LIKE ANY GROUP, a family could be a positive example of a community designed to help its members treat others fairly, to avoid scapegoating and instead be self-critical. Yet in some ways the family is the prototype for the “bad” group. Often a family mythologizes itself as perfection, as the social ideal, in which outsiders are dangerous. And much of the family’s work is about maintaining a strange kind of anti-social version of “loyalty” in which we prove our love to family members by upholding any wrongdoing they commit on others. In some ways, racism, class oppression, nationalism, and
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