Family Myth Essay

Why do family myths hold so much power over our individual lives and or family lives? In the Kennon family it holds a lot of power because people they have internalized and hold on to it for truth. One prime example of this is a myth that society has placed on African American people as a whole and one that the Kennon family has internalized and held on to. That myth is the poor black broken family, and as we all know “race is one of the most powerful determinants of a person’s life course, opportunity, and health status.” (Ocampo, 2005, p. 575) for generations the Kennon family has always just assumed, that they would be poor and uneducated, and that was all that was expected of them. When I asked my grandmother about this (Dorris Kennon please see Appendix) she said “it was just the way that we thought growing up, my mother

In the Kennon family it was said that several of the family members were and are hoarders, a prime example that I have seen of this is my grandmother Dorris Kennon, I asked her if she knew that she was a hoarder and she said “yes” and I asked her why, she told me that she “always feels that something is perfectly good and one day she may need that item” I then asked her when she started feeling this way and she said “when I was a kid there was so many of us I always felt like I did not get things so when I would find something I liked I would hold on to it, it started with combs and brushes and later it just became more things, when every my family was looking for something they would ask me first had I seen it and 9 times out of 10 I had it.” (D. Kennon, personal communication, October 07, 2015) I asked her if she felt like our family myth of being a hoarder had anything to do with it and she said she was “unsure, she had never thought about it like that, but several of our family members hoard items the same way.” (D. Kennon, personal communication, October 07,