Through authors research she was able to replace the shame, ignorance, and confusion that surrounded my heritage with pride, knowledge, and understanding.
2 concepts helpful in this process: 1. telling of one’s story as a way of restorying the past and constructing a coherent narrative. 2. concept of “societal projection process” – an expansion of his concept of the family projection process to the level of society. The dominant group in society may stabilize itself, relieving tension and anxiety for itself through the presence of a victim group, which it views as weak and less competent.
1. nonexistence of African Americans in larger society
2. nullification of the black male. father was always omitted during and after slavery.
3. vulnerability of slaves to dev. of a fused identity of enslavement process, and poor self-differentiation.
4. vulnerability of African Americans to emotional cutoff due to their inability to claim the White part of their lineage and the absence of the White fathers.
5. Vulnerability of African Americans to the negative stereotypes of their masters, developing a negative identity by internalizing, or passive aggression, or oppositional behavior.
6. Vulnerability to responding to the pain of oppression by sealing off the pain, not talking about it, not asking, not trying to understand it.
7. The tendency for a behavior I have labeled “not knowing” to become one’s essential learning style.
What to do to find freedom from racist ideology
1. Find a sense of continuity for a grater sense of clarity and confidence about who I am and where I came from.
2. Label complexities, contradictions, and gaps for the family and to reveal secrets to have a reversed sense of disconnectedness, ignorance, and not knowing.
3. Identify mythes, misconceptions, and distortions that have reinforced both my own and others’ “stuckness” in the family process to get out of paradoxical positions.
4. Undo the emotional cutoff form my extended family that was the result of poverty, racism, and shame.

ch 10 The Discovery of my Multicultural Identity
autobiography of authors life of growing up in a foster home.

Ch 12 Voluntary Childlessness and Motherhood
Cultural and societal messages told me that I could not depend on a Black man and that single Black mother-headed families were pathological. Family shame about out of wedlock children and family beliefs that children keep women from succeeding and trapped in bad marriages frightened me.
Author choosing not to have children out of stigma of how it will define her and her child.
The loss of marriage and/or the compounded loss of marriage and motherhood for Black women are ignored, reframed, minimized, and pathologized.
The experience of childlessness is often on about which women are silenced.
Internalizing childlessness, some may react to perceived resentment of their unworthy freedom by overemphasizing male qualities of achievement and autonomy.
Rethinking motherhood: childlessness seems to threaten the patriarchal social order. Collectivistic cultures promote “other mother” – ex: mother a niece or nephew.
Research found prolonged psychological distress is linked to involuntary childlessness and not to voluntary childlessness.
Conventional values emphasizing biological motherhood tend to create a hierarchy of womanhood without attending to issues of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and other social inequities.

Ch 14 Going Home: Orphan’s journey from Chicago to Poland and Back
Simpson interviewed adults who grew up in orphanages, many were furtive about their past as if they had been in reform schools, and were unable to rid themselves of the feeling that they were somehow responsible for having been institutionalized.

MINORITY/MAJORITY
Ch 23 Latinas in the US
Latinas adapt to mainstream American culture in flux. There is a process of selective adaptation, becoming American only to the extent that it feels safe.
Therapeutic interventions to help Latinas build bridges that connect the two worlds and to provide a safe place from which to choose what to keep from the old culture and what to take from the new. The goal is to encourage transformation and liberation of the spirit by validating personal strengths, maintaining family connections, and