Family Homestead Quotes

Darren knew the power of home, knew what it meant to stand on the land where your forefathers had forged your future out of dirt, knew the power of what could be loved up by hand, how a harvest could change a fate. He knew what it felt like to stand on the back porch of his family homestead in Camilla and feel the breath of his ancestors in the trees, feel the power of gratitude in every stray breeze.

Re-creations of the Addams Family house, the abandoned shack in the Evil Dead trilogy, Tyler Durden’s flophouse in Fight Club, and the Lars Homestead on Tattooine.

Kip cleared his throat and gave a brave smile. ‘We destroyed our world,’ he said, ‘and left it for the skies. Our numbers were few. Our species had scattered. We were the last to leave. We left the ground behind. We left the oceans. We left the air. We watched these things grow small. We watched them shrink into a point of light. As we watched, we understood. We understood what we were. We understood what we had lost. We understood what we would need to do to survive. We abandoned more than our ancestors’ world. We abandoned our short sight. We abandoned our bloody ways. We made ourselves anew.’ He spread his hands, encompassing the gathered. ‘We are the Exodus Fleet. We are those that wandered, that wander still. We are the homesteaders that shelter our families. We are the miners and foragers in the open. We are the ships that ferry between. We are the explorers who carry our names. We are the parents who lead the way. We are the children who continue on.’ He picked up his scrib from the podium. ‘What is his name?

More than once I have tried to picture myself in the position of a boy or man with an honoured and distinguished ancestry which I could trace back through a period of hundreds of years, and who had not only inherited a name, but fortune and a proud family homestead; and yet I have sometimes had the feeling that if I had inherited these, and had been a member of a more popular race, I should have been inclined to yield to the temptation of depending upon my ancestry and my colour to do that for me which I should do for myself. Years ago I resolved that because I had no ancestry myself I would leave a record of which my children would be proud, and which might encourage them to still higher effort.

Everything she loved and cherished seemed to wither away. No matter how hard she fought, someone she loved always left, one way or another. Life remained still on the large grounds of the old family homestead. There was nothing but silence, followed by nights that brought the worst dreams with the oddest sense of foreboding knocking at her soul. Too many hours turned into days, all merging together, eating her alive from within.

family homestead.” “Lion... I know that you have plans to ride out to West Hills this morning, and I don’t want to make you late, but—” The doctor’s sensitive face reflected his search for the right words. “I don’t mean to pry, but I know

In life, loss was the engine that set Wilder's fiction in motion. Exile propelled the powerful emotional current of the Little House books, an intensely felt nostalgia for people and places lost to her. That emotion was absent in "Free Land," relegating it to homesteading soap opera. Its loosely linked anecdotes were joined not by familial love but by Lane's, and the Post's, ideology.

...nor do I want to suggest that the Amish are perfect people or that their way of life is perfect. What I want to recommend are some Amish principles: 1) They have preserved their families and communities. 2) They have maintained the practices of neighbourhood. 3) They have maintained the domestic arts of kitchen and garden, household and homestead. 4) They have limited their use of technology so as not to displace or alienate available human labour or available free source of power (the sun, wind, water, and so on). 5) They have their farms to a scale that is compatible both with the practice of neighborhood and with the optimum use of low-power technology. 6) By the practices and limits already mentioned, they have limited their costs. 7) They have educated their children to live at home and serve their communities. 8) They esteem farming as both a practical art and a spiritual discipline. These principles define a world to be lived by human beings, not a world to be exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.

I passed out cigars to the men, and we lit them with a twig caught alight in the fire and passed the bottle around. Charley was doing most of the talking, telling a hunting story from the days of elk and bison, neither of which anyone in attendance except Charley had ever seen. He made them epic animals in his story, inhabitants of an old and better world not to come around again. He then told of his lost farmstead at the old mound village of Cowee, before one of the many disastrous treaties had driven him and his family west to Nantayale. At Cowee, he has been noted for his success with apple trees, which over the years he had planted at spots where his outhouses had stood. Apples grew on his trees huge as dreams of apples. That Cowee house was old, from the time when they still buried dead loved ones in the dirt floor.

One night a flock of red-tailed black cockatoos break the quiet as they charge up from the creek, right over the homestead, then down the hill towards Clem's house. 'They're my favourite, you know, of all the birds, they're the best,' comes Tom's raspy whisper. 'I know Dad,' says Clem. 'You always say.' 'They're majestic, dramatic. You wouldn't argue with one.

