Rereading america engaging the text answers

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REREADING AMERICA Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and

Writing

ELEVENTH EDITION

EDITED BY

Gary Colombo

Emeritus—Los Angeles City College

Robert Cullen

Emeritus—San Jose State University

Bonnie Lisle

University of California, Los Angeles

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PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS ABOUT REREADING AMERICA Designed for first-year writing and critical thinking courses,

Rereading America anthologizes a diverse set of readings

focused on the myths that dominate U.S. culture. This central

theme brings together thought-provoking selections on a broad

range of topics — family, education, technology, success,

gender, and race — topics that raise controversial issues

meaningful to college students of all backgrounds. We’ve drawn

these readings from many sources, both within the academy

and outside of it; the selections are both multicultural and

cross-curricular and thus represent an unusual variety of

voices, styles, and subjects.

The readings in this book speak directly to students’

experiences and concerns. Every college student has had some

brush with prejudice, and most have something to say about

education, the family, or the gender stereotypes they see in

films and on television. The issues raised here help students

link their personal experiences with broader cultural

perspectives and lead them to analyze, or “read,” the cultural

forces that have shaped and continue to shape their lives. By

linking the personal and the cultural, students begin to

recognize that they are not academic outsiders — they too have

knowledge, assumptions, and intellectual frameworks that give

them authority in academic culture. Connecting personal

knowledge and academic discourse helps students see that they

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are able to think, speak, and write academically and that they

don’t have to absorb passively what the “experts” say.

FEATURES OF THE ELEVENTH EDITION

A Cultural Approach to Critical Thinking Like its predecessors, the eleventh edition of Rereading

America is committed to the premise that learning to think

critically means learning to identify and see beyond dominant

cultural myths — collective and often unconsciously held beliefs

that influence our thinking, reading, and writing. Instead of

treating cultural diversity as just another topic to be studied or

“appreciated,” Rereading America encourages students to

grapple with the real differences in perspective that arise in a

pluralistic society like ours. This method helps students to

break through conventional assumptions and patterns of

thought that hinder fresh critical responses and inhibit

dialogue. It helps them recognize that even the most apparently

“natural” fact or obvious idea results from a process of social

construction. And it helps them to develop the intellectual

independence essential to critical thinking, reading, and

writing.

Timely New Readings To keep Rereading America up to date, we’ve worked hard to

bring you the best new voices speaking on issues of race,

gender, class, family, education, and technological progress. As

in past editions, we’ve retained old favorites like Gary Soto,

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Stephanie Coontz, John Taylor Gatto, Mike Rose, Sherry Turkle,

Barbara Ehrenreich, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Kilbourne, Rebecca

Solnit, Sherman Alexie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. But you’ll also

find a host of new selections by authors such as Amy Ellis Nutt,

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Peggy Orenstein, Yuval Noah Harari,

Jean M. Twenge, Ellen K. Pao, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Marc

Lamont Hill, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, and José Orduña. And like

earlier versions, this edition of Rereading America includes a

healthy mix of personal and academic writing, representing a

wide variety of genres, styles, and rhetorical strategies.

Visual Portfolios In addition to frontispieces and cartoons, we’ve included a

Visual Portfolio of myth-related images in every chapter of

Rereading America. These collections of photographs invite

students to examine how visual “texts” are constructed and

how, like written texts, they are susceptible to multiple readings

and rereadings. Each portfolio is accompanied by a series of

questions that encourage critical analysis and connect portfolio

images to ideas and themes in chapter reading selections. As in

earlier editions, the visual frontispieces that open each chapter

are integrated into the prereading assignments found in the

chapter introductions. The cartoons, offered as a bit of comic

relief and as opportunities for visual thinking, are paired with

appropriate readings throughout the text.

Focus on Struggle and Resistance Most multicultural readers approach diversity in one of two

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ways: either they adopt a pluralist approach and conceive of

American society as a kind of salad bowl of cultures or, in

response to worries about the lack of “objectivity” in the

multicultural curriculum, they take what might be called the

“talk show” approach and present American culture as a series

of pro-and-con debates on a number of social issues. The

eleventh edition of Rereading America, like its predecessors,

follows neither of these approaches. Pluralist readers, we feel,

make a promise that’s impossible to keep: no single text, and no

single course, can do justice to the many complex cultures that

inhabit the United States. Thus the materials selected for

Rereading America aren’t meant to offer a taste of what “family”

means for Native Americans or the flavor of gender relations

among immigrants. Instead, we’ve included materials like

excerpts from Sheryll Cashin’s Loving: Interracial Intimacy in

America and the Threat to White Supremacy or Ta-Nehisi

Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” because they offer us fresh

critical perspectives on the common myths that shape our

ideas, values, and beliefs. Rather than seeing this anthology as a

mosaic or kaleidoscope of cultural fragments that combine to

form a beautiful picture, it’s more accurate to think of

Rereading America as a handbook that helps students explore

the ways that the dominant culture shapes their ideas, values,

and beliefs.

This notion of cultural dominance is studiously avoided in

most multicultural anthologies. “Salad bowl” readers generally

sidestep the issue of cultural dynamics: intent on celebrating

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America’s cultural diversity, they offer a relatively static picture

of a nation fragmented into a kind of cultural archipelago. “Talk

show” readers admit the idea of conflict, but they distort the

reality of cultural dynamics by presenting cultural conflicts as a

matter of rational — and equally balanced — debate. All of the

materials anthologized in Rereading America address the

cultural struggles that animate American society — the tensions

that result from the expectations established by our dominant

cultural myths and the diverse realities that these myths often

contradict.

Extensive Apparatus Rereading America offers a wealth of features to help students

hone their analytic abilities and to aid instructors as they plan

class discussions, critical thinking activities, and writing

assignments. These include:

A Comprehensive Introductory Essay The book begins with a comprehensive essay, “Thinking Critically, Challenging Cultural Myths,” that introduces students to the relationships among thinking, cultural diversity, and the notion of dominant cultural myths, and that shows how such myths can influence their academic performance. We’ve also included a section devoted to active reading, which offers suggestions for prereading, prewriting, note taking, text marking, and keeping a reading journal. Another section helps students work with the many visual images included in the book.

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“Fast Facts” Begin Each Chapter Several provocative statistics before each chapter introduction provide context for students and prompt discussion. For example, “Following the 2016 presidential election, 64% of Americans said that fake news stories online had left the nation confused about basic facts. However, 84% also feel either ‘very confident’ or ‘somewhat confident’ that they can recognize fake news when they see it.”

Detailed Chapter Introductions An introductory essay at the beginning of each chapter offers students a thorough overview of each cultural myth, placing it in historical context, raising some of the chapter’s central questions, and orienting students to the chapter’s internal structure.

Prereading Activities Following each chapter introduction you’ll find prereading activities designed to encourage students to reflect on what they already know about the cultural myth in question. Often connected to the images that open every chapter, these prereading activities help students to engage the topic even before they begin to read.

Questions to Stimulate Critical Thinking Three groups of questions following each selection encourage students to consider the reading carefully in several contexts: “Engaging the Text” focuses on close reading of the selection itself; “Exploring Connections” puts the selection into dialogue with other selections throughout the book; “Extending the Critical Context” invites students to connect the ideas they read about here with sources of knowledge outside the anthology, including library and Internet

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research, personal experience, interviews, ethnographic- style observations, and so forth. As in past editions, we’ve included a number of questions linking readings with contemporary television shows and feature films for instructors who want to address the interplay of cultural myths and the mass media. Also as in past editions, we’ve included a number of questions focusing on writers’ rhetorical and stylistic strategies. Identified as “Thinking Rhetorically” for easy reference, these questions typically appear as the final item under “Engaging the Text.”

“Further Connections” Close Each Chapter Located at the end of each chapter, these questions and assignments invite students to undertake more challenging projects related to the chapter’s theme. They often provide suggestions for additional in-depth research or activities that require community engagement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Critical thinking is always a collaborative activity, and the kind

of critical thinking involved in the creation of a text like

Rereading America represents collegial collaboration at its very

best. Since publication of the last edition, we’ve heard from

instructors across the country who have generously offered

suggestions for new classroom activities and comments for

further refinements and improvements. Among the many

instructors who shared their insights with us as we reworked

this edition, we’d particularly like to thank James Allen, College

of DuPage; Deborah Bertsch, Columbus State Community

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College; Ruth Blandon, East Los Angeles College; Nancy Botkin,

Indiana University South Bend; Tony Bowers, College of

DuPage; Michael Duncan, University of Houston–Downtown;

Irene Faass, Minneapolis Community and Technical College;

Rebecca Fleming, Columbus State Community College; Karen

Forgette, University of Mississippi; Melanie Gagich, Cleveland

State University; Rick Garza, Reedley College; Joshua Giorgio-

Rubin, Indiana University South Bend; Sara Heaser, University

of Wisconsin–La Crosse; Owen Kaufman, Quinebaug Valley

Community College; Julia Klimek, Coker College; David

McCracken, Coker College; Alisea McLeod, Rust College; Ilona

Missakian, Fullerton College; Stan Porter, Merced College;

Pegeen Powell, Columbia College Chicago; Edwin Sams, San

Jose State University; Jasna Shannon, Coker College; Abha

Sood, Monmouth University; Jeffrey Susla, University of

Hartford; Kerry Taylor, Anne Arundel Community College;

Bronte Wieland, Iowa State University.

For their help with the tenth edition, we’d like to thank the

following: Douglas Armendarez, East Los Angeles College; Tolu

Bamishigbin, University of California, Los Angeles; Sheena

Boran, University of Mississippi; David Bordelon, Ocean County

College; Jane Carey, Quinebaug Valley Community College;

Kirsti Cole, Minnesota State University; Rachelle Costello,

Indiana University South Bend; Virginia Crisco, California State

University, Fresno; Peter DeNegre, Tunxis Community College;

Tiffany Denman, Sacramento City College; Peter Dorman,

Central Virginia Community College; Chip Dunkin, University

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of Mississippi; Randa Elbih, Grand Valley State University;

Maria Estrada, Mt. San Antonio College; Karen Forgette,

University of Mississippi; JoAnn Foriest, Prairie State College;

Kimberly Hall, Harrisburg Area Community College; Barbara

Heifferon, Louisiana State University; Cristina Herrera,

California State University, Fresno; Robert Imbur, University of

Toledo; Danielle Lake, Grand Valley State University; Catherine

Lamas, East Los Angeles College; Danielle Muller, Los Angeles

City College; Pamela McGlynn, Southwestern College; Charlotte

Morgan, Cleveland State University; Eduardo Munoz, East Los

Angeles College; Kylie Olean, University of Hartford; Heather

Seratt, University of Houston–Downtown; Phil Wagner,

University of California, Los Angeles; Jessica Walsh, Harper

College; Vallie Watson, University of North Carolina at

Wilmington; Judith Wigdortz, Monmouth University; Mary

Williams, San Jose State University.

For their help with the ninth edition, we’d like to thank the

following: Janice Agee, Sacramento City College; Fredric J. Ball,

Southwestern College; Chantell M. Barnhill, Indiana University

South Bend; Norka Blackman-Richards, Queens College, City

University of New York; Candace Boeck, San Diego State

University; Mark Brock-Cancellieri, Stevenson University;

Audrey Cameron, North Idaho College; Catheryn Cheal,

Oakland University; Kirsti Cole, Minnesota State University,

Mankato; Sean P. Connolly, Tulane University; Jackson Connor,

Guilford College; Myrto Drizou, State University of New York at

Buffalo; David Estrada, Fullerton College; Jacquelyn Lee

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Gardner, Western Michigan University; Rochelle Gregory,

North Central Texas College; Gwyn Fallbrooke, University of

Minnesota; Philip Fishman, Barry University; Naomi E. Hahn,

Illinois College; Rick Hansen, California State University,

Fresno; Nels P. Highberg, University of Hartford; Amy Lynn

Ingalls, Three Rivers Community College; Asao B. Inoue,

California State University, Fresno; Amanda Katz, Worcester

State University; O. Brian Kaufman, Quinebaug Valley

Community College; Barbara Kilgust, Carroll University;

Carolyn Kremers, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Catherine

Lamas, East Los Angeles College; Sharon A. Lefevre,

Community College of Philadelphia; Alisea Williams McLeod,

Indiana University South Bend; Tanya Millner-Harlee,

Manchester Community College; Ilona Missakian, Rio Hondo

College; Roxanne Munch, Joliet Junior College; Katrina J.

Pelow, Kent State University; M. Karen Powers, Kent State

University at Tuscarawas; Kevin Quirk, DePaul University; Alex

Reid, State University of New York at Buffalo; Brad C. Southard,

Appalachian State University; Terry Spaise, University of

California, Riverside; Sarah Stanley, University of Alaska

Fairbanks.

We are also grateful to those reviewers who helped shape

previous editions.

As always, we’d also like to thank all the kind folks at

Bedford/St. Martin’s, who do their best to make the effort of

producing a book like this a genuine pleasure. We’re especially

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grateful to Edwin Hill, Leasa Burton, and John Sullivan. We

thank Cara Kaufman, our editor, whose patience and

professionalism have helped us immensely throughout the

development of this new edition. We also want to thank Pamela

Lawson, who served as content project manager; Lumina

Datamatics, Inc., who managed copyediting and composition;

William Boardman, who produced our new cover; Mark

Schaefer, for clearing text permissions; Candice Cheesman and

Krystyna Borgen, for researching and tracking down art; and

editorial assistant William Hwang who helped out with many of

the hundreds of details that go into a project such as this.

Finally, we’d like to acknowledge our spouses, Elena Barcia, Liz

Silver, and Roy Weitz, for their love and support.

Gary Colombo

Robert Cullen

Bonnie Lisle

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CONTENTS PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS

INTRODUCTION: Thinking Critically, Challenging Cultural Myths

1 HARMONY AT HOME

Myths of Family

LOOKING FOR WORK, GARY SOTO

“For weeks I had drunk Kool-Aid and watched morning reruns of Father Knows Best, whose family was so uncomplicated in its routine that I very much wanted to imitate it. The first step was to get my brother and sister to wear shoes at dinner.”

WHAT WE REALLY MISS ABOUT THE 1950s, STEPHANIE COONTZ

“What most people really feel nostalgic about . . . is the belief that the 1950s provided a more family-friendly economic and social environment, an easier climate in which to keep kids on the straight and narrow, and above all, a greater feeling of hope for a family’s long-term future, especially for its young.”

THE COLOR OF FAMILY TIES: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND EXTENDED FAMILY INVOLVEMENT, NAOMI GERSTEL AND NATALIA SARKISIAN

“Marriage actually diminishes ties to kin.”

WHEN SHOULD A CHILD BE TAKEN FROM HIS PARENTS?, LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

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“When a child has been left alone because his mother can’t afford childcare and has to go to work, is that poverty or neglect?”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF AMERICAN

FAMILIES

FROM BECOMING NICOLE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY, AMY ELLIS NUTT

“I am the proud father of identical twins. One is a boy and one is a girl.”

FROM LOVING: INTERRACIAL INTIMACY IN AMERICA AND THE THREAT TO WHITE SUPREMACY, SHERYLL CASHIN

“White people who have an intimate relationship with a person of color, particularly a black person, can lose the luxury of racial blindness . . . and gain something tragic, yet real.”

