By Trish B, Prize winning journalist
For generations, the black family has been the basis of strength, existence and inheritance in front of unimaginable adversity. Through slavery, isolation, large -scale dislocation and economic exclusion, black families have found ways to catch each other, to believe, for identity, and for hope. But today, we are looking at a slow pace. Not because of an external force, but a convergence of quiet killers – the evidence, social, emotional and spiritual – who are quietly out of our homes.
We are carrying generations of pain in our DNA. From PTSD to slavery and gym Crowe, black men and women in daily micro-aggression and racial fights faced to live simply to survive. But we rarely name it. We rarely treat it. Because somewhere with the line, we were taught that therapy was weakness, this vulnerability was not safe, and this prayer would fix it alone.
According to the Department of US Health and Human Services, one of the only three black Americans who need mental health care actually receive it. The stigma goes deep. We say “I’m good” when we are breaking. We tell boys not to cry and expect women to take all this. This silence is a reproduction of depression, resentment, emotional abuse and generational dysfunction.
It is difficult to put in your family when you are salary for Pachek. It is difficult to create a legacy when you are just trying to survive. According to the Brookings Institution, due to decades of redlying, veg interval, and lack of access to capital, black families have only one-tenth part of white families. Financial stress fractures relationships. This argument, silent sorrow, and ultimately distance – especially distance in houses where love is expected to survive on hope alone.
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We glorify the piece, but many of us are grinding in the grave. No life insurance. No savings. No estate planning. We leave our children to start from scratch. And in many homes, women are forced into both the provider and nutritional roles, while outrage is made in silence.
It is not about the defect. It is about truth. Seventy-two percent of black children are born in single-mother-father homes-a figure that is often armed against us, but rarely detected with compassion and depth. It is not only about absence. It is about broken relationships, cycles of mistrust and failure of community support that were filled in intervals once.
Many men were not shown how to lead or love, and many women were taught that freedom was more secure than vulnerability. So we are preserved. Disconnected. Are afraid of each other’s needs. Once the partnership is surviving on the opposite edges of the battlefield.
Instagram is teaching us more about relationships than our elders. Filters are feeding false fantasies of wealth, love and success – and our people are silently suffering behind the screen. Marriage is ending because they “do not look” like doubles goals. Friendship is being closed. And the family’s time is lost to scroll, compare and show off.
We are more connected to strangers than our brothers and sisters. More invested in followers than family. And when the Internet calms down, do our homes – because we never learned how to sit in peace with each other.
Our ancestors prayed through whipping, war and water hoses. But today, trust has become a facility. We are doing churches but not committed. We know the scriptures but not forgiveness. We worship publicly but fight privately. And for many families, God is no longer the center – he is an emergency contact.
Without spiritual discipline, the house becomes a war zone. There is no standard, no peace, no compass. And when you remove the source, the structure begins to be uprooted.
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We do not talk about this enough that jealousy is separating families. How ego is silenceing reconciliation. How women are going away from each other in pain, and men are more competing than connecting. Kali unity is being threatened not only by the system with self-torrent.
We have forgotten how to cover each other. How to call each other, not just call each other out. And when the community dies, the family soon follows.
We need truth. We need treatment. We need Jesus and Therapy. We need a father to return home – not only physically, but emotionally. We need to allow mothers to relax. We need love again as a discipline, not as a feeling. We need to remember that our elders did not march, fast, and simply fight we can succeed – but so we can be fulfilled.
Our families are not disposables. Our children are not experiments. We do not have marriage display pieces. Today is killing black families, what was done only to us. This is what we are allowing to continue.
But what is killing us is not to define us. We can fix. We can rebuild. We can miss. Because the same blood that forms states outside of nothing, still runs through us. And our families deserve to live – not only in history books – but in strength, in happiness, and really.
