The Nuclear Family Takes a Hit
Black Lives Matter has put a spotlight on the seemingly tangential issue of the “nuclear family.” Perhaps it’s because of Conservative media attacks on single-parent households in the Black community that’s provoked a strong reaction. For example, Bill O’Reilly, when he was on Fox News, routinely linked crime in Black neighborhoods to absentee fathers.
Much of what we hear from Black Lives Matter or informal treatises on Critical Race Theory reads like a rebuttal to Right-wing criticism of the Black community: poor outcomes are proof of systemic racism, not what the racists assert, goes the rebuttal. Black assaults on Asian-Americans actually reflect an “internalization” of White Supremacy is another rebuttal.
Yet it’s the attack on the nuclear family that is most bewildering to me. This, too, could be a rebuttal, a rhetorical tactic to fend off attacks from the Right. Yet, African American mothers are twice as likely to be unmarried as are White women, and about 65 percent of Black children lived in single-parent homes as of 2018. The rate is even higher in the poorest inner-city homes.
Here’s an excerpt from a position paper put out by the Black Lives Matter Global Network I found:
“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.”
I don’t know if that statement is aspirational, or if it reflects nostalgia for a real or imagined past. Certainly, Black Lives Matter, while no monolith, is not alone in downplaying the nuclear family. A woman doesn’t have to be married to give birth and raise a child on her own, and a gay couple should have the same rights to adopt as any other couple. But these beliefs are now relatively mainstream – why the continued assault on marriage and the nuclear family?
I remember the time that The Indianapolis Star, at my request, hosted a journalism class from northern Indiana while I was still at the paper. At one point the professor took me aside and boasted that in his class the word “marriage” was banned so as not to “privilege” one family structure over another. I recall asking him if any other words signifying this or that particular family structure were banned – no, only “marriage,” he acknowledged.
I’m equally confused by critics who argue that the “nuclear family” is not even the norm in human history, but that somehow it is the invention of bourgeois liberal society, which itself is linked to the rise of Capitalism. (This analysis is more au courant than you might realize – with the rise of Capitalism men would have to leave the home and abandon their wives and children during the day, which tied mothers to their apron strings. The critical thinker here will surely understand that the critique, however streamlined here, must assume that the nuclear family pre-existed the rise of Capitalism.)
As for going really far back in history, sure, my ancestors (and yours) probably did live in a hunter-gatherer society where anyone’s children may have been everyone’s children (so, no nuclear family there), or they may have been part of a tribe where the Headman had his pick of women, maybe many at one time.
So, let’s concede that the nuclear family was not universal in human history. Nonetheless, look around the world today, and look back in Europe for hundreds of years, and the nuclear family was, and is, a widespread model. Although China has a history of extended family structures, the nuclear family is the dominant model today in what is the most populous country on Earth.
The existence of multi-generational homes sometimes is offered as proof that there is nothing natural or sacrosanct about nuclear families, but that’s an argument that undermines itself. In parts of the Middle East, for example, many a married son will build an addition to his father’s house and settle there with his bride. I’d argue that’s less of a threat to the nuclear family than an extension of the nuclear model, a very tight knit one at that.
Intriguingly, one of the main arguments against mass incarceration in America is that it takes too many fathers out of the home, particularly in Black and Brown communities, yet it is some of the most radical Black activists today that say the nuclear family is bunko. Ditto for the argument against separating migrant families at the border – it breaks up families. The argument either for or against a nuclear family begins to look tactical at this point, something you say whenever it is useful to your cause either to deflect criticism or to gain support.
I remember the controversy between former Vice President Dan Quayle and actress Candice Bergen, whose television character “Murphy Brown” famously adopted a child as a single parent. Quayle criticized the television program for promoting single mothers and Brown pushed back, a highly publicized spat at the time. Yet less reported was that the two ultimately reached an understanding – it was single teenage moms that troubled them both. Bergen was not knocking the nuclear family and Quayle was not saying it was the only model.
But that was 30-odd years ago. Today, even some moderate Conservatives agree, at least in part, with this assault on family and marriage. I was surprised to learn that David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic last year, called the nuclear family “a mistake,” but not surprised that the accompanying graphic showed a nuclear Black family.