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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The racism of this would be so easy for even them to see if there were professors praising the benefits of family – or even just objectively reporting them – while also going out of their way to make the case that it is an advantage of whiteness. The white supremacy of today’s ‘antiracism’ is another great irony of the age.
“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.”
..and so it is! It has built the world as we know it, and alternatives have been tried and failed against it.
Adopting any other culture that we know of will be a step backwards. Trying some new culture will just be a gamble.
I guess they’ve never talked to anyone who had sociopath siblings, or other similar ‘fun family privileges’.
That “…invisible and unacknowledged” knife cuts both ways. Fools.
The relevant question becomes how often does it cut one way vs the other. The evidence as studied by various economists, most notably Bryan Caplan and Thomas Sowell is that, in the overwhelming majority of instances, marriage, monogamy and stable family units provide better socioeconomic outcomes for children than the obverse.
Of course, when society fails to provide a child a good family, we try to pick up the pieces. We fund foster families, food programs and schools. Despite the taxes that go to pay the ticket of the absent, shiftless or dysfunctional parents, many children fail to make full use of the curative programs. If they want to sit around and cry about the outcomes, I suppose they can. It isn’t going to help them, and most rational folks who had decent parents aren’t going to feel guilty about having decent parents.
There are two family privileges, and they are both strokes of luck, but one is less defensible than the other.
The privilege of having two parents who love each other and love you is a definitely stroke of luck. And you can’t really stop people from getting divorced or from changing or from not liking each other as well 15 years into the relationship as they did in the beginning. Adults have rights as well, including to be human beings and to get upset at their partners for stuff that they did. And of course there are some percentage of abusive parents too, which is terrible and which society should do everything it can to protect children from, but which ultimately presents some issues beyond societal control (especially if you respect some notion of family privacy). In any event, there’d, unfortunately, still be child abusers in the leftist utopia world where the village takes care of the child.
So we understand that part, and that’s really an aspect of “life is unfair”.
But there’s another form of family privilege that is more insidious, which is the fact that the wealthier and more powerful families can use their clout to get their underwhelming offspring ahead in life. And that’s really, really bad. For instance, one way or another, there should be a stigma and perhaps punishment imposed on otherwise selective universities who abandon their selectivity to let celebrities and their children, and the children of big donors, in through their doors. Nepotism is really bad and should be thought of as unearned privilege and condemned and stigmatized, not thought of as the “natural desire of a parent to see their kids get ahead”. There should be serious inheritance taxes, especially on large estates. Obviously, again, society is not going to eliminate all of the powers that rich parents have to get their less talented children ahead in life, but we ought to do a lot more than we do now to make this sort of thing more difficult, because, among other things, the result of it is that the children of rich people are able to get into institutions that more talented, less privileged children are excluded from, and society loses access to some of the talents of those more talented kids as a result.
Putting aside the extremely small cohort of “wealthier and more powerful families using their clout to get their underwhelming offspring ahead in life,” the sort of delusional conspiracy theory that self-indulgent people on the left pretend is some sort of serious threat to humanity and equity, your argument is nothing more than you don’t like them and so they it’s unfair that parents help their children, just like all other decent parents only better because they have more resources.
And this is “really, really bad” because you, whoever you are, say so? Who the fuck do you think pays for those sweet, sweet libraries that the “more talented, less privileged children” get to use for free?
There’s nothing inherently evil about being wealthy or virtuous about being poor. That you suffer from such social justice delusions doesn’t change that.
Nobody’s saying being wealthy is evil. But if you want to effectively utilize your talent pool, nepotism, pulling strings to get people into school, preferences for big donors and celebrities, etc., are bad because they are forms of significant inefficiency. These people take up slots which could go to smarter, more talented people without the familial connections.
Which would you rather your favorite football team do- hire the best players available at each position, or grant a preference to the star quarterback’s brother?
A football team has eleven players on the field. Harvard can squeeze in a few extra chairs for the handful of undeserving idiot children of those parents wealthy enough to buy their kid a slot with a new building. This is not a good analogy.
