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Comment by genghisjahn | Hacker News Reader

This is the language from the BLM site regarding disrupting the nuclear family. I'm very pro nuclear family. This didn't seem bad to me.

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We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.

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. -----------------

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A dig at fathers in the first paragraph, and a diplomatically stated rejection of the nuclear family in the second.

You need to be very generous to interpret this as anything other than an attack on the traditional family.

And across all the KPI's we know of - kids in a two parent household are more successful by every measure.

I've encountered people who say that's bad, biased, unfair, etc. - and not that we should encourage more two parent households.

"Some say" doesn't make it so. Two-parent households make children more successful; emotionally, intellectually, and economically.

Does that measure have an inherent bias? Is it like saying kids with parents that tolerate each other are successful? When they don't tolerate, they separate and are not a two parent household anymore and so don't show up in the measure. Maybe it just means kids in peaceful households fare better?

It does. This text picks it apart concisely. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2021/03/01/the-success-...

That text doesn’t actually dismantle anything (and ignores mountains of other evidence) and doesn’t defend its own alternative either. Put simply, if redistribution worked, we’d see poverty rates decrease rather than stagnate or increase.

In contrast, single parent households drastically reduce the chances of success in life along a ton of metrics. Those kids get worse grades, drop out early, suffer learning and mental disorders at a much higher rate, are much more subject to domestic violence, etc. A shocking statistic is that around 85% of people in prison had no significant father figure in their life. This isn’t a one-off statistic either as incarceration rates do seem to track with single mothers over time. It even affects the mothers themselves who report higher rates of mental health issues (this tracks over time and across racial and ethnic groups).

Note: This probably would occur with single fathers too, but fathers are unlikely to be granted custody unless the mother has extreme issues going on and the father has a pristine record in comparison. Likewise, with 90+% of elementary teachers now being women (this wasn’t always true), finding a male role model is more difficult during the early, formative years.

> Put simply, if redistribution worked, we’d see poverty rates decrease rather than stagnate or increase.

That is what we see, in other countries with more robust (and more redistributive) welfare state systems than the US.

Which is why it says they reject the "requirement". No one is denying that a 2 parent home is better.

But if you are a kid that grew up with one parent, we need to have alternatives to help those kids thrive. Harping on the fact that 2 parents are better than 1 does nothing for kids with only one parent (except maybe make them feel defective and disadvantaged).

Who made it a requirement?

They are probably referring to policies or laws or just culture that make it more difficult to thrive if you don't have 2 parents, one male, one female. It's obviously not an actual, literal requirement, hence the quotes.

Yes, if the traditional family implies that the bulk of child rearing falls on mothers and there is little help from the community in that respect.

I don't think this is a very charitable take. To me this statement is about making sure mothers don't have to do all the child-rearing, and coming together as a community to raise children. In any event, I definitely don't buy "tradition" as the sole reason to keep doing something a certain way. I also don't think the tradition you're talking about is nearly as traditional as you think.

The reason I don't interpret it in that innocuous way is because the founders of Black Lives Matter are self-described "trained Marxists" (https://www.city-journal.org/marxist-revolutionaries-black-l...), are follows of the ideologies of various Marxist theorists like Lenin and Mao (https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors...), and therefore know full well that a core tactic of socialist/communist theory is to disrupt the family unit as a way to eliminate private property, increase the collectivist/state-rearing of children (propagandizing), and diminish competing ideologies/culture that can emerge from family structure (https://thefederalist.com/2015/06/29/americans-buy-into-marx...).

That's an amazing inference.

IIRC, The Occupy Movement heavily influenced BLM.

David Graeber talks about the origins of Occupy in The Democracy Project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Democracy_Project

Sure Anarchists like Graeber are adjacent to Socialists, Marxists, and other groups. But Anarchists are for participatory democracy, against government. The left-wing version of libertarians. So Anarchists oppose Socialists, Communists, and Liberals (today's Democrats & Republicans) equally.

I couldn't say if Occupy or BLM are Marxist, Socialist, or whatever. Or since everyone uses their own definitions, what that could possibly mean. Things get nutty when people try to use 100 year old terms to talk about contemporary stuff.

It's on my to do list to find similar write-ups about BLM. Please share if you found any.

> I couldn't say if Occupy or BLM are Marxist, Socialist, or whatever.

You can say, at least regarding the founders of BLM: https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives

"BALL: ...he was concerned or is concerned that there’s a lack of perhaps ideological direction in Black Lives Matter that would allow it to be, to fizzle out in, as he said, in comparison to Occupy Wall Street. As you advance in your own organization, as you all are headed to Cleveland to participate in this Black Lives Movement conference, how do you respond to that particular critique?... CULLORS: Um, I think that the criticism is helpful. I also think that it might–. I think of a lot of things. The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives. And I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don’t believe it’s going to fizzle out. It just gets stronger, and we see it, right. We’ve seen after Sandra Bland. We’re seeing it now with the interruption of the Netroots Nation presidential forum. What I do think, though, is folks–especially folks who have been trained in a particular way want to hear certain things from us, that we’re not sort of framing it in the same ways that maybe another generation have, has. But I think it’s important that people know that we are, the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t just live online, although there’s many people who utilize it online. We’re in a different set of circumstances, a different generation that–social media may feel like it’s diluting the larger ideological frame. But I argue that it’s not. "

Right, and that's straight from Engels' playbook on advancing Marxist agendas. Nuclear families lead to private property, therefore, inveigh against nuclear families. [1]

This is exactly backward for how to elevate poor and minority interests. Strong ("nuclear") families, education (not indoctrination), and _more_ private property from which those families can build security is what's needed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family,_Priv...

