Chapter 02 - Family Terrors

Section Notes¶

Fascism and the Family¶

• 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting: white supremacist shooting targeting Mexican migrants

  • Designed to incite terror and make Latino people leave the country

  • Part of a longer tradition of trying to instigate race wars against Black and Latino people

• Baby survived because his mother saved him

  • Both of his parents were murdered during the shooting

  • Donald and Melania Trump flew to El Paso for a photo op with him

    • No other survivors would meet with them

    • Photo released 4 days after the shooting

  • Implicit endorsement of racial terror by Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and other conservative elites

• Family has always been central to white supremacy

  • 14 words (white supremacist slogan): “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

  • Nazi-allied Vichy France slogan: “Travail, familie, patrie” (Work, family, homeland)

• American presidents and the image of family

  • Trump portrait with shooting survivor (caricature of happy parents)

  • Keeping transgressions quiet whenever possible

  • Maintaining legitimacy by returning to image of family ideal

• Trumps represent different approach to family

  • Apparent disinterest in caring for children

  • Incestuous sexualization of Ivanka

  • Nepotism in business practices

  • Inheriting real estate empire and expanding with father’s help

  • Family name as international brand

• Two forms of violence integral to the family

  1. Family as a white supremacist normative ideal, imposed through violence, state policy, and cultural norms

  2. Terrors within the family, the violences it enables and obscures, the regimes of gender and power it reproduces

• Dual treatment of families

  • Valorization of white families

  • Destruction of Black families

The Family Ideal¶

• The family as a normative ideal is constructed/maintained through various social and legal structures

• The ideal is important to projects beyond the family itself, like nation-building

• Family ideal defined by:

  • How we imagine and talk about it

  • The specific form it takes (along with the historical context of that form)

  • How that form is encouraged and enforced through governmental policy

• Families choose to pursue or reject the ideal

  • Usually nuclear

  • Keeps pleasures & abuses adequately hidden from public view

  • Closely associated with

    • White femininity

    • Innocent children

    • True love

    • Home as refuge and solace

    • Stability

The Family Policing System¶

• Deviations from the family ideal are discouraged or attacked, on individual and societal scales

• Family policing system: various coalitions of public and private agencies working to intervene in family life that differs from the ideal, especially with Black families

  • Majority of Black children experience at least 1 CPS investigation

  • Quarter of a million children removed from households every year

• Eugenicist family regulation policies

  • Sterilization

  • Medical experimentation

  • Criminalization of reproduction of disabled women, Puerto Rican women, Black women, Indigenous women

• Family ideal supported through legal systems

Private Terrors¶

• Family policing system claims to serve and protect children, but it actually harms children constantly

• Norm-aligned families have the luxury of privacy

  • Division between public space (work, recreation) and private space (home) happened through capitalist development

  • Family structure encourages isolation and competition

• Lots of violence occurs behind closed doors

  • 55% of women murdered in the US killed by current or former partners

    • 16% by strangers

  • 1 in 5 US women have been raped, majority by intimate partner

  • Abuse victims often stuck in family unit because of legal and economic constraints

  • What is acceptable in public and what is acceptable behind closed doors can differ a lot

• Enforcing gender/sexual norms is a core role of families

Coercion and Care¶

• Everybody relies on some kind of care relationships for survival

• Dual character of the family: source of both coercion and care

  • Families are the main source of care for most

  • Main source of support for those who cannot work

    • State support is often very limited

• Market effects on family formation

  • Even loving, non-abusive familial relationships can be sources of constant frustration and conflict

    • But there are no good alternatives

  • Tight real estate market = moving in quickly, staying living together after separating

Bonding Violence¶

• Violence, inside and outside, is what holds the family form together

• Two forms of family violence

  1. External: violence of state actors - social workers, border patrol, parole officers

  2. Internal: violence within family

     • Mostly targeting women and children

Quotes¶

“Defense of the white family is central to the fascist imagination. children and mothers, in this fantasy, are the vulnerable innocents who must be defended through righteous violence. Throughout US history, this rhetoric of defense of the white family appears prominently in the rollback of Reconstruction, in mass lynching efforts, in anti-native genocide, and in today’s racist ideology.” (pp. 33)

“The family is a normative ideal, structured through race, sexuality, class, and gender. The family as normative ideal is a white supremacist image, a fantasy space of terror that defines the human, the innocent, and the sexually pure. The family as normative ideal binds together three principal dimensions: a cultural image and psychic fantasy; a particular, privileged form of the family household characteristic historically of the capitalist class and whiteness; and a regulatory regime created by government policy. In the family ideal, the material class and race politics of how people are able to form families is bound together with social status, cultural fantasy, and government policies.” (pp. 36)

“The family ideal is bolstered through state through juridical and legal recognition. This family ideal is a regulatory regime, a set of interconnected administrative policies and legal codes encouraging and subsidizing heterosexual marriage, the construction of single-family residences, parental authority, and family-based property ownership. These government policies, in turn, were shaped by particular strategies of class rule, often through attempting to consolidate particular relationships of race and gender.” (pp. 39)

“The claim to save and protect children has been central to the fantasy of the family norm, to the fascist imaginary, and to state policy, even when pursuing policies that lead to the mass death of children. Actually conceiving of a system that protects hildren, that provides the basis for care and flourishing for all, will require analyzing how the private family form structurally enables child abuse.” (pp. 39)

“Abuse within the family is made possible through the structure of the private household itself. Functioning as a private economic unit, members of the family can become stuck in its in its internal order. Living in an isolated and separated home, a goal for many families, prevents others from seeing or intervening in family dynamics. There is a clear division in many families between behavior presented to the outside world and what is acceptable behind closed doors, creating the conditions for otherwise socially unacceptable violence. Even when clear to others, the norms of family privacy make intervention extremely difficult. Serious male abusers rely on the structural privacy and ideological justification of family authority, sustaining their family politics with the aid of other men in close-knit social peer groups. Women are most likely to be murdered by their husbands or boyfriends when they try to leave, emphasizing the role of violence as a means of enforcing familial unity.” (pp. 41-42)

“The family often fills basic needs that could not easily be met elsewhere. Unlike most friends, the family may be there for a lifetime. Unlike service workers, the family may care without pay, out of genuine and real affection. Unlike roommates or neighbors, the family may provide a place to live for months or years of unemployment. Unlike most dates, a spouse may grow to love and accept even the most shameful and secret parts of a person. Unlike a boss, a family is not likely to cast you out for an unproductive day or a single conflict. Though families can judge, attack, and exclude, for most people the family is the closest we ever come to experiencing unconditional love and support. The family as a social form joins together care and coercion, dependency and love, abuse and affection. These relationships can be sources of genuine care, but the necessary ties of dependency leave them constantly open to abuse. This is the dual character of any family structure in class society. The family offers precisely that which is most precious and most needed in human life. Yet it is also where someone is most likely to be brutalized, raped, or forced into a long-term relationship of violent subordination.” (pp. 44)