Home Economics

One often hears that certain minority groups are held back by an inadequate culture, above all by an inadequate family structure. One might say, then, that the most salient problems that face said minority group are “in house” and cannot be adequately addressed on the level of the broader society, on the level of the economy or of employment discrimination, etc. They must set their house in order — by definition, no one on the outside can do that for them.

There are a few problems with such arguments that go beyond the rather obvious, albeit true, claim that this is simply a euphemized racism. The first is that the notion of the family as a realm of “private” responsibility not properly addressable by the broader society is itself produced by the broader society. The second is that the family, far from being a realm autonomous from mere economic conditions, is itself an economic arrangement, and different forms of family life are made possible by shifts of the mode of production. The ideal of the bourgeois nuclear family can only be practiced adequately when certain socio-economic structures are in place. Temporal or geographical distance from such structures, as in the case of previous eras or “ghetto” areas in the present, respectively, prevent individuals from following the ideal. Those who aspire to follow the ideal must escape the conditions that render the ideal unattainable, further compounding the problem in the areas left behind.

This basic pattern is visible within the white population in the United States. So-called “traditional family structures” (i.e., the bourgeois family ideal) are adhered to only in certain upwardly-mobile sectors of the population. The remaining “white trash” tend to live in varying degrees of social chaos, similar to the conditions supposedly reserved for the “culture-poor” minority groups — the Jerry Springer vision of the white underclass here being the equivalent to the stereotypes of the minority ghettos.

More than that, there is a widespread acknowledgment that the goal of the “traditional family” is to produce further members of the upper classes, such that today parents’ lives are widely portrayed as being dominated by their children’s implacable lust for extra-curricular activities, test-prep courses, admissions coaches, etc., all in the service of admission to the elite college that will signify the child’s entrance into a life of privilege and security. The flurry of activity dedicated to satisfying the demands of the supposed meritocracy has the beneficial side-effect of blinding the participants to the amount of start-up capital required to participate in the meritocracy at all — a function also served by the reification of “the family,” which shows that the alliance between the capitalists and the “family values” crowd is perhaps more natural than one might first suppose.