Vibes, Not Budgets: How Performative Care Fails Black Elders and Their Mental Health

Stop telling me you care about older adults or Black history when your budget says otherwise.

Whenever I'm searching for resources for our elders, I find websites that read, “We center ‘successful aging’ and ‘aging in place,’” but most places will not put a budget behind their wellness, safety, or joy.

This year marks 100 years of Black History Month observances, born from Carter G. Woodson’s vision that Black people must remake our past in order to make our future. A century later, organizations flood timelines with “we honor our ancestors” graphics and polished posts about resilience and legacy. Yet we are consistently neglecting the people who are living Black history in real time, Black elders who have survived segregation, displacement, medical racism, and policy violence, and are now told there is nothing left for them but a brochure, a flyer, and a waitlist. Too many Black elders live with untreated depression, anxiety, and race related stress that our systems continually ignore.

A for profit primary care practice serving older adults in a predominantly Black neighborhood reached out to me for a meeting about elder mental health. They told me, without flinching, that about 70 percent of their older adults had unmet mental health needs, mirroring what we know about high levels of psychological distress and unmet care among Black adults. In the next sentence, they asked me to bring five therapists for three hours, for free, with a budget of zero dollars. No stipend, no honorarium, no transportation, no consultation fee. Just vibes and charity.

That is not care. That is extraction. That is “we need you to fix this data point for our population, but we will not adjust our financial priorities to make sure our elders actually receive dignified, sustained care.” You cannot claim to care about older adults when the line item for their mental health is 0 dollars.

To all the folks cranking out performative Black History Month posts, do you even care about older adults, about our living Black history, the grandmothers raising third generations, the elders holding the stories, the ones whose bodies carry the receipts of every policy we pretend is “in the past”? Because your budgets, your staffing plans, your investment in accessibility, your program designs, and your “partnerships” tell the truth your captions will not, you do not.

Nana’s Circle is a community based nonprofit that supports and empowers elder caregivers, especially grandparents and other relatives age 55+ who are raising children under 18. We now have more than 42 older adults raising more than 100 kids between them. Just like Carter G. Woodson’s vision, we must invest in our past in order to build a strong future.

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