40 Years Later, The Truth Starts Trickling Out

[Annie]

Many responsible sociologists have been saying this all along, the 'War on Poverty' caused the dismantling of the black family. Patrick Moynihan saw that it would:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_black_family.html

The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies
Kay S. Hymowitz
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Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.

To go back to the political and social moment before the battle broke out over the Moynihan report is to return to a time before the country’s discussion of black poverty had hardened into fixed orthodoxies—before phrases like “blaming the victim,” “self-esteem,” “out-of-wedlock childbearing” (the term at the time was “illegitimacy”), and even “teen pregnancy” had become current. While solving the black poverty problem seemed an immense political challenge, as a conceptual matter it didn’t seem like rocket science. Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legal barriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance, just as poor immigrants had...

 

[dilloduck]

Many responsible sociologists have been saying this all along, the 'War on Poverty' caused the dismantling of the black family. Patrick Moynihan saw that it would:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_black_family.html

I'm curious if WJ is going to say I told you so or rep you.

 

[Hobbit]

If I can find the picture, I'll post it, but I once saw a picture of a black man's foot in a basketball shoe with a ball and chain attached to it. It basically illustrates another problem in black culture. Nearly every black kid thinks he's good enough at basketball to go pro. This keeps him from seriously seeking more plausible careers, most of which require a better education than he will work for. As a final note, I encourage any successful black people reading this, especially those who started in the ghetto, to oppose the 'gangsta' culture and help get those guys out of the ghetto through better education. I'd do it, but they won't listen to me because I'm white, meaning I'm obviously just trying to keep them in their place.