FROM BEYOND MONOGAMY: POLYAMORY AND THE FUTURE OF POLYQUEER SEXUALITIES, MIMI SCHIPPERS

“What if having more than one long-term partner was available to wives as well as husbands, and tolerated or even expected across and within all races and classes?”

2 LEARNING POWER

The Myth of Education and Empowerment

AGAINST SCHOOL, JOHN TAYLOR GATTO

“School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children.”

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“I JUST WANNA BE AVERAGE,” MIKE ROSE

“I was placed in the vocational track, a euphemism for the bottom level. Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant.”

FROM SOCIAL CLASS AND THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM OF WORK, JEAN ANYON

“Public schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes.”

CHOOSING A SCHOOL FOR MY DAUGHTER IN A SEGREGATED CITY, NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES

“Legally and culturally, we’ve come to accept segregation once again. Today, across the country, black children are more segregated than they have been at any point in nearly half a century.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF EDUCATION

AND EMPOWERMENT

EDUCATION: ATTENTIONAL DISARRAY, SHERRY TURKLE

“Other generations passed notes, doodled, or zoned out. [Oliver’s] generation can send texts and go to Facebook. He calls his generation ‘lucky’: ‘We have the awesome new power to erase boredom.’”

BLURRED LINES, TAKE TWO, PEGGY ORENSTEIN

“A paramedic who responded to some UC Berkeley calls . . . told a reporter that he had personally stopped a group of these top-tier college boys as they dragged an

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unconscious girl out of a party. . . . ‘Who knows what their intentions were?’ the paramedic mused.”

CITY OF BROKEN DREAMS, SARA GOLDRICK-RAB

“‘Money has a lot to do with stress. . . . People obviously start thinking, should I just stop going to school? This is a lot of money I’m paying for classes, I shouldn’t be here.’”

3 THE WILD WIRED WEST

Myths of Progress on the Tech Frontier

OUR FUTURE SELVES, ERIC SCHMIDT AND JARED COHEN

“Soon everyone on Earth will be connected. With five billion more people set to join the virtual world, the boom in digital connectivity will bring gains in productivity, health, education, quality of life and myriad other avenues in the physical world.”

HAS THE SMARTPHONE DESTROYED A GENERATION?, JEAN M. TWENGE

“There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives — and making them seriously unhappy.”

LET’S GET LOST, KENNETH GOLDSMITH

“I think it’s time to drop the simplistic guilt about wasting time on the Internet and instead begin to explore — and perhaps even celebrate — the complex possibilities that lay before us.”

ZOË AND THE TROLLS, NOREEN MALONE

“Gamergaters had not only created a whole new set of

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celebrities, like [Milo] Yiannopoulos and [Mike] Cernovich; it had solidified their methods . . . and their grudges had calcified into a worldview.”

TWITTER AND WHITE SUPREMACY, A LOVE STORY, JESSIE DANIELS

“On Twitter, Trump and white supremacists are in a racists-loving-each-other-feedback-loop through retweets while they simultaneously use the platform to bully, harass, and threaten black women, Jews, and anyone else who opposes them.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF WIRED

CULTURE

HOW WE SOLD OUR SOULS — AND MORE — TO THE INTERNET GIANTS, BRUCE SCHNEIER

“It’s the location of your phone, who you’re talking to and what you’re saying, what you’re searching and writing. . . . Corporations gather, store, and analyze this data, often without our consent. . . . We may not like to admit it, but we are under mass surveillance.”

YOU WILL LOSE YOUR JOB TO A ROBOT — AND SOONER THAN YOU THINK, KEVIN DRUM

“No matter what job you name, robots will be able to do it. They will manufacture themselves, program themselves, and manage themselves. If you don’t appreciate this, then you don’t appreciate what’s barreling toward us.”

BIG DATA, GOOGLE, AND THE END OF FREE WILL, YUVAL

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NOAH HARARI

“Proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data . . . and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data- processing system — and then merge into it.”

4 MONEY AND SUCCESS

The Myth of Individual Opportunity

CLASS IN AMERICA, GREGORY MANTSIOS

“From cradle to grave, class position has a significant impact on our well-being.”

SERVING IN FLORIDA, BARBARA EHRENREICH

“I had gone into this venture in the spirit of science, to test a mathematical proposition, but somewhere along the line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, it became a test of myself, and clearly I have failed.”

FROM A TANGLE OF PATHOLOGY TO A RACE-FAIR AMERICA, ALAN AJA, DANIEL BUSTILLO, WILLIAM DARITY JR., AND DARRICK HAMILTON

“What explains the marked and persistent racial gaps in employment and wealth? Is discrimination genuinely of only marginal importance in America today?”

FROM HOW THE OTHER HALF BANKS, MEHRSA BARADARAN

“Approximately 70 million Americans do not have a bank account or access to traditional financial services. That is more people than live in California, New York, and

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Maryland combined.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF INDIVIDUAL

OPPORTUNITY

FRAMING CLASS, VICARIOUS LIVING, AND CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION, DIANA KENDALL

“The poor do not fare well on television entertainment shows, where writers typically represent them with one- dimensional, bedraggled characters standing on a street corner holding cardboard signs that read ‘Need money for food.’”

FROM RESET: MY FIGHT FOR INCLUSION AND LASTING CHANGE, ELLEN K. PAO

“So many super-rich people I encountered in the corridors of power believed that the rules didn’t, or shouldn’t, apply to them. Any of the rules.”

THANK GOD IT’S MONDAY, KATE ARONOFF

“A few trends surface: a near-total collapse of work-life balance, marathon working days, unclear job descriptions, a cult-like enforcement of the company’s mission, and a senior management that’s as demanding and raucous as it is disorganized.”

WHY WE SHOULD GIVE FREE MONEY TO EVERYONE, RUTGER BREGMAN

“It is now within our means to take the next step in the history of progress: to give each and every person the security of a basic income.”

5 TRUE WOMEN AND REAL MEN

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Myths of Gender

GIRL, JAMAICA KINCAID

“Try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.”

HOW TO DO GENDER, LISA WADE AND MYRA MARX FERREE

“Somewhere between reaching out to learn the rules [and] learning . . . what rules were ‘meant to be broken,’ we manage to develop a way of doing gender that works for us.”

GUYS’ CLUB: NO FAGGOTS, BITCHES, OR PUSSIES ALLOWED, CARLOS ANDRÉS GÓMEZ

“I want more than this narrow slice of humanity I’ve been given permission to taste. . . . I’m tired of needing to throw hurtful words like ‘faggot’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘pussy’ around to prove that I’m a man.”

SISTERHOOD IS COMPLICATED, RUTH PADAWER

“Where . . . should Wellesley draw a line, if a line should even be drawn? At trans men? At transmasculine students? What about students who are simply questioning their gender?”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF GENDER

FROM THE GENDER KNOT: “PATRIARCHY,” ALLAN G. JOHNSON

“We cannot avoid participating in patriarchy. It was handed to us the moment we come into the world. But we can choose how to participate in it.”

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“TWO WAYS A WOMAN CAN GET HURT”: ADVERTISING AND VIOLENCE, JEAN KILBOURNE

“Ads don’t directly cause violence, of course. But the violent images contribute to the state of terror . . . a climate in which there is widespread and increasing violence.”

THE LONGEST WAR, REBECCA SOLNIT

“Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

FROM RUSH LIMBAUGH TO DONALD TRUMP: CONSERVATIVE TALK RADIO AND THE DEFIANT REASSERTION OF WHITE MALE AUTHORITY, JACKSON KATZ

“Conservative talk radio, like Trumpism, champions the reassertion of an idealized, throwback White masculinity as the solution to America’s myriad problems at home and abroad.”

6 CREATED EQUAL

Myths of Race

THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS, TA-NEHISI COATES

“An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

THEORIES AND CONSTRUCTS OF RACE, LINDA HOLTZMAN AND LEON SHARPE

“While race itself is fiction, the consequences of racism

29

are a historical and contemporary fact of American life.”

GENTRIFICATION, SHERMAN ALEXIE

“I waved to them but they didn’t wave back. I pretended they hadn’t noticed me and waved again. They stared at me. They knew what I had done.”

NOBODY, MARC LAMONT HILL

“The stories of Ferguson, Baltimore, Flint, and countless other sites of gross injustice . . . spotlight the nagging presence of the exploited, the erased, the vulnerable, the dehumanized — those who are imagined, treated, and made to feel like Nobody.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF RACE

FROM MUSLIM GIRL, AMANI AL-KHATAHTBEH

“I was suddenly confronted by my own suffocating vulnerability: the intense self-realization that, among the three of us, I was the only one wearing a headscarf — the only one ‘visibly’ Muslim.”

PASSPORT TO THE NEW WEST, JOSÉ ORDUÑA

“In this border region, the horizon between natural violence and state violence has been collapsed. The arid climate, the flash floods, the diamondbacks, the mountain impasses, the distance, and the heat of the sun have all been weaponized. . . . This is murder without a murderer.”

HOW IMMIGRANTS BECOME “OTHER,” MARCELO M. SUÁREZ-OROZCO AND CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO

“Unauthorized immigrants live in a parallel universe.

30

Their lives are shaped by forces and habits that are unimaginable to many American citizens.”

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND TITLES

31

THINKING CRITICALLY, CHALLENGING CULTURAL MYTHS

BECOMING A COLLEGE STUDENT Beginning college can be a disconcerting experience. It may be

the first time you’ve lived away from home and had to deal with

the stresses and pleasures of independence. There’s increased

academic competition, increased temptation, and a whole new

set of peer pressures. In the dorms you may find yourself

among people whose backgrounds make them seem foreign

and unapproachable. If you commute, you may be struggling

against a feeling of isolation that you’ve never faced before. And

then there are increased expectations. For an introductory

history class you may read as many books as you covered in a

year of high school coursework. In anthropology, you might be

asked to conduct ethnographic research — when you’ve barely

heard of an ethnography before, much less written one. In

English, you may tackle more formal analytic writing in a single

semester than you’ve ever done in your life.

College typically imposes fewer rules than high school, but

also gives you less guidance and makes greater demands —

demands that affect the quality as well as the quantity of your

work. By your first midterm exam, you may suspect that your

previous academic experience is irrelevant, that nothing you’ve

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done in school has prepared you to think, read, or write in the

ways your professors expect. Your sociology instructor says she

doesn’t care whether you can remember all the examples in the

textbook as long as you can apply the theoretical concepts to

real situations. In your composition class, the perfect five-

paragraph essay you turn in for your first assignment is

dismissed as “superficial, mechanical, and dull.” Meanwhile,

the lecturer in your political science or psychology course is

rejecting ideas about country, religion, family, and self that

have always been a part of your deepest beliefs. How can you

cope with these new expectations and challenges?

There is no simple solution, no infallible five-step method

that works for everyone. As you meet the personal challenges of

college, you’ll grow as a human being. You’ll begin to look

critically at your old habits, beliefs, and values, to see them in

relation to the new world you’re entering. You may have to re-

examine your relationships to family, friends, neighborhood,

and heritage. You’ll have to sort out your strengths from your

weaknesses and make tough choices about who you are and

who you want to become. Your academic work demands the

same process of serious self-examination. To excel in college

work you need to grow intellectually — to become a critical

thinker.

WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING? What do instructors mean when they tell you to think critically?

Most would say that it involves asking questions rather than

33

memorizing information. Instead of simply collecting the

“facts,” a critical thinker probes them, looking for underlying

assumptions and ideas. Instead of focusing on dates and events

in history or symptoms in psychology, she probes for motives,

causes — an explanation of how these things came to be. A

critical thinker cultivates the ability to imagine and value points

of view different from her own — then strengthens, refines,

enlarges, or reshapes her ideas in light of those other

perspectives. She is at once open and skeptical: receptive to

new ideas yet careful to test them against previous experience

and knowledge. In short, a critical thinker is an active learner,

someone with the ability to shape, not merely absorb,

knowledge.

All this is difficult to put into practice, because it requires

getting outside your own skin and seeing the world from

multiple perspectives. To see why critical thinking doesn’t come

naturally, take another look at the cover of this book. Many

would scan the title, Rereading America, take in the surface

meaning — to reconsider America — and go on to page one.

There isn’t much to question here; it just “makes sense.” But

what happens with the student who brings a different

perspective? For example, a student from El Salvador might

justly complain that the title reflects an ethnocentric view of

what it means to be an American. After all, since America

encompasses all the countries of North, South, and Central

America, he lived in “America” long before arriving in the

United States. When this student reads the title, then, he

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actually does reread it; he reads it once in the “commonsense”

way but also from the perspective of someone who has lived in

a country dominated by U.S. intervention and interests. This

double vision or double perspective frees him to look beyond

the “obvious” meaning of the book and to question its

assumptions.

Of course you don’t have to be bicultural to become a

proficient critical thinker. You can develop a genuine sensitivity

to alternative perspectives even if you’ve never lived outside

your hometown. But to do so you need to recognize that there

are no “obvious meanings.” The automatic equation that the

native-born student makes between “America” and the United

States seems to make sense only because our culture has

traditionally endorsed the idea that the United States is America

and, by implication, that other countries in this hemisphere are

somehow inferior — not the genuine article. We tend to accept

this equation and its unfortunate implications because we are

products of our culture.

THE POWER OF CULTURAL MYTHS Culture shapes the way we think; it tells us what “makes sense.”

It holds people together by providing us with a shared set of

customs, values, ideas, and beliefs, as well as a common

language. We live enmeshed in this cultural web: it influences

the way we relate to others, the way we look, our tastes, our

35

habits; it enters our dreams and desires. But as culture binds us

together it also selectively blinds us. As we grow up, we accept

ways of looking at the world, ways of thinking and being that

might best be characterized as cultural frames of reference or

cultural myths. These myths help us understand our place in

the world — our place as prescribed by our culture. They define

our relationships to friends and lovers, to the past and future, to

nature, to power, and to nation. Becoming a critical thinker

means learning how to look beyond these cultural myths and

the assumptions embedded in them.

You may associate the word “myth” primarily with the myths

of the ancient Greeks. The legends of gods and heroes like

Athena, Zeus, and Oedipus embodied the central ideals and

values of Greek civilization — notions like civic responsibility,

the primacy of male authority, and humility before the gods.

The stories were “true” not in a literal sense but as reflections of

important cultural beliefs. These myths assured the Greeks of

the nobility of their origins; they provided models for the roles

that Greeks would play in their public and private lives; they

justified inequities in Greek society; they helped the Greeks

understand human life and destiny in terms that “made sense”

within the framework of that culture.

Our cultural myths do much the same. Take, for example, the

American dream of success. Since the first European colonists

came to the “New World” some four centuries ago, America has

been synonymous with the idea of individual opportunity. For

36

generations, immigrants have been lured across the ocean to

make their fortunes in a land where the streets were said to be

paved with gold. Of course we don’t always agree on what

success means or how it should be measured. Some calculate

the meaning of success in terms of six-figure salaries or the

acreage of their country estates. Others discover success in the

attainment of a dream — whether it’s graduating from college,

achieving excellence on the playing field, or winning new rights

and opportunities for less fortunate fellow citizens. For some

Americans, the dream of success is the very foundation of

everything that’s right about life in the United States. For

others, the American dream is a cultural mirage that keeps

workers happy in low-paying jobs while their bosses pocket the

profits of an unfair system. But whether you embrace or reject

the dream of success, you can’t escape its influence. As

Americans, we are steeped in a culture that prizes individual

achievement; growing up in the United States, we are told again

and again by parents, teachers, advertisers, Hollywood writers,

politicians, and opinion makers that we, too, can achieve our

dream — that we, too, can “Just Do It” if we try. You might

aspire to become an Internet tycoon, or you might rebel and opt

for a simple life, but you can’t ignore the impact of the myth.

