Is it cheating to have a family? Loving and supportive parents? After all, not everyone has one. In some cases, it’s a product of misfortune, a parent lost to disease or accident. In other cases, it’s a parent’s poor choices that give rise to their not being nuclear. And sometimes, the parent is there, but not very good at it and possibly really bad at parenting. So if you had good parents, a good and caring family, have you enjoyed a privilege that should be stripped from you to even the score in the name of equity?
Like White privilege, family privilege is an unacknowledged and unearned benefit instantiated in U.S. laws, policies, and practices and bestowed upon traditional or “standard” nuclear families to the disadvantage of non-traditional configured family systems (e.g., sole-parent families, unmarried committed partners rearing children together, grandparents raising grandchildren). Family privilege is defined as the benefits, often invisible and unacknowledged, that one receives by belonging to family systems long upheld in society as superior to all others. It serves to advantage certain family forms over others and is typically bestowed upon White, traditional nuclear families.
Family privilege is a structural mechanism “hidden” within our White supremacist society that creates systemic barriers to equal opportunity and justice for all families.
The contradiction in there, that a traditional family is both a real privilege and a phony construct “long upheld in society as superior to all others,” as if it’s just another white supremacist myth, is a minor sticking point. It’s true that the law favors the traditional family in a great many ways, from banal tax benefits to the spousal testimonial prohibition. The government has established its preference for the traditional family and has provided incentives to facilitate it and perpetuate it.
Have you ever wondered why a divorce requires a judge to approve? What business is it of the government, the courts, whether you remain married? It’s because the state wants the breakup of marriage, the cornerstone of the traditional family, to be difficult and limited only to those causes it deems worthy. It wants people to stay married. It anticipates, in the normal course of events, that a married couple will have children, and it wants those childen to have a family. It wants those children to enjoy the “family privilege.”
But then, is it not better to raise children in a loving family, whether that family is the traditional one as understood to be between a man and woman or a gay couple? Is there anything wrong with non-traditional families, from single parent to multiple adults, whether in a stable relationship or floating in and out of a child’s life?
These are all fair questions, although it is unlikely any honest answers will be found as long as the questions are laden with politics that preclude an answer in the negative. But in the meantime, there is a strain of social justice that attacks the traditional nuclear family as something to be “dismantled.”
Interestingly, one year ago Black Lives Matter took down a section of its website which had criticized traditional families.
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the site read.
The crux of this tenet was to destigmatize black non-traditional families, whether because fathers were in prison or baby mamas didn’t know their names, even though there is no reason to assume that black families are any less inclined to be traditional than white families, or that the benefits of having a loving and supportive family don’t inure to black children the same as white.
But if every child doesn’t get the benefit of a loving and supportive family, the unearned hidden structure of white supremacy as the two academics argue, is the solution to dismantle the nuclear family for the “privileged many” or to further incentivize and promote this benefit for all?
That having a good family is a benefit to children (and not merely some white supremacist myth) seems overwhelmingly clear. And not having such a family is a detriment that a child, who didn’t deserve to be denied a caring family, must overcome. Then the only rational answer is to do what we can to help every child to have a good family rather than “dismantle” what best serves a child’s interests because not everyone has one.
H/T Wesley Yang
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