ABSTRACT
For growing away from addiction, self-recovery is an idea most people know best from programs that focus on helping people break addictions, usually to substances. In contemporary black life, disenabling addictions have become a dangerous threat to our survival as a people. Still many black people refuse to take addiction seriously, or if we accept the harm to individual and community that addictions cause, we may refuse to take seriously what it means to create an environment where people can recover. Increasingly, books about addiction are emphasizing that ours is a culture of addiction. Addiction is not an abnormality in our society. He believes black people cannot collectively experience recovery if we continue to deny the experience of addiction. The chapter explores the ways by which the societal construction of black women as 'mammies' and caretakers, makes the likely candidates for the role of co-dependent, enabling those around us to maintain addiction.