Harvard and other selective universities aggressively limit their entering class sizes. It may not be 11 people, but it’s small and it hasn’t increased as population has increased. So we are talking about a pretty scarce resource that is being misallocated here.
So your beef has nothing to do with families (the subject of the post) or with wealth (even though you argue for an inheritance tax to wipe out generational wealth for no reason other than you personally don’t like it), but with elite colleges allowing rich people to buy their way in, a thing that happens incredibly rarely except in your fertile imagination of bad things to be outraged about, to take the seats of the deserving but parentless urchins. Thanks for clearing up.
Now I no longer give a shit and wonder why I wasted a second of my life replying to such idiocy.
I’m not sure urchins need be parentless, since this took a deep dive down the rabbit hole.
FWIW, something like 30 percent of Harvard admittees get in on wealth preferences of some sort. That came out in the affirmative action litigation. So we are talking about a pretty significant number of people.
You’re confusing the legacy admissions rate with wealth.
Three thoughts on your money privilege point.
Far from wealthy myself, but have known fairly well several families who are and their children run the arc of talent from none to amazing. If wealthy people are just people with more money than most but otherwise pretty much like all of us and our families what mechanism, if any, do you propose to allow the unfortunately wealthy and talented to compete on at least a level playing field?
If I were a wealthy man you can bet your last corn dodger that I would buy one of my little darlings into the best college I could afford in a heartbeat. It would be interesting to see a neutral poll of the existence of such an aspiration across various fiscal demographics. If universal, I suppose that the desire to obtain financial success would fall under the category of really, really bad since it produces the opportunity to make such decisions? Most of your argument, especially punitive estate taxes, seems to lean that way.
So Daddy Warbucks builds a wing on say the history building of Snoot Tech and his offspring are welcomed with open arms. Whose children warm the additional seats created beyond the one or two held back for him?
Also, I’m a bit confused. Is it Tuesday?
I’d argue that the opportunity to send your kids to a good school down the road is a big part of the reason to pay the enormous sticker price of American college. So too with passing on an inheritance and the various costs that entails, as opposed to perfect financial management.* It’s not really about the beneficiary, but the will of the person conferring the benefit, which a free society shouldn’t blithely ignore in favor of some planned, utilitarian talent-maximizing scheme.
*”When the check to the undertaker bounces.”
Not an “extremely small” cohort. Not a small cohort. You don’t have to be very much wealthier and more powerful to choose to live in a good school district, to feed your children a decent diet, to have enough free time to read a story to your children before bed. But you do need a reasonable income, say twice the poverty level at a minimum.
On the other side of the coin, it’s all too easy to find yourself just outside of the legal protections given to families. For example, parental rights in same sex marriages are sufficiently poorly respected that family law practitioners triple dot their Is and double cross their Ts to be sure their clients don’t have a problem in some unenlightened jurisdiction.
Don’t conflate wealthy people who can buy their idiot children into college with people who live an ordinary middle class lifestyle. Focus.
And what’s wrong with people choosing to live in good school districts? Should they want bad school districts for their kids?
The text you quoted is a slam at the ordinary middle class lifestyle.
I didn’t quote any text. No more sniffing glue before commenting.
phv3773.
On the other side of the coin, it’s all too easy to find yourself just outside of the legal protections given to families.
Preach it brother! Amen!
Even if they are raising the children, grandparents get shit for legal rights. The druggy father and absent mother have too much say in how the children get raised.
DTRN. (Doing That Right Now.)
Do these PhDs have the slightest iota of self awareness or any capacity for self reflection? The idea that a nuclear family is “white privilege” is an astonishing piece of racist tunnel vision that denies Latino, Chinese, South Asian and even Ethiopian culture in favor of a false dichotomy of TV sitcom “white culture” and crime drama “black culture”.
Also why are academics so obsessed with destroying things?
Academic privilege.
They cant build/create anything so they must destroy.
Harrison Bergeron was more prophetic than I ever thought.