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The Negro Family: The Case For National Action - a follow-up, 42 years later
The Moynihan Report is probably the most famous piece of social scientific analysis never published. Completed in March 1965 as an internal document by a young assistant secretary of labor, it was written as input into an ongoing debate within the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson about how to move forward in grappling with “the Negro problem” in the wake of the landmark passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
40+ years later, The Moynihan Report has been, itself, studied up and down and back and forth, and the results of these reflections have now been published, as well.
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
January 2009, Volume 621, No. 1
You would think with all the talk about poverty, inner city pathology, redistribution of wealth that one of the seminal works on the issue is being so blatantly ignored. Seems like even the thread's author is AWOL.
Moynihan was not ONLY a US Senator from New York, and the US Ambassador to the UN, he was also a recognized expert in the field of sociology. In his day, he was a very big 'lib' and generally considered a great friend and supporter of the lower-income black population in New York. He was very well liked.
But times changed, and Moynihan's writings increasingly began to 'hit a nerve'. His ever-more frequent references to the problems of single-parent households, teenage mothers, absentee fathers, and out-of-wedlock births as being a HUGE factor in the stubborn, continuing problem of inner-city poverty, finally got too "uncomfortable", and he gradually lost much of his popular support. He was saying things that too many people just didn't want to hear, and it was particularly galling coming from a rich white 'elite'.
The anger in the 'community' that finally lost Moynihan much of his backing among the black 'underclass' wasn't TOO much different from the anger directed at Bill Cosby a few years ago. Like Moynihan, Cosby exhorted these folks toward greater personal accountability and less dependence on 'society at large' as a solution to their problems....and like Moynihan, Cosby's words caused resentment toward the 'messenger', rather than any agreement that the message MAY just be a valid one.
I BELIEVE it was in reaction to some of Moynihan's writings in this area that someone (can't recall now just who it was) accused him of "Blaming the Victim", a phrase coined then, and still popular today.
It's a bit daunting because the tread requires some familiarity with Moynihan's writing, and reading some of the interesting articles posted by the OP. It doesn't lend itself to quips, anecdotal commentary, and half bakes screeds, but it does touch on a number of subjects that are being bandied about, race, the underclass, government intervention and poverty.
The anger in the 'community' that finally lost Moynihan much of his backing among the black 'underclass' wasn't TOO much different from the anger directed at Bill Cosby a few years ago. Like Moynihan, Cosby exhorted these folks toward greater personal accountability and less dependence on 'society at large' as a solution to their problems....and like Moynihan, Cosby's words caused resentment toward the 'messenger', rather than any agreement that the message MAY just be a valid one.
I find that to be ironic because as much as Moynihan was excoriate by liberals and lauded by conservatives, he clearly lays the blame for the black underclass at the doorstep of American racism.
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