Barbara Manning Professor Thelma P.

Rich SOWK 209 07 February 2012

A Strengths Perspective on Black Families: Then and Now What period of black family would I choose?

As individuals within these communities, I would choose to live in a traditional period. African Americans today have been determined with a social location that is defined by our gender, race, social class, age, ability, religion, sexual orientation, and geographic location. Each of these locations is the basis for a status hierarchy, where certain positions seem to have relatively greater influence and greater power than others. Families learn to anticipate the needs and wants of others. They learn that achievement is a means to gain recognition not only in the outside world but also in the in a strengths perspective. On a strengths perspective more individual should learn more about their heritage and where their roots started from. These adults many times enter the helping professions to continue their caretaking role. Personally they are locked in a cycle of feeling unworthy and inadequate no matter how much they perform, which leads to exhaustion and burnout. Their personal search is approval and appreciation. Family members can begin their own recovery and get back into enjoying the world around them. The time now is to rise up and take back humanity which had been stripped away by the white slave traders. The call to justice, the call to right the wrongs in society, the call to action against an evil oppressor, are reminiscent of the Hebrew prophets for too long we have been the

oppressed of the oppressors. They take us and put us as drivers one over the other, and make us afflict each other as bad as they themselves afflict us and to crown the whole of this catalogue of cruelties. They tell us that we the blacks are an inferior race of beings incapable of selfgovernment we would be injurious to society and ourselves today.