For this Eaton family, the Fire did not arrive on neutral ground

By Zella Knight, especially for CalMatters

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By the time my parents made their home in Altadena, they had already survived the Jim Crow South. They carried with them the understanding that for black families, safety, ownership, and opportunity were never guaranteed.

Home ownership was not just a personal achievement for them; it was an act of repair. It was a way to claim dignity in a country that had long denied black families the right to build, maintain, and transmit stability.

Our home stood for decades. It hosts birthdays and celebrations of life, holidays and ordinary moments of care. It was a gathering place for family and neighbors, a refuge from a world that still too often devalued Black and Brown life. It was to be an inheritance—a rare form of generational wealth in a nation where black families have been systematically excluded from wealth-building opportunities.

Then came the Ethan fire. In a single catastrophic event, the house was destroyed.

The most devastating loss was not material. My younger brother who lived there was traumatized during the eviction and later died. His life and the future my parents worked to provide for him and his siblings were taken away from us.

Disasters are often described as equalizers. Fires, floods and wind make no difference. But this framing ignores history. It ignores how racial injustice shapes vulnerability, loss, and recovery long before disaster strikes.

For black and brown families, disaster does not arrive on neutral ground.

Property loss in black and brown communities was never accidental. From redlining and racial covenants, gentrification and discriminatory lending, insurance practices and disaster recovery systems, black home ownership is constantly undermined.

When a fire destroys a black family’s home, it compounds generations of dispossession. What is being lost is not just structure, but capital built up over decades in a system that has never made it easy. What disappears are irreplaceable records of survival, photographs, documents, heirlooms and, all too often, lives.

The weight of previous losses

Grief in black families is rarely solitary. It’s piling up. It carries the weight of past losses that have never been fully mourned because survival requires moving forward.

The fire reopened wounds my parents carried from the South — the constant knowledge that even when you do everything “right,” safety can still be taken.

This is why intergenerational healing is not an abstract or academic concept. For families like mine, it’s a necessity. Healing begins with telling the truth—pointing out how racism compounds the disaster, how black families are more likely to be underinsured, displaced for longer periods, and offered fewer resources to rebuild. It also requires refusing to privatize grief when it comes to systemic failures.

My parents believed deeply in community because community was how they survived Jim Crow. This belief carried us through the aftermath of the fire.

Neighbors, friends, acquaintances, strangers showed up not just with condolences, but with care. This relational support is a form of wealth that is rarely recognized in political discussions, but is often the difference between despair and survival.

However, community resilience cannot replace institutional accountability.

If racial justice is to mean more than rhetoric, it must be about what disasters reveal. Why Are Black Families More Likely to Lose Generational Wealth in Crashes? Why is recovery slower and more bureaucratic for communities shaped by historical disinvestment? Why are families expected to be infinitely “sustainable” without repair?

Intergenerational healing requires policy responses that acknowledge history. This requires equitable disaster relief, fair insurance practices, protection of inherited property, culturally competent mental health services, and reimagining programs so they don’t displace families from the communities they helped build.

Eaton Fire took home. The exodus took lives and shattered dreams. But they didn’t erase the legacy my parents built—a commitment to dignity, community, and truth.

Intergenerational healing is not forgetting what has been taken. It’s about refusing to allow that loss to be normalized.

If we want a future where black and brown families can truly build and transmit stability, racial justice must extend to how we prepare for, respond to, and recover from disaster. Anything less ensures that fires like ours will continue to burn for generations.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.