Chapter 05 - The Family Politics of Slavery and Genocide

Section Notes¶

White Families, White Nations¶

• Settler nation-building depends on families

  • White women/kids turned frontiers -> towns -> nations

• 1862 Homestead act in the US, Dominion Lands Act in Canada

• News used violence against white women to call for more violence & dispossession against natives

• White women were active enslavers

• Anti-slavery rebellion required going against white, southern family and its basis in violence, property, domination

• White counterrevolution at the end of the Black Reconstruction

Indigenous Kinship and Genocide¶

• Residential schools as civilizing project, breaking kinship ties

  • Violence, sex abuse, forced labor, starvation, loss of culture

• Diversity of Indigenous kinship forms

  • Gender, sexuality, family, romance, child-rearing, collective identity

  • Threatened European sense of naturalness/universality/social order

• Prior to US invasion of California, Spanish conquest

  • Policy of mass rape

  • Not establishing large settler populations

  • Instead promote & manage mixed-race & Indigenous procreation

    • Labor force

    • Population adequate for military defense

  • Forced adoption of European lifeways

• Genocide by settler societies

  1. Extermination

     • Disease

     • Mass murder

     • Producing conditions for mass death

  2. Subjugation

     • Military defeat

     • Displacement to unfavorable land

     • Counterinsurgency

  3. Assimilation to white settler culture

• Extermination & subjugation easiest through targeting Indigenous children

  • Assimilation required instilling white family values

• “Child welfare” relocations

Natal Alienation Under Slavery¶

• Natal alienation: practice and constant possibility of enslavers separating parents and kids

• Enforced kinlessness

• Enslaved Black women crucial to white social reproduction

• Plenty of repercussions into modern day

• Central to Black feminism

Imposing White Family Norms¶

• Redistribution of reservation land to Indigenous nuclear families

• Jim Crow coercive family politics

  • Lease sharecropper tenancies only to married couples

  • Post-JC low rates of Black marriage can be read as resistance

• Dawes Act allotments as assimilation

  • 160 acres regardless of family size

  • Abandon Native naming; must have same last name

  • Restricted from consolidating land

Family Abolition and Racial Domination¶

• Different systems in the UK and US, but similar effects on marginalized families

• For both enslaved and waged proletarians, kinship ties not respected by ruling class

• Reject “family abolition” that calls for enforced kinlessness, parenting tests, or child removal

  • Or that which consolidates childcare under state

Quotes¶

For both enslaved and waged proletarians, their kinship ties were not recognized by those in power, not respected by law, and did not readily conform to elite social expectations. In each case, proletarian deviancy was understood in opposition to the consolidation of gender and sexual norms among the property-owning class, who formed sharply structured families based on inheritance and status. (pp. 91)

This racial history calls for a complete rejection of overcoming the family that rests on an outside authority taking children en masse away from their parents, that consolidates childcare under the centralized authority of racist states, or that has no regard for preexisting relationships of love and care. (pp. 91)