Part of Wordsworth’s complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not, by themselves, have eradiated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him. The poet accused the cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City dwellers had no perspective, he alleged, they were in thrall of what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire to new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder that it did on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. ‘One thought baffled my understanding,’ wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London: ‘How men lived even next-door neighbors, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other’s names.

The myth of the pioneer family or lone frontiersman venturing into virgin forest to hack out a meager homestead is belied by the thoroughly organized commercial value of such ventures. The main figure in the settlement of the west was the land company, which frequently operated not only on the edge of civilization but on the edge of legality as well.

That’s why, white America, we had no objection to (and indeed supported mightily) the “big government” intervention known as the Homestead Act, passed in 1862, which gave over 200 million acres of essentially “free” land to white families: land that had been confiscated from indigenous people or from Mexico and was then made available to white settlement.

I know they was families got thowed off their farms back in the thirties by the TVA and come to Anderson County and got thowed off all over again. They was even families had been removed from their homesteads in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the thirties, TVA in the thirties again, and the atom bomb in the forties. By that time they didnt have nothin.

TIMELINE OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER’S LIFE 1865-Laura’s sister Mary is born in Pepin, Wisconsin 1867-Laura Ingalls is born in Pepin, Wisconsin 1869-The Ingallses move to Indian Territory, Kansas 1870-Caroline Ingalls, “Carrie,” is born in Kansas 1871-The Ingallses return to the Big Woods of Wisconsin 1874-Lives in a dugout near Walnut Grove, Minnesota 1875-Charles Frederick Ingalls, “Freddy,” is born 1876-Laura’s brother, Freddy, dies at nine months old Laura moves with her family to Burr Oak, Iowa 1877-Grace Ingalls is born in Burr Oak 1879-Mary becomes blind after a fever 1880-The Ingallses begin homesteading in De Smet, Dakota Territory 1885-Almanzo Wilder and Laura Ingalls marry 1886-Rose Wilder born in De Smet 1894-The Wilders move to Mansfield, Missouri 1932-Little House in the Big Woods is published when Laura is sixty-five 1954-Laura awarded the first Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, for her eight-book Little House series 1957-Laura (age ninety) dies at her Rocky Ridge home in Mansfield

However, we must try to see, and the best place to begin may be with the fact that the family farm is not the only good thing that is failing among us. The family farm is failing because it belongs to an order of values and a kind of life that are failing. We can only find it wonderful, when we put our minds to it, that many people now seem willing to mount an emergency effort to “save the family farm” who have not yet thought to save the family or the community, the neighborhood schools or the small local businesses, the domestic arts of household and homestead, or cultural and moral tradition—all of which are also failing, and on all of which the survival of the family farm depends.

Father Joseph had come to love the tamarisk above all trees. It had been the companion of his wanderings. All along his way through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, wherever he had come upon a Mexican homestead, out of the sun-baked earth, against the sun-baked adobe walls, the tamarisk waved its feathery plumes of bluish green. The family burro was tied to its trunk, the chickens scratched under it, the dogs slept in its shade, the washing was hung on its branches. Father Latour had often remarked that this tree seemed especially designed in shape and colour for the adobe village. The sprays of bloom which adorn it are merely another shade of the red earth walls, and its fibrous trunk is full of gold and lavender tints. Father Joseph respected the Bishop’s eye for such things, but himself he loved it merely because it was the tree of the people, and was like one of the family in every Mexican household.

In a sense, the farmer was the looniest speculator in a nation overrun with them. He was wagering he would master this fathomlessly intricate global game, pay off his many debts, and come out with enough extra to play another round. On top of that, he was betting on the kindness of Mother Nature, always supremely risky. But the farmer had no choice if he hoped to sustain himself and a way of life, the family farm. Instead, he was drawn into a kind of social suicide. The family farm and the whole network of small-town life that it patronized were being washed away into the rivers of capital and credit that flowed toward the railroads, banks, and commodity exchanges, toward the granaries, wholesalers, and numerous other intermediaries that stood between the farmer and the world market. Disappearing into all the reservoirs of capital accumulation, the family farm increasingly remained a privileged way of life only in sentimental memory. Perversely the dynamic Lincoln had described as the pathway out of dependency—spending a few years earning wages, saving up, buying a competency, and finally hiring others—now operated in reverse. Starting out as independent farmers, families then slipped inexorably downward, first mortgaging the homestead, then failing under intense pressure to support that mortgage (they called themselves “mortgage slaves”) and falling into tenancy—or into sharecropping if in the South—and finally ending where Lincoln’s story began, as dispossessed farm and migrant laborers.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