Cultural myths gain such enormous power over us by

insinuating themselves into our thinking before we’re aware of

them. Most are learned at a deep, even unconscious level.

Gender roles are a good example. As children we get gender

role models from our families, our schools, our churches, and

37

other important institutions. We see them acted out in the

relationships between family members or portrayed on

television, in the movies, or in song lyrics. Before long, the

culturally dominant roles we see for women and men appear to

us as “self-evident”: for many Americans it still seems “natural”

for a man to be strong, competitive, and heterosexual, just as it

may seem “unnatural” for a man to shun competitive activity or

to be romantically attracted to other men. Our most dominant

cultural myths shape the way we perceive the world and blind

us to alternative ways of seeing and being. When something

violates the expectations that such myths create, it may even be

called unnatural, immoral, or perverse.

CULTURAL MYTHS AS OBSTACLES TO CRITICAL THINKING Cultural myths can have more subtle effects as well. In

academic work they can reduce the complexity of our reading

and thinking. A few years ago, for example, a professor at Los

Angeles City College noted that he and his students couldn’t

agree in their interpretations of the following poem by

Theodore Roethke:

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

38

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

The instructor read this poem as a clear expression of a child’s

love for his blue-collar father, a rough-and-tumble man who

had worked hard all his life (“a palm caked hard by dirt”), who

was not above taking a drink of whiskey to ease his mind, but

who also found the time to “waltz” his son off to bed. The

students didn’t see this at all. They saw the poem as a story

about an abusive father and heavy drinker. They seemed

unwilling to look beyond the father’s roughness and the

whiskey on his breath, equating these with drunken violence.

Although the poem does suggest an element of fear mingled

with the boy’s excitement (“I hung on like death”), the class

39

ignored its complexity — the mixture of fear, love, and

boisterous fun that colors the son’s memory of his father. It’s

possible that some students might overlook the positive traits in

the father in this poem because they have suffered child abuse

themselves. But this couldn’t be true for all the students in the

class. The difference between these interpretations lies,

instead, in the influence of cultural myths. After all, in a culture

now dominated by images of the family that emphasize

“positive” parenting, middle-class values, and sensitive fathers,

it’s no wonder that students refused to see this father

sympathetically. Our culture simply doesn’t associate good,

loving families with drinking or with even the suggestion of

physical roughness.

Years of acculturation — the process of internalizing cultural

values — leave us with a set of rigid categories for “good” and

“bad” parents, narrow conceptions of how parents should look,

talk, and behave toward their children. These cultural

categories work like mental pigeonholes: they help us sort out

and evaluate our experiences rapidly, almost before we’re

consciously aware of them. They give us a helpful shorthand for

interpreting the world; after all, we can’t stop to ponder every

new situation we meet as if it were a puzzle or a philosophical

problem. But while cultural categories help us make practical

decisions in everyday life, they also impose their inherent

rigidity on our thinking and thus limit our ability to understand

the complexity of our experience. They reduce the world to

dichotomies — simplified either/or choices: either women or

40

men, either heterosexuals or homosexuals, either nature or

culture, either animal or human, either “alien” or American,

either them or us.

Rigid cultural beliefs can present serious obstacles to success

for first-year college students. In a psychology class, for

example, students’ cultural myths may so color their thinking

that they find it nearly impossible to comprehend Freud’s ideas

about infant sexuality. Ingrained assumptions about childhood

innocence and sexual guilt may make it impossible for them to

see children as sexual beings — a concept absolutely basic to an

understanding of the history of psychoanalytic theory. Yet

college-level critical inquiry thrives on exactly this kind of

revision of common sense: academics prize the unusual, the

subtle, the ambiguous, the complex — and expect students to

appreciate them as well. Good critical thinkers in all academic

disciplines welcome the opportunity to challenge conventional

ways of seeing the world; they seem to take delight in

questioning everything that appears clear and self-evident.

QUESTIONING: THE BASIS OF CRITICAL THINKING By questioning the myths that dominate our culture, we can

begin to resist the limits they impose on our vision. In fact, they

invite such questioning. Often our personal experience fails to

fit the images the myths project: a young woman’s ambition to

be a test pilot may clash with the ideal of femininity our culture

41

promotes; a Cambodian immigrant who has suffered from

racism in the United States may question our professed

commitment to equality; a student in the vocational track may

not see education as the road to success that we assume it is;

and few of our families these days fit the mythic model of

husband, wife, two kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs.

Moreover, because cultural myths serve such large and

varied needs, they’re not always coherent or consistent.

Powerful contradictory myths coexist in our society and our

own minds. For example, while the myth of “the melting pot”

celebrates equality, the myth of individual success pushes us to

strive for inequality — to “get ahead” of everyone else. Likewise,

our attitudes toward education are deeply paradoxical: on one

level, Americans tend to see schooling as a valuable experience

that unites us in a common culture and helps us bring out the

best in ourselves; yet at the same time, we suspect that formal

classroom instruction stifles creativity and chokes off natural

intelligence and enthusiasm. These contradictions infuse our

history, literature, and popular culture; they’re so much a part

of our thinking that we tend to take them for granted, unaware

of their inconsistencies.

Learning to recognize contradictions lies at the very heart of

critical thinking, for intellectual conflict inevitably generates

questions. Can both (or all) perspectives be true? What evidence

do I have for the validity of each? Is there some way to reconcile

them? Are there still other alternatives? Questions like these

42

represent the beginning of serious academic analysis. They

stimulate the reflection, discussion, and research that are the

essence of good scholarship. Thus whether we find

contradictions between myth and lived experience, or between

opposing myths, the wealth of powerful, conflicting material

generated by our cultural mythology offers a particularly rich

context for critical inquiry.

THE STRUCTURE OF REREADING AMERICA We’ve designed this book to help you develop the habits of mind

you’ll need to become a critical thinker — someone who

recognizes the way that cultural myths shape thinking and can

move beyond them to evaluate issues from multiple

perspectives. Each of the book’s six chapters addresses one of

the dominant myths of American culture. We begin with the

myth that’s literally closest to home — the myth of the model

family. In Chapter One, “Harmony at Home,” we begin with

readings that show what makes the mythical nuclear family so

appealing and yet so elusive. Subsequent readings enrich our

understanding of family by exploring the intersections of family

life with race, class, and gender — key themes that resonate

throughout Rereading America. These selections ask

fascinating questions: How can a family best help a transgender

daughter navigate her adolescence? When should child

protection agencies or courts intervene in a family’s affairs, and

are their life-altering decisions swayed by racial bias? Is

43

choosing a partner of a different ethnicity a political as well as a

romantic act? And what about setting monogamy aside and

choosing two or more partners? Chapter Two, “Learning

Power,” gives you the chance to reflect on how the “hidden

curriculum” of schooling has shaped your own attitudes toward

learning. You’ll also encounter readings here that address

problems currently associated with higher education, including

campus sexual assault and student debt. We begin our

exploration of American cultural myths by focusing on home

and education because most students find it easy to make

personal connections with these topics and because they both

involve institutions — families and schools — that are

surrounded by a rich legacy of cultural stories and myths. These

two introductory chapters are followed by consideration of one

of the most durable American myths — our national belief in

progress. In Chapter Three, “The Wild Wired West: Myths of

Progress on the Tech Frontier,” you’ll have the chance to

explore how technologies like the Internet and social media are

reshaping American lives. You’ll also be invited to consider how

technologies like data mining and artificial intelligence may

threaten our privacy, our ability to make a living, and even our

sense of personal agency.

The second portion of the book focuses on three cultural

myths that offer greater intellectual and emotional challenges

because they touch on highly charged social issues. Chapter

Four introduces what is perhaps the most famous of all

American myths, the American Dream. “Money and Success”

44

addresses the idea of unlimited personal opportunity that

brought millions of immigrants to our shores and set the story

of America in motion. It invites you to weigh some of the

human costs of the dream and to reconsider your own

definition of a successful life. The next chapter, “True Women

and Real Men,” considers the socially constructed categories of

gender — the traditional roles that enforce differences between

women and men. This chapter explores the perspectives of

Americans who defy conventional gender boundaries. Chapter

Six, “Created Equal,” critically examines the meaning of race

and the myth of racial and ethnic superiority. It looks at the

historical and contemporary consequences of racism, offers

personal perspectives on racial and religious discrimination,

and explores antiracist activism. Each of these two chapters

questions how our culture divides and defines our world, how it

artificially channels our experience into oppositions like black

and white, male and female, straight and gay.

THE SELECTIONS Our identities — who we are and how we relate to others — are

deeply entangled with the cultural values we have internalized

since infancy. Cultural myths become so closely identified with

our personal beliefs that rereading them actually means

rereading ourselves, rethinking the way we see the world.

Questioning long-held assumptions can be an exhilarating

experience, but it can be distressing too. Thus you may find

certain selections in Rereading America difficult, controversial,

45

or even downright offensive. They are meant to challenge you

and to provoke classroom debate. But as you discuss the ideas

you encounter in this book, remind yourself that your

classmates may bring with them very different, and equally

profound, beliefs. Keep an open mind, listen carefully, and

treat other perspectives with the same respect you’d expect

other people to show for your own. It’s by encountering new

ideas and engaging with others in open dialogue that we learn

to grow.

Because Rereading America explores cultural myths that

shape our thinking, it doesn’t focus on the kind of well-defined

public issues you might expect to find in a traditional

composition anthology. You won’t be reading arguments for

and against affirmative action, bilingual education, or the death

penalty here. We’ve deliberately avoided the traditional pro-

and-con approach because we want you to aim deeper than

that; we want you to focus on the subtle cultural beliefs that

underlie, and frequently determine, the debates that are waged

on public issues. We’ve also steered clear of the “issues

approach” because we feel it reinforces simplistic either/or

thinking. Polarizing American culture into a series of debates

doesn’t encourage you to examine your own beliefs or explore

how they’ve been shaped by the cultures you’re part of. To

begin to appreciate the influence of your own cultural myths,

you need new perspectives: you need to stand outside the

ideological machinery that makes American culture run to

begin to appreciate its power. That’s why we’ve included many

46

strongly dissenting views: there are works by community

activists, gay-rights activists, socialists, libertarians, and more.

You may find that their views confirm your own experience of

what it means to be an American, or you may find that you

bitterly disagree with them. We only hope that you will use the

materials here to gain some insight into the values and beliefs

that shape our thinking and our national identity. This book is

meant to complicate the mental categories that our cultural

myths have established for us. Our intention is not to present a

new “truth” to replace the old but to expand the range of ideas

you bring to all your reading and writing in college. We believe

that learning to see and value other perspectives will enable you

to think more critically — to question, for yourself, the truth of

any statement.

You may also note that several selections in Rereading

America challenge the way you think writing is supposed to

look or sound. You won’t find any “classic” essays in this book,

the finely crafted reflective essays on general topics that are

often held up as models of “good writing.” It’s not that we reject

this type of essay in principle. It’s just that this kind of writing

has lost its appeal for many authors who stand outside the

dominant culture, and it is being supplanted today by new

forms of expression evolving in academia, in the business

world, and on the Internet.

Our selections, instead, come from a wide variety of sources:

professional books and journals from many disciplines, popular

47

magazines, college textbooks, personal memoirs, literary

works, nonfiction best sellers, and online publications. We’ve

included this variety partly for the very practical reason that

you’re likely to encounter texts like these in your college

coursework. But we also see textual diversity, like ethnic and

political diversity, as a way to multiply perspectives and

stimulate critical analysis. For example, an academic article like

Jean Anyon’s study of social class and school curriculum might

give you a new way of understanding Mike Rose’s personal

narrative about his classroom experiences. On the other hand,

you may find that some of the teachers Rose encounters don’t

neatly fit Anyon’s theoretical model. Do such discrepancies

mean that Anyon’s argument is invalid? That her analysis needs

to be modified to account for these teachers? That the teachers

are simply exceptions to the rule? You’ll probably want to

consider your own classroom experience as you wrestle with

such questions. Throughout the book, we’ve chosen readings

that “talk to each other” in this way and that draw on the

cultural knowledge you bring with you. These readings invite

you to join the conversation; we hope they raise difficult

questions, prompt lively discussion, and stimulate critical

inquiry.

THE POWER OF DIALOGUE Good thinking, like good writing and good reading, is an

intensely social activity. Thinking, reading, and writing are all

forms of relationship — when you read, you enter into dialogue

48

with an author about the subject at hand; when you write, you

address an imaginary reader, testing your ideas against

probable responses, reservations, and arguments. Thus you

can’t become an accomplished writer simply by declaring your

right to speak or by criticizing as an act of principle: real

authority comes when you enter into the discipline of an active

exchange of opinions and interpretations. Critical thinking,

then, is always a matter of dialogue and debate — discovering

relationships between apparently unrelated ideas, finding

parallels between your own experiences and the ideas you read

about, exploring points of agreement and conflict between

yourself and other people.

We’ve designed the readings and questions in this text to

encourage you to make just these kinds of connections. You’ll

notice, for example, that we often ask you to divide into small

groups to discuss readings, and we frequently suggest that you

take part in projects that require you to collaborate with your

classmates. We’re convinced that the only way you can learn

critical reading, thinking, and writing is by actively engaging

others in an intellectual exchange. So we’ve built into the text

many opportunities for listening, discussion, and debate.

The questions that follow each selection should guide you in

critical thinking. Like the readings, they’re intended to get you

started, not to set limits; we strongly recommend that you also

devise your own questions and pursue them either individually

or in study groups. We’ve divided our questions into three

49

categories. Here’s what to expect from each:

Those labeled “Engaging the Text” focus on the individual selection they follow. They’re designed to highlight important issues in the reading, to help you begin questioning and evaluating what you’ve read, and sometimes to remind you to consider the author’s choices of language, evidence, structure, and style. Questions in this category are labeled “Thinking Rhetorically,” and we’ve included more of them in this edition.

The questions labeled “Exploring Connections” will lead you from the selection you’ve just finished to one or more other readings in this book. When you think critically about these connecting questions, though, you’ll see some real collisions of ideas and perspectives, not just polite and predictable “differences of opinion.”

The final questions for each reading, “Extending the Critical Context,” invite you to extend your thinking beyond the book — to your family, your community, your college, the media, the Internet, or the more traditional research environment of the library. The emphasis here is on creating new knowledge by applying ideas from this book to the world around you and by testing these ideas in your world.

ACTIVE READING You’ve undoubtedly read many textbooks, but it’s unlikely that

you’ve had to deal with the kind of analytic, argumentative, and

50

scholarly writing you’ll find in college and in Rereading

America. These different writing styles require a different

approach to reading as well. In high school you probably read

to “take in” information, often for the sole purpose of

reproducing it later on a test. In college you’ll also be expected

to recognize larger issues, such as the author’s theoretical slant,

her goals and methods, her assumptions, and her relationship

to other writers and researchers. These expectations can be

especially difficult in the first two years of college, when you

take introductory courses that survey large, complex fields of

knowledge. With all these demands on your attention, you’ll

need to read actively to keep your bearings. Think of active

reading as a conversation between you and the text: instead of

listening passively as the writer talks, respond to what she says

with questions and comments of your own. Here are some

specific techniques you can practice to become a more active

reader.

