From rollbacks in health care policy, to regressions in the ways everyday people have been engaging with conversations on relationships, the World post 2020 has been marked by a retrenchment of the Familial Order. For many the idea of a family conjures feelings of comfort and care, while for others it can conjure feelings of trauma and abandonment; however, rarely, does anyone hear “family” and think world building, child trafficking, or systematic and routine murder. This all-spells particular danger for Black people who have become largely entranced by the American farces of hope, redemption, and worst of all, representation especially as they seem to be enabled by proximity to or location in a legitimized family. The impetus of this project was the recognition of a need for an intervention which synthesized the research on the Family while providing a framework and a set of accessible references that could together, help rewrite our knowledge on this problem. Requiem for Cassandra draws on both Afropessimism and Black Feminism to interrogate the notions of the Family which animated 3 popular shows that emerged within the first era of Black sitcoms— Good Times (1974-1979), The Cosby Show (1984-1992), and Family Matters (1989-1997). The selection criteria for these sitcoms were simple: they had incredibly high viewership, lasting cultural impacts, and emerged following a similar yet not-too-distant moment of national crisis—the Civil Rights Movement. Following said crisis, certain individuals took it upon themselves to construct these shows as interventions to the general conscience. Iteratively, they sought not only to ameliorate the relationships between Black and white people, but to do so through comforting and recognizable structures. These shows were to put the entire American public at ease and usher in a new era of social integration; however, if what Black Feminists have suggested about the Family, and what Afropessimists have suggested both about representation and the epistemically antagonistic relationship between Blackness and whiteness, is correct, what does that suggest about the true potential this type of intervention? What is the ontology of the Family, especially when situated in these sitcoms, such that it was to have such great power? The argument proposes that, following moments of national crisis, “the Family” reemerges to reestablish and secure the interests of the Western ruling class. For Black people, these interests, include a reminder of our enslaved origins and the thinly veiled hope that we may take pride and joy in “returning.” With these considerations in mind, this project makes use of the Trojan Horse as a metaphor for falsely ameliorative war strategies, but focuses on the location of Cassandra in the story in order to construct a framework with the potential to clarify, the roles of the mother, the father, and the children as they are sequentially and propagandistically positioned both on and off screen in relation to these shows. In so doing Requiem for Cassandra presents a revelation on the ways that the Family in the modern era not only takes its cues from Atlantic slavery, but particularly and systematically serves to (1) situate the Black mother as a corporeal ruse which distracts from (2) the Black cishet male’s attempt to develop himself according to a hegemonic and humanizing form of masculinity, that is empowered specifically by and through the trafficking and sexual exploitation of the girls positioned as daughters. To intervene on this clear and present danger, the third movement of the project suggests a turning away from this Familial order, toward a choral praxis which essentially emphasizes what so many Black Feminists have been telling us all along: abolish the patriarchy, queer your politics, and go find you some real community.