For families like mine, the Eaton Fire disaster didn’t arrive on neutral ground

By the time my parents made a home in Altadena, they had already survived the Jim Crow South.  They had carried with them an understanding that for Black families, safety, property and opportunity are never guaranteed.

Homeownership for them was not simply a personal achievement; it was an act of repair.  It was a way of claiming dignity in a country that had long denied Black families the right to build, keep and pass down stability.

Our home stood for decades. It held birthdays and celebrations of life, holidays and ordinary moments of care. It was a gathering place for family and neighbors, a refuge from a world that still too often devalues Black and Brown Life.  It was meant to be an inheritance — a rare form of generational wealth in a nation where Black families have been systematically excluded from wealth-building opportunities.

Then came the Eaton fire. In a single catastrophic event, the house was destroyed.  

The most devastating loss was not material. My younger brother, who lived there, through displacement was traumatized and later died. His life and the future my parents worked to secure for him and his siblings was taken from us.

Disasters are often described as equalizers.  Fires, floods and wind do not discriminate.  But that framing ignores history.  It ignores how racial injustice shapes vulnerability, loss and recovery long before disaster strikes.  

For Black and Brown families, catastrophe does not arrive on neutral ground.

Property loss in Black and Brown communities has never been accidental. From redlining and racial covenants, gentrification and discriminatory lending, insurance practices and disaster recovery systems — Black homeownership has been consistently undermined.

When a fire destroys a Black family’s home, it compounds generations of dispossession. What is lost is not only a structure, but equity built over decades in a system that never made it easy.  What disappears are irreplaceable records of survival, photographs, documents, heirlooms and too often lives.

The weight of earlier losses

Grief in Black families is rarely singular. It accumulates. It carries the weight of earlier losses that were never fully mourned because survival required moving forward.

The fire reopened wounds my parents carried from the South — the persistent knowledge that even when you do everything “right” safety can still be taken.  

This is why intergenerational healing is not an abstract or academic concept. For families like mine, it is a necessity. Healing begins with truthtelling — naming how racism magnifies disaster, how Black families are more likely to be underinsured, displaced for longer periods and offered fewer recovery resources. It also requires refusing to privatize grief when systemic failures are involved.

My parents believed deeply in community because community was how they survived Jim Crow.  That belief carried us through the aftermath of the fire. 

Neighbors, friends, acquaintances, strangers showed up not just with condolences, but with care. That relational support is a form of wealth rarely acknowledged in policy discussions, yet it is often the difference between despair and survival. 

Still, community resilience cannot substitute for institutional responsibility.

If racial justice is to mean more than rhetoric, it must address what disasters reveal. Why are Black families more likely to lose generational wealth in catastrophes?  Why is recovery slower and more bureaucratic for communities shaped by historic disinvestment? Why are families expected to be endlessly “resilient” without repair?

Intergenerational healing requires policy responses that acknowledge history. It requires equitable disaster aid, fair insurance practices, protections for inherited property, culturally competent mental health services and reimagining programs so they don’t displace families from communities they helped build. 

The Eaton Fire took a home. Displacement took a life and shattered dreams. But these did not erase the legacy my parents built — a commitment to dignity, community and truth. 

Intergenerational healing is not forgetting what was taken. It is about refusing to allow that loss to be normalized.

If we want a future where Black and Brown families can truly build and pass down stability, racial justice must extend to how we prepare for, respond to and recover from catastrophe. Anything less ensures that fires like ours will continue to burn through generations.