Prereading and Prewriting It’s best with most college reading to “preread” the text. In

prereading, you briefly look over whatever information you

have on the author and the selection itself. Reading chapter

introductions and headnotes like those provided in this book

can save you time and effort by giving you information about

the author’s background and concerns, the subject or thesis of

the selection, and its place in the chapter as a whole. Also take a

look at the title and at any headings or subheadings in the piece.

These will give you further clues about an article’s general

51

scope and organization. Next, quickly skim the entire selection,

paying a bit more attention to the first few paragraphs and the

conclusion. Now you should have a pretty good sense of the

author’s position — what she’s trying to say in this piece of

writing.

At this point you may do one of several things before you

settle down to in-depth reading. You may want to jot down in a

few lines what you think the author is doing. Or you may want

to make a list of questions you can ask about this topic based on

your prereading. Or you may want to freewrite a page or so on

the subject. Informally writing out your own ideas will prepare

you for more in-depth reading by recalling what you already

know about the topic.

We emphasize writing about what you’ve read because

reading and writing are complementary activities: being an avid

reader will help you as a writer by familiarizing you with a wide

range of ideas and styles to draw on; likewise, writing about

what you’ve read will give you a deeper understanding of your

reading. In fact, the more actively you “process” or reshape

what you’ve read, the better you’ll comprehend and remember

it. So you’ll learn more effectively by marking a text as you read

than by simply reading; taking notes as you read is even more

effective than marking, and writing about the material for your

own purposes (putting it in your own words and connecting it

with what you already know) is better still.

52

Marking the Text and Taking Notes After prereading and prewriting, you’re ready to begin critical

reading in earnest. As you read, be sure to highlight ideas and

phrases that strike you as especially significant — those that

seem to capture the gist of a particular paragraph or section, or

those that relate directly to the author’s purpose or argument.

While prereading can help you identify central ideas, you may

find that you need to reread difficult sections or flip back and

skim an earlier passage if you feel yourself getting lost. Many

students think of themselves as poor readers if they can’t whip

through an article at high speed without pausing. However, the

best readers read recursively — that is, they shuttle back and

forth, browsing, skimming, and rereading as necessary,

depending on their interest, their familiarity with the subject,

and the difficulty of the material. This shuttling actually

parallels what goes on in your mind when you read actively, as

you alternately recall prior knowledge or experience and

predict or look for clues about where the writer is going next.

Keep a record of your mental shuttling by writing comments

in the margins as you read. It’s often useful to gloss the contents

of each paragraph or section, to summarize it in a word or two

written alongside the text. This note will serve as a reminder or

key to the section when you return to it for further thinking,

discussion, or writing. You may also want to note passages that

puzzled you. Or you may want to write down personal reactions

or questions stimulated by the reading. Take time to ponder

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why you felt confused or annoyed or affirmed by a particular

passage. Let yourself wonder “out loud” in the margins as you

read.

The following section illustrates one student’s notes on a

passage from Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average” (p. 123). In

this example, you can see that the reader puts glosses or

summary comments to the left of the passage and questions or

personal responses to the right. You should experiment and

create your own system of note taking, one that works best for

the way you read. Just remember that your main goals in taking

notes are to help you understand the author’s overall position,

to deepen and refine your responses to the selection, and to

create a permanent record of those responses.

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Keeping a Reading Journal You may also want (or be required) to keep a reading journal in

response to the selections you cover in Rereading America. In

such a journal you’d keep all the freewriting that you do either

before or after reading. Some students find it helpful to keep a

double-entry journal, writing initial responses on the left side of

the page and adding later reflections and reconsiderations on

the right. You may want to use your journal as a place to explore

personal reactions to your reading. For example, you might

make notes about ideas or lines in the reading that surprise you.

Or you might want to note how the selection connects to your

own experiences or why you found it particularly interesting or

dull. You can do this by writing out imaginary dialogues —

between two writers who address the same subject, between

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yourself and the writer of the selection, or between two parts of

yourself. You can use the journal as a place to rewrite passages

from a poem or an essay in your own voice and from your own

point of view. You can write letters to an author you particularly

like or dislike or to a character in a story or poem. You might

even draw a cartoon that comments on one of the reading

selections.

Many students don’t write as well as they could because

they’re afraid to take risks. They may have been repeatedly

penalized for breaking “rules” of grammar or essay form; their

main concern becomes avoiding trouble rather than exploring

ideas or experimenting with style. But without risk and

experimentation, there’s little possibility of growth. One of the

benefits of journal writing is that it gives you a place to

experiment with ideas, free from worries about “correctness.”

Here are two examples of student journal entries, in response to

Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average” (we reprint the entries

as they were written):

Entry 1: Personal Response to Rose

It’s interesting that Rose describes how school can label

you and stifle your dreams and also how it can empower

you and open doors in your life. When he goes to Our Lady,

they put him in a crappy Voc-Ed. track by mistake —

incredible because this could mess up his entire life. I

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knew lots of kids who were forced into ESL back in middle

school just because they spoke Spanish. What a waste! Still,

when Rose meets Mr. MacFarland, his whole life changes

cause the guy makes learning exciting and he knows how to

hook the kids on ideas. Mr. Moore was my Mr. Mac. He

used to push us to read stuff way beyond grade level, things

like Fight Club and Malcolm X. He was also like

MacFarland because he made everything personal. We

used to spend weeks doing research on big issues like

police brutality — and then we’d hold day-long debates

that’d get really heated. But then there were a-hole teachers

too — the ones who didn’t care and would just sit there and

read the paper while we did homework drills in our books.

We had some nut-jobs like Brother Dill, but nobody’d dare

hit us or call us names. All that’s changed since Rose was in

school — or maybe it’s changed at least in public school.

Maybe the nuns still can get away with it?

Entry 2: Dialogue Between Rose and Ken Harvey

Rose: I never really understood why you said that you just

wanted to be average. It always seemed to me that you

were just buying into the bull that the Voc-Ed. teachers

were handing out about us. Why would you give up

when you were obviously smarter than most of them?

Harvey: You wouldn’t understand ’cause you were one of

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MacFarland’s favorites. You were a hipster-nerd and that

was the ID that got you through school. Mine was

different. I was a jock and a rebel—and both seemed

better than being a brain. We thought you guys were just

kissing up—and that you read books because you

couldn’t make it on the field.

Rose: But you just threw your future away. We all knew you

were a leader and that you could’ve done anything if you

tried.

Harvey: Yeah, but why try? I wasn’t interested in

postponing my life the way you were. I had girlfriends

and people thought I was cool. My parents didn’t expect

much out of me except sports. So why not just do the

minimum in school and enjoy my life? Reading a lot of

weird books on religion and philosophy didn’t make me

particularly happy. Maybe we just wanted different

things. Have you thought about that?

Rose: I just figured you were protecting yourself against

being classified as a Voc-Ed. Protecting yourself against

being seen as working class.

Harvey: Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was happy being who I

was and I didn’t need school to change me the way you

did. School just isn’t for everybody.

You’ll notice that in the first entry the writer uses Rose’s

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memoir as a point of departure for her own reflections on

school and education. She also uses the journal as a place to

pose questions about Rose’s essay and about schooling in

general. In the second entry she explores how a shift in

perspective might challenge Rose’s conclusions about Ken

Harvey and his attitude toward education. Rose sees the damage

schooling can do, but he ultimately accepts the idea that

education can empower us. That’s why he assumes that Harvey

has given up on himself when he won’t try to be more than just

average. But what if Harvey’s choice isn’t just a matter of self-

protection? What if it’s a rational expression of who he is? Here,

the writer uses an imaginary dialogue to explore alternatives to

Rose’s own thinking about school as a means of self-

transformation.

WORKING WITH VISUAL IMAGES The myths we examine in Rereading America make their

presence felt not only in the world of print — essays, stories,

poems, memoirs — but in every aspect of our culture. Consider,

for example, the myth of “the American family.” If you want to

design a minivan, a restaurant, a cineplex, a park, a synagogue,

a personal computer, or a tax code, you had better have some

idea of what families are like and how they behave. Most

important, you need a good grasp of what Americans believe

about families, about the mythology of the American family.

The Visual Portfolio in each chapter, while maintaining our

focus on myths, also carries you beyond the medium of print

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and thus lets you practice your analytic skills in a different

arena.

Although we are all surrounded by visual stimuli, we don’t

always think critically about what we see. Perhaps we are

numbed by constant exposure to a barrage of images on TV, in

films, and in social media and other websites. In any case, here

are a few tips on how to get the most out of the images we have

collected for this book. Take the time to look at the images

carefully; first impressions are important, but many of the

photographs contain details that might not strike you

immediately. Once you have noted the immediate impact of an

image, try focusing on separate elements such as background,

foreground, facial expressions, and body language. Read any

text that appears in the photograph, even if it’s on a T-shirt or a

belt buckle. Remember that many photographs are carefully

constructed, no matter how “natural” they may look. In a photo

for a magazine advertisement, for example, everything is

meticulously chosen and arranged: certain actors or models are

cast for their roles; they wear makeup; their clothes are really

costumes; the location or setting of the ad is designed to

reinforce its message; lighting is artificial; and someone is

trying to sell you something.

Also be sure to consider the visual images contextually, not

in isolation. How does each resemble or differ from its

neighbors in the portfolio? How does it reinforce or challenge

cultural beliefs or stereotypes? Put another way, how can it be

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understood in the context of the myths examined in Rereading

America? Each portfolio is accompanied by a few questions to

help you begin this type of analysis. You can also build a

broader context for our visual images by collecting your own,

then working in small groups to create a portfolio or collage.

Finally, remember that both readings and visual images are

just starting points for discussion. You have access to a wealth

of other perspectives and ideas among your family, friends,

classmates; in your college library; in your personal experience;

and in your imagination. We urge you to consult them all as you

grapple with the perspectives you encounter in this text.

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CHAPTER 1 HARMONY AT HOME Myths of Family

Self-portrait with family in SUV, Michigan (2007)

FAST FACTS

1. Among adults younger than 35, roughly 61% live without a spouse or partner. In 2017 the median household income for partnered adults was $86,000, versus $61,000 for unpartnered adults.

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2. Nearly 33% of the U.S. adult population share a household with at least one “extra adult” (e.g., an adult child, a sibling, an elderly parent, or an unrelated housemate). This percentage, measured in 2017, is up from 14% in 1995.

3. Since the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide (Obergefell v. Hodges), the percentage of same-sex cohabiting couples who are married has risen from 38% to 61%. LGBTQ Americans who marry are twice as likely as the general public to cite legal rights and benefits as a very important reason to marry.

4. Ten percent of Americans today say they would oppose a close relative marrying someone of a different race or ethnicity — down from 32% in 2000. The percentage of nonblack Americans who would oppose a relative marrying a black person has dropped from 63% in 1990 to 14% today.

5. Among 41 countries studied by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, the United States is the only country that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents. Several countries offer a year or more of paid leave.

6. Nearly 450,000 American children live in foster care. Drug abuse by a parent is associated with roughly a third of the cases in which a child is removed from home.

7. Estimates of the number of Americans in polyamorous (multiple- partner) relationships vary widely — from 1.2 to 9.8 million people, according to Internet polyamory sites.

Data from (1), (2), (3), (4) Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

tank/2017/10/11/the-share-of-americans-living-without-a-partner-has-increased-

especially-among-young-adults/; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

tank/2018/01/31/more-adults-now-share-their-living-space-driven-in-part-by-parents-

living-with-their-adult-children/; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

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http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/11/the-share-of-americans-living-without-a-partner-has-increased-especially-among-young-adults/
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/31/more-adults-now-share-their-living-space-driven-in-part-by-parents-living-with-their-adult-children/
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/26/same-sex-marriage/
tank/2017/06/26/same-sex-marriage/; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

tank/2017/06/12/key-facts-about-race-and-marriage-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia/; (5)

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,

https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF2_1_Parental_leave_systems.pdf; (6) “Number of

Children in Foster Care Continues to Increase,” US Department of Health and Human

Services, Administration for Children & Families, November 30, 2017; (7) Elisabeth Sheff,

The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families (New York:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 3.

THE FAMILY MAY BE THE ORIGINAL CULTURAL INSTITUTION; people lived in families long before they invented the wheel, began farming, or founded cities. You might think that by now we would have clear and stable ideas about what defines a family, how families form and dissolve, what forms they can take, and how they can best raise their children, but such absolutely fundamental elements of family life have shifted dramatically through the centuries and continue to change today — perhaps faster than ever before. The most dramatic recent change in the United States is the groundswell of support for same-sex marriage: marriage equality, a concept almost unheard of thirty years ago, is now being claimed as a fundamental human right. Other changes are garnering fewer headlines but nonetheless are reshaping the values and behaviors we associate with family life. Both divorce and cohabitation have become more common and less stigmatized, and “singlehood” has gained traction as a perfectly normal alternative to marriage. An increasing number of adult Americans are now living in multigenerational families, whose larger households help them economize in tough times as well as

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http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/12/key-facts-about-race-and-marriage-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia/
https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF2_1_Parental_leave_systems.pdf
provide for elderly members. Meanwhile, birth control, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, and genetic screening for heritable diseases are giving people more choices about whether, when, and how to have children.

Although experts agree that family and marriage are changing, there is little consensus about what these changes mean. Are we witnessing the collapse of family values, or a welcome evolution beyond restrictive and discriminatory models of family life? Central to this cultural debate is the traditional nuclear family — Dad, Mom, a couple of kids, maybe a dog, and a spacious suburban home. Millions of Americans aspire to this middle-class “model family,” while others see it as limiting, unattainable, or simply outdated. Whatever value you, your family, or your community may place on the nuclear family, it’s important to recognize that it has been around only a short time, especially when compared with the long history of the family itself.

In fact, what we call the “traditional” family, headed by a breadwinner-father and a housewife-mother, has existed for little more than two hundred years, and the suburbs came into being only in the 1950s. But the family as a social institution was legally recognized in Western culture at least as far back as the Code of Hammurabi, created in ancient Mesopotamia some four thousand years ago. To appreciate how profoundly concepts of family life have changed, consider the absolute power of the Mesopotamian father, the patriarch: the law allowed him to use

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any of his dependents, including his wife, as collateral for loans or even to sell family members outright to pay his debts.

Although patriarchal authority was less absolute in Puritan America, fathers remained the undisputed heads of families. Seventeenth-century Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire enacted laws condemning rebellious children to severe punishment and, in extreme cases, to death. In the early years of the American colonies, as in Western culture stretching back to Hammurabi’s time, unquestioned authority within the family served as both the model for and the basis of state authority. Just as family members owed complete obedience to the father, so all citizens owed unquestioned loyalty to the king and his legal representatives. In his influential volume Democracy in America (1835), French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville describes the relationship between the traditional European family and the old political order:

Among aristocratic nations, social institutions recognize, in truth, no one in the family but the father; children are received by society at his hands; society governs him, he governs them. Thus, the parent not only has a natural right, but acquires a political right to command them; he is the author and the support of his family; but he is also its constituted ruler.

