An excerpt from the Root -
How My Playcousin Stopped a Mass Shooting and Disproved the Myth about Good Guys With Guns
By Michael Harriot
To understand this story, you must first know the hierarchy of the Black family tree. There are black people across this country who have blood relatives they don’t know about, including sisters, brothers and sometimes parents. Ranking higher than any DNA-based relationship is the earned honorific of “playcousin.” A playcousin is a defacto sibling. It is more family member than actual family.
When I was growing up, my mother’s best friend had four children. She was as much my aunt as any of my mother’s sisters. Her husband was one of the scant few in-house fathers in my neighborhood, and he was a hulking figure of a man who still calls me “professor.” Like my family, they had three girls and only one of their children was a boy. His name was Heyward Jackson, Jr. but in most black neighborhoods, birth names are as malleable as DNA and often give way to nicknames.
We call him “Junie Poonie.”
https://www.theroot.com/how-my-playcousin-stopped-a-mass-shooting-and-disproved-1823669955
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