LaShawnDa Pittman

LaShawnDa Pittman is an associate professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the Joff Hanauer Honors Professor in Western Civilization and has an appointment in the Department of Sociology. Caring has profoundly shaped Pittman’s life. Her maternal extended family cared deeply about her teenage mother and her children, buffering them from the poverty they came of age in. Their love and care made it possible for love, joy, wisdom, traditions, humility, and survival to take root and grow in her. A perfect storm of events in graduate school led her to write a dissertation on how Black grandmothers raising their grandchildren in skipped-generation households (consisting only of grandparents and grandchildren) coped with all that raising another generation entailed. Her loved ones were not surprised by the focus of her dissertation-turned-book, Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First Century Story of Love, Coercion, and Survival, given her “old soul” and love for elders.

During her time as a Story Fellow, she plans to write about grandparent caregivers’ experiences of the social safety net, the impact of grandparent caregiving on caregivers’ health, and the aging experiences of marginalized populations. Many of the grandmothers that she has interviewed question how our government can give a stranger more money to raise their grandchildren through the foster care system than they will to them when they decide to raise them. Pittman will write about the needs and resources it takes for Black grandmothers to step in to raise their grandchildren, and how they are getting by as already scant public resources are cut.