Listen to this
I am now old enough to have a certain nostalgia for life altering events that occurred half a century ago. That said, I have always been skeptical about nostalgia and quite suspicious of its allure. To find an ambivalent attraction for a world already past has never struck me as appealing and more importantly seemed a dangerous distraction from the political and social realities of the contemporary moment. To be winsome over things past, I find to be an ambivalent rejection of things present. It is also almost always a narcissistic indulgence in memory that constructs a world that never really existed except as a failed opportunity that lacked the force to persist into the present. Of course, we can try and resurrect the past within the present moment through nostalgic gestures in the way we dress, the music we produce, even the politics we pursue. But it’s important to remember that such gestures cannot return the past into the future. At some level they are always what Baudrillard called simulacra, or a copy of a copy.
Nostalgia as simulacra is a remembrance disconnected from its actual historical coordinates. Instead of attempting to produce a version of the past rooted in an exploration of actual material conditions, an idealized past is constructed that fits our needs in the present. To some degree it is a copy of the past but composed only of selected elements. It is a collage of bits and pieces of a past that may or may not have ever existed except in our personal or collective imagination.
A key example of nostalgic collage in our work in CYC is the way that contemporary accounts of childhood and family life are presented in our trainings and literature. I would argue that the dominant telling of the family in working with young people is often framed as a laudable social structure that is worthy of protection and replication. However, I would suggest that this version of the family is largely illusory; an excellent example of nostalgia premised in simulacra.
It is Stephanie Coontz who tells us that the version of the family and childhood that is often represented culturally and socially as the “nuclear family” never really existed for most of us. However, a powerful representation of the nuclear family as white, middle class, patriarchal, heterosexual, and self-enclosed was reproduced in countless movies, television shows, and advertising campaigns in such a way as to produce it as though it were a reality.
That copy of a mythical childhood lived within the confines and frameworks of the nuclear family gained nostalgic force through social and cultural saturation that became deeply rooted in our personal and cultural unconscious. Collectively we gradually began to believe in the loss of a childhood situated in a nuclear family that never really existed. We began to believe in it so strongly that even now we continue to try desperately to re-enact it. In other words, we try to produce a copy of a copy of something that never really existed. And, as we fail to live out the diagram of the utopic childhood situated in the nuclear family, many of us have become saddened and nostalgic for a life that never was.
This can be a dangerous set of deferred desires for those of us working with young people. To desire the reproduction of a world that never was, can cast the lives of the children we see today as always failing to meet the exacting standards of a utopic childhood that only exists in our collective imagination. The idea that the world was better back then, and that children and families were happier and far more sensible serves us in denying the actuality of the nuclear family as a claustrophobic social diagram that made every attempt to assert colonial and patriarchal sets of values.
It is important to remember that a key element of the colonial and capitalist project was the creation of whole set of identities and mythical social structures that either justified the subjugation or exploitation of those colonized or set up disciplinary and systems of governance that perpetuated the dominance of colonial/capitalist rule. Certainly, this included social constructions such as race, sexuality, and gender that were created and proliferated across the cultural and social landscape of the colonial project. In addition, I would note the nuclear family and its associated fantasies about an innocent and happy childhood as key feature of the social architecture of colonization well into our contemporary moment. I would further assert that the colonial constructions of the family deploy race, sexuality and gender in a powerful socially psychotic and paranoid construction that is divorced from any kind of material reality,
To say that a social or cultural structure doesn’t or hasn’t existed doesn’t in any way mitigate its force. Put simply, just because something isn’t real, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have real force. The concept of the nuclear family and its associated version of childhood has had a profound effect on how we have imagined working with both families and children. The very definitions of deviance and pathology for children and families have far too often been measured against this colonial fantasy. Ideas such the normality of marriage and the deviance of the unmarried parent, the single parent or the broken home permeate our dreams and desires. Indeed, even when we say the word family as a reference for working with children, we almost always have the mythical nuclear family as the set point. Other family constellations are seen as alternative.
I should note that the nuclear family as the center point of our collective imaginary has the ghost of whiteness as a key referent as well. As is often the case with whiteness it is most influential in its absence. That is to say that when we begin to talk about or learn about cross cultural work with families, there is considerable effort put into descriptions of all sorts of families of color, but I have yet to see a family therapy text that highlights the “white” family.
