Toward Dismantling Family Privilege and White Supremacy in Family Science
The views expressed by the webinar presenters are their own.
Family Science has long studied non-traditional families. The discipline still struggles with family inequality, though, in how it privileges certain types of families over others. 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.
At the conclusion of the webinar, attendees will be able to define family privilege, White supremacy, and apply a critical intersectional framework that can be used in one’s work. Using an intersectional lens, presenters will also share multiple examples of how family privilege manifests in Family Science and more broadly. Discussions will be held on multiple, interlinked strategies for recognizing family privilege in Family Science and working toward a more inclusive and just praxis.
Beneficial to family scholars, practitioners, and policymakers, attendees will leave this webinar 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.
Approved for 1.5 hours of CFLE continuing education credit.
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About the Presenters
Bethany Letiecq, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at George Mason University where she teaches courses in family law and public policy. Dr. Letiecq's community-based participatory research examines the ways in which racialized structural oppression manifests in laws, policies, and practices and in the lived family experiences of families of color and Latinx immigrant families.
Antionette Landor, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and the Millsap Professor of Diversity & Multicultural Studies in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at the University of Missouri, and Co-Founder, Associate Director, Center for Body Image Research and Policy. Dr. Landor 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.
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