Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Source: Journal of Childhood Studies
Author: Suad Ahmed
Institution: York University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7225587636