You’d think that an organization called the “National Council on Family Relations” would be pro-family, or at least not actively anti-family. You’d be wrong.
As The Federalist reports, “Despite its name, the National Council on Family Relations is looking to destroy American families. It claims that the nuclear family – consisting of father, mother, and children – is merely an extension of white supremacy.”
Such a dire claim is, in fact, mostly substantiated by NCFR’s own words. In an announcement for a May 2021 webinar, NCFR said:
Like White privilege, family privilege is an unacknowledged and unearned benefit instantiated in U.S. laws, policies, and practices and bestowed upon traditional or “standard” nuclear families to the disadvantage of non-traditional configured family systems (e.g., sole-parent families, unmarried committed partners rearing children together, grandparents raising grandchildren). Family privilege is defined as the benefits, often invisible and unacknowledged, that one receives by belonging to family systems long upheld in society as superior to all others. It serves to advantage certain family forms over others and is typically bestowed upon White, traditional nuclear families.
Family privilege is a structural mechanism “hidden” within our White supremacist society that creates systemic barriers to equal opportunity and justice for all families. In this webinar, attendees will examine, recognize, and learn how to dismantle the manifestations of family privilege in our social systems by using an intersectional framework developed by critical feminist and race scholars. Participants will be challenged to consider how structural forces create differential experiences and opportunities that produce diverse family constellations.
And that’s not all. NCFR said that seminar attendees would leave with the ability to:
- Dismantle family privilege in Family Science scholarship, teaching, practice, and policymaking;
- Recognize family privilege and White supremacy in research, practitioner, and policy settings;
- Reduce the ways in which family privilege manifests in Family Science and in society.
The webinar was hosted by Bethany Letiecq and Antionette Landor. Letiecq is an associate professor whose “community-based participatory research” examines such topics as “the ways in which racialized structural oppression manifests in laws” and “the lived family experiences of families of color.” Landor, according to the NCFR, “teaches thought-provoking courses on Black Families, Youth Culture, and Human Sexuality and her research focuses on the impact of colorism and racism on individual, relational, and family health and functioning.”
And NCFR isn’t some fringe organization with a half-dozen undercover FBI agents as members; it’s quite large. Again according to The Federalist, “NCFR’s members come from more than 35 countries and all 50 states, and work as teachers, program developers, and counselors, according to the organization’s website. It has thousands of active members, who participate in focus groups, discussion, and networking. NCFR has 10 state and regional-level affiliates and 26 student chapters at universities.”
Nor is NCFR the only organization waging war on the nuclear family; other far-left organizations have similar attitudes toward the traditional American family.
For example, the “What We Believe” section of Black Lives Matter’s website similarly claimed that the organization aimed to “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”
The New York Post adds that the section originally said “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.” BLM later scrubbed that portion of its website.
Further, as Bradley Thomas of The Mises Wire points out, hostility to families is a common theme in Marxist thought:
“This idea isn’t unique to BLM, of course. “Disrupting” the “nuclear family” is a commonly stated goal among Marxist organizations. Given that BLM’s founders have specifically claimed to be “trained Marxists,” we should not be surprised that the organization’s leadership has embraced a Marxian view of the family.
But where does this hostility toward the family originate? Partly, it comes from the theories of Marx and Engels themselves, and their views that an earlier, matriarchal version of the family rejected private property as an organizing principle of society. It was only later that this older tribal model of the family gave way to the modern “patriarchal” family, which promotes and sustains private property.”
The NCFR does not describe itself as a Marxist organization. However, given its anti-family attitude, some might describe it as such.
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.