By the mid-eighteenth century, however, new ideas about individual freedom and democracy were stirring the colonies. And by the time Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831,

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they had evidently worked a revolution in the family as well as in the nation’s political structure. He observes: “When the condition of society becomes democratic, and men adopt as their general principle that it is good and lawful to judge of all things for one’s self,… the power which the opinions of a father exercise over those of his sons diminishes, as well as his legal power.” To Tocqueville, this shift away from strict patriarchal rule signaled a change in the emotional climate of families: “as manners and laws become more democratic, the relation of father and son becomes more intimate and more affectionate; rules and authority are less talked of, confidence and tenderness are oftentimes increased, and it would seem that the natural bond is drawn closer.” In Tocqueville’s view, the American family heralded a new era in human relations. Freed from the rigid hierarchy of the past, parents and children could meet as near equals, joined by “filial love and fraternal affection.”

This vision of the democratic family — a harmonious association of parents and children united by love and trust — has mesmerized popular culture in the United States. From the nineteenth century to the present, popular novels, magazines, music, and advertising images have glorified the comforts of loving domesticity. For several decades we have absorbed our strongest impressions of the family from television. In the 1950s we watched the Andersons on Father Knows Best, the Stones on The Donna Reed Show, and the real-life Nelson family on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet — shows which portrayed the mythical American family as happy, healthy, and modestly

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affluent. Over the next three decades the model stretched to include single parents, second marriages, and interracial adoptions on My Three Sons, The Brady Bunch, and Diff ’rent Strokes, but the underlying ideal of wise, loving parents and harmonious happy families remained unchanged. More recently, our collective vision of the family has grown more complicated. In shows like The Sopranos, Sister Wives, Here and Now, Transparent, The Fosters, and This Is Us, we encounter not only diverse families (for example, same-sex, multiracial, or polygamous households), but also a wide range of social issues including adoption, foster care, infidelity, substance abuse, domestic abuse, immigration status, and transgenderism. Although media portrayals of family have evolved dramatically since the 1950s, our never-ending fascination with television families underscores the cultural importance of family dynamics and family boundaries.

There are a few reasons why Rereading America begins with this chapter on myths of family. First, we all know a lot about families from living in our own families, observing our communities, and consuming various media. We may not be licensed experts, but we are deeply knowledgeable. In addition, the notion of an ideal nuclear family is a perfect example of a cultural myth that held sway for decades despite its dubious relation to real life. As you proceed through the chapter you can judge for yourself how much power that myth retains today. Finally, other key topics in Rereading America — notions about gender, race, and success, for example — are powerfully shaped

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by family life.

The myth of the idealized nuclear family is explored in the chapter’s first reading selection, “Looking for Work,” in which Gary Soto recalls his boyhood desire to transform his working- class Chicano family into a facsimile of the Cleavers on Leave It to Beaver. Stephanie Coontz, in “What We Really Miss About the 1950s,” then takes a close analytical look at the 1950s family, explaining its lasting appeal to some Americans but also documenting its dark side. Together these selections describe and then reread a complex set of cultural assumptions.

The next few selections draw on sociology, public policy, law, and the visual arts to provide broader and more recent perspectives on the meanings of family. “The Color of Family Ties: Race, Class, Gender, and Extended Family Involvement,” by Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian, challenges common misconceptions by carefully examining how ethnicity and social class shape the behaviors of American families. The next reading — “When Should a Child Be Taken from His Parents?” — asks us to consider one of the most difficult and consequential decisions a society can make, the decision to break apart a family to guarantee the safety or even the survival of its children. The need to separate some parents from their children is in itself a troubling reality, but as author Larissa MacFarquhar reveals, such decisions about child welfare may also reflect racial or class bias. Next, midway through the chapter, the Visual Portfolio offers you a chance to practice interpreting images; the

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photographs in this collection suggest some of the complex ways the contemporary American family intersects with gender, ethnicity, and social class.

The chapter ends with three readings that explore twenty-first century challenges and opportunities for American families. First, Amy Ellis Nutt tells the story of how a family supports the transition of one of their identical twin boys, Wyatt, into a young transgender woman, Nicole. Next, in a selection from Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White

Supremacy, Sheryll Cashin explains why the growing number of interracial marriages may foster healthier race relations and serve as a powerful counterforce to white supremacism. The chapter concludes with a short reading by sociologist Mimi Schippers that questions our cultural assumption that a monogamous couple is the best or only foundation of family life.

Sources

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.

Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Life. New York: Free Press, 1988. Print.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

BEFORE READING

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Spend ten minutes or so jotting down every word, phrase, or image you associate with the idea of “family.” Write as freely as possible, without censoring your thoughts or worrying about grammatical correctness. Working in small groups, compare lists and try to categorize your responses. What assumptions about families do they reveal?

Draw a visual representation of your family. This could take the form of a graph, chart, diagram, map, cartoon, symbolic picture, or literal portrait. Don’t worry if you’re not a skillful artist: the main point is to convey an idea, and even stick figures can speak eloquently. When you’re finished, write a journal entry about your drawing. Was it easier to depict some feelings or ideas visually than it would have been to describe them in words? Did you find some things about your family difficult or impossible to convey visually? Does your drawing “say” anything that surprises you?

Write a journal entry about how you think attending college has changed, or will change, your relationship to your family.

Study the frontispiece to this chapter on page 15 and discuss the way photographer Julie Mack has chosen to portray her family. Is this a “typical” family? How do you read the expressions of the people and the emotional tone of the image as a whole? Why is the family posing in their SUV, in their driveway, seemingly at dusk?

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LOOKING FOR WORK GARY SOTO

“Looking for Work” is the narrative of a nine-year-old

Mexican American boy who wants his family to imitate

the “perfect families” he sees on TV. Much of the humor

in this essay comes from the author’s perspective as an

adult looking back at his childhood self, but Soto also

respects the child’s point of view. In the marvelous

details of this midsummer day, Soto captures the

interplay of seductive myth and complex reality. Gary

Soto (b. 1952) grew up “on the industrial side of Fresno,

right smack against a junkyard and the junkyard’s cross-

eyed German shepherd.” Having discovered poetry

almost by chance in a city college library, he has now

published more than forty books of poetry, fiction, and

nonfiction for children, young adults, and adults. He has

also received fellowships from the National Endowment

for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, in addition

to numerous other awards. His recent publications

include Meatballs for the People: Proverbs to Chew On

(2017) and The Elements of San Joaquin (2018).

ONE JULY, WHILE KILLING ANTS ON THE KITCHEN SINK

with a rolled newspaper, I had a nine-year-old’s vision of wealth

that would save us from ourselves. For weeks I had drunk Kool-

Aid and watched morning reruns of Father Knows Best, whose

family was so uncomplicated in its routine that I very much

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5

wanted to imitate it. The first step was to get my brother and

sister to wear shoes at dinner.

“Come on, Rick — come on, Deb,” I whined. But Rick

mimicked me and the same day that I asked him to wear shoes

he came to the dinner table in only his swim trunks. My mother

didn’t notice, nor did my sister, as we sat to eat our beans and

tortillas in the stifling heat of our kitchen. We all gleamed like

cellophane, wiping the sweat from our brows with the backs of

our hands as we talked about the day: Frankie our neighbor was

beat up by Faustino; the swimming pool at the playground

would be closed for a day because the pump was broken.

Such was our life. So that morning, while doing-in the train

of ants which arrived each day, I decided to become wealthy,

and right away! After downing a bowl of cereal, I took a rake

from the garage and started up the block to look for work.

We lived on an ordinary block of mostly working class

people: warehousemen, egg candlers, welders, mechanics, and

a union plumber. And there were many retired people who kept

their lawns green and the gutters uncluttered of the chewing

gum wrappers we dropped as we rode by on our bikes. They

bent down to gather our litter, muttering at our evilness.

At the corner house I rapped the screen door and a very

large woman in a muu-muu answered. She sized me up and

then asked what I could do.

1

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“Rake leaves,” I answered smiling.

“It’s summer, and there ain’t no leaves,” she countered. Her

face was pinched with lines; fat jiggled under her chin. She

pointed to the lawn, then the flower bed, and said: “You see any

leaves there — or there?” I followed her pointing arm, stupidly.

But she had a job for me and that was to get her a Coke at the

liquor store. She gave me twenty cents, and after ditching my

rake in a bush, off I ran. I returned with an unbagged Pepsi, for

which she thanked me and gave me a nickel from her apron.

I skipped off her porch, fetched my rake, and crossed the

street to the next block where Mrs. Moore, mother of Earl the

retarded man, let me weed a flower bed. She handed me a

trowel and for a good part of the morning my fingers dipped

into the moist dirt, ripping up runners of Bermuda grass.

Worms surfaced in my search for deep roots, and I cut them in

halves, tossing them to Mrs. Moore’s cat who pawed them

playfully as they dried in the sun. I made out Earl whose face

was pressed to the back window of the house, and although he

was calling to me I couldn’t understand what he was trying to

say. Embarrassed, I worked without looking up, but I imagined

his contorted mouth and the ring of keys attached to his belt —

keys that jingled with each palsied step. He scared me and I

worked quickly to finish the flower bed. When I did finish Mrs.

Moore gave me a quarter and two peaches from her tree, which

I washed there but ate in the alley behind my house.

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10

I was sucking on the second one, a bit of juice staining the

front of my T-shirt, when Little John, my best friend, came

walking down the alley with a baseball bat over his shoulder,

knocking over trash cans as he made his way toward me.

Little John and I went to St. John’s Catholic School, where

we sat among the “stupids.” Miss Marino, our teacher,

alternated the rows of good students with the bad, hoping that

by sitting side-by-side with the bright students the stupids might

become more intelligent, as though intelligence were

contagious. But we didn’t progress as she had hoped. She grew

frustrated when one day, while dismissing class for recess,

Little John couldn’t get up because his arms were stuck in the

slats of the chair’s backrest. She scolded us with a shaking

finger when we knocked over the globe, denting the already

troubled Africa. She muttered curses when Leroy White, a real

stupid but a great softball player with the gift to hit to all fields,

openly chewed his host when he made his First Communion;

his hands swung at his sides as he returned to the pew looking

around with a big smile.

Little John asked what I was doing, and I told him that I was

taking a break from work, as I sat comfortably among high

weeds. He wanted to join me, but I reminded him that the last

time he’d gone door-to-door asking for work his mother had

whipped him. I was with him when his mother, a New Jersey

Italian who could rise up in anger one moment and love the

next, told me in a polite but matter-of-fact voice that I had to

2

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leave because she was going to beat her son. She gave me a

homemade popsicle, ushered me to the door, and said that I

could see Little John the next day. But it was sooner than that. I

went around to his bedroom window to suck my popsicle and

watch Little John dodge his mother’s blows, a few hitting their

mark but many whirring air.

It was midday when Little John and I converged in the alley,

the sun blazing in the high nineties, and he suggested that we go

to Roosevelt High School to swim. He needed five cents to make

fifteen, the cost of admission, and I lent him a nickel. We ran

home for my bike and when my sister found out that we were

going swimming, she started to cry because she didn’t have the

fifteen cents but only an empty Coke bottle. I waved for her to

come and three of us mounted the bike — Debra on the cross

bar, Little John on the handle bars and holding the Coke bottle

which we would cash for a nickel and make up the difference

that would allow all of us to get in, and me pumping up the

crooked streets, dodging cars and pot holes. We spent the day

swimming under the afternoon sun, so that when we got home

our mom asked us what was darker, the floor or us? She feigned

a stern posture, her hands on her hips and her mouth puckered.

We played along. Looking down, Debbie and I said in unison,

“Us.”

That evening at dinner we all sat down in our bathing suits to

eat our beans, laughing and chewing loudly. Our mom was in a

good mood, so I took a risk and asked her if sometime we could

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15

have turtle soup. A few days before I had watched a television

program in which a Polynesian tribe killed a large turtle, gutted

it, and then stewed it over an open fire. The turtle, basted in a

sugary sauce, looked delicious as I ate an afternoon bowl of

cereal, but my sister, who was watching the program with a

glass of Kool-Aid between her knees, said, “Caca.”

My mother looked at me in bewilderment. “Boy, are you a

crazy Mexican. Where did you get the idea that people eat

turtles?”

”On television,” I said, explaining the program. Then I

took it a step further. “Mom, do you think we could get dressed

up for dinner one of these days? David King does.”

“Ay, Dios,” my mother laughed. She started collecting the

dinner plates, but my brother wouldn’t let go of his. He was still

drawing a picture in the bean sauce. Giggling, he said it was me,

but I didn’t want to listen because I wanted an answer from

Mom. This was the summer when I spent the mornings in front

of the television that showed the comfortable lives of white

kids. There were no beatings, no rifts in the family. They wore

bright clothes; toys tumbled from their closets. They hopped

into bed with kisses and woke to glasses of fresh orange juice,

and to a father sitting before his morning coffee while the

mother buttered his toast. They hurried through the day making

friends and gobs of money, returning home to a warmly lit

living room, and then dinner. Leave It to Beaver was the

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program I replayed in my mind:

“May I have the mashed potatoes?” asks Beaver with a smile.

“Sure, Beav,” replies Wally as he taps the corners of his

mouth with a starched napkin.

The father looks on in his suit. The mother, decked out in

earrings and a pearl necklace, cuts into her steak and blushes.

Their conversation is politely clipped.

”Swell,” says Beaver, his cheeks puffed with food.

Our own talk at dinner was loud with belly laughs and

marked by our pointing forks at one another. The subjects were

commonplace.

“Gary, let’s go to the ditch tomorrow,” my brother suggests.

He explains that he has made a life preserver out of four empty

detergent bottles strung together with twine and that he will

make me one if I can find more bottles. “No way are we going to

drown.”

“Yeah, then we could have a dirt clod fight,” I reply, so happy

to be alive.

Whereas the Beaver’s family enjoyed dessert in dishes at the

table, our mom sent us outside, and more often than not I went

into the alley to peek over the neighbor’s fences and spy out

fruit, apricots or peaches.

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I had asked my mom and again she laughed that I was a

crazy chavalo as she stood in front of the sink, her arms rising

and falling with suds, face glistening from the heat. She sent me

outside where my brother and sister were sitting in the shade

that the fence threw out like a blanket. They were talking about

me when I plopped down next to them. They looked at one

another and then Debbie, my eight-year-old sister, started in.

“What’s this crap about getting dressed up?”

She had entered her profanity stage. A year later she would

give up such words and slip into her Catholic uniform, and into

squealing on my brother and me when we “cussed this” and

“cussed that.”

I tried to convince them that if we improved the way we

looked we might get along better in life. White people would

like us more. They might invite us to places, like their homes or

front yards. They might not hate us so much.

My sister called me a “craphead,” and got up to leave with a

stalk of grass dangling from her mouth. “They’ll never like us.”

My brother’s mood lightened as he talked about the ditch

— the white water, the broken pieces of glass, and the rusted car

fenders that awaited our knees. There would be toads, and

rocks to smash them.

David King, the only person we knew who resembled the

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middle class, called from over the fence. David was Catholic, of

Armenian and French descent, and his closet was filled with

toys. A bear-shaped cookie jar, like the ones on television, sat

on the kitchen counter. His mother was remarkably kind while

she put up with the racket we made on the street. Evenings, she

often watered the front yard and it must have upset her to see

us — my brother and I and others — jump from trees laughing,

the unkillable kids of the very poor, who got up unshaken,

brushed off, and climbed into another one to try again.

David called again. Rick got up and slapped grass from his

pants. When I asked if I could come along he said no. David said

no. They were two years older so their affairs were different

from mine. They greeted one another with foul names and took

off down the alley to look for trouble.

