We Were Once A Family

We Were Once A Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (2023) by Roxanna Asgarian

Genre: Investigative journalism that takes a briefly viral news story and investigates it from the perspective of the characters whose stories were never told.

Recommended For: Someone who has the stomach for a devastating story but is energized by the notion that it’s on us, collectively, to give voices to people who society tries to disenfranchise.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

Reality can be visceral in different ways depending on the scope of a tragedy you are provided.

You might imagine a van driving off a cliff with two adults and six children. I imagine a porkchop.

We Were Once A Family is, in some ways, about the Hart family murders, which you possibly heard about last decade when two white women adopted six Black children, eventually killing them and themselves in a murder-suicide in California. It was a viral moment and later depicted (with a different result) in a surreal episode of Atlanta.

Asgarian does not center the viral story of the Harts, who, in life, convinced adoption agencies that children were safe with them and, in death, convinced people their story was captivating. Instead, she focuses on the biological families of those children.

That’s where it all starts. With parents who had children ripped from them only to end up in woeful, traumatizing foster systems, and in this particular case, to be murdered by white parents who the state deemed as more fitting parents.

There is a scene in the book in which an older relative to one of the children, heartbroken, is trying with his extremely limited resources to help another relative, who has been put in the foster care system. He finally gets awarded custody after an infuriating amount of pushback, but it almost feels too late after what the system has done to the child’s psyche. He catches the child in his home eating a raw pork chop, something the child says he did regularly to ensure he actually got food in his previous home.

—

People try desperately hard to take care of each other.

Statistically, mistakes in parenting are not really a big part of what we’re talking about here, because who gets to remain together as a family comes down to who ever had resources in the first place.

I have trouble writing about Asgarian’s work because I generally just want to endorse it. It’s difficult, and it’s worthy. The reporting is phenomenal.

What I really want to focus on is that shift in perspective. To see that tragedy through the lens of the Harts, even if you see them as evil, is to miss the systematic problem. It’s too convenient. At worst, it makes the story seem “juicy” and at best, it lulls you into believing that it is a freak thing, totally disconnected with anything that we should reckon with.

It’s a heavy subject, and I’d rather you read it in Asgarian’s words.

Instead, there’s something lighter that I have been thinking about that makes you look problems in the eye: Abbot Elementary. People talk about feel-good television, and I think it belongs on a pedestal for what it does with emotions and laughter and makes you look at the real world for what it is; unfair and beautiful despite that.

Presumably if we put at the tip-top of the that pedestal, we’d be knocking off Ted Lasso, a show that, personally, I can’t stand. I think I have more cynicism for Ted Lasso than I do for an Amazon commercial trying to drop ship me McDonalds. The notion that it paints a picture where A Guy Is Very Nice, is fine and great, but his interactions with the world are so cartoonishly sanitized as to have no basis in reality, so I don’t believe it really inspires people to be Nice. (Four years ago, I tweeted “Ted Lasso is treated like science fiction because the premise if ‘what if a man were nice,’” which seemed like a fairly innocuous post, but it went viral, and I had to delete it after enough Ted Lasso fans had told me to kill myself).

There is an episode of Lasso in Season 2, called “Do the Right-est Thing” in which a Nigerian character, Sam, backs out of an endorsement deal with Dubai Air because he is informed of how the company is polluting Nigeria. This is an evocative premise for an episode. There begins to be a conflict when the owner of the team is pressured to cut him. She does not relent to this pressure. He does a minor protest of Dubai Air during a game and all the characters bond over it at the end.

The great documentarian Ezra Edleman directed this episode, and it is of course great to bring attention to airlines disregard for environmentalism, especially in African countries (Dubai Air is a fictional airline). The problem with the episode is the tidiness of everything. Any person who has covered professional sports can tell you that the owner in this situation would either crush this protest, cut this player, or have actively been contributing to the corrupt deed being protested in the first place. Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the owner of Paris St. Germain (PSG) football club was investigated for “kidnapping, unlawful detention and acts of torture.” Arsenal FC owner Stan Kroenke, who also owns the Los Angeles Rams and Denver Nuggets, donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. When he moved the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles (a move he did illegally, and the city of St. Louis won an $800 million lawsuit against him as a result of), he tried to apply Missouri labor laws to all his players (who now lived and worked in California) in order to nickel and dime them out of partial wages. Jim Ratcliffe, partial owner of Manchester United, said the UK has been “colonized by immigrants.”…The point is that these are by and large people who have collected wealth through a willingness to quell any sense of uprising. An episode like this feels so lock in step with the series; gently naming an issue, almost like it’s being called to from another room, and letting viewers feel they are participating in a responsible version of escapism.

None of this should bother me, except for the two odd contrasts: the show is not very funny (see Jack Hamilton’s excellent review “Ted Lasso Is a Perfect Show if You Hate Laughing”) and people are obsessed with it to a parasocial degree (the hardest I’ve laughed at Ted Lasso is when someone claimed to be baking the cookies from Ted Lasso and my wife said to me “TED LASSO’S NOT REAL!”). I hear a lot of people tell me that they agree it’s not funny but that they want to watch something that is just intended to make them feel good at the end. That’s at least an honest sentiment that I can respect during a time when things are unbelievably bleak. It sort of comes back to the theory that in this moment “Everyone is 12” as written by, among other people, Sophie Gilbert and Chris Richards. As Richards wrote, “Our Star Wars became forever wars. With [Pete] Hegseth, even the real war we’re currently shielding our eyes from is being propagandized as videogame stuff.”

So, I can understand being averse to brutally dark prestige TV anger. I only watch maybe an hour of non-sports television a week. I’m also interested in something lighter than Succession.

Enter Abbott Elementary. The way Asgarian was willing to make us see the parts around us that were broken that could lead to the Hart family murder, I find myself giving Abbott Elementary more and more credit for just asking people to look at the public school system - in this case in Philadelphia - and say, “watch these people deal with it.”

It’s a legitimately hilarious show, full of specific references (and not broad humor like Lasso) and breakout star performances - Quinta Brunson is brilliant, but Janelle James is Steve Carrell-level funny. You have to deal with a little bit of Office fatigue in some will-they-won’t-they storylines early in the show, but its transcendent in its own ways. (Also, if Mr. Johnson is the show’s Creed, then imagine giving Creed a bigger role and making him lovable). It’s also worth noting that Zack Fox is a national treasure. You don’t get him every episode, but you get plenty of him.

Having a child (only four months old) and talking to other parents as they discuss schools or school districts, you’ll hear people stress about the quality of their children’s potential school, a fairly reasonable concern. Then you hear a white parent desperately yearn for one school over another when they have the same rating, and a little digging really only reveals a much smaller white population at one than the other.

Abbott Elementary makes people confront the ingredients of issues that lead to unequal or difficult schooling (whether bureaucratic or universal), like charter schools, public transit, testing programs, and funding. And they make you laugh every 40 seconds while thinking about it.

Shows like Abbott and Reservation Dogs (the best show in the past decade in my opinion) make me feel the way I think television can and should make me feel. Both have had me on the verge of tears, and they make me laugh and feel hopeful. They both move the lens away from what always gets told and center something that has been shut out. And the voice is riveting and funny and makes you want to keep listening like there’s an urgency to what you seek out.

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