Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome, the Patriarchal Nuclear Family Structure, and African American Male-Female Relationships.

African American marriages and relationships have strived to model the white patriarchal nuclear family model, but the experiences of slavery and contemporary structural racism have prevented the attainment of this model. Posttraumatic slave syndrome offers a framework that allows social workers to place African American experiences within a trauma-informed perspective and think about their implication for trauma-specific interventions. This article provides a brief overview of the traumatic experiences of African Americans as they relate to African American relationships, integrates the historical experiences of African Americans into a trauma-informed perspective to help social workers recognize the manifestations of trauma in African American relationships, and discusses implications for trauma-specific interventions to strengthen African American relationships.

How Policy Improves Health.

A discussion of health equity should be intricately examined in policy and practice discourse about the healthcare industry. This article addresses health equity with strategies to institutionalize it through policy implementation. This discourse is relevant to social work because social workers are charged with elucidating conditions that are maniacal and disadvantageous to racial groups, undocumented workers, immigrants and women. Social workers engaged in policy practice should consider how these stakeholders are excluded from health equity, because of the lack of transformative policy implementation that addresses industry practices that encourage disparity and maintain equity. This article hopes to provide a helpful view of health equity.

Ideological schisms about HIV/AIDS helping systems in the African American community, with an emphasis on women.

This article is an initial exploration about the impact of ideological beliefs on helping services in the African American community. Newly infected HIV/AIDS cases place African Americans at 45% of such new cases, with African American women becoming infected at a rate 18 times that of Whites. Yet, helping services that are organic to African American women should be stronger through a discussion of cultural beliefs held in the community, where the genesis of helping services exists. Values and beliefs should be at the center of community partnerships, public media strategies, generalist-practice curricula in macro-level systems, and creating more space for relationship dialogue between African American men and women, which includes gender and racial distortions. Given the exponentially high numbers of HIV/AIDS cases in the African American community, a more earnest examination of values and beliefs is warranted.