The Negro Family and the Moynihan Report
Carper, Laura
When discussed among the editors of Disss T, the following article aroused unusually strong reactions, pro and con. We print it because it focuses sharply on controversial matters. Several...
...The father is haphazardly employed and at a very low wage...
...Prior to 1962, if an applicant was a poor housekeeper, mentally disturbed, or evidence of a male friend could be found, her application for AFDC was denied...
...The challenge to the Negro community is political...
...In 1963, the year the lines for AFDC cases and the unemployment rate converge, the rates were especially high...
...Is the caricature I have drawn of the shtetl family accurate...
...It is the characteristic way in which those on top describe those on the bottom, even when sincerely trying to uplift them...
...As a staff member of the department informed me, "it is our policy to give everyone a chance now...
...My Negro landlady encountered a helpful woman who tried to tell her that Negro culture was rooted in the life style of slavery and fixed by history...
...Their conclusion became a landmark in the field with which every investigator has been forced to contend...
...in 1963 the lines for each cross...
...Since the Negro man does not rationalize his role as being a desirable religious achievement, it seems to me he would be easier to integrate into the surrounding culture than the Jew...
...The children are raised by an extended family of adult women...
...This view of the desirability of army life is patently absurd...
...Let me also add that I am not trying to draw any direct analogies between the Irish poor, the Jewish poor, or even the Puerto Rican poor, and the Negro poor...
...Let your father furrage for himself now...
...I've done all I could an' it was all no use—he'll be hopeless till the end of his days...
...The question the report raises is the direction a government program would take to insure family stability...
...Presumably, the negative correlation after 1962 shows or suggests that giving the Negro male a job will no longer insure or help insure family stability...
...BOYLE: It'll have what's far betther—it'll have two mothers...
...The studies, together with the introduction, almost seem to argue for the existence of a racial unconscious...
...With the publication of this document a sociological theory which borders on an ideology has become a political weapon which we are all obliged to examine...
...In telling me about the conversation my landlady said, "That woman thinks that if she handed me a bail of cotton, I'd know how to make a dress out of it...
...It is not new for a ruling elite to characterize its poor as incontinent and shiftless...
...Among the Hassidic Jews (Hassidism was a movement initiated by the poor) , it was common for the father to leave his wife and children without a kopek or a groshen in the house and depart for the Rebbe's court where he would dance and drink and spend all his money...
...It was the culmination of a thoroughgoing examination of the corrosive effects of our peculiar social organization and value system on the Negro as compared to the white...
...There was a manpower shortage in 1940...
...It is the pathological relationship between white social institutions and the Negro community which has bred the statistics the report cites—from low scholastic averages to drug addiction to arrest records to illegitimacy to unemployment rates...
...BOYLE: We'll go...
...After all, once integration became a viable possibility, even the shtetl Jew cast off what no longer served him...
...It is not my contention that the area of full employment is the only front on which we should fight...
...As the unemployment rate drops, AFDC cases drop...
...He is grappling with the social system under which he lives today...
...The graph shows a direct correlation between the non-white male unemployment rate and AFDC cases opened each year between 1948 and 1961...
...and it is of course the young and not the mature Negro woman who would be a new AFDC case...
...Peter Townsend has pointed out that in 1930 many Englishmen estimated that as many as a million of their fellowcountrymen were unemployable because of their personal problems and only a decade later found that only 100,000 could be characterized in this way...
...According to the Report "the essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut...
...He has either deserted or been thrown out by the mother...
...What destroys a people is physical annihilation or assimilation, not its family life...
...Underlying the Report's understanding of the problems of the Negro family is its author's concept of masculinity...
...that what is now needed is a national effort not to alter our white social institutions but the way the Negro poor relate to each other on the primary personal level—the family...
...We print it because it focuses sharply on controversial matters...
...The statistics I have tried to examine are the supportive evidence the report offers in defense of a social psychological theory...
