But you're missing an important part there: the "tight-knit" part doesn't just mean "stays together no matter what". It means "genuinely care about each other and work well together."
Yes, a close, loving, supportive family is hugely important, for everyone in it. But a) the nuclear family you're almost certainly thinking about (a married couple and their children) has not been the norm for the vast majority of human history (and certainly wasn't when Confucius was writing), and b) whether you have a nuclear family or not, when one or more of the relationships at the core of your family is dysfunctional and causing significant stress, breaking that relationship apart can be a big improvement for the family as a whole. (In fact, when you don't have a nuclear family, it's much easier and safer to do that, because you're much less likely to be losing half the income in the household, or the only stable adult-to-adult relationship in the household.)
Telling people that it doesn't matter if they divorce and that they should put their own short-term happiness first and foremost is tantamount to denying this. And when it's the liberal upper class doing this, they're pretty much pulling up the ladder to effective social cohesion behind themselves, even as they hypocritically enjoy its benefits while denouncing the horrific plight of those most socially marginalized. The fact that some people in terrible relationships are genuinely better off if they split apart doesn't mean that celebrating divorce as anything other than potentially a lesser evil is a sensible idea.
That's a straw man, though. Nobody relevant is telling people that. You're either not listening to the primary sources and are getting a distorted representation by politically motivated secondary sources, or your own biases are clouding your understanding when you're reading the primary sources.
"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.
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?
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-...
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.
That means that a) there will be very few such families to study (and where you do find larger populations that have non-nuclear family structures, there are likely to be other confounding factors, as they are likely to belong to some particular subculture). This reduces your sample sizes and makes it hard to draw rigorous conclusions based on the data you are able to collect.
But also b) any such families you find will be necessarily marginalized to some extent, because, again, the nuclear family is the norm, and that fundamentally means that those who eschew it will find themselves underrepresented and frequently discriminated against, both overtly and subtly.
That means that outcomes for such families in the real world, today, will be almost guaranteed to be worse than they could be otherwise, because of the exact thing BLM is trying to change (the nuclear-family norm).
Now you are responding to me and saying empiricism cannot be used to support the given sociological position. Did you mean to respond to the poster I was responding to? I did not put forth that study in this thread.
Even given all of that, I strongly disagree with the anti-empiricism notion for this topic and any other related one.
On sample sizes being an issue:
-The US has 330 million people.
-There are 130 million households in the US.
-There are 74 million children in the US.
-35% of children have lived with a relative (i.e. non-nuclear) other than their parent or sibling at some point by age 18 (source: umich link the previous poster posted)
-And when you look beyond the US, the world has a population of 7 billion people
-Needless to say, we don't have a dearth of data to lean on to answer questions such as these
-There's also such a thing called statistical significance, which can be used to display the confidence of a result given the sample size. Studies usually use p=0.05
On the idea that non-majority populations/lifestyles automatically means guaranteed worse outcomes, I do not agree that's a given, and don't accept that it must be the case here. I have seen no causal chain presented yet (that also accounts for the available evidence). A couple counter-examples:
-Non-overweight people are the minority in the US, but their outcomes are much better, even though there are norms around larger/higher caloric meals in the US
-Same-sex couples, a minority, have higher household income than heterosexual couples
Do not misread the above examples as saying there's no discrimination going one way or the other or there being no confounding factors. They are showing that living a minority lifestyle does NOT guarantee worse outcomes. And we shouldn't assume that's the case without evidence for other things.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
The relevant bit:
> 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 imagine this is in response to various conservative proposals over the years to put forth (straight) marriage as a solution to various unrelated societal ills.
I'm not in favor of requiring hiking or certain family structures either. Serious question, is there a requirement for the nuclear family?
Let us not conflate norms and legal requirements. Where I live, there is most certainly a norm around hiking being a really positive thing that you should do, and it's associated with being higher status (local fashion trends even favor looking like you are a hiker). Not everyone is a hiker, and some people don't like hiking. But I'm okay with the norm existing, but would never support a requirement for it.
The answer depends on where you are. It's nowhere as strict as "if you have a child outside a nuclear family, you go to jail". But there may be all sorts of softer pressures in place.
Now, I don't think having such pressures is necessarily bad in all places. It becomes bad when it's a "one solution fits all" approach, and the pressure is applied even in situations where dissolving a traditional nuclear family would be in the participants' (especially the children's) best interests.
Putting myself in the shoes of black folks, I can certainly see how certain conservative initiatives cross that line.
If your position is just a flavor of the 'No true scotsman' fallacy, why even bother?
Why not just come out and say "There can never be a true BLM source! You can never cite an authoritative position from BLM! You cannot cite anything because there are many local chapters, and the movement can exist even independently of that! BLM can never be criticized thusly for any positions! Ha!"
That is your position here, no?
It ignores that THERE IS a central hub for the BLM network. And the website for this is blacklivesmatter.com, which is what I cited. This is the primary website for the BLM org and movement. It is by far, the most heavily trafficked website in the BLM movement. BLM started with the group of people who created the org for which the website serves as the face for. Calling it 'purportedly onboard' the BLM movement is incredibly ignorant of its history. Yes, there is a broader network. But this is the center of that network.
This central hub (which runs blacklivesmatter.com) took in $90 million in donations in 2020. And it then distributed $21.7 million of that to local chapters.
> That is your position here, no?
Not at all. Your core point revolves around me thinking about and using local chapters as a core defense. I didn’t even know that was a thing for all of this.
The comment revolves around various assumption. Pointing to a caricature of an immature left wing person who craves getting one under everyone to the right of them. Like “if you wouldn’t accept any evidence”. I asked because I don’t particularly care much about BLM a specifically because caring about oppressed minorities has always been a core tenant. i knew little about this most famous blm group**. Similarly, I can’t remember the last video feed in the past year I’ve gotten from YouTube that was about BLM from a lefty source. Except for two specifically focused on black issues in America.
** I searched “blm vs black lives matter group”. I see a majority of front page news and other stuff being conservatives foaming out about stuff. As if a lot of the issues and “facts” of BLM centralization are something greatly discussed by all sides. Not just the people upset over it. Now I more likely believe how big this org is. If they get this much attention from center and right leaning media. Not dissimilar to the over exaggeration done by the mostly centrist and neoliberal media of focusing on Trump so much (though definitely including more left wing media a lot too). Still. Not every one on the left or sympathetic to certain issues thinks this way. Nor is every one on the left a smarmy smart ass. People aren’t a monolith.
Same issues with out of touch elites like Biden and Mrs Harris throwing every other struggling person in prison if it benefits them while pretending it is being tough on crime and prevailing justice. Or Pelosi, or the Clinton’s, and oh so many more. Pelosi with her “let me trade investments with possible insider knowledge as possible” heh.
There's little about this claim that's "bizarre", and the OP brings relevant evidence. Celebrating widespread, no-fault divorce and dismissing the importance of household-scale social cohesion is indeed a key part of the current Zeitgeist amongst intellectual, often left-leaning elites.
It's six of one, half a dozen of another. As the Chinese philosopher Confucious was already well aware of, a tight-knit family is the foundation of all other social structures.
> Finally, historically speaking, decrying the next generation as depraved, lost, and needing traditional discipline
Except that it's not merely "the next generation", i.e. youth that's being so described. The ongoing fraying of the social fabric in late-stage modern societies, especially among those most vulnerable to marginalization due to a broad variety of added factors, has been ascertained quite objectively.