Black Families Matter

COMMENTARY Marriage and Family

Black Families Matter

Jun 29, 2021 3 min read
COMMENTARY BY

Former Manager, Public Programs, Events and Programming

Ellie served as manager for Public Programs in Events and Programming at The Heritage Foundation.
Marxism posits that the family unit is a hierarchy that undergirds capitalism. Tearing down capitalism, therefore, requires breaking up its foundation: the family. fizkes / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

Black Lives Matter’s stated mission is to “eradicate white supremacy”—a cause that, on its face, sounds admirable.

Tearing down capitalism, therefore, requires breaking up its foundation: the family. The leaders of the main Black Lives Matter organization openly agree.

Helping America live up to its founding principles of equality and freedom must begin in our homes and with policies and ideas that support strong families.

Black Lives Matter’s stated mission is to “eradicate white supremacy”—a cause that, on its face, sounds admirable. But a closer look reveals BLM to be a revolutionary movement, rooted in Marxism, that wants to dismantle Western society.

Marxism posits that the family unit is a hierarchy that undergirds capitalism. Tearing down capitalism, therefore, requires breaking up its foundation: the family. The leaders of the main Black Lives Matter organization openly agree. At least, they used to be open about it.

At one time, the website of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation trumpeted its desire to dismantle the nuclear family on its “What We Believe” page. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another,” it said.

That language was silently erased from the website last September, but it lives on as one of the “Guiding Principles” of BLM classroom curricula around the country.

>>> The Agenda of Black Lives Matter Is Far Different From the Slogan

BLM’s assertion that the nuclear family is “Western-prescribed” is misleading at best. The nuclear family is defined as two parents and their children, and this structure has existed throughout history. Yes, some cultures have kinship structures in which children live with their parents and extended blood relatives, but this is markedly distinct from raising children among a collective of strangers.

Moreover, kinship structures evolved over time as part of social change—they were not imposed by an ideological movement whose calling cards include antisemitism, violent riots, and questionable finances.

Across the globe and throughout history, families have been the source of economic and social stability. Particularly in the United States, two-parent nuclear families are the leading preventers of poverty and abuse.

In a February 2020 article in the Atlantic, University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox and Brigham Young University associate professor Hal Boyd note: ”One federal report found that children living in a household with an unrelated adult were about nine times more likely to be physically, sexually, or emotionally abused than children raised in an intact nuclear family.” That hardly makes the case for undoing family and outsourcing familial duties to a collective of strangers.

Moreover, AEI’s Ian Rowe tells us that intact families are the leading driver of poverty prevention. Indeed, their significance among the black community is astounding. “Being raised in a married-couple household led the poverty rate for black children to go down 73 percent compared to mother-only households and 67 percent compared to father-only households,” Rowe notes.

The data are clear: Children, especially black children, raised in two-parent households are better off. BLM and those parroting its claims would be well served to reconsider their call to dismantle the most effective anti-poverty program that African Americans, and all other people for that matter, have ever known.

No one will solve America’s race problems, or any other social problem, by attacking the family. Strong families and communities are the foundation stones of every healthy, thriving society.

>>> Like the Soviets, Black Lives Matter Purges Its History

But that’s exactly why Black Lives Matter doesn’t like them. Despite the rhetoric about quashing white supremacy, BLM’s ultimate goal is to create a new world order—a Marxist utopia that requires the destruction of the traditional family unit and the abandonment of traditional American values.

Few people displaying BLM yard signs or wearing BLM T-shirts embrace that vision. It is a recipe for misery—for all races. Helping America live up to its founding principles of equality and freedom must begin in our homes and with policies and ideas that support strong families.

This piece originally appeared in The Washington Examiner