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. NCFR has joined with critical race theorists and Black Lives Matter in this outright attack on the foundational values and norms of American culture.
NCFR has a wide reach. Founded in 1938, the organization publishes three journals, including the Journal of Marriage and Family, which the organization touts as “the leading research journal in the family field.” The group’s lamentable views on marriage will influence hundreds of marriage and family therapists and researchers across the nation.
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.
NCFR also produces research for lawmakers. In its most recent 2020 annual report, NCFR lists as its first “program highlight” its “racial justice resources.”
The Nuclear Family As ‘Family Privilege’
In an announcement for a webinar that premiered in May, titled “Toward Dismantling Family Privilege and White Supremacy in Family Science,” the organization offers continuing education credits for its members to learn that the field of “Family Science” is “struggling” with “how it privileges certain types of families over others.” NCFR introduces its webinar as follows:
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.
According to NCFR, the nuclear family is now a vehicle of “family privilege” – yet another new term – and white supremacy, a “structure” that no longer is viewed as one that nurtures young children, provides them with stability and security, and prepares them for successful and emotionally sound adulthood.
Instead, NCFR now says the family of mom, dad, and kids has mistakenly been upheld as “superior to all others” and “creates systemic barriers to equal opportunity and justice for all families.”
Teaching the Dismantling of ‘Family Privilege’
In NCFR’s 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.” Webinar attendees are expected to learn how to “define family privilege, White supremacy, and apply a critical intersectional framework that can be used in one’s work.”
NCFR is essentially stating everything they have taught about family science in the past was a lie, because the organization failed to recognize “family privilege” throughout all these decades, and now must acknowledge its guilt. After only a 90-minute webinar, attendees are expected to have 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.
Data Shows This Is All a Dangerous Lie
Ironically, critical race theory (CRT) is a tool of the same left that has created a populace within the black community that is dependent upon the government for survival. Even though published data confirms that two-parent families – including black two-parent families – dramatically reduces poverty, childhood abuse, and many other social ills, NCFR is now asserting our two-parent American families, white and black, represent systemic racism and “family privilege.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18.3 million children – 1 in 4 – live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. Research that has not been tainted by CRT has shown children raised in fatherless homes have a four times greater risk of poverty, seven times greater risk of becoming pregnant as a teen, and are two times as likely to be obese and to drop out of high school.
Additionally, traditional research has shown children raised without a father are more likely to exhibit behavioral problems, to face abuse and neglect, to abuse drugs and alcohol, to commit crimes, and to go to prison.
The black community is missing out on the opportunities our country has to offer, and it is not because of systemic racism or white privilege. It’s because, since the 1960s, the culture has declined from approximately 80 percent two-parent families to 80 percent fatherless homes without one national initiative to reverse the trend.
It is time to address the real issues that drive racial disparities, while helping to move the country toward a post-racial America.