> A dig at fathers in the first paragraph

The writers are African-American women. Working has been a feature of most African-American women's lives for the entirety of America. It's not a dig at the fathers, who have historically also been working. The traditional African-American family has typically had two workers. (The "double-shift" is working for someone else, then coming home and doing homemaking. Commonly, the father would be working a second job during the evening hours.)

I think reading this as an attack on the traditional American family is making a lot of assumptions about which families are considered "traditional."

> We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work

That’s not a stab at fathers. It’s a stab at the societal norms that force single mothers to work double shifts just to support their family. They are purporting that this is due to the fact that our society is patriarchal (run by men - which it is). Whether they’re right or wrong it’s not a dig at traditional dads.

They’re attacking the societal norms that a straight cis mom and straight cis dad are the only foundational units for a legitimate family.

We have to separate micro from macro. At micro, there are many succesful families of all kinds. At macro, families where biological parents raise their children are happier, wealthier and safer.

The first sentence is "We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children." That seems very pro traditional family. What is the dig at fathers that you speak of? Is it the women working double shifts thing? If the double shift thing is true, then it's a rightful dig at fathers that should happen. We should do more domestically. If you think there isn't a double shift and that all domestic tasks are shared equally, then I can see it coming across as an unwarranted attack. Personally, I don't.

There is no dig. Just people finding excuses to be offended. Based on the assumption that any thing pro-motherhood is necessarily anti-fatherhood. Good grief.

> traditional family

What's a "traditional family"?

Typically it means children being raised by their biological parents.

So foster kids like me aren't traditional?

No, a foster family is not a traditional family. That's not a value judgement, it's a basic classification. Is there a point to your line of questioning?

I'm trying to figure out why the GP was triggered by some random BLM statement about families.

If I offended you, I'm sorry. The terminology we are using in this context was not invented by me. My only intent with the post was to clarify the definition of the term in question.

That's the point. There will be people who look down on your foster family for not being their idea of "traditional" and therefore inferior.

Increasingly, lots of different kinds of families are being recognized as good, and they're pushing back against people who insist that only one kind of family is acceptable.

It’s calling for a village rather than just nuclear families. But somewhere someone reads this passage and their instincts tell them that traditional families are being attacked.

What is your vision of traditional black family?

Those paragraphs go through great contortions to avoid using the word "father".

Yeah, especially odd that they don't make it into this sentence.

> mothers, parents, and children are comfortable

Well, they said "patriarchal", I am sure that is linguistically related.

That's a vague value statement. But it's meaningless without any concrete solution/proposal presented.

It's easy to agree on platitudes. The disagreement comes when it comes to the implementation.

That's my biggest problem with the BLM movement. The cause sounds great, but I still don't understand the solution. Everything is vague, like "systemic racism". It feels like they are just winding up millions of people into a frenzy, gaining allies to a cause that is to-be-defined. I shudder to think what solutions will finally be presented when everyone is at peak temperature.

Thank you for calling into question my underlying assumption (that media representation of BLM could be taken at face value).

I found this summary of the BLM language online to be pretty fair: https://www.iwf.org/2020/10/01/fact-check-is-it-true-that-bl...

I guess I believe that society functions best with households where a mother figure and a father figure are present and align as a team with the goal of providing for and raising their children. Many circumstances can get in the way of that ideal to be sure. I do see BLM language above calling into question that ideal by labeling it western which is ridiculous.

More fundamentally though it seems the solution to their problem may not be political as much as cultural. Where have the fathers gone? Honestly - where did they go? So many broken relationships, so many men in jail. These are the issues we should be fighting more than anything else _by far_.

We can tackle this in the political arena by looking closely at over-incarceration, but that's only one aspect of the problem. It seems detrimental to the actual "Black Lives Matter" cause to ignore the rest. Of course admitting that your group has a problem isn't exactly protest inducing material, and that is where my cynicism creeps in.

> We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another

A commune? Your child will be raised by the state automatically?

It's hippy-dippy marxist nonsense.

Depends on how far you take it.

"Your kids are on their way to becoming sociopathic gang members, but far be it from me to lift a finger to help you. My kids are fine." Yeah, that's going too far on the individualistic side. Help your neighbors and your community, not just your own family.

"All children will be taken from their parent(s) at birth, and raised exclusively by the community/state." That's too far in the other direction. Take care of your own family first, don't depend on others to do it.

(And if you think I contradict myself: I'm saying take care of your own family, and help others outside it, and (to the extent you can) don't depend on others to do the same for you. Give more than you get. Yes, it's unfair. Don't look at life in a purely selfing manner.)

I can't tell, from the BLM statement, how far they want to go away from a pure no-community, nuclear-family-only position. (I must say, though, that "We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work 'double shifts' so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work" sounds to me like "We're too busy marching in the streets to take care of our own kids, so someone should do that for us".)

You should read the rest of the page, it's quite eye-opening. It's most certainly not an equality movement for black people, it's some sort of leftist intersectional organization. No wonder people extrapolate the meaning of that marketing-language laden sentence.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklive...

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