I went inside the house, turned on the television, and was

about to sit down with a glass of Kool-Aid when Mom shooed

me outside.

“It’s still light,” she said. “Later you’ll bug me to let you stay

out longer. So go on.”

I downed my Kool-Aid and went outside to the front yard.

No one was around. The day had cooled and a breeze rustled

the trees. Mr. Jackson, the plumber, was watering his lawn and

when he saw me he turned away to wash off his front steps.

There was more than an hour of light left, so I took advantage of

it and decided to look for work. I felt suddenly alive as I skipped

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down the block in search of an overgrown flower bed and the

dime that would end the day right.

ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. Why is the narrator attracted to the kind of family life depicted on TV? What, if anything, does he think is wrong with his life? Why do his desires apparently have so little impact on his family?

2. Why does the narrator first go looking for work? How has the meaning of work changed by the end of the story, when he goes out again “in search of an overgrown flower bed and the

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dime that would end the day right”? Explain.

3. As Soto looks back on his nine-year-old self, he has a different perspective on things than he had as a child. How would you characterize the mature Soto’s thoughts about his childhood family life? (Was it “a good family”? What was wrong with Soto’s thinking as a nine-year-old?) Back up your remarks with specific references to the narrative.

4. Review the story to find each mention of food or drink. Explain the role these references play.

5. Review the cast of “supporting characters” in this narrative — the mother, sister, brother, friends, and neighbors. What does each contribute to the story and in particular to the meaning of family within the story?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

6. Look ahead to the excerpt from Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (p. 73). Compare Soto’s family to the Maines family, being sure to consider ethnicity, gender roles, levels of affluence, and the different time periods and locations. What would it be like to live in each of these families — particularly as a young boy like Gary or like Nicole’s brother Jonas? Can you see any important similarities in addition to the numerous differences?

7. Compare and contrast the relationship of school and family in this narrative to that described by Mike Rose in “I Just Wanna Be Average” (p. 123).

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EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

8. Write a journal entry about a time when you wished your family were somehow different. What caused your dissatisfaction? What did you want your family to be like? Was your dissatisfaction ever resolved?

9. “Looking for Work” is essentially the story of a single day. Write a narrative of one day when you were eight or nine or ten; use details as Soto does to give the events of the day broader significance.

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WHAT WE REALLY MISS ABOUT THE 1950s STEPHANIE COONTZ

Popular myth has it that the 1950s were the ideal decade

for the American family. In this example of academic

writing at its best, Stephanie Coontz (b. 1944) provides a

clear, well-documented, and insightful analysis of what

was really going on and suggests that our nostalgia for

the 1950s could mislead us today. Coontz teaches family

studies and history at The Evergreen State College in

Olympia, Washington; she also serves as Director of

Public Education at the Council on Contemporary

Families, a nonprofit association based at the University

of Texas, Austin. An award-winning writer and

internationally recognized expert on the family, she has

testified before a House Select Committee on families,

appeared in several television documentaries, and

published extensively for both general and scholarly

audiences. Her recent books include Marriage, a History:

How Love Conquered Marriage and The Way We Never

Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (both

2016); this excerpt is from her earlier study The Way We

Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing

Families (1997).

IN A 1996 POLL BY THE KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS AGENCY,

more Americans chose the 1950s than any other single decade

as the best time for children to grow up. And despite the4

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research I’ve done on the underside of 1950s families, I don’t

think it’s crazy for people to feel nostalgic about the period. For

one thing, it’s easy to see why people might look back fondly to

a decade when real wages grew more in any single year than in

the entire ten years of the 1980s combined, a time when the

average 30-year-old man could buy a median-priced home on only 15–18 percent of his salary.

But it’s more than just a financial issue. When I talk with

modern parents, even ones who grew up in unhappy families,

they associate the 1950s with a yearning they feel for a time

when there were fewer complicated choices for kids or parents

to grapple with, when there was more predictability in how

people formed and maintained families, and when there was a

coherent “moral order” in their community to serve as a

reference point for family norms. Even people who found that

moral order grossly unfair or repressive often say that its

presence provided them with something concrete to push

against.

I can sympathize entirely. One of my most empowering

moments occurred the summer I turned 12, when my mother

marched down to the library with me to confront a librarian

who’d curtly refused to let me check out a book that was “not

appropriate” for my age. “Don’t you ever tell my daughter what

she can and can’t read,” fumed my mom. “She’s a mature young

lady and she can make her own choices.” In recent years I’ve

often thought back to the gratitude I felt toward my mother for

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that act of trust in me. I wish I had some way of earning similar

points from my own son. But much as I’ve always respected his

values, I certainly wouldn’t have walked into my local video

store when he was 12 and demanded that he be allowed to

check out absolutely anything he wanted!

Still, I have no illusions that I’d actually like to go back to the

1950s, and neither do most people who express such occasional

nostalgia. For example, although the 1950s got more votes than

any other decade in the Knight-Ridder poll, it did not win an

outright majority: 38 percent of respondents picked the 1950s;

27 percent picked the 1960s or the 1970s. Voters between the

ages of 50 and 64 were most likely to choose the 1950s, the

decade in which they themselves came of age, as the best time

for kids; voters under 30 were more likely to choose the 1970s.

African Americans differed over whether the 1960s, 1970s, or

1980s were best, but all age groups of blacks agreed that later

decades were definitely preferable to the 1950s.

Nostalgia for the 1950s is real and deserves to be taken

seriously, but it usually shouldn’t be taken literally. Even people

who do pick the 1950s as the best decade generally end up

saying, once they start discussing their feelings in depth, that

it’s not the family arrangements in and of themselves that they

want to revive. They don’t miss the way women used to be

treated, they sure wouldn’t want to live with most of the fathers

they knew in their neighborhoods, and “come to think of it” — I

don’t know how many times I’ve recorded these exact words —

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“I communicate with my kids much better than my parents or

grandparents did.” When Judith Wallerstein recently

interviewed 100 spouses in “happy” marriages, she found that

only five “wanted a marriage like their parents’.” The husbands

“consciously rejected the role models provided by their fathers.

The women said they could never be happy living as their

mothers did.”

People today understandably feel that their lives are out of

balance, but they yearn for something totally new — a more

equal distribution of work, family, and community time for

both men and women, children and adults. If the 1990s are

lopsided in one direction, the 1950s were equally lopsided in the

opposite direction.

What most people really feel nostalgic about has little to do

with the internal structure of 1950s families. It is the belief that

the 1950s provided a more family-friendly economic and social

environment, an easier climate in which to keep kids on the

straight and narrow, and above all, a greater feeling of hope for

a family’s long-term future, especially for its young. The

contrast between the perceived hopefulness of the fifties and

our own misgivings about the future is key to contemporary

nostalgia for the period. Greater optimism did exist then, even

among many individuals and groups who were in terrible

circumstances. But if we are to take people’s sense of loss

seriously, rather than merely to capitalize on it for a hidden

political agenda, we need to develop a historical perspective on

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where that hope came from.

Part of it came from families comparing their prospects in

the 1950s to their unstable, often grindingly uncomfortable

pasts, especially the two horrible decades just before. In the

1920s, after two centuries of child labor and income insecurity,

and for the first time in American history, a bare majority of

children had come to live in a family with a male breadwinner,

a female homemaker, and a chance at a high school education.

Yet no sooner did the ideals associated with such a family begin

to blossom than they were buried by the stock market crash of

1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the 1930s

domestic violence soared; divorce rates fell, but informal

separations jumped; fertility plummeted. Murder rates were

higher in 1933 than they were in the 1980s. Families were

uprooted or torn apart. Thousands of young people left home to

seek work, often riding the rails across the country.

World War II brought the beginning of economic recovery,

and people’s renewed interest in forming families resulted in a

marriage and childbearing boom, but stability was still beyond

most people’s grasp. Postwar communities were rocked by

racial tensions, labor strife, and a right-wing backlash against

the radical union movement of the 1930s. Many women

resented being fired from wartime jobs they had grown to

enjoy. Veterans often came home to find that they had to elbow

their way back into their families, with wives and children

resisting their attempts to reassert domestic authority. In one

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recent study of fathers who returned from the war, four times

as many reported painful, even traumatic, reunions as

remembered happy ones.

By 1946 one in every three marriages was ending in

divorce. Even couples who stayed together went through rough

times, as an acute housing shortage forced families to double up

with relatives or friends. Tempers frayed and generational

relations grew strained. “No home is big enough to house two

families, particularly two of different generations, with

opposite theories on child training,” warned a 1948 film on the

problems of modern marriage.

So after the widespread domestic strife, family disruptions,

and violence of the 1930s and the instability of the World War II

period, people were ready to try something new. The postwar

economic boom gave them the chance. The 1950s was the first

time that a majority of Americans could even dream of creating

a secure oasis in their immediate nuclear families. There they

could focus their emotional and financial investments, reduce

obligations to others that might keep them from seizing their

own chance at a new start, and escape the interference of an

older generation of neighbors or relatives who tried to tell them

how to run their lives and raise their kids. Oral histories of the

postwar period resound with the theme of escaping from in-

laws, maiden aunts, older parents, even needy siblings.

The private family also provided a refuge from the anxieties

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of the new nuclear age and the cold war, as well as a place to get

away from the political witch hunts led by Senator Joe

McCarthy and his allies. When having the wrong friends at the

wrong time or belonging to any “suspicious” organization could

ruin your career and reputation, it was safer to pull out of

groups you might have joined earlier and to focus on your

family. On a more positive note, the nuclear family was where

people could try to satisfy their long-pent-up desires for a more

stable marriage, a decent home, and the chance to really enjoy

their children.

The 1950s Family Experiment The key to understanding the successes, failures, and

comparatively short life of 1950s family forms and values is to

understand the period as one of experimentation with the

possibilities of a new kind of family, not as the expression of

some longstanding tradition. At the end of the 1940s, the

divorce rate, which had been rising steadily since the 1890s,

dropped sharply; the age of marriage fell to a 100-year low; and

the birth rate soared. Women who had worked during the

Depression or World War II quit their jobs as soon as they

became pregnant, which meant quite a few women were

specializing in child raising; fewer women remained childless

during the 1950s than in any decade since the late nineteenth

century. The timing and spacing of childbearing became far

more compressed, so that young mothers were likely to have

two or more children in diapers at once, with no older sibling to

help in their care. At the same time, again for the first time in

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100 years, the educational gap between young middle-class

women and men increased, while job segregation for working

men and women seems to have peaked. These demographic

changes increased the dependence of women on marriage, in

contrast to gradual trends in the opposite direction since the

early twentieth century.

The result was that family life and gender roles became

much more predictable, orderly, and settled in the 1950s than

they were either twenty years earlier or would be twenty years

later. Only slightly more than one in four marriages ended in

divorce during the 1950s. Very few young people spent any

extended period of time in a nonfamily setting: They moved

from their parents’ family into their own family, after just a

brief experience with independent living, and they started

having children soon after marriage. Whereas two-thirds of

women aged 20 to 24 were not yet married in 1990, only 28

percent of women this age were still single in 1960.

Ninety percent of all the households in the country were

families in the 1950s, in comparison with only 71 percent by

1990. Eighty-six percent of all children lived in two-parent

homes in 1950, as opposed to just 72 percent in 1990. And the

percentage living with both biological parents — rather than,

say, a parent and stepparent — was dramatically higher than it

had been at the turn of the century or is today: seventy percent

in 1950, compared with only 50 percent in 1990. Nearly 60

percent of kids — an all-time high — were born into male

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breadwinner–female homemaker families; only a minority of

the rest had mothers who worked in the paid labor force.

If the organization and uniformity of family life in the 1950s

were new, so were the values, especially the emphasis on

putting all one’s emotional and financial eggs in the small

basket of the immediate nuclear family. Right up through the

1940s, ties of work, friendship, neighborhood, ethnicity,

extended kin, and voluntary organizations were as important a

source of identity for most Americans, and sometimes a more

important source of obligation, than marriage and the nuclear

family. All this changed in the postwar era. The spread of

suburbs and automobiles, combined with the destruction of

older ethnic neighborhoods in many cities, led to the decline of

the neighborhood social club. Young couples moved away from

parents and kin, cutting ties with traditional extrafamilial

networks that might compete for their attention. A critical

factor in this trend was the emergence of a group of family

sociologists and marriage counselors who followed Talcott

Parsons in claiming that the nuclear family, built on a sharp

division of labor between husband and wife, was the

cornerstone of modern society.

The new family experts tended to advocate views such as

those first raised in a 1946 book, Their Mothers’ Sons, by

psychiatrist Edward Strecker. Strecker and his followers argued

that American boys were infantilized and emasculated by

women who were old-fashioned “moms” instead of modern

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“mothers.” One sign that you might be that dreaded “mom,”

Strecker warned women, was if you felt you should take your

aging parents into your own home, rather than putting them in

“a good institution … where they will receive adequate care and

comfort.” Modern “mothers” placed their parents in nursing

homes and poured all their energies into their nuclear family.

They were discouraged from diluting their wifely and maternal

commitments by maintaining “competing” interests in friends,

jobs, or extended family networks, yet they were also supposed

to cheerfully grant early independence to their (male) children

— an emotional double bind that may explain why so many

women who took this advice to heart ended up abusing alcohol

or tranquilizers over the course of the decade.

The call for young couples to break from their parents and

youthful friends was a consistent theme in 1950s popular

culture. In Marty, one of the most highly praised TV plays and

movies of the 1950s, the hero almost loses his chance at love by

listening to the carping of his mother and aunt and letting

himself be influenced by old friends who resent the time he

spends with his new girlfriend. In the end, he turns his back on

mother, aunt, and friends to get his new marriage and a little

business of his own off to a good start. Other movies, novels,

and popular psychology tracts portrayed the dreadful things

that happened when women became more interested in careers

than marriage or men resisted domestic conformity.

Yet many people felt guilty about moving away from older

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parents and relatives; “modern mothers” worried that fostering

independence in their kids could lead to defiance or even

juvenile delinquency (the recurring nightmare of the age); there

was considerable confusion about how men and women could

maintain clear breadwinner-homemaker distinctions in a

period of expanding education, job openings, and consumer

aspirations. People clamored for advice. They got it from the

new family education specialists and marriage counselors, from

columns in women’s magazines, from government pamphlets,

and above all from television. While 1950s TV melodramas

warned against letting anything dilute the commitment to

getting married and having kids, the new family sitcoms gave

people nightly lessons on how to make their marriage or rapidly

expanding family work — or, in the case of I Love Lucy,

probably the most popular show of the era, how not to make

their marriage and family work. Lucy and Ricky gave weekly

comic reminders of how much trouble a woman could get into

by wanting a career or hatching some hare-brained scheme

behind her husband’s back.

At the time, everyone knew that shows such as Donna

Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows

Best were not the way families really were. People didn’t watch

those shows to see their own lives reflected back at them. They

watched them to see how families were supposed to live — and

also to get a little reassurance that they were headed in the right

direction. The sitcoms were simultaneously advertisements,

etiquette manuals, and how-to lessons for a new way of

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organizing marriage and child raising. I have studied the scripts

of these shows for years, since I often use them in my classes on

family history, but it wasn’t until I became a parent that I felt

their extraordinary pull. The secret of their appeal, I suddenly

realized, was that they offered 1950s viewers, wracked with the

same feelings of parental inadequacy as was I, the promise that

there were easy answers and surefire techniques for raising

kids.

