Many political commentators often complain that minority families are usually nontraditional and dysfunctional while traditional nuclear families (like the one depicted in Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Fear) are the only ones capable of supportive relationships and strong family connections. In their essay, “The Color of Family Ties: Race, Class, Gender, and Extended Family Involvement,” Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian make an effort to offer evidence that nontraditional minority families who rely on extended family members (such as Latina or African single mothers) can actually function quite well and enjoy support and strong emotional ties. In their essay, they make several generalizations about traditional and nontraditional white and minority families. For this essay, identify two claims they make that you can agree with and back up with evidence drawing on personal experience and observation and then find two other claims that you disagree with or find prolematic and explain why using personal experience and observation or evidence obtained from a scholarly journal using ELAC’s databases.
Your essay must:
4 complete pages in length of analytical expository writing (excluding the list of Works Cited)
Offer a clear thesis as last sentence of first paragraph
Start subsequent paragraphs with topic sentences
Directly quote at least twice from Gerstel and Sarkisian’s essay in your introductory paragraph and in the body paragraphs
Explain how your personal experience or research works as evidence for or against the ideas you have chose