Reflective nostalgics miss the past and dream about the past. Some of them study the past and even mourn the past, especially their own personal past. But they do not really want the past back. Perhaps this is because, deep down, they know that the old homestead is in ruins, or because it has been gentrified beyond recognition--or because they quietly recognize that they wouldn't much like it now anyway. Once upon a time life might have been sweeter or simpler, but it was also more dangerous, or more boring, or perhaps more unjust. Radically different from the reflective nostalgics are what Boym calls the restorative nostalgics, not all of whom recognize themselves as nostalgics at all. Restorative nostalgics don't just look at old photographs and piece together family stories. They are mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects. They do not merely want to contemplate or learn from the past. They want, as Boym puts it, to "rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps." Many of them don't recognize their own fictions about the past for what they are: "They believe their project is about truth." They are not interested in a nuanced past, in a world in which great leaders were flawed men, in which famous military victories had lethal side effects. They don't acknowledge that the past might have had its drawbacks. They want the cartoon version of history, and more importantly, they want to live in it, right now. They don't want to act out roles from the past because it amuses them: they want to behave as think their ancestors did, without irony. It is not by accident that restorative nostalgia often goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories and the medium-sized lies. These needn't be as harsh or crazy as the Smolensk conspiracy theory or the Soros conspiracy theory; they can gently invoke scapegoats rather than a full-fledged alternative reality. At a minimum, they can offer an explanation: The nation is no longer great because someone has attacked us, undermined us, sapped our strength. Someone—the immigrants, the foreigners, the elites, or indeed the EU—has perverted the course of history and reduced the nation to a shadow of its former self. The essential identity that we once had has been taken away and replaced with something cheap and artificial. Eventually, those who seek power on the back of restorative nostalgia will begin to cultivate these conspiracy theories, or alternative histories, or alternative fibs, whether or not they have any basis in fact.

Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan. According to most accounts, he was born in 1480, in the remote mountain parish of Sabrosa, the seat of the family homestead. He spent his childhood in northwestern Portugal, within sight of the pounding surf of the Atlantic.

One great pleasure they enjoyed together was bathing. The Homestead possessed a little cove of its own under the rocks, where there was a bathing-house, and full perfection of arrangement for young ladies' aquatic enjoyment, in safety and absolute privacy. Rachel's vigorous strength and health had been greatly promoted by her familiarity with salt water, and Bessie was in ecstasies at the naiad performances they shared together on the smooth bit of sandy shore, where they dabbled and floated fearlessly. One morning, when they had been down very early to be beforehand with the tide, which put a stop to their enjoyment long before the breakfast hour, Bessie asked if they could not profit by their leisure to climb round the edge of the cliff's instead of returning by the direct path, and Rachel agreed, with the greater pleasure, that it was an enterprise she had seldom performed. Very beautiful, though adventurous, was the walk—now on the brow of the steep cliff, looking down on the water or on little bays of shingle, now through bits of thicket that held out brambles to entangle the long tresses streaming on their shoulders;

October 5th, 1884, and is over ninety ears of age. Until her memory failed her, a few years ago, she thought the country ruined beyond recovery when the Democratic party lost control in 1860. Her family, which was large, inherited her views, with the exception of one son who settled in Kentucky before the war. He was the only one of the children who entered the volunteer service to suppress the rebellion. Her brother, next of age and now past eighty-eight, is also still living in Clermont County, within a few miles of the old homestead, and is as active in mind as ever. He was a supporter of the Government during the war, and remains a firm believer, that national success by the Democratic party means irretrievable ruin.

The Federal Homestead Act, enacted in 1862, became one of the foundation pieces of the settlement of western America. More than ten percent of the land in the United States was settled under this law. From the Act: Be it enacted, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first of January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter-section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands . . .

In the only picture Brennan ever did for the legendary director John Ford, the character actor worked well beside Ford stalwarts such as Ward Bond, playing one of Earp’s brothers. Indeed, what is most remarkable about this film is the contrast between Clanton and his boys and Earp and his congenial brothers, the youngest of whom is killed when the Clanton gang rustles cattle the Earps have been driving to California. Brennan personifies the authority of evil, as he does in Brimstone (August 15, 1949), where he again bullies his boys into driving out homesteaders. It is almost as if in each subsequent film—especially in Westerns—Brennan is building a persona that is like a suit subjected to constant alteration without ever losing its basic contours. He would essay yet another version of the dominating father with sons in tow in Shoot Out at Big Sag (June 1, 1962), an independent production organized by his son Andy, in which Walter plays a pusillanimous preacher who has let down his wife and family by not defending them. But he ultimately redeems himself when he realizes he has lost the respect of everyone, including his daughter, who in the end proves to be his salvation owing to her unwillingness to accept her family’s defeatist mentality.

