KENNETH FOX, W. LADSON HINTON and SUE LEVKOFF TAKE UP THE CAREGIVER’S BURDEN: STORIES OF CARE FOR URBAN AFRICAN AMERICAN ELDERS WITH DEMENTIA ABSTRACT. This pilot study uses an anthropological gaze to analyze transcripts of extended in-home interviews among a set of ten caregivers of African-American elders with dementia. How are race and ethnicity made to matter in the recognition of, the meaning-making around and the responses to dementing illness among a sample of African-American caregivers? The essay contrasts prevailing cultural representations of African-American caregiver burden with caregiver interview data. What we find is that cur- rent constructs which consistently demonstrate “lesser burden” among African-American caregivers compared with Whites may not adequately capture these caregivers’ experi- ences. Interpretations of experiences, meanings of “burden” and the logic of symptoms in the illness narratives generated by these African-American caregivers of elders with dementia require attention to the embodiment of large scale sociopolitical and historical forces like residential, educational and occupational segregation, institutional racism, and economic exploitation over the life course. INTRODUCTION This essay is an analytical review of transcripts of extended in-home interviews with a sample of ten caregivers of non-institutionalized African- American elders with dementia. We aim to interpret a set of retrospective accounts of illness and caregiving experience with one central question in mind: How are race and ethnicity 1 made to matter in the recognition of, the meaning-making around, and the responses to dementing illnesses among a sample of self-identified African-American caregivers? This essay also contrasts prevailing representations found in some social gerontology writing about African-American caregivers with our qualitative data. 2 The descriptive features of this report aim to contribute to what is known about how some African-Americans make sense of both dementing illness among the elderly and the experience of caregiving for an afflicted relative. These caregiver accounts will not reveal sets of behavioral determinants or become the raw data for multivariate models of caregiver stress or burden. Rather, this paper explores in a small sample of African-American caregivers in Boston, the meaningful relations between their experiences of and positions within everyday local social worlds and Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 23: 501–529, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.