Ta-Nehisi Coates

There was some good conversation in comments yesterday about Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: A Call For National Action on the black family and some of the resulting pushback. Horde Legionnaire Socioprof offered this link to a 2009 issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In it, Moynihan's legacy is re-assessed from several perspectives. 

I am just beginning to go through the volume. But the first essay argues that Moynihan was unfairly tarred as a racist by people who had not read the report. Apparently portions of it were leaked early, many of them taken out of context. I have my own critiques of The Negro Family. I think the slavery portion doesn't hold up as well as some of the other portions of the report. I also think anyone considering its arguments about slavery should check out Herb Gutman's The Black Family In Slavery In Freedom.

But Moynihan's argument is differs substantially from the kind of ahistorical shaming you see from people who attack black culture as the font of the race problem.The opening chapter is written by Douglass Massey and Robert Sampson. I'm not very familiar with Sampson, but I know Massey's work well. He is a pioneer in understanding the continuing effects of segregation and the piracy of black wealth that characterized mid-20th century domestic policy. Here are their thoughts on what Moynihan was actually trying to accomplish:

The key to arresting the alarming rise in family instability, he felt, was a dedicated federal effort to provide jobs for black men. He was, after all, assistant secretary in the Department of Labor, not in the Department Health, Education, and Welfare; his purview was the workforce and not the family. The crisis in the black family was his justification for a federal jobs program. Along with educa- tion, training, and apprenticeship programs that would enhance the employabil- ity of black men, he favored a major public works effort that would guarantee jobs to all able-bodied workers. If full employment for black males - especially young black males - could be achieved, he thought, then family stability could be restored and government would be in a better position to attack more entrenched problems such as discrimination and segregation.

I tend to think that it would be really hard to separate out segregation from employment and family stability. That's a subject worthy of debate. But Moynihan didn't get a debate. He got condemnation:

Perhaps a major effort to generate employment for low-income, minority workers was never in the cards. Even LBJ was skeptical of government work programs. But something else also transpired to seal the fate of Moynihan, his report, and its emphasis on federal employment programs. Immediately after the president's speech at Howard University, someone leaked the Moynihan Report to journalists, who naturally published the florid language and incendiary prose that was meant to stir passions within the administration while ignoring the more prosaic but critical structural analysis embedded in the report.

Soon, headlines blared that Moynihan was calling the black family pathological and blaming it for the problems of the ghetto, which suggested that he was laying the onus of black educational failure, joblessness, and criminality on female matriarchs. Moynihan-bashing quickly became a boom industry in the liberal press, led by the journalist William Ryan, who in The Nation coined the term "blaming the victim" to describe the report (Ryan 1971).

Moreover, in the context of an emer- gent black power movement, Moynihan s emphasis on humiliated black men could not have been less timely, and in the context of a coalescing feminist movement, his pairing of matriarchy and pathology could not have been less wel- come. Young black militants and newly self-aware feminists joined in the rising tide of vilification, and Moynihan was widely pilloried not only as a racist, but a sexist to boot.

A great irony is that few of his vociferous critics had actually read Moynihan s report. It was still an internal document with a very limited number of copies. Most people had only read selective extracts published in columns and stories about the report, which when combined yielded a bowdlerized version of its arguments. One wonders, for example, whether critics who claimed Moynihan was racist had read even the first page of the report, where it was claimed that "the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us." The report was not actually "published" and widely distributed until 1967, when Rainwater and Yancey included a facsimile in their analysis of "the politics of controversy."

By then, of course, it was too late; Moynihan's report had been consigned to the netherworld of the politically incorrect, where it would remain for decades. One can only imagine the even more vociferous reaction that would have ensued had the Moynihan Report been leaked in the technological world of today, with its capacity for instantaneous and frenzied distribution the world over.

Perhaps. There's also an argument that the Moynihan Report actually would have done better today--a two-year lagtime in publication is unthinkable. Moreover, in 1967 the tools of publication were only in a few hands. Today they belong to anyone with an internet connection.

But there would be no Moynihan report today. The liberal consensus has shifted too far to the right. And so we have people who were influenced by Moynihan's thoughts on the importance of family, neglecting to heed his lessons on how to solve those problems.*

Moynihan powerfully believed that government could actually fix "the race problem." He probably believed this because he knew that government had, at best, stood aside while the problem was created and, at its worse, actively contributed to the problem. This is not a line that liberals in politics generally advocate for today.

*Note that this pose is much less risky, politically. There's no real political cost to telling people to get married. (Everyone loves a wedding.) Telling them that there should be a jobs program that makes more men marriage-material is different.

The Urban Institute revisits Daniel Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case For National Action and finds that a lot has changed. Mostly for the worse:

These demographic trends are stunning. Five decades after Moynihan's work, white families exhibit the same rates of nonmarital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace. That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.

I've never really gotten the hubbub over the Moynihan Report. It seems pretty clear to me that in America, parenting is about resources. That families that can bring to bear two streams of resources have better outcomes, on balance, than those who only have one strikes me as logical and predictable. I don't say that as a black person, but as parent.

Moreover unlike people who believe that black people think reading makes you white, or think that blacks somehow like being poor, Moynihan was never confused about the root causes of the black communities predicament:

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary -- a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people. But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

Moynihan believed that the crisis of the black family was the result of having been "battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice and uprooting." Three centuries of injustice," wrote Moynihan, "have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American." In my experience people love to quote Moynihan's thoughts on the crisis of the black family. Quoting Moynihan on the how and why of the crisis? Not so much.

The Urban Institute's report demonstrates that the battering Moynihan highlights continues into the present. Last week, I argued that you can't really analogize the "black middle class" with the "white middle class" or the "black elite" with the "white elite" in any real meaningful sense. You can see why in this chart.

To summarize:

The historical segregation of neighborhoods along racial lines fueled the geographic concentration of poverty and the severe distress of very high-poverty neighborhoods. As Massey and Denton demonstrated in American Apartheid (1993), discriminatory policies and practices confining urban blacks--among whom the incidence of poverty was markedly higher than for whites--to a limited selection of city neighborhoods produced much higher poverty rates than in white neighborhoods. Subsequent job losses and rising unemployment pushed poverty in many black neighborhoods even higher.

Today, despite the significant decline in residential segregation, virtually all high-poverty neighborhoods (neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of the population is poor) are majority-minority, and blacks are over five times more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods.4 Poor white households are much more geographically dispersed than poor black or Hispanic households. In fact, the average high-income black person lives in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than the average low-income white person.

It's worth considering the message a society sends to its citizens with data like this. If you are an African-American aspiring to affluence, you can expect to live in a neighborhood that is about as impoverished as the average poor white person.

I think I've said before that I like to boot up college lectures and listen while gaming. I'm still playing Civilization V (stuck on King) and so I generally use the Yale History Department's lectures (available through Open Yale) as background music. "Background music" is really disservice, if only because since I've started teaching I've been thinking about which lectures I enjoy and which ones I do not.

My favorite right now is John Merriman's "European Civilization, 1648-1945." It obviously helps to be actually interested in what folks are lecturing on, and European history is basically my second love. I've long said that had I been born white, I would have been a medievalist. I don't read the material for the courses, or purchase the books, though I'm going to read Merriman's single volume history of modern Europe this summer. Still, listening to these guys have helped me get a hold on what makes for a great lecture.