Marriage Promotes ‘White Supremacy,’ According to White University Professor

“Marriage fundamentalism” promotes the ideas of “White supremacy,” according to a White George Mason University professor.

Professor Bethany Letiecq wrote in the Journal of Marriage and Family about her theory “that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy.”

“Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family,” she wrote. “But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States.”

Letiecq is an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University, “specializing in the utilization of community-based participatory action research approaches, anti-racist research methods.”

{snip}

In the article, Letiecq said she drew upon “critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status.”

She argued that, “since colonization,” “marriage fundamentalism has been instantiated through laws, policies, and practices to unduly advantage WHNFs while simultaneously marginalizing Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families, among others.”

{snip}