The Negro Family: The Case For National Action

The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, also known as the Moynihan Report, written by sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was released in 1965. It focused on the deep roots of black poverty in America and concluded that the relative absence of nuclear (that is, husband-wife) families would greatly hinder further progress toward economic and political equality.

Contents

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The report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a 'tangle of pathology...capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,' and that 'at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.' Further, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures. This particular notion of black familial life has become a widespread, if not dominant, paradigm for comprehending the social and economic disintegration of late twentieth-century black urban life. (pp.218-219)

Moynihan concluded in the report, "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States".

Importance

The Moynihan Report has had long-lasting and important implications. Writing to President Lyndon Johnson, then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Patrick Moynihan argued that, without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers. This would cause rates of divorce, abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s)—leading to vast increases in the numbers of female-headed households and the high rates of poverty, low educational outcomes, and inflated rates of abuse that are associated with them. Moynihan made a compelling contemporary argument for the provision of jobs, job programs, vocational training, and educational programs for the Black community. Modern scholars, including Douglas Massey, now consider the report one of the more influential in the construction of the War on Poverty.

Reception of the report

From the time of its publication, the report has been sharply attacked by Black-American and civil rights leaders as examples of white patronizing, cultural bias, or even racism. The report has, at various times, been condemned or dismissed by the N.A.A.C.P, The Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Among the complaints lodged at the "Moynihan Report" are the stereotyping of the black family and black men, inferences of inferior academic performance by Black-Americans, portrayals of endemic crime and "pathology" in the black community, and a failure to recognize both cultural bias and racism in standardized tests.

Heather MacDonald wrote for National Review in 2008, "Conservatives of all stripes routinely praise Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescience for warning in 1965 that the breakdown of the black family threatened the achievement of racial equality. They rightly blast those liberals who denounced Moynihan’s report".

See also

• Black matriarchy
• American family structure
• Research on the African-American Family

Further reading

• Massey, Douglas S., and Robert J. Sampson, “Moynihan Redux: Legacies and Lessons,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 621 (Jan. 2009), 6–27.
• Patterson, James T. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle Over Black Family Life From LBJ to Obama (Basic Books; 2010) 264 pages
• Wilson, William Julius, “The Moynihan Report and Research on the Black Community,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 621 (Jan. 2009), 34–46.

External links

• Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor (March 1965) "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action"
• Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor (March 1965) "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action" - Moynihan Report hosted by Department of Labor
• Kristol, Irving (August 1971) "The Best of Intentions, the Worst of Results" The Atlantic - discusses Moynihan and his critics
• Hymowitz, Kay S. (Summer 2005) "The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies" City Journal - this article argues that early rejection of the Moynihan report caused untold, needless misery in inner city communities.
• Ferguson, Roderick A. (2004) Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique University of Minnesota Press. In chapter 4, Ferguson analyzes the Moynihan Report as a coalition of sociological canons, black nationalism, the civil rights movement, neoconservative resentment, and neo-racist tendencies to initiate a trend that sought to reaffirm heteropatriarchal normativity by suggesting that the problems that plagued nonwhites of the US are sourced primarily in their departures from hetero- and patriarchal- norms.