107 pages • 3 hours read
Adrian Nicole LeBlancRandom Family
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Calcified Gender and Sexual Norms
This is a pervasive and consistent theme in LeBlanc’s narrative. Jessica, acutely aware of a sexual economy which values her good looks and voluptuous body, begins to use the things that gender norms have defined as assets in order to secure her heart’s dearest ambition: true love. However, persistent misogyny and sexist abuse dog her path, as the men around her are sanctioned—by gender and sexual norms and the acquiescence of the entire community to those norms–to act as sexual agents who use violence, power, and control to both limit and define the worth of women, who are deemed sexual objects. Jessica’s experience is common to all of the women around her, including Lourdes and Coco, most significantly. Almost every woman in the story undergoes sexual abuse as a young child, and the subsequent absence of social, cultural, and psychological support that could adequately address the trauma of sexual violence. This, too, is a product of a sexual economy that objectifies the bodies of women while simultaneously sanctioning and ignoring the abuse of men.
Racism and Poverty
The state and its agencies (including social services, schools, housing services, policing and prisons) often actively impede the progress of the people within the community that Random Family depicts because they do not adequately address root causes and contexts of racism and poverty.
We can see this theme most saliently brought to bear in Coco’s life. Her circumstances continually bring her in contact with state agencies. She comes into contact with them through Cesar, the father of two of her children and her first love. He is separated from her and their children by a penalty imposed upon him by the state. This penalty does nothing to address the root causes of his violent act. Those root causes include poverty, parental neglect, institutionalized racism, and the creation of the ghetto. However, Coco must toil on in his absence, struggling to raise her children and find her own happiness. Coco bounces from apartment to apartment, enduring rat and flea infestations ignored by slumlords. She must become homeless in order to document her housing need in the eyes of the state, and even her requests for inspections from the Department of Housing end not with a resolution of a pest-infestation problem, but in a forced eviction. She has mighty difficulties locating Medicare-covered care for her special-needs child, Pearl, and is even forced to quit her job in order to manage the hours-long journeys for medical care that she and the child must ultimately undertake. Too, her daughter Mercedes, who acts out in anger as a result of the absence of her beloved father, is met largely with disdain and punishment from school systems and their authorities, rather than sensitive attendance to the root causes of the girl’s pain and anger. Through all of these examples, we see that Coco must tease out the desperately-needed resources that lie behind walls of inscrutable state gatekeepers. The bureaucracy erects more barriers and half-baked band-aid quick fixes than sustained and contextualized aid.
The Ghetto Lie Complex
Beyond salacious headlines and fetishized media depictions regarding the ghetto lie complex, intelligent, and wholly individual people, who live complicated and rich lives.
LeBlanc’s careful, deeply-detailed research, and her understatedly intimate and sensitive writing style aid her in carrying forth this theme throughout the narrative. Each of her chosen subjects are situated within both micro- and macro- level contexts, including familial, territorial, legislative, political, and economic contexts. Each of their key individual characteristics are also explicitly identified upon their character introductions. These key characteristics are methodically and sensitively parsed throughout the decades that the book documents. We see the characters grapple with the difficulties in their lives, while they also simultaneously find moments of tender love and pure joy. Through all of these life experiences, each character remains resolutely his or her self because LeBlanc takes the time to sensitively depict the interplay between these character’s traits and personalities and their psychological, emotional, and political circumstances. No character is ever purely a victim, statistic, or aggressor, because LeBlanc’s depictions capture their full, complicated humanity.