Ever since, I have found it useful to think of the sitcoms as

the 1950s equivalent of today’s beer ads. As most people know,

beer ads are consciously aimed at men who aren’t as strong and

sexy as the models in the commercials, guys who are uneasily

aware of the gap between the ideal masculine pursuits and their

own achievements. The promise is that if the viewers on the

couch will just drink brand X, they too will be able to run 10

miles without gasping for breath. Their bodies will firm up,

their complexions will clear up, and maybe the Swedish bikini

team will come over and hang out at their place.

Similarly, the 1950s sitcoms were aimed at young couples

who had married in haste, women who had tasted new

freedoms during World War II and given up their jobs with

regret, veterans whose children resented their attempts to

reassert paternal authority, and individuals disturbed by the

changing racial and ethnic mix of postwar America. The

message was clear: Buy these ranch houses, Hotpoint

appliances, and child-raising ideals; relate to your spouse like

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this; get a new car to wash with your kids on Sunday afternoons;

organize your dinners like that — and you too can escape from

the conflicts of race, class, and political witch hunts into

harmonious families where father knows best, mothers are

never bored or irritated, and teenagers rush to the dinner table

each night, eager to get their latest dose of parental wisdom.

Many families found it possible to put together a good

imitation of this way of living during the 1950s and 1960s.

Couples were often able to construct marriages that were much

more harmonious than those in which they had grown up, and

to devote far more time to their children. Even when marriages

were deeply unhappy, as many were, the new stability,

economic security, and educational advantages parents were

able to offer their kids counted for a lot in people’s assessment

of their life satisfaction. And in some matters, ignorance could

be bliss: The lack of media coverage of problems such as abuse

or incest was terribly hard on the casualties, but it protected

more fortunate families from knowledge and fear of many

social ills.

There was tremendous hostility to people who could be

defined as “others”: Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans,

the poor, gays or lesbians, and “the red menace.” Yet on a day-

to-day basis, the civility that prevailed in homogeneous

neighborhoods allowed people to ignore larger patterns of

racial and political repression. Racial clashes were ever-present

in the 1950s, sometimes escalating into full-scale antiblack riots,

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but individual homicide rates fell to almost half the levels of the

1930s. As nuclear families moved into the suburbs, they

retreated from social activism but entered voluntary

relationships with people who had children the same age; they

became involved in PTAs together, joined bridge clubs, went

bowling. There does seem to have been a stronger sense of

neighborly commonalities than many of us feel today. Even

though this local community was often the product of exclusion

or repression, it sometimes looks attractive to modern

Americans whose commutes are getting longer and whose

family or work patterns give them little in common with their

neighbors.

The optimism that allowed many families to rise above

their internal difficulties and to put limits on their

individualistic values during the 1950s came from the sense that

America was on a dramatically different trajectory than it had

been in the past, an upward and expansionary path that had

already taken people to better places than they had ever seen

before and would certainly take their children even further.

This confidence that almost everyone could look forward to a

better future stands in sharp contrast to how most

contemporary Americans feel, and it explains why a period in

which many people were much worse off than today sometimes

still looks like a better period for families than our own.

Throughout the 1950s, poverty was higher than it is today,

but it was less concentrated in pockets of blight existing side-by-

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side with extremes of wealth, and, unlike today, it was falling

rather than rising. At the end of the 1930s, almost two-thirds of

the population had incomes below the poverty standards of the

day, while only one in eight had a middle-class income (defined

as two to five times the poverty line). By 1960, a majority of the

population had climbed into the middle-income range.

Unmarried people were hardly sexually abstinent in the

1950s, but the age of first intercourse was somewhat higher

than it is now, and despite a tripling of nonmarital birth rates

between 1940 and 1958, more than 70 percent of nonmarital

pregnancies led to weddings before the child was born. Teenage

birth rates were almost twice as high in 1957 as in the 1990s, but

most teen births were to married couples, and the effect of teen

pregnancy in reducing further schooling for young people did

not hurt their life prospects the way it does today. High school

graduation rates were lower in the 1950s than they are today,

and minority students had far worse test scores, but there were

jobs for people who dropped out of high school or graduated

without good reading skills — jobs that actually had a future.

People entering the job market in the 1950s had no way of

knowing that they would be the last generation to have a good

shot at reaching middle-class status without the benefit of

postsecondary schooling.

Millions of men from impoverished, rural, unemployed, or

poorly educated family backgrounds found steady jobs in the

steel, auto, appliance, construction, and shipping industries.

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Lower-middle-class men went further on in college during the

1950s than they would have been able to expect in earlier

decades, enabling them to make the transition to secure white-

collar work. The experience of shared sacrifices in the

Depression and war, reinforced by a New Deal–inspired belief

in the ability of government to make life better, gave people a

sense of hope for the future. Confidence in government,

business, education, and other institutions was on the rise. This

general optimism affected people’s experience and assessment

of family life. It is no wonder modern Americans yearn for a

similar sense of hope.

But before we sign on to any attempts to turn the family clock

back to the 1950s we should note that the family successes and

community solidarities of the 1950s rested on a totally different

set of political and economic conditions than we have today.

Contrary to widespread belief, the 1950s was not an age of

laissez-faire government and free market competition. A major

cause of the social mobility of young families in the 1950s was

that federal assistance programs were much more generous and

widespread than they are today.

In the most ambitious and successful affirmative action

program ever adopted in America, 40 percent of young men

were eligible for veterans’ benefits, and these benefits were far

more extensive than those available to Vietnam-era vets.

Financed in part by a federal income tax on the rich that went

up to 87 percent and a corporate tax rate of 52 percent, such

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benefits provided quite a jump start for a generation of young

families. The GI Bill paid most tuition costs for vets who

attended college, doubling the percentage of college students

from prewar levels. At the other end of the life span, Social

Security began to build up a significant safety net for the

elderly, formerly the poorest segment of the population.

Starting in 1950, the federal government regularly mandated

raises in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation. The

minimum wage may have been only $1.40 as late as 1968, but a

person who worked for that amount full-time, year-round,

earned 118 percent of the poverty figure for a family of three.

By 1995, a full-time minimum-wage worker could earn only 72

percent of the poverty level.

An important source of the economic expansion of the 1950s

was that public works spending at all levels of government

comprised nearly 20 percent of total expenditures in 1950, as

compared to less than 7 percent in 1984. Between 1950 and 1960,

nonmilitary, nonresidential public construction rose by 58

percent. Construction expenditures for new schools (in dollar

amounts adjusted for inflation) rose by 72 percent; funding on

sewers and waterworks rose by 46 percent. Government paid 90

percent of the costs of building the new Interstate Highway

System. These programs opened up suburbia to growing

numbers of middle-class Americans and created secure, well-

paying jobs for blue-collar workers.

Government also reorganized home financing, underwriting

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low down payments and long-term mortgages that had been

rejected as bad business by private industry. To do this,

government put public assets behind housing lending

programs, created two new national financial institutions to

facilitate home loans, allowed veterans to put down payments

as low as a dollar on a house, and offered tax breaks to people

who bought homes. The National Education Defense Act funded

the socioeconomic mobility of thousands of young men who

trained themselves for well-paying jobs in such fields as

engineering.

Unlike contemporary welfare programs, government

investment in 1950s families was not just for immediate

subsistence but encouraged long-term asset development,

rewarding people for increasing their investment in homes and

education. Thus it was far less likely that such families or

individuals would ever fall back to where they started, even

after a string of bad luck. Subsidies for higher education were

greater the longer people stayed in school and the more

expensive the school they selected. Mortgage deductions got

bigger as people traded up to better houses.

These social and political support systems magnified the

impact of the postwar economic boom. “In the years between

1947 and 1973,” reports economist Robert Kuttner, “the median

paycheck more than doubled, and the bottom 20 percent

enjoyed the greatest gains.” High rates of unionization meant

that blue-collar workers were making much more financial

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progress than most of their counterparts today. In 1952, when

eager home buyers flocked to the opening of Levittown,

Pennsylvania, the largest planned community yet constructed,

“it took a factory worker one day to earn enough money to pay

the closing costs on a new Levittown house, then selling for

$10,000.” By 1991, such a home was selling for $100,000 or more,

and it took a factory worker eighteen weeks to earn enough

money for just the closing costs.

The legacy of the union struggle of the 1930s and 1940s,

combined with government support for raising people’s living

standards, set limits on corporations that have disappeared in

recent decades. Corporations paid 23 percent of federal income

taxes in the 1950s, as compared to just 9.2 percent in 1991. Big

companies earned higher profit margins than smaller firms,

partly due to their dominance of the market, partly to America’s

postwar economic advantage. They chose (or were forced) to

share these extra earnings, which economists call “rents,” with

employees. Economists at the Brookings Institution and

Harvard University estimate that 70 percent of such corporate

rents were passed on to workers at all levels of the firm,

benefiting secretaries and janitors as well as CEOs.

Corporations routinely retained workers even in slack periods,

as a way of ensuring workplace stability. Although they often

received more generous tax breaks from communities than they

gave back in investment, at least they kept their plants and

employment offices in the same place. AT&T, for example,

received much of the technology it used to finance its postwar

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expansion from publicly funded communications research

conducted as part of the war effort, and, as current AT&T

Chairman Robert Allen puts it, there “used to be a lifelong

commitment on the employee’s part and on our part.” Today,

however, he admits, “the contract doesn’t exist anymore.”

Television trivia experts still argue over exactly what the

fathers in many 1950s sitcoms did for a living. Whatever it was,

though, they obviously didn’t have to worry about downsizing.

If most married people stayed in long-term relationships during

the 1950s, so did most corporations, sticking with the

communities they grew up in and the employees they originally

hired. Corporations were not constantly relocating in search of

cheap labor during the 1950s; unlike today, increases in worker

productivity usually led to increases in wages. The number of

workers covered by corporate pension plans and health benefits

increased steadily. So did limits on the work week. There is

good reason that people look back to the 1950s as a less hurried

age: The average American was working a shorter workday in

the 1950s than his or her counterpart today, when a quarter of

the workforce puts in 49 or more hours a week.

So politicians are practicing quite a double standard when

they tell us to return to the family forms of the 1950s while they

do nothing to restore the job programs and family subsidies of

that era, the limits on corporate relocation and financial

wheeling-dealing, the much higher share of taxes paid by

corporations then, the availability of union jobs for noncollege

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youth, and the subsidies for higher education such as the

National Defense Education Act loans. Furthermore, they’re not

telling the whole story when they claim that the 1950s was the

most prosperous time for families and the most secure decade

for children. Instead, playing to our understandable nostalgia

for a time when things seemed to be getting better, not worse,

they engage in a tricky chronological shell game with their

figures, diverting our attention from two important points.

First, many individuals, families, and groups were excluded

from the economic prosperity, family optimism, and social

civility of the 1950s. Second, the all-time high point of child

well-being and family economic security came not during the

1950s but at the end of the 1960s.

We now know that 1950s family culture was not only

nontraditional; it was also not idyllic. In important ways, the

stability of family and community life during the 1950s rested

on pervasive discrimination against women, gays, political

dissidents, non-Christians, and racial or ethnic minorities, as

well as on a systematic cover-up of the underside of many

families. Families that were harmonious and fair of their own

free will may have been able to function more easily in the

fifties, but few alternatives existed for members of discordant

or oppressive families. Victims of child abuse, incest,

alcoholism, spousal rape, and wife battering had no recourse,

no place to go, until well into the 1960s.

At the end of the 1950s, despite ten years of economic

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growth, 27.3 percent of the nation’s children were poor,

including those in white “underclass” communities such as

Appalachia. Almost 50 percent of married-couple African

American families were impoverished — a figure far higher

than today. It’s no wonder African Americans are not likely to

pick the 1950s as a golden age, even in comparison with the

setbacks they experienced in the 1980s. When blacks moved

north to find jobs in the postwar urban manufacturing boom

they met vicious harassment and violence, first to prevent them

from moving out of the central cities, then to exclude them

from public space such as parks or beaches.

In Philadelphia, for example, the City of Brotherly Love,

there were more than 200 racial incidents over housing in the

first six months of 1955 alone. The Federal Housing Authority,

such a boon to white working-class families, refused to insure

homes in all-black or in racially mixed neighborhoods. Two-

thirds of the city dwellers evicted by the urban renewal projects

of the decade were African Americans and Latinos; government

did almost nothing to help such displaced families find

substitute housing.

Women were unable to take out loans or even credit cards in

their own names. They were excluded from juries in many

states. A lack of options outside marriage led some women to

remain in desperately unhappy unions that were often not in

the best interests of their children or themselves. Even women

in happy marriages often felt humiliated by the constant

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messages they received that their whole lives had to revolve

around a man. “You are not ready when he calls — miss one

turn,” was a rule in the Barbie game marketed to 1950s girls; “he

criticizes your hairdo — go to the beauty shop.” Episodes of

Father Knows Best advised young women: “The worst thing you

can do is to try to beat a man at his own game. You just beat the

women at theirs.” One character on the show told women to

always ask themselves, “Are you after a job or a man? You can’t

have both.”

The Fifties Experiment Comes to an End The social stability of the 1950s, then, was a response to the

stick of racism, sexism, and repression as well as to the carrot of

economic opportunity and government aid. Because social

protest mounted in the 1960s and unsettling challenges were

posed to the gender roles and sexual mores of the previous

decade, many people forget that families continued to make

gains throughout the 1960s and into the first few years of the

1970s. By 1969, child poverty was down to 14 percent, its lowest

level ever; it hovered just above that marker until 1975, when it

began its steady climb up to contemporary figures (22 percent

in 1993; 21.2 percent in 1994). The high point of health and

nutrition for poor children was reached in the early 1970s.

So commentators are being misleading when they claim that

the 1950s was the golden age of American families. They are

disregarding the number of people who were excluded during

that decade and ignoring the socioeconomic gains that

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continued to be made through the 1960s. But they are quite

right to note that the improvements of the 1950s and 1960s came

to an end at some point in the 1970s (though not for the elderly,

who continued to make progress).

Ironically, it was the children of those stable, enduring,

supposedly idyllic 1950s families, the recipients of so much

maternal time and attention, that pioneered the sharp break

with their parents’ family forms and gender roles in the 1970s.

This was not because they were led astray by some youthful

Murphy Brown in her student rebel days or inadvertently

spoiled by parents who read too many of Dr. Spock’s child-

raising manuals.

Partly, the departure from 1950s family arrangements was

a logical extension of trends and beliefs pioneered in the 1950s,

or of inherent contradictions in those patterns. For example,

early and close-spaced childbearing freed more wives up to join

the labor force, and married women began to flock to work. By

1960, more than 40 percent of women over the age of 16 held a

job, and working mothers were the fastest growing component

of the labor force. The educational aspirations and

opportunities that opened up for kids of the baby boom could

not be confined to males, and many tight-knit, male-

breadwinner, nuclear families in the 1950s instilled in their

daughters the ambition to be something other than a

homemaker.28

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Another part of the transformation was a shift in values.

Most people would probably agree that some changes in values

were urgently needed: the extension of civil rights to racial

minorities and to women; a rejection of property rights in

children by parents and in women by husbands; a reaction

against the political intolerance and the wasteful materialism of

1950s culture. Other changes in values remain more

controversial: opposition to American intervention abroad;

repudiation of the traditional sexual double standard; rebellion

against what many young people saw as the hypocrisy of

parents who preached sexual morality but ignored social

immorality such as racism and militarism.

