Another language shift for you: I’ve used broken in this chapter because it’s so prevalent, but I don’t love it for the same reason I use enslaved rather than slave. To call it a broken black family makes it seems like the brokenness is somehow normal, just how black families are—when we know by now that the disjoint owes a lot to systemic forces. What if we called them broken-apart families instead? That would put more emphasis on the fact that black families didn’t become fractured all on their own.
