wcaleb’s avatarwcaleb’s Twitter Archive—№ 13,975

                      1. 1. I wondered this, too, but what’s missing from @Slate analysis are long histories of racism & the black family. @Slate/762714443872624641
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                      2. There’s a long history, going back to slavery, of the importance of extended kinship in African American families.
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                    3. In face of racism & slave trade, enslaved people relied on what Brenda Stevenson calls “the constancy of variety” in family structures.
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                  4. Stevenson: “growing white hostility meant that free men & women who were black continuously had to rely on alternative familial…styles"
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                5. (That’s from Stevenson’s history, *Life in Black and White* amazon.com/Life-Black-White-Family-Community/dp/0195118030)
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              6. More recently, books like @thenewjimcrow have noted how War on Drugs, mass incarceration again force extended, alternative family styles
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            7. Historians of slavery & mass incarceration also note white political rhetoric that then blames black families for being untraditional...
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          8. …while racism continually reproduces the conditions that make those untraditional arrangements necessary for survival.
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        9. In Biles’s case, most media reports tell us her biological mother was a “drug addict,” so we don’t much about larger context of her birth
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      10. But refusal of some media members to call Biles’s adoptive parents her parents arguably fits a common pattern in US history of race.
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    11. Each such refusal becomes an opportunity to interrogate "sins of the mother” & the putatively unusual structure of a black family.
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      12. …w/o confronting structural forces, "poverty, legally sanctioned instability, & growing white hostility” (Stevenson) that shape families
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