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Disclaimer: while I support the BLM movement, I've never personally interacted with it in any meaningful way, so I don't know exactly what they mean by this, to

Disclaimer: while I support the BLM movement, I've never personally interacted with it in any meaningful way, so I don't know exactly what they mean by this, to the extent that they have, in fact, said it. "Dismantling the nuclear family structure" doesn't mean "throw organized families to the wind, let children fend for themselves, force everyone into single-parent households" or anything like that. Like I said in my previous comment, the "nuclear family" is not the norm, it is not a particularly stable or sustainable model for family units, and what we had before, while it certainly also has its flaws, tends to be much better for any family that doesn't completely fit within the happy fairy-tale ideal of two parents who love each other completely, 2.4 kids, and a dog. Through most of human history, "family" has meant either "three generations of blood relations living under one roof, out to aunts/uncles/cousins or even farther, all sharing responsibility for things like child-rearing" or, even more broadly, just "the entire community, made up of a big extended family (with or without blood relations)/tribe/clan." When two parents didn't get along, even if they didn't "divorce" in the way we understand it today, they could still stop being pair-bonded without it significantly affecting the children, because those children were being raised more or less in common with a half-dozen (dozen? score?) others in the much large "family unit", by all the parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc. "Dismantling the nuclear family" doesn't mean breaking it down and sending the component parts off to do their own thing individually. It means removing that very specific and very inflexible structure as our society's only acceptable model of what it means to be a "family," because like many other things that emerged in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, it may be helpful for some people, but it's deeply harmful for many, many others.

zozbot234 5y ago
Unfortunately, the radical left's contempt for the bourgeois nuclear family is only exceeded by their far greater contempt for the traditionalism of extended family structures, which often entails "staying put" for multiple generations in comparatively rural towns and villages - far different from the inner-city concerns of the rest of the BLM movement, and the leftist progressive movement more generally. So, while there's much to say for what you're advocating here, it's not the kind of change that BLM is going to meaningfully pursue.
FFRefresh 5y ago
The question has to be, why is there open hostility to the nuclear family by this and other movements? Why is there a negative statement about it needing to be disrupted/dismantled? Why can't there just be a positive statement about supporting different arrangements where it makes sense? Yes, there are some social norms around the nuclear family in the West, but it isn't a requirement in society. Nobody is stopping anybody from living how they want as far as who you can have in your life or whether extended family/community can support each other. Nobody is not hiring people because their parents are divorced. There IS evidence that growing up with both parents greatly increases the likelihood of success. Does that mean having 2 parents is the only way to live? No, it doesn't. But why be hostile/negative towards something that evidence shows is positive? Why not just be positive towards something else?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > why is there open hostility to the nuclear family by this and other movements? The term, as used in there criticism, refers to the social norm and institutional structures centered on it, not the existence of families that happen to fit the norm.. > But why be hostile/negative towards something that evidence shows is positive? The nuclear family norm is not positive for the community BLM is concerned with, it both stigmatizes what is common in that community (a harm in itself) and idealizes something which evidence shows is harmful for that community (almost certainly more due to present material conditions than inherently, but the reason isn't that important for this purpose.) https://news.umich.edu/more-than-one-third-of-american-kids-have-lived-in-extended-family-households/ https://news.umich.edu/more-than-one-third-of-american-kids-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3172319/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3172319/
  - FFRefresh 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing the links to data/studies. However, I don't think they support the idea that the nuclear family is harmful to african-americans. A few points: 1. Logically, if certain behaviors/social arrangements are common within a community, then they inherently become 'norms' themselves. 2. The study you linked, associates cognitive scores at 2 years old to household structure. I personally don't think using data for 2 year olds is the best measure for determining the impact of household structures on life outcomes/the community. There's also a lot of massaging of the data to produce its final results, which raises a flag for me without further investigation (this does NOT mean anything untoward has happened, just flagging that). 3. All that being said, the study linked shows that the nuclear household is the second best household structure for african-americans (as measured by 2 year old cognitive scores), bested only by also having a grandparent around. Interestingly, grandparents weren't net good in every case. Here's a further quote directly from the study: > Supplemental split models showed that for African American children, living with both grandparents and other adults was associated with a significantly lower cognitive score than living with grandparents or in a nuclear family 4. If that study is the backbone of the idea that the nuclear family is harmful for african-americans, then more attention should be paid to keeping other adults out of the house, and keeping biological parents in the household. 5. Just a word of advisement, as far as American social norms go for sharing data on cognitive scores across different racial groups, there's a strong norm to NOT share the data if it doesn't suggest perfect equality. The study you linked doesn't show perfect equality, so I would just be careful sharing in other environments.