The blight of office cubes housing lawyers and lobbyists had popped up like chokeweeds in the manicured lawn of the family homestead.

Homestead”  term was first used in USA in the Homestead Act in 1862 and before.  In Saharan Africa, especially in nations which were controlled by the British, a homestead is the single extended family’s household compound.

The bailiff tucked the jurors into their windowless room where they could surf for porn on their PDAs, and the judge turned to me. “Mr. Lassiter, Ah assume you got some legal mumbo jumbo for the record.” His Honor came from a family of gentleman farmers in Homestead by way of Kentucky, and his voice rippled with bourbon and branch water.

Why won’t you give up this silly idea of homesteading?” Gertrude went on. Her tone of voice was moderate, but her blue eyes were snapping. “I can’t help thinking you’re just being stubborn, Lily. Caleb is well able to provide for you, I assure you. He comes from one of the finest families in Pennsylvania—I’ve known the Hallidays a long time.” Lily looked down at the floor for a moment, gathering her courage. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said softly. Gertrude sighed. “Do sit down,” she told Lily kindly, taking a chair herself. “Now what is it that I would find so difficult to understand?” “I love Caleb very much,” Lily began in a shaky voice, “but I’m not the woman for him.” Mrs. Tibbet raised her eyebrows. “Oh? And why not?” Lily leaned forward in her chair and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think I may be like my mother.” “How so?” Mrs. Tibbet asked, smoothing her skirts. “She was—she drank. And there were men. Lots of men.” “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Tibbet seriously. “And you drink?” Lily swallowed. “Well—no.” “Then there are men.” “Only Caleb,” Lily said quietly. “But he can make me do and say the most shameful things. I’m so afraid it’s because I’m—er—hot-blooded.” Mrs. Tibbet looked as though she might be trying to suppress a smile. “You wouldn’t be the first girl who’d given herself to a man before marriage, Lily. It isn’t a wise course of action, but it happens often enough.” Lily drew in a deep breath. “I suppose the drinking would come later,” she said, discounting Mrs. Tibbet’s remarks as mere kindness. “And then the men. No, I’m sure I’m better off going on with my life just as I’ve planned.” There was a rap at the door, and then Velvet put her head inside. “Pardon, missus, but dinner’s ready, and the men say they’re going to eat without you if you don’t hurry.” “We’ll be there in a moment,” Mrs. Tibbet answered. “And tell the men that if they don’t wait, they’ll have me to deal with.” “Yes, ma’am,” Velvet replied with a hint of laughter in her voice. The door closed with a click. Mrs. Tibbet turned back to her guest. “If you were my own daughter, Lily, I would tell you the same thing. You couldn’t do better than Caleb Halliday if you searched the world over for a man. Don’t throw away a chance at real happiness—it might be the only one you get.” Lily pushed herself out of her chair and went to stand at the window. From there she could see the moon rising above the roof of the house next door; it looked as though it had just squeezed out of the chimney. “Sometimes I think I know what I want. I’ll decide that I want to marry Caleb and forget all about having a homestead. But then I remember what Mama was like.” “Lily, you’re not your mother.” “No,” Lily agreed sadly, turning to face Mrs. Tibbet, her hands clasped in front of her. “But Mama was young and happy once, and she must have thought she was in love with my father. She married him, she had his children. And then something changed, and she began to drink. Papa went away—I don’t even remember him—and the men started coming around, one after the other …” Gertrude came to take Lily’s hands in her own. “Things will be different for you,” she said quietly. “You’re strong, and so is Caleb. Oh, Lily, don’t be afraid to take a chance.” At that moment the colonel thundered from the hallway that he was going to have his supper right then whether the women cared to come to the table or not, and Lily smiled. “I promise I’ll think things through very carefully, Mrs. Tibbet.” “Don’t take too long,” Gertrude answered, ushering her toward the door of the study. “Fate can take the strangest twists and turns, sealing us off from someone when we least expect it.” At

Among the Nuer, there is a special class of priestly figures who specialize in mediating feuds, referred to in the literature as “leopard-skin chiefs.” If one man murders another, he will immediately seek out one of their homesteads, since such a homestead is treated as an inviolate sanctuary: even the dead man’s family, who will be honor-bound to avenge the murder, will know that they cannot enter it, lest terrible consequences ensue. According to Evans-Pritchard’s classic account, the chief will immediately start trying to negotiate a settlement between the murderer and victim’s families, a delicate business, because the victim’s family will always first refuse:

We are the Exodus Fleet. We are those that wandered, that wander still. We are the homesteaders that shelter our families. We are the miners and foragers in the open. We are the ships that ferry between.

