The Plight of a Politically Obsessed Addict

"The American Dream is not my story," writes Jessica Hoppe. If anything, she writes in her new memoir First in the Family, the idea of the American dream has held her back. Hoppe describes her parents’ journey from Honduras and Ecuador to the United States, her family’s journey from dysfunction to stability and her own journey from addiction to sobriety. The memoir’s central claim is that all of these journeys are related and that they must all be seen through the lens of racism and colonialism.

Hoppe grew up mostly in New Jersey. Her parents struggled to make a living but wanted to give their children access to good schools. So they rented a small house on a property that their father helped to maintain. Her father had been working at a factory for $3.50 an hour when he met her mother in the late 1970s. She already had a child whose father was not in the picture. She was on WIC and Hoppe’s father demanded that she get off of it. "He didn’t want anyone to think he needed help taking care of his family. Under the spell of the American dream, our basic needs were cast as charity." Her father’s work ethic and his pride in being able to provide become objects of scorn for Hoppe, proof that he has been taken in by this "USian" ideal.

Though he worked his way up to more secure jobs, Hoppe’s father was not treated well by his coworkers who called him "wetback" and "spic." They would threaten him, and bosses would not promote him. "Absorbing the daily death of my father’s dignity was not a pain any of us discussed." But it is hard to square this with Hoppe’s other recollection of living in this house, which was that "as a child, I had no idea we were the help."

While Hoppe traces much of her trauma to the racism she and her family experienced in a mostly white, upper-middle-class town, the parts of her family story that have nothing to do with race are the ones that seem the most devastating. Her uncle molested her mother and beat her—once, almost to death—before she came to the United States. Her mother regularly left Hoppe and her siblings while they were growing up. At first it was because she wanted to get an education. Then it was because of a political awakening after seeing Gloria Steinem speak. But finally, when they were older, Hoppe’s mother just abandoned the family for months and didn’t tell anyone where she went. Hoppe says she knew that she and her two sisters were "the leash tied around her neck."

Hoppe’s uncle was subsequently convicted of sexually abusing children here in the United States. "Despite my uncle’s guilty plea, my grandmother maintained his innocence. My mother knew a plea didn’t mean shit—especially for a Central American immigrant caught up in the U.S. carceral system." If you have to put in a dig at the U.S. carceral system when you’re talking about a serial pedophile, maybe you’ve missed the plot. But Hoppe can’t help herself. Public messaging campaigns discouraging people from using drugs are just government "propaganda" meant to demonize immigrants. And when she accidentally gets pregnant after not using birth control for several months with a guy she is dating but doesn’t really like, and has an abortion, it’s all evidence of "profound, lifelong cultural programming based on colonial violence," which has "penetrated my family, my school and my world, forming a mythology around goodness, womanhood, motherhood—one I consciously rejected but unknowingly internalized."

First in the Family demonstrates how people’s minds can be warped when every aspect of our lives is filtered through political ideology. Hoppe is raped as a teenager and begins a career of serious drinking to deal with the trauma of her assault and her family’s other problems. By the time Hoppe is in college, she is regularly drinking to excess, blacking out for entire evenings. In her 20s, she tried to jump off a building and winds up in the hospital trying to piece together what happened.

She finds Alcoholics Anonymous, whose meetings she attends religiously for several years. She makes important discoveries about herself. While she knew she had problems that "drove me to drink," she assumed that she would need to solve those problems first and then that would result in less drinking. "It never occurred to me that this cycle must be resolved in reverse order. Unless I removed the drug, I could never access the self who actually deserved the things I claimed to want."

Despite these life-altering revelations, Hoppe decides that, like every other American institution, AA is racist. At one point, she goes to visit family in Georgia and attends an AA celebration there. People were wearing MAGA hats, and Hoppe says, "I wasn’t about to announce myself in this amped crowd or celebrate my decision to stay alive with a roomful of people whose politics want me dead."

And then "politics had made its way into my recovery at home too." Arguments about immigration broke out in text chats and Zoom rooms about Trump. The mediator at one point suggested that this was not the right forum for political arguments and tried to broker peace between Hoppe and another participant. But Hoppe wasn’t having it. "I began to question everything [about AA]—the book, the steps, the traditions—a colonial indoctrination so familiar I complied."

As best as a reader can tell, Hoppe believes that white people are largely to blame for the addiction problems of people of color and are thereby not equipped to help combat them. She prefers instead "culturally competent" and "decolonized" approaches to recovery that addresses "the spiritual needs of oppressed people … a practice that naturally empowers us to demand social justice."

A previous version of Alcoholics Anonymous actually did break apart over politics, as Hoppe notes. Intense debates about slavery and abolition ended the first group, which had reached over 100,000 people in the early 19th century. Determined to not repeat these mistakes the founders of AA specifically noted, "Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never to be drawn into public controversy."

Hoppe believes that this has allowed AA meetings to become unwelcoming places for black, Hispanic, and Native people. "The collective critical consciousness surrounding white supremacy requires that we call it out. … There cannot be a place dedicated to wellness where its existence is denied." And she concludes that "anti-Racism work is its own form of recovery."

Though Hoppe has a hard time imagining it, there is a benefit to society in having organizations that remain outside the political fray. Yes, you could criticize schools or nonprofits or corporations for failing to take a stand on the issues that you think are the most important. But this will inevitably come back to haunt you when they take positions you disagree with. Also, they tend to forget their actual missions.

It is certainly true that people of all races and backgrounds should feel comfortable in AA or any other kind of setting that encourages them to speak frankly about personal and traumatic situations. But who is served when AA becomes just a vehicle for "social justice"? And what does that mean?

There was a time during the Temperance movement when sobriety was seen by Progressives as a form of social justice. Efforts to get men to stop drinking were seen as necessary to ensure that women and children would not be left destitute and that they would be spared the violence that often stemmed from overindulgence. And freedom from addiction was seen as an important tool for ensuring dignity among the downtrodden. As Frederick Douglass noted (and Hoppe quotes), "As I desire, therefore, their freedom from physical chains, so I desire their emancipation from intemperance because I believe it would be the means—a great and glorious means—toward helping them break their physical chains and letting them go free."

If Hoppe wants to defeat Donald Trump or launch an "anti-racist" crusade or demand more access to abortion, she can have at it. But it seems a little selfish to get sober and then burn it all down so no one else can.

First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream
by Jessica Hoppe
Flatiron Books, 272 pp., $29.99

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

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