I would argue that this obfuscation of the families of the dominant class is an extension of the colonial constructions of race which constructed the other as racially distinct from European whiteness without ever really producing an overt description of what whiteness entailed. In a perverse way whiteness was delineated by comparison to its others. You know you are white when you don’t have to say you are a White American. Others, however, are often compelled to say they are African American or Asian American or Native American and so on.
Similarly, there is an assumption of heterosexuality as an assumed central norm with queer families requiring explanation, justification or special attention. The legislative battles over “gay marriage” and whether gay couples can foster or adopt children exemplify the privilege associated with heterosexual families “composed of a man and a woman.”
Misogyny and race have also played a significant role in how we see families. The ongoing social and cultural discourse about the absence of fathers in Black families as problematic is a key example. The idea that households headed by Black women without the presence of “father” figure require special attention and are often deemed pathological for boys who grow up in such households is a common discourse across fields of social intervention. Perversely, the functional absence of white wealthy fathers through their engagement as capitalist functionaries is somehow not seen as problematic. White upper-class women apparently can raise boys while Black women cannot. It should be noted, as a profound irony, that many of the boys raised in the white upper class are often actually raised by women of color hired for that purpose. However, oddly there are very few calls for male mentors for the boys of the rich and powerful. The issue of the number of white wealthy boys raised away from their families in boarding schools also fails to raise red flags.
Of course, for those of us working in CYC, we seldom see the children of wealthy white families in our work. The pathologies associated with absent wealthy parents or being raised in institutions such as boarding schools are not given the same degree of moral panic that the pathologies of the children of color are given. Of course, the economic impact of a single parent household under conditions of racism and poverty are of a different register of trauma than the economic impact of a single parent household created by divorce or corporate absence in the families of the wealthy. In both cases we know statistically there is a drop in financial well-being when men are absent, but the scale of loss is significantly different depending on race and socioeconomic status.
It is also notable that the institutions into which the children of the wealthy are inducted are substantively different, as is process for institutionalization. To be sent to live with other wealthy relatives when things fail at home is a profoundly different experience than being taken from the family by the state and placed into the system of foster care, group homes, or residential treatment. Even when the children of the wealthy are raised away from family members, life at a boarding school is simply not the same as life in long term foster care or residential placement. Of course, there can be traumas associated with both and on occasion wealthy young people can enter care, but overall the lived relations of wealthy white families and poor families of color are socially and culturally incomparable.
The bifurcation of care based in race and social class is a largely absent discourse in the work we do with families in CYC. Of course, we have loads of training and literature on how to work with disenfranchised and marginalized young people and their families. Regrettably, most of that literature deals with these families at best as survivors and at worst as inherently dysfunctional.
While there may be a passing mention of the role that capitalist structures of wealth play in creating the relation of these families to the institutions of the state and its minions, we simply don’t talk about the fact that our models of family care don’t really work in this context. The failures of foster care and residential care as familial substitutes are ample evidence of what happens when we fail to account for the material contexts of poverty and racism. That is not to say that there are not children and families that manage against all odds to navigate the system of care. There are. But they are the exception not the rule.
Given all of this, there are three central points I want to make as to how we might respond as CYC workers to this set of dilemmas. The first is that we need to acknowledge our nostalgic bias for the nuclear family and recognize how deeply its diagram is entangled in our sociocultural DNA. We need to understand that this nostalgia for a kind of family that doesn’t and hasn’t ever worked for most children needs to be seriously rethought. Our references to the very word family need to be re-examined, re-thought, and opened to new thinking about what systems of relations mean in terms of kinship and care.
The second point is that we need to consciously untangle the intersectional weave of race, class, sexuality, and gender in how we see families. These biases run deep and can corrupt even the best of intentions. To do this means to interrogate the ongoing effects of colonization and capitalism on how families and children continue to be brutally exploited at all levels for the advancement of the acquisition and accrual of wealth.
Finally, we need to abandon the complex layering of false memory that perpetuates the nuclear family as a powerful form of nostalgia. To the degree we continue to indulge in this fantasy we will miss the actual living world of the children and families we see in our work. Of course, the first place to start is at home. To begin this work, we need to look hard at our own families and how we think of them. That will be a hard and complex task but one that is essential if we are to effectively care for those we serve.