This has been a story of the buried life after all: Emily and Austin and Vinnie firing up at the spark Mabel touched off when she flirted with Austin’s buried passions and intruded on the Homestead and coveted the shadow-world of Sue and Emily. But to touch off that spark was Austin’s doing as well as Mabel’s. The feud was not wholly something that was done to the Dickinsons but was in some sense a sequel to what they were.

Once The Evergreens and then the Homestead opened their doors to Mabel Todd, emotions—a lethal mix of passion, jealousy and rage—erupted during the last years of the poet’s life, perpetuated by descendants and the authorities they co-opted or persuaded.

Chapter

At the fence, the driver punches something into his phone and halfheartedly salutes the soldiers. Just as he is about to get back into the van, he bends down as if he has dropped something and scoops up a handful of earth to examine like a gardener. He looks up, sees the soldiers watching him and chucks it into the hedge, laughing out loud, then dusts his hands down on his khaki trousers, climbs in, and starts the engine.

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of expropriated Indigenous land west of the Mississippi to any citizen or person eligible for citizenship (which, after the 1790 Naturalization Act, was only white immigrants) if they could reach the land and build on it. A free grant of property! Fewer than six thousand Black families were able to become part of the 1.6 million landowners who gained deeds through the Homestead Act and its 1866 southern counterpart. Today, an estimated 46 million people are propertied descendants of Homestead Act beneficiaries.

Before the ubiquity of the traditional schooling system, it was the families that fulfilled this role. The nuclear family and single parents that stay in smaller households was the exception rather than the norm. Family members tended to stay together in one area. This meant in one homestead there were grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts and so on. This in turn created a strong supportive environment

Of all the extraordinary things that occurred at the Gorman ranch, the most common involved the strange, unworldly orange structures that would appear in the western sky. All family members saw these structures dozens of times. They would appear in the sky and seemed to hover low over the cottonwood trees about a mile away. Tom often used a large, four-foot-high tree stump that stood outside the homestead as a vantage point to steady his binoculars or other viewing equipment. His favorite piece of gear was the scope on a night-vision rifle. He could easily hold it steady while leaning on the tree stump and watch the bizarre orange structure about a mile away.

Without fail, every Friday, he’d meet me at his old family homestead after hiking the eight miles to get the reading, drop off his loans, and tote his new ones back to the isolated families waiting.

One quick flick of the wrist and his father and his horse were off, galloping toward the road, back to the remnants of the barn and the house. It still amazed Jake how his father and his horse seemed to always be one entity. It was like his father controlled the beast by telepathy, as if he could let go of the reins and the animal would know exactly where to go and what to do. James had told Jake that it was the ultimate form of trust and one of the cornerstones of their family’s success. It was why they had survived the buyouts from the bigger ranches. It was what people had come to call the Bowers Standard.

we forget Joseph F. Glidden's 1874 invention of barbed wire, which, more than the rifle or the plow, transformed Buffalo Bill's Great Plains by insuring the survival of thousands of family farms, and making possible the growth of enormous-and enormously profitable-cattle ranches. In addition, I feel a personal connection. In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west. Starting by steamboat, the two brothers floated down the Ohio River until it joined the Mississippi and then traveled upstream to St. Louis. In St. Louis they found little transportation west, so they walked, hitched rides, and rode horseback to reach St. Joseph, Missouri. There they caught a stagecoach to Council Bluffs, Iowa, riding on top of the stage, with seventeen men and women-a three-day ordeal. On May 14, nineteen days after leaving St. Louis, the brothers crossed the Missouri River and landed on the town site of Omaha, then a community of cotton tents and shanties, where lots were being offered to anyone willing to build on them. They refused this offer and pressed on to their final destination, DeSoto, Washington County, Nebraska Territory, where they found only one completed log house and another under construction. There they homesteaded the town of Blair, Nebraska. For three generations there were Carters in Nebraska, first in

To take just one example, the 1862 Homestead Act gleefully gave away millions of acres of stolen land almost exclusively to whites.10 And, quiet as it’s kept, white people continue to be the number-one beneficiaries of affirmative action today. Race scholars are aware that white women are the top recipients of affirmative action, but few have considered that white women’s primary access to affirmative action helps maintain the racial wealth gap.11 Because these white women typically marry white men, their affirmative action benefits are channeled toward their white families.