...The form these so-called excesses take varies from culture to culture and person to person within the culture-but no matter how extreme the nature of the adjustment, once the social pressure which created it is removed, a new adjustment develops...
...Taken as a whole, the unemployment rate of non-white men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four during the years in question fluctuates but shows little over-all change...
...Of course not...
...Whereas between July 1960 and June 1961 33.4% of the applications were denied, only 28% were denied between July 1963 and June 1964...
...I lumped a few hundred years of history together and failed to distinguish between people...
...The unemployment rate for eighteen and nineteen year old non-white men rose from 23.9% in 1961 to 27.4% in 1963, and for eighteen and nineteen year old women who would be obliged to assist in the support of their families from 28.2% to 31.9...
...The strange graph in the Moynihan Report is the result of graphing the wrong things...
...Pathology is in the eye of the beholder...
...And further, that people living under oppression always develop social formations which appear to the surrounding oppressive culture to be excessive or pathological...
...Is it peculiar to them...
...The thesis of the Report is that the Negro poor "confront the nation with a new kind of problem...
...Service in the United States Armed Forces is the only [author's italics] experience open to the Negro-American in which he is truly treated as an equal: not as a Negro equal to any white, but as one man equal to any man in a world where the category 'Negro' and 'white' do not exist...
...This picture does not focus fifty per cent of the Negro families...
...Several editors have declared their intention to dispute Mrs...
...as the unemployment rate rises, AFDC cases rise...
...What is the quality of the solutions Mr...
...The argument is supported with an array of statistics but without any effort to come to terms with the fact that variations in life style and social adjustment within the ghetto and between the Northern and Southern Negro poor are far more varied than between all of them and society at large...
...It is inevitable that as news of this policy change spreads among the Negro poor and as each of the states slowly alters its policy to conform to this new view, AFDC cases will continue to rise...
...The thinking here represents a powerful tendency in modern sociological thought...
...Dreger and Miller's conclusion reflected the intensive efforts of liberal sociological and psychological thought of the period...
...The Irish matriarchal family formation is noteworthy because it existed in conflict with an Irish patriarchal ideal...
...I have chosen to detail the matriarchal organization of the Jewish family life not because it corresponds to the Negro family but because sociologists look upon Jewish family life as remarkably cohesive...
...When discussed among the editors of Disss T, the following article aroused unusually strong reactions, pro and con...
...But I cannot help wonder with James Tobin, who published an interesting economic study in the Fall 1965 issue of Daedalus, why "personal attributes which doom(ed) a man to unemployment in 1932 or even 1954 or 1961 did not handicap him in 1944 or 1951 or 1956...
...Come, Mary, an' we'll never come back here agen...
...Although illegitimacy was not a problem (partly because divorce merely involved a witnessed statement placed in the hand of the wife...
...the father was frequently absent, either as a peddler on the road, as an immigrant in America, or as a permanent resident of the house of study who came home only to eat...
...A national effort is required that will give unity and purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure...
...A complete explanation must include the famous 1962 change in the social security law...
...in 1964 AFDC cases continue to rise as the unemployment rate continues to drop...
...I've got a little room in me sisther's where we'll stop till your throuble is over, an' then we'll work together for the sake of the baby, MARY: My poor little child that'll have no father...
...The man either struggled desperately to make a living with little success or withdrew entirely into a private male society based on discourse or ecstacy and left the family to shift for itself...
...Moynihan's—but it seems clear to me that it is for the Negro male himself to determine his sexual and social style— whether strutting or not...
...What is more, Frank Riessman has found that involving emotionally disturbed people among the Negro poor in the civil rights movement can resolve their personal problems...
...What appears to be a social malformation in one period becomes the problem of isolated individuals in another...
...New AFDC cases must therefore be compared with the unemployment rate of young Negroes...
...The negative correlation is due to an inconsistency between youth unemployment rate and the unemployment rate of the non-white male population as a whole and to an important change in policy on the part of the welfare authorities...
...Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present will not work here...
...I have applied Mr...
...The conclusion is that something more is needed...
...And the depth and extent to which oppression and poverty reduced the Jew can be measured by the disintegrative effects of the widespread Messianic movements, two of which emphasized orgiastic sexual practices as a means of insuring the coming of the Messiah...
...But I would like to attempt to explain the graph, particularly since the authors of the report direct the reader's attention to the negative correlation and argue that no government program should be instituted which aims at relieving the plight of the Negro poor until the reasons for the reversal are understood...
...and that the Negro, under continued oppression, developed a matriarchal family organization within which the male played an inadequate role, if any...
...MRS...
...Matriarchy" is a cultural formation common to many oppressed people throughout the history of western civilization—regardless of their own past history and regardless of the values they themselves held...
...and a copy of the article has been sent to Mr...
...Newly married couples usually moved into the home of the bride's parents...
...after 1962 she was accepted if she showed need, regardless of her housekeeping practices, her mental health or her social life...
...Moynihan further states that for the Negro "the armed forces are a dramatic and desperately needed change: a world away from women, a world run by strong men of unquestioned authority, where discipline, if harsh, is nonetheless orderly and predictable and where rewards, if limited, are granted on the basis of performance...
...The Negro is not grappling with the social system under which he lived over a hundred years ago, or even with the social system under which he lived ten years ago...
...Moynihan has in mind...
...Their rate showed a general tendency to increase...
...The Negro family is not the source of the "tangle of pathology" which the report attributes to the Negro community...
...As among the American poor, relations between husband and wife were cold and the roles of each clearly defined...
...If he is present and works, he may squander his income...
...If one eliminates the positive social function of a cultural constellation, if one ignores the meaning personal relations have to the people involved, if one, in short, uses science to depersonalize, what emerges is always pathology...
...Where the over-all non-white male unemployment rate went down in 1963, the unemployment rate for youth went up and then went down a little in 1964...
...I am seeking to show that "matriarchy" within the larger social context of what the report calls "patriarchy" is common to the way of life of poor people...
...In the state of Michigan at least (I choose Michigan arbitrarily, only because I live there and was in a position to discuss the graph with the welfare department) , the department has interpreted this law as a directive to alter its standards...
...A brilliant and moving characterization of how and why such a family constellation developed among the Irish poor can be found in Sean O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock, from which I took the quotation which precedes this piece...
...I cannot here counterpose my taste in men or my concept of the good life against Mr...
...The Negro poor are distinguished from the middle class primarily by the fact that they are poor...
...But it does include a significant section of the Negro poor...
...But in 1962 a negative correlation begins to emerge...
...He is frequently absent from the family scene...
...They concluded that "in the areas of psychological functioning most closely related to the sociological, social class differences show up more clearly as a basis for differentiation between the two groups...
...Fifty per cent of the Negro population is identified as reflecting the "social pathology" these statistics itemize, and the Negro family is recognized as its "source...
...Moynihan with an invitation to reply...
...On page thirteen of the report there is a graph charting the non• white male unemployment rate and the number of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) cases opened each year...
...The first consideration in evaluating statistics is to understand their relevance...
...Non-white youth, male and female, show a radically different set of statistics...
...MRS...
...A people is not destroyed by its history...
...Juno and the Paycock, Act III, Sean O'Casey) The culmination of intensive efforts to codify the life of the hapless is a document published by the Department of Labor entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and commonly referred to as "The Moynihan Report," after the reputed head of the investigation—the sociologist Daniel Moynihan...
...There is a remarkable correlation between AFDC figures and the date of the new law, which authorized greater social and case work service to the poor...
...In order to understand the theoretical framework within which this document was written, we must take a cursory look at sociological thought in the recent period...
...The wife worked and assumed the main burden of supporting the family, and children became adults before they had ever had an opportunity to be children...
...The picture for young non-white women is comparable...
