looked at her like... what's a play aunt?

Unknown Speaker

That concept — the play cousin, the play auntie, the neighbor who's basically family — it's deeply embedded in Black culture. And both panelists talked about why that matters.

Jason Miller

Dewana grew up in Jamaica, Queens, but her mother had migrated from Alabama, so her birth family wasn't nearby. She described how mobility — especially that Great Migration north — often scattered families. And without your biological family close, you build one. She created a group called Circle of Friends when she was living somewhere with no family nearby — Black families who wanted to keep their kids connected to their history and to each other. And her son is in college now, and all his friends call her Auntie.

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Hassan concluded this point in one line: "The families we are born into give us our roots. The families we choose give us our strength."

Jason Miller

He also talked about his childhood in the Brownsville projects in Brooklyn — not having his dad in the picture — and how the neighborhood, the block, the older men who would stop and play stickball with the kids for five minutes on their way home from work — that was his village. That was chosen family doing real work.

Unknown Speaker

And he said something that's at the core of what the Father Factory teaches: that Black families will embrace you. His words: "As long as you cool, that's the only requirement. You cool? We cool." You can show up at a Black family reunion as a stranger and leave with a plate and a nickname. Legacy is not just about blood. It's about bonds.

Jason Miller

The third conversation theme was faith and spirituality — and this is where both Hassan and Dewana really caught the spirit. Hassan described faith as doing two things simultaneously: it anchors you, and it disrupts you.

Unknown Speaker

Anchoring you in purpose, in healthy expectations, in community. And disrupting you — pulling you out of self-focus, demanding self-sacrifice. He referenced the psychological concept of rumination — that hyper-focused state of thinking only about yourself — and pointed out that it's closely associated with depression. We are not made, he said, to live in isolation. And then he mentioned COVID — how those two years of isolation have done lasting damage, and how many people are still emotionally and psychologically shut down because of it.

Jason Miller

Dewana came at faith from the lens of the Black church — which she called not just a building but a way of being. She talked about spirituality going all the way back through enslavement as a survival mechanism. How our ancestors could love in spite of the most brutal conditions imaginable. And music. She talked about Negro spirituals, gospel music, the way her grandmother would just hum a hymn when things were heavy. That music was — and still is — a vessel for intergenerational faith.

Unknown Speaker

Dewana said "We know who holds tomorrow. You don't need to know what's coming. You just need to trust who's holding it."

Jason Miller

Her family is heading into their 47th annual reunion this summer. Forty-seven years of gathering, of singing We've Come This Far by Faith. That is legacy. That is tradition made tangible.

Unknown Speaker

The fourth conversation theme was practical strategies — what can Black families actually do to build and preserve legacy? Hassan led with the word intentional. Everything — family reunions, holiday gatherings, everyday moments — needs to be made intentional. Use those times to tell stories. Have elders share history. Let the recipes get passed down.

Jason Miller

He actually described how moved he was at Thanksgiving and Christmas to see the youngest family members now being the ones who cook and bring dishes. Saying "the torch is being passed — and that's a beautiful thing."

Unknown Speaker

He also encouraged families to volunteer together — food banks, community service — because that spirit of mutual aid is in our DNA. He said the first food banks in Black communities had to do with connecting with neighbors. Like when you used to borrow a cup of sugar from the person next door.. And he was passionate about fathers advocating for early childhood education. Reading to babies in the womb. Showing up for Head Start. Making sure the next generation starts connected.

Jason Miller

Dewana's strategies hit differently — she talked about preservation. Videotaping yourself cooking. Her kids literally film her making sweet potatoes so they'll have the recipe when she's gone, because like her grandmother, she doesn't measure anything. She smells it.

Unknown Speaker

She also talked about buying books on black history, preserving oral history, joining or creating gatherings even if your biological family isn't close. And she made the point that it is never too late to start a tradition. You just start it today and tell your kids: this is what we do now.

Jason Miller

She also brought up the role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities in legacy-building. Three generations of her family attended HBCUs. She wants educators and counselors to introduce Black children to that legacy, because the impact is generational.

Unknown Speaker

The last theme was a challenge directed at providers — teachers, clinicians, therapists, social workers — anyone who works with Black families. What do Black families need from the people who serve them?

Jason Miller

Hassan kept it tight and powerful. Honor our culture. Invite our elders. Empower fathers. Send representation that actually understands the true story. Ending on the fact that we are all wounded healers and we need to stay humble.

Unknown Speaker

Dewana went deep on authenticity. She challenged providers to put the elephant in the room — to actually name race, name systemic barriers, and name what families are navigating. She described wishing, as a mother of two young Black men, that a teacher had once just looked her in the eye and said: "I see your son. He is safe here. I will protect him."

Jason Miller

And she pointed to a devastating statistic: Black children make up 18% of the preschool population, but account for 50% of preschool suspensions and expulsions. That’s Half. That is not a coincidence. It is preconceived notions with consequences.

Unknown Speaker

She also talked about the last five years — from George Floyd's murder to the ongoing erasure of Black history in school curriculum — as a preparation for battle. No one can unsee what was seen. And so now everyone — inside and outside the Black community — is making a choice about who they're going to be.

Jason Miller

She ended with this: we've done this generation a disservice by not being fully honest with them about what it took to get here. They need grit. And that grit comes from knowing their history, their faith, their people.

Unknown Speaker

The throughline is this: legacy is an act of resistance. Every family reunion, every recipe written down, every story told, every "yes, you're calling her Auntie" — it is all pushback against a system that tried to sever those connections. Building legacy is not just sentimental. It is political. It is spiritual. It is survival.

Jason Miller

And it is available to anyone willing to be intentional about it. You don't have to have the perfect family. You don't have to have your biological people close. You build community. You show up. You choose your people and you hold on.

Unknown Speaker

Thank you for listening to The Parenting While Black recap.

Jason Miller

To learn more about the Parenting While Black conversation series, follow the link in the episode description on this page. Until next time. Take care, everyone.