Reimagining Care for Black Children, Youth, and Families

This book review engages We Were Not Built to Break by Beverly-Jean M. Daniel, to critically examine the historic, political, structural, and affective conditions shaping the everyday lives of Black children, Black youth, and Black families in Canada. Daniel’s book offers a comprehensive intervention into the dominant service-based frameworks that exist in Canada to expose how anti-Blackness operates across institutions while proposing alternative strengths-based and racially affirming models of care. This review situates We Were Not Built to Break within broader conversations within contemporary childhood studies to explore its contributions to rethinking childhood beyond developmentalist, Euro-Western paradigms that privilege white innocence. I aim to showcase that this text not only diagnoses systemic harms from the historic, political, structural, and affective dimensions but actively invites practitioners and scholars alike to reimagine relational, ethical, and political engagements with Black childhoods.