Very generally speaking: marriage to the state. Black women often literally can't raise children without Medicaid
That's not a structure, though. It's barely a
characteristic of family structure. It's a description of economic circumstance.
And you think this is a replacement for having two parents?
It isn't a replacement. Multi-generationality and extensiveness are the historical rule among black American families; there was no point at which they all had stereotypically WASPish suburban nuclear families, and then it all went off the rails. In the first place, these sorts of structures were far from uncommon among poor whites. While the prevalence of "extended families" in the the Medieval early modern European world has been exaggerated, single-household families do seem to have been the rule, "household" in this context implies something broader than "nuclear family". Further, black American family structures were profoundly shaped by the institution of slavery. Black Americans, unlike poor whites, mostly lived and worked on plantations, which functioned at the ground-level on a sort of barracks system, in which slaves were forced by necessity to practice a more communal lifestyle than white Americans. This was reinforced by the difficulty of maintaining anything like a nuclear family structure, even by the standards of the era, when family members may be plucked out of the community at the whim of the planters. Abolition lessened this impact, but black Americans after slavery mostly ended up as agricultural peons and gradually made the move to industrial proletarians, both of which left black communities in a state of geographic and economic precariousness, reinforcing the importance of extended family networks as a safety net and, often as not, a way of sharing and minimising costs.
This was especially true in the black diaspora, from which the majority of urban black Americans in the North, Midwest and West- which is therefore to say, the majority of urban black Americans- are drawn. Like any diaspora, chain migration was a common practice, and new migrants tended to settle near to kin, even living alongside them on a temporary or permanent basis as circumstances demanded.
Now, the obvious reply is that this was all decades ago, and that's true. But the question then is, what has prevented black Americans from adopting a conventional two-parent nuclear family structure like other ethnic minorities have tended to do over time? What in the African-American experience has differed over the last, say, fifty years that would lead to these differences in family structures being perpetuated? "Culture" is a grossly insufficient answer, unless you're prepared to argue that the peasant masses of the Old World, from Ireland to Japan, were all possessed of some latent tendency towards two-parent nuclear households that black Americans do not, and to giving a convincing explanation as to why.
I'd be the first one to tear down the nuclear family, but denying the importance of parents doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. I have two Haredi aunts with families; they don't resemble the Afro-American single-mother households in the slightest.
I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, "the two-parent heterosexual family" is a very specific family structure that is neither "natural", in the sense that Peterson et al. would have us believe, nor universal. To declare the basis of a stable polity is therefore to raise a lot of questions about what human societies were doing for the thousands of years before Europeans developed the essentially Utopian notion that human kinship system is just
supposed to look a certain way. Peterson fancies himself a stony realist, but this is an almost comical example of "no, it's the children who are wrong".
Sure, honoring the flag is and always was political, but it's a political thing that brings people together under a shared identity. If that identity is co-opted for partisan politics, it's tantamount to making the identity conditional on those demands being met.
Well, yeah. Group identities are produced by negotiation, by consensus, they are not imposed from above. If an irreconcilable disagreement is encountered, a solution must be reached before the group identity can be authentically reaffirmed. What Kaerpernick and other protesters are saying is that they, as black people, can not feel wholly American unless they are treated equally with other Americans, unless their civil rights are upheld, specifically in regards to police violence. That's not an unreasonable demand- you might disagree with the empirical claim that their rights are not being upheld, bu that their rights should be upheld is itself beyond dispute- so it is reasonable for Kaaerpernick and his fellows to withhold their affirmation of the group identity until some satisfactory solution is achieved.
Otherwise, uncritical affirmation of the group identity and its rituals becomes the condition for even the most basic demands being met. Is it better that spectators are made to feel slightly uncomfortable, or that all criticism of the prevailing regime be carefully couched in a declaration of loyalty?