Still other developments, such as the growth of me-first

individualism, are widely regarded as problematic by people on

all points along the political spectrum. It’s worth noting,

though, that the origins of antisocial individualism and self-

indulgent consumerism lay at least as much in the family values

of the 1950s as in the youth rebellion of the 1960s. The

marketing experts who never allowed the kids in Ozzie and

Harriet sitcoms to be shown drinking milk, for fear of offending

soft-drink companies that might sponsor the show in

syndication, were ultimately the same people who slightly later

invested billions of dollars to channel sexual rebelliousness and

a depoliticized individualism into mainstream culture.

There were big cultural changes brewing by the beginning of

the 1970s, and tremendous upheavals in social, sexual, and

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family values. And yes, there were sometimes reckless or

simply laughable excesses in some of the early experiments

with new gender roles, family forms, and personal expression.

But the excesses of 1950s gender roles and family forms were

every bit as repellent and stupid as the excesses of the sixties:

Just watch a dating etiquette film of the time period, or recall

that therapists of the day often told victims of incest that they

were merely having unconscious oedipal fantasies.

Ultimately, though, changes in values were not what brought

the 1950s family experiment to an end. The postwar family

compacts between husbands and wives, parents and children,

young and old, were based on the postwar social compact

between government, corporations, and workers. While there

was some discontent with those family bargains among women

and youth, the old relations did not really start to unravel until

people began to face the erosion of the corporate wage bargain

and government broke its tacit societal bargain that it would

continue to invest in jobs and education for the younger

generation.

In the 1970s, new economic trends began to clash with all

the social expectations that 1950s families had instilled in their

children. That clash, not the willful abandonment of

responsibility and commitment, has been the primary cause of

both family rearrangements and the growing social problems

that are usually attributed to such family changes, but in fact

have separate origins.

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ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. According to Coontz, what do we really miss about the 1950s, and what don’t we miss? Explain how it might be possible for us to miss an era that’s now half a century in the past.

2. In Coontz’s view, what was the role of the government in making the 1950s in America what they were? What part did broader historical forces or other circumstances play?

3. Although she concentrates on the 1950s, Coontz also describes the other decades from the 1920s to the 1990s, when she wrote this piece. Use her information to create a brief chart naming the key characteristics of each decade. Then consider your own family history and see how well it fits the pattern Coontz outlines. Discuss the results with classmates or write a journal entry reflecting on what you learn.

4. Consider the most recent ten years of American history. What events or trends (e.g., same-sex marriage, immigration policies, and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements) do you think a sociologist or cultural historian might consider important for understanding our current mythologies of family? How do you think our ideas about family have changed in this decade?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

5. The mythic nuclear family of the 1950s included kids. Do you think people today place less emphasis on raising children, and if so, why? How might Coontz respond to the “Future Salmon”

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cartoon on page 24 or to the frontispiece to this chapter (p. 15)?

6. Review “Looking for Work” by Gary Soto (p. 20). How does this narrative evoke nostalgia for a simpler, better era for families? Does it reveal any of the problems with the 1950s that Coontz describes?

7. Look at the image on page 525 and discuss which elements of the photo — and of the 2016 Trump-Pence campaign more generally — could be considered nostalgic. Do you think the title “What We Really Miss about the 1850s” would be an apt one for this image?

EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

8. Watch an episode of a 1950s sitcom such as Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, or I Love Lucy. Analyze the extent to which it reveals both positive and negative aspects of the 1950s that Coontz discusses — for example, an authoritarian father figure, limited roles for wives, economic prosperity, or a sense of a secure community.

9. Coontz suggests that an uninformed nostalgia for the 1950s could promote harmful political agendas. What connections do you see between her analysis and the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” or other recent political stances or events? Do you agree with Coontz that nostalgia can be dangerous? Why or why not?

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THE COLOR OF FAMILY TIES: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND EXTENDED FAMILY INVOLVEMENT NAOMI GERSTEL AND NATALIA SARKISIAN

The myth of the nuclear family is not just a harmless

cliché; rather, it can lock us into fundamental

misunderstandings of how American families live,

misunderstandings that can divide groups and promote

simplistic public policy. In this study, sociologists Naomi

Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian examine data on black,

white, and Latino/a families to challenge the popular

notion that minority families have weaker ties and are

more fragmented than white families. They find that

social class is more important than ethnicity; moreover,

while differences between ethnic groups do exist, each

group has developed ways to cope with the practical,

emotional, and financial challenges they face and to

maintain family solidarity. Gerstel is Distinguished

University Professor and professor of sociology at the

University of Massachusetts, Amherst; she has published

widely on such topics as the changing American family,

elder care, child care, and work schedules. Sarkisian is

Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College. The

two coauthored the 2012 book Nuclear Family Values,

Extended Family Lives: The Importance of Gender, Race,

and Class. “The Color of Family Ties” appeared in

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American Families: A Multicultural Reader, edited by

Stephanie Coontz (see p. 26) with Maya Parson and

Gabrielle Raley (2008).

WHEN TALKING ABOUT FAMILY OBLIGATIONS and

solidarities, politicians and social commentators typically focus

on the ties between married couples and their children. We

often hear that Black and Latino/a, especially Puerto Rican,

families are more disorganized than White families, and that

their family ties are weaker, because rates of non-marriage and

single parenthood are higher among these minority groups. But

this focus on the nuclear family ignores extended family

solidarities and caregiving activities. Here we examine these

often overlooked extended kinship ties.

Taking this broader perspective on family relations refutes

the myth that Blacks and Latinos/as lack strong families.

Minority individuals are more likely to live in extended family

homes than Whites and in many ways more likely to help out

their aging parents, grandparents, adult children, brothers,

sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and other kin.

According to our research using the second wave of the

National Survey of Families and Households, as Figures 1 and 2

show, Blacks and Latinos/as, both women and men, are much

more likely than Whites to share a home with extended kin: 42

percent of Blacks and 37 percent of Latinos/as, but only 20

percent of Whites, live with relatives. Similar patterns exist for

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living near relatives: 54 percent of Blacks and 51 percent of

Latinos/as, but only 37 percent of Whites, live within two miles

of kin. Blacks and Latinos/as are also more likely than Whites to

frequently visit kin. For example, 76 percent of Blacks, 71

percent of Latinos/as, but just 63 percent of Whites see their

relatives once a week or more.

Figure 1. Ethnicity and extended kin involvement among men.

Data from National Survey of Families and Households, 1992–1994.

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Figure 2. Ethnicity and extended kin involvement among women.

Data from National Survey of Families and Households, 1992–1994.

Even if they don’t live together, Blacks and Latinos/as are as

likely as Whites — and in some ways more likely — to be

supportive family members. But there are important racial and

ethnic differences in the type of support family members give

each other. Whites are more likely than ethnic minorities to

give and receive large sums of money, and White women are

more likely than minority women to give and receive emotional

support, such as discussing personal problems and giving each

other advice. When it comes to help with practical tasks,

however, we find that Black and Latino/a relatives are more

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likely than Whites to be supportive: they are more likely to give

each other help with household work and child care, as well as

with providing rides and running errands. These differences

are especially pronounced among women.

This is not to say that Black and Latino men are not

involved with kin, as is implied in popular images of minority

men hanging out on street corners rather than attending to

family ties. In fact, Black and Latino men are more likely than

White men to live near relatives and to stay in touch with them.

White men, however, are more likely to give and receive large-

scale financial help. Moreover, the three groups of men are

very similar when it comes to giving and getting practical help

and emotional support.

These data suggest that if we only consider married couples

or parents and their young children, we are missing much of

what families in general and families of color in particular do

for each other. A focus on nuclear families in discussions of

race differences in family life creates a biased portrait of

families of color.

Explaining Race Differences: Is It Culture or Class? When discussing differences in family experiences of various

racial and ethnic groups, commentators often assume that

these differences can be traced to cultural differences or

competing “family values.” Sometimes these are expressed in a

positive way, as in the stereotype that Latino families have more

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extended ties because of their historical traditions and religious

values. Other times these are expressed in a negative way, as

when Blacks are said to lack family values because of the

cultural legacy of slavery and subsequent years of oppression.

Either way, differences in family behaviors are often explained

by differences in cultural heritage.

In contrast, in our research, we find that social class rather

than culture is the key to understanding the differences in

extended family ties and behaviors between Whites and ethnic

minorities. To be sure, differences in cultural values do exist.

Blacks and Latinos/as are more likely than Whites to say they

believe that extended family is important; both groups are also

more likely to attend religious services. Blacks tend to hold

more egalitarian beliefs about gender than Whites, while

Latinos/as, especially Mexican Americans, tend to hold more

“traditional” views. But these differences in values do not

explain racial differences in actual involvement with relatives.

It is, instead, social class that matters most in explaining these

differences.

It is widely known (and confirmed by U.S. Census data

presented in Table 1) that Blacks and Latinos/as tend to have far

less income and education than Whites. Families of color are

also much more likely than White families to be below the

official poverty line. In our research, we find that the

differences in extended family ties and behaviors between

Whites and ethnic minorities are primarily the result of these

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social class disparities.

TABLE 1 Education, Income, and Poverty Rates by Race

WHITES BLACKS LATINOS/AS

Median household income $50,784 $30,858 $35,967

Percentage below poverty line 8.4% 24.7% 22.0%

Education:

Less than high school 14.5% 27.6% 47.6%

High school graduate 58.5% 58.1% 42.0%

Bachelor’s degree or higher 27.0% 14.3% 10.4%

Data from U.S. Census Bureau, 2005.

Simply put, White, Black, and Latino/a individuals with

the same amount of income and education have similar

patterns of involvement with their extended families. Just like

poor minorities, impoverished Whites are more likely to

exchange practical aid and visit with extended kin than are their

wealthier counterparts. Just like middle-class Whites, middle-

class Blacks and Latinos/as are more likely to talk about their

personal concerns or share money with relatives than are their

poorer counterparts.

More specifically, it is because Whites tend to have more

income than Blacks and Latinos/as that they are more likely to

give money to their relatives or get it from them. And the higher

levels of emotional support among White women can be at least

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in part traced to their higher levels of education, perhaps

because schooling encourages women to talk out their

problems and makes them more likely to give (and get) advice.

Conversely, we find that the relative economic deprivation of

racial/ethnic minorities leads in many ways to higher levels of

extended family involvement. Individuals’ lack of economic

resources increases their need for help from kin and boosts

their willingness to give help in return. Because Blacks and

Latinos/as typically have less income and education than

Whites, they come to rely more on their relatives for daily needs

such as child care, household tasks, or rides. The tendency of

Blacks and Latinos/as to live with or near kin may also reflect

their greater need for kin cooperation, as well as their

decreased opportunities and pressures to move away, including

moving for college.

Social Class and Familial Trade-Offs How do our findings on race, social class, and familial

involvement challenge common understandings of minority

families? They show that poor minority families do not

necessarily lead lives of social isolation or lack strong family

solidarities. The lower rates of marriage among impoverished

groups may reflect not a rejection of family values but a realistic

assessment of how little a woman (and her children) may be

able to depend upon marriage. Sociologists Kathryn Edin and

Maria Kefalas (2007) recently found that because disadvantaged

men are often unable to offer women the kind of economic

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security that advantaged men provide, poor women are less

likely to marry. Instead, these women create support networks

beyond the nuclear family, regularly turning to extended kin for

practical support.

Reliance on extended kin and lack of marital ties are linked.

In another analysis of the National Survey of Families and

Households, we found that, contrary to much rhetoric about

marriage as a key source of adult social ties, marriage actually

diminishes ties to kin. Married people — women as well as men

— are less involved with their parents and siblings than those

never married or previously married. These findings indicate a

trade-off between commitments to nuclear and extended family

ties. Marriage, we have found, is a “greedy” institution: it has a

tendency to consume the bulk of people’s energies and

emotions and to dilute their commitments beyond the nuclear

family.

On the one hand, then, support given to spouses and

intimate partners sometimes comes at the expense of broader

kin and community ties. Indeed, married adult children take

care of elderly parents less often than their unmarried siblings.

Marriage can also cut people off from networks of mutual aid.

Married mothers, for example, whether Black, Latina, or White,

are often unable to obtain help from kin in the way that their

single counterparts can. Although the “greedy” nature of

marriage may pose a problem across social class, it is especially

problematic for those less well off economically, as these

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individuals most need to cultivate wider circles of obligation,

mutual aid, and reciprocity.

On the other hand, support to relatives sometimes comes at

the expense of care for partners, and can interfere with nuclear

family formation or stability. Indeed, individuals who are

deeply immersed in relationships with extended families may

be less likely to get married or, if they marry, may be less likely

to put the marital ties first in their loyalties. Several decades ago

in her observations of a poor Black community, anthropologist

Carol Stack (1974) found that the reciprocal patterns of sharing

with kin and “fictive kin” forged in order to survive hardship

often made it difficult for poor Blacks either to move up

economically or to marry. To prevent the dilution of their social

support networks, some extended families may even discourage

their members from getting married, or unconsciously sabotage

relationships that threaten to pull someone out of the family

orbit. As sociologists Domínguez and Watkins (2003) argue, the

ties of mutual aid that help impoverished individuals survive on

a day-to-day basis may also prevent them from saying “no” to

requests that sap their ability to get ahead or pursue individual

opportunities.

Overall, we should avoid either denigrating or glorifying the

survival strategies of the poor. Although social class disparities

are key to understanding racial and ethnic variation in familial

involvement, it is too simple to say that class differences create

“more” involvement with relatives in one group and “less” in

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another. In some ways economic deprivation increases ties to

kin (e.g., in terms of living nearby or exchanging practical help)

and in other ways it reduces them (e.g., in terms of financial

help or emotional support). These findings remind us that love

and family connections are expressed both through talk and

action. Equally important, focusing solely on the positive or on

the negative aspects of either minority or White families is

problematic. Instead, we need to think in terms of trade-offs —

among different kinds of care and between the bonds of kinship

and the bonds of marriage. Both trade-offs are linked to social

class.

Why Do These Differences in Family Life Matter? Commentators often emphasize the disorganization and

dysfunction of Black and Latino/a family life. They suggest that

if we could “fix” family values in minority communities and get

them to form married-couple households, all their problems

would be solved. This argument misunderstands causal

connections by focusing on the family as the source of

problems. Specifically, it ignores the link between race and

class and attributes racial or ethnic differences to cultural

values. Instead, we argue, it is important to understand that

family strategies and behaviors often emerge in response to the

challenges of living in economic deprivation or constant

economic insecurity. Therefore, social policies should not focus

on changing family behaviors, but rather aim to support a range

of existing family arrangements and improve economic

conditions for the poor.

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Social policies that overlook extended family obligations may

introduce, reproduce, or even increase ethnic inequalities. For

example, the relatives of Blacks and Latinos/as are more likely

than those of Whites to provide various kinds of support that

policymakers tend to assume is only provided by husbands and

wives. Such relatives may need the rights and support systems

that we usually reserve for spouses. For instance, the Family

and Medical Leave Act is an important social policy, but it only

guarantees unpaid leave from jobs to provide care to spouses,

children, or elderly parents requiring medical attention. Our

findings suggest that, if we really want to support families, such

policies must be broadened to include adult children, needy

grown-up brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles.