also received Social Security and Disability, the government subsidies and babysitting revenue wasn’t always enough. I recall families owing money to Mom and Mary for babysitting their kids, just as Mom and Mary owed the local drug and grocery stores. When their Social Security checks arrived, Mom would have us kids pay various bills across town.
Mom, me, and Mary in Wilkinsburg
Still, I never felt poor, at least not until I went to Allegheny College, a private liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania ninety minutes north of Pittsburgh, where so many of my peers owned their own cars and had bank accounts that always seemed to have money in them. In comparison, my grandfather “Twenty” gave me $50 and a “Good luck!” when he dropped me off at the steps of my dorm. And I couldn’t have had a happier upbringing—at least, not until that day when Uncle Hotsy and Dot made me realize that my belonging was conditional and that, in their eyes, I belonged in foster care.
Insecurities about not belonging never quite go away. I couldn’t ignore the bell Hotsy rang. The belief that I had to fight to be included followed me to college and all the colleges where I ever worked, from my first, humble job as a camp counselor, helping the children of migrant workers, to the boardrooms of the Brookings Institution, where my cushy office has a nice view and my name is garnished with a flashy title. Yet I haven’t outgrown my roots: I work in a unit of Brookings dedicated to making sure our economic growth includes all racial and ethnic groups. And over the weekends, I write a weekly column for the education website the Hechinger Report about how race impacts education.
But my sense of (in)security in where I live and work does not completely stem from unresolved family issues. In my office, which overlooks a main drag of one of the wealthiest areas of Washington, D.C., I constantly read insulting and infantilizing research and commentary about how Black people cause their own poverty by not getting married or by having too many children. For those writers, family planning strictly means that low-income women must figure out how to not have children. I look over my shoulder as I read these articles, thinking, “Is the researcher talking about me and my upbringing?” Well—yeah.
Privileged eyes constantly remove their gaze from root causes of social and economic despair to myopically perceive positive family adaptations as dysfunction or as causing poverty. You’d think people intuitively would know that Black people don’t deliberately choose their family arrangements so they will be worse off. To be clear, we shape and create family configurations to protect children and adults. I don’t think Karen, who had four children before her twenty-third birthday, could have overcome the obstacles she faced early in life to become a social worker if Mom hadn’t taken in her three boys. In Black communities, it’s fairly common to have women plan family based on a more expansive understanding of what a family is. A lack of opportunities for Black men and women demands innovation, creativity, and more options for family—not fewer.
The fact that many of my friends grew up with one female breadwinner doesn’t mean Black people don’t want to be married or that Black men are unwilling to work. Instead, maternal caregivers stepped into the breach when an economy that didn’t pay women fairly, denied Black men and women job opportunities, and criminalized labor in the underground economy made it harder to form nuclear family units—if they wanted to do so. But those aren’t the stories you read in much of the research on Black communities that ends up recommending changes in individual behaviors rather than endorsing anti-racism policy. Theorists who posited that poverty was mainly about individual choices produced the foundational studies undergirding family planning research. First popularized in the 1960s by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, culture of poverty theories argued that low-income people share inherent characteristics and values that keep them impoverished. Thus, children who grow up in poor communities fall victim to the decisions of their parents, replicating the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Subsequently, low-income mothers were—are—rendered culpable for putting their children in poverty. Culture of poverty theories manifest themselves in a seemingly constant focus on how Black folk aren’t living up to White norms instead of probing how to dismantle systems that privilege White people at Black people’s expense. I now know that my existence is a manifestation of Black women’s resistance against the criminalization of poverty and the devaluing of Black lives. For me, family planning research has mostly been a thinly veiled negative reinforcement campaign that attempts to punish Black people for poverty we didn’t create.
Since 1965, when Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, better known as the Moynihan Report, researchers and journalists have continued framing poverty mainly as a function of individual choices—that is, mothers form families that put children in harm’s way. Moynihan also offered a robust structural analysis of the economic and social conditions that help shape Black family structures. However, he set a dangerous example by identifying the main problem as Black people not living up to White middle-class ideals. This is a mold that researchers of Black people and cities willfully maintain to this day. One of the major goals of this book is to show that there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve.
What Hotsy and some researchers called a no-parent home I called family. I had multiple mothers, guardians, and father figures whose love didn’t fit in a neat little nuclear family structure. In that Hill Avenue home, I learned to read, write, share, love, and accept others who didn’t share my genes. Mom regularly said, “I took you from the hospital, and you were born into love.” It was her way of making the single Black mother debate irrelevant for me.
Still, my struggles with Hotsy, Dot, and Patrick Moynihan are with me and manifested in my work on Black-majority cities.
In the U.S. context, we, as researchers and as residents, are bombarded with studies that project how bad Black families, students, and residents are compared to an assumed White norm. Researchers rarely ask these analytic questions: What is good about Black families? Where are the assets of Black communities? According to the research nonprofit the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, “Assets provide the tangible resources that help individuals move out of and stay out of poverty.”2 Assets include the material and nonmaterial, such as physical property, federal treasury notes, cash, stocks, bonds, brand names, savings, copyrights, and more. Assets are the physical, nonphysical, and behavioral resources that can be exchanged for quality of life improvements. People are the most important asset of all. My upbringing was an asset.
Our relentless pursuit of disparities between Black and White people often omits the policies that were designed to devalue Black assets. Those omissions help foster a sense of superiority among Whites while minimizing financial and social privileges gained from not acknowledging root policy causes of disparities.
As a way of moving toward research frameworks that look for assets in Black communities, I spoke with several of my Black colleagues who grew up in Black-majority places. I asked them two basic questions: “What are the benefits to living in a Black-majority city?” and, “Why do so many of us choose to stay in them?”
One of my peers, the Brookings fellow Makada Henry-Nickie, responded, “Home feels safe.” She leaned back, sprouting a smile that spoke of relief and comfort, and added, “I don’t have to explain myself.” However, much of the research that is motivated to bring about equity or fairness amounts to making a case of why we should belong.
Though Henry-Nickie currently lives in Washington, D.C., home for Henry-Nickie is the Black-majority island country of Trinidad and Tobago. She acknowledges that being a Black woman and an immigrant from a Black-majority country gives her a particular appreciation of Black-majority cities in the United States. Henry-Nickie is a researcher who works with data every day. She, like many Black immigrants, feels the collateral damage of negative expectations, stereotypes, and assumptions she didn’t grow up with but now has to
