I dropped my kid off with grandma recently, and my mom looked at me and said, “You look disgusting.” She meant the septum ring pierced through my nose, a small piece of jewelry that to her represented everything unruly and unacceptable about me. The comment was blunt, but the setting was the deeper blow in front of my daughter. It wasn’t just judgment; it was instruction. This happens when you step outside the family’s definition of respectability: you don’t just embarrass yourself. You embarrass the people who have to claim you.

That moment was another revelation of my family’s script: control masquerading as love, belonging traded for obedience. Families like these are mirrors of America itself. Once you notice the reflection, you can’t unsee it. A mother calling her daughter “disgusting” for a nose ring is not only mean, it is a rehearsal of the national demand. Perform. Conform. Prove your worth. And always let capital stand in for morality in whatever form it takes.

In my family, the currency is money. The sibling who earns the most is treated as the most responsible, the one who “did it right.” The sibling who struggles financially is quietly cast as reckless or weak, no matter how much circumstance shaped their life. Support isn’t offered freely; it comes entangled with judgment. If you need help, you are deficient. If you never ask, you are strong. Over time, money stopped being a measure of security and became a measure of character.

Capitalism has always turned survival into a moral test. The Protestant ethic cast wealth as a sign of virtue and poverty as a mark of failure. England’s Poor Laws split the “deserving poor” (widows, orphans, the sick) from the “undeserving” non-disabled, who were pushed into workhouses. In America, the same logic was racialized: enslaved Africans were denied property and rights, while white landholding was treated as proof of worth.

By the Gilded Age, the myth of the “self-made man” sanctified industrial barons while striking workers were branded lazy or dangerous. Even in the Great Depression, mass unemployment was treated differently depending on who suffered: white men were pitied, while Black workers, immigrants, and women were blamed. Each version carried the same lie: poverty is not misfortune but deficiency.

Neoliberalism only sharpened the knife. Healthcare depends on employment, higher education comes with lifelong bills, and bankruptcy is one misstep away; if you survive, you earn praise, and if you fail, you are stabbed by a thousand “You should haves.”

The logic doesn’t end with money. It stretches into every form of capital. A friend told me about a baseball game with her MAGA cousin shortly after Charlie Kirk was assassinated by his own base. Beforehand, he called to ask that they “just enjoy their time together.” At the game, he leaned over his nachos and ordered them not to mention Kirk because he felt “emotionally raw.” The irony was obvious: the man who ridiculed trigger warnings demanded one for himself. In my family, money buys that privilege. For him, it was a grievance. Different currencies, same result: the person with capital decides the terms, and everyone else learns to tiptoe. That’s how power works; not only by shielding itself, but by policing language, dictating what can and cannot be said, and forcing silence where truth should be spoken.

That same power extends to language itself. Consider the word Antifa. It literally means anti-fascist. Our grandparents fought a world war under that banner. To oppose fascism was once considered the floor of American morality. But the bottom’s dropped out, friends. Now, in the mouths of my cousin and hers, the word antifa isn’t a stance against tyranny at all; it’s folded into right-wing rhetoric as if it signals terrorism. It is fucking stupid to fall for that.

The definition was flipped, not by accident, but by design. White supremacy depends on redefining resistance as a threat. Corporate media and political elites work in tandem to launder the lie until it feels soft and pliable, like their common sense. 

This is why debates over reparations or land back ignite such panic. Imagine if every descendant of enslaved people were granted free college access. The outcome would be transformative: a generation less shackled by debt, able to move through society with stronger footholds. Yet the proposal is attacked as “unfair.” Repair, in a country built on stolen labor, always looks like theft to the thief.

The same fear surfaces when First Nations demand land back and sovereignty over resources. For many white Americans, the idea is unbearable: what if they refuse to let us use the lakes? What if they don’t let us keep treating their land as ours? What if they replace our National Monuments!? The fear is not of loss, but of justice. Because deep down, the nation knows the truth: the land was stolen. Patriarchy and white supremacy both thrive on denial, but denial cracks the moment truth is spoken. And the response turns violent again: if you deny us access, we will destroy you to reclaim what we never rightfully owned. 

“We’ll be right back with another genocide following a word from our sponsors.” 

Families act out the same pattern in miniature. If I don’t comply, if I don’t look right, act right, or live right, I am threatened with emotional exile: the silent treatment, the backhanded comment, the gossip that trickles back in refrains like “Why would she do that?” Belonging is conditional. Families control through withheld love. Nations control people in the same way: by withholding fundamental human rights and dignities and feeding us lies.

What strikes me most is how natural this system feels from the inside. My family doesn’t say money equals morality. America doesn’t say power equals virtue. They don’t need to. The rules are embedded in every holiday conversation about jobs and houses; in every policy that ties survival to capital; in every twisted definition that recasts anti-fascism as extremism. Neoliberalism erases the idea that we owe each other safety, stability, and care, and then reframes struggle as a test of virtue. If you “pass” (by thriving despite precarity), you’re good; if you “fail,” you’re undeserving.

The cruelty lies in the inversion. The very things that should be byproducts: money, status, political advantage, are treated as the measure of human worth. The real cultivation, whether in families or nations, should be of people: our ability to live with difference, extend care without condition, and loosen the grip of fear. Instead, we have built a culture that mistakes control for virtue and hierarchy for stability. That is capitalism’s deepest lie, patriarchy’s most enduring promise, and white supremacy’s most reliable ruse.

Families like these are mirrors of our nation. To see them clearly is not to escape their power, but to recognize how private wounds echo public structures. A mirror does not create what it reflects; it reveals what was already there, only reversed. In its glass, capital poses as virtue, obedience passes for belonging, and domination masquerades as love. Until we stop mistaking that hierarchy for morality, our families and our politics will keep playing out the same destructive patterns.