Bethany L. Letiecq George Mason University Surfacing Family Privilege and Supremacy in Family Science: Toward Justice for All In family science, a great deal of scholarly work has focused on marginalized and disadvantaged families with stated goals of improving family outcomes and well-being. Yet little attention has been paid to family privilege and the ways in which the advantages of privileged families are maintained within a White heteronormative hegemonic society to the continued disadvan- tage of others. In this article, I define family privilege and consider how it intersects with other privileges (e.g., White privilege) to main- tain the supremacy of the Standard North American Family. I theorize how family privi- lege is masked yet perpetuated and instantiated in the field of family science. I conclude with a discussion of approaches that family scien- tists can employ to surface and redress family privilege in the self, family privilege in family theories and methods, and the mechanisms that perpetuate family privilege and the maintenance of advantage. This work is critical to advancing family equality and social justice. In family science as in other disciplines (e.g., sociology, public health), many scholars have focused their efforts on both understanding and ameliorating disadvantage among individuals and families and the poor outcomes that are Human Development and Family Science, College of Education and Human Development, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 4C2, Fairfax, VA 22030 (bletiecq@gmu.edu). Key Words: Cross-cultural issues, cultural and ethnic minor- ity family issues, family diversity, multicultural issues. linked to such disadvantage (Stephens, 2010). However, less time and focus has been spent researching privilege and the ways in which some benefit from unearned, often unacknowl- edged advantages in society “simply because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they’ve done or failed to do” (Johnson, 2006, p. 21). The public discourse on privilege and privilege modifiers, such as “White privi- lege,” “male privilege,” or “heterosexual priv- ilege,” has gained momentum in recent years and has certainly moved beyond the classroom, where McIntosh (1989) first challenged us to unpack our invisible privilege knapsack. Indeed, as Maltz Bovy (2018) recently reflected, the year 2017 could have been declared the year of the public privilege epiphany, as countless authors penned reflexive interrogations of their own privileged positionalities. Missing from this privilege discourse, how- ever, is a deep and critical examination of family privilege and how such privilege manifests in the maintenance of (dis)advantage and supremacy in America (Marks, 2000; Stephens, 2010). The term family privilege can be defined as the ben- efits, often invisible and unacknowledged, that one receives by belonging to family systems long upheld in society as superior to all oth- ers (Badgett, 2011; Seita, 2001). The acknowl- edgment of family privilege calls into question and challenges individualistic notions of being self-made, of pulling oneself up by the boot- straps, and of earning a place at the table through individual hard work and grit alone. Family priv- ilege discourse also raises questions about the ways such privilege is codified, regulated, and Journal of Family Theory & Review (2019) 1 DOI:10.1111/jftr.12338