...What is destructive to the Negro man and woman is social impotence here and now, and what rehabilitates them is social power and the struggle for it...
...What the Jewish man succeeded in doing that the Negro man has failed to do is place a positive value on family desertion and personal withdrawal...
...Moynihan's method of describing the Negro to a description of the Jew...
...A little investigation shows that the unemployment rate for non-white males as a whole is not reflected in the unemployment rate of non-white youth...
...He admits that "for those comparatively few who are killed or wounded in combat, or otherwise, the personal sacrifice is inestimable...
...Leadership, family life, child rearing practices, fertility and mate selection all seem to conform to social structure rather than to racial lines per se...
...These figures, although they radically temper the implications of the graph, do not account for the extent of the reversal...
...This is the reason the Black Muslims have chosen to withdraw, and this is the reason the civil rights movement has chosen to confront us...
...that despite the enactment of the voting rights bill, the creation of the "Manpower Retraining Program, The Job Corps, and Community Action—et al," fifty per cent of the Negro population is incapable of profiting because of a psychological distemper...
...The argument continues that since American family life is patriarchal, the matriarchal family formation is pathological and is perpetuating a pathological Negro culture—as the statistics show...
...The report includes a detailed description of the therapeutic effects of military service...
...But on balance, service in the Armed Forces over the past quarter-century has worked greatly to the advantage of those involved...
...In 1960, Dreger and Miller published in the Psychological Bulletin a critical evaluation of the "Comparative Psychological Studies of Negroes and Whites in the United States," which was an examination of the relevant contributions in the field between 1943 and 1958...
...It remains to be seen whether we can make room for the poor to acquire social and economic power...
...I am not prepared to argue an economic determinist thesis...
...The thinking behind the new policy is that by accepting the "undeserving" poor as well as the "deserving" poor, case-work service is made available to those who need it most...
...This may indeed be true, but the theoretical basis of the issue is that due to the vicissitudes of his history and the brutality of white society, the Negro has developed a recognizable psychology and a recognizable personality which emerged under slavery, and that this psychology is self-sustaining and transmitted from generation to generation...
...Both Patricia Sexton and Oscar Lewis have shown that the poor Puerto Rican family is beginning to move toward the same "pathology" as the Negro: illegitimacy and families with a woman at the helm...
...This is our social problem—and not the existence of a matriarchal family organization...
...The same can be said of Jewish family life in the shtetl...
...Frankly admitting that in this effort social psychology was whistling in the dark since the Negro was notorious for his refusal to reveal his inner self to the social investigator and since it was virtually impossible to establish control groups of whites, Pettigrew nevertheless argued that past findings have "underestimated the corrosive effects on young children of impecunious ghetto living...
...Moynihan argues that the armed forces are educational and that they "provide the largest single source of employment in the nation...
...This graph is the strongest argument the report offers to substantiate its thesis that the Negro poor have been so crippled by their situation and history that ordinary measures—which I suppose would be full employment, a radical revision of the ghetto school system, integrated education, decent housing, and a rigorously controlled police force— will no longer suffice...
...They were unable to find a uniquely Negro personality or Negro psychology in any class...
...The presumption is that the Negro poor are no longer merely the victims of white institutional corruption but also, to an undetermined extent, of their corrosive family life...
...In April 1964, however, The Journal of Social Issues published a collection of studies with an introduction by Thomas Pettigrew and Daniel C. Thompson and a lead article by Thomas Pettigrew which sought to delineate what Dreger and Miller were unable to locate— a Negro personality and a Negro psychology...
...and it is this thinking, shorn of its somewhat hesitant and carefully hedged tone, which characterizes the ideological commitment of The Report on the Negro Family and the direction its authors feel national action should take...
...For health involves spontaneous human feelings of affection and tenderness which the Moynihan Report, like my deliberate caricature of Jewish family life, cannot encompass...
...Carper in a subsequent issue...
...In brief the argument is that American slavery stripped the Negro of his culture and his most minimal human rights...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