zozbot234 5y ago

Unfortunately, the radical left's contempt for the bourgeois nuclear family is only exceeded by their far greater contempt for the traditionalism of extended family structures, which often entails "staying put" for multiple generations in comparatively rural towns and villages - far different from the inner-city concerns of the rest of the BLM movement, and the leftist progressive movement more generally. So, while there's much to say for what you're advocating here, it's not the kind of change that BLM is going to meaningfully pursue.

FFRefresh 5y ago

The question has to be, why is there open hostility to the nuclear family by this and other movements? Why is there a negative statement about it needing to be disrupted/dismantled? Why can't there just be a positive statement about supporting different arrangements where it makes sense? Yes, there are some social norms around the nuclear family in the West, but it isn't a requirement in society. Nobody is stopping anybody from living how they want as far as who you can have in your life or whether extended family/community can support each other. Nobody is not hiring people because their parents are divorced. There IS evidence that growing up with both parents greatly increases the likelihood of success. Does that mean having 2 parents is the only way to live? No, it doesn't. But why be hostile/negative towards something that evidence shows is positive? Why not just be positive towards something else?

dragonwriter 5y ago
> why is there open hostility to the nuclear family by this and other movements? The term, as used in there criticism, refers to the social norm and institutional structures centered on it, not the existence of families that happen to fit the norm.. > But why be hostile/negative towards something that evidence shows is positive? The nuclear family norm is not positive for the community BLM is concerned with, it both stigmatizes what is common in that community (a harm in itself) and idealizes something which evidence shows is harmful for that community (almost certainly more due to present material conditions than inherently, but the reason isn't that important for this purpose.) https://news.umich.edu/more-than-one-third-of-american-kids-have-lived-in-extended-family-households/ https://news.umich.edu/more-than-one-third-of-american-kids-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3172319/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3172319/
- FFRefresh 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing the links to data/studies. However, I don't think they support the idea that the nuclear family is harmful to african-americans. A few points: 1. Logically, if certain behaviors/social arrangements are common within a community, then they inherently become 'norms' themselves. 2. The study you linked, associates cognitive scores at 2 years old to household structure. I personally don't think using data for 2 year olds is the best measure for determining the impact of household structures on life outcomes/the community. There's also a lot of massaging of the data to produce its final results, which raises a flag for me without further investigation (this does NOT mean anything untoward has happened, just flagging that). 3. All that being said, the study linked shows that the nuclear household is the second best household structure for african-americans (as measured by 2 year old cognitive scores), bested only by also having a grandparent around. Interestingly, grandparents weren't net good in every case. Here's a further quote directly from the study: > Supplemental split models showed that for African American children, living with both grandparents and other adults was associated with a significantly lower cognitive score than living with grandparents or in a nuclear family 4. If that study is the backbone of the idea that the nuclear family is harmful for african-americans, then more attention should be paid to keeping other adults out of the house, and keeping biological parents in the household. 5. Just a word of advisement, as far as American social norms go for sharing data on cognitive scores across different racial groups, there's a strong norm to NOT share the data if it doesn't suggest perfect equality. The study you linked doesn't show perfect equality, so I would just be careful sharing in other environments.