Real Message of the Moynihan Report (text)
To Be Equal
Real Message Of Moynihan Report
By Whitney M. Young Jr. (Executive Dwector, Urban League) (photo of author below)
Last Spring, a report published by the U.S. Department of Labor and popularly known as the Moynihan Report, after its author, received a good deal of publicity in the press. Since then it has become difficult to read about or discuss the Negro’s drive for full equality without encountering references to this report or without dealine with the questions it raises.
Briefly, the point of the report, which is entitled “The Negro Family,” is that as a consequence of slave! and oppression, the Negro family as an institution has deteriorated to the point where its pathological state threatens to engulf the gains Negroes may make in the future. Impressive looking charts and graphs are presented to show that Negroes commit more crimes, have more illegitimate births, are more often unemployed. and are more often members of broken families.
Unfortunately, the report has been pressed into uses which its author, Daniel P. Moynihan, an eloquent advocate of civil rights, could not have for- seen. Both the popular press and other quarters, have seized upon parts of its finding and have distorted them to the point where the record must be set right.
First of all, the report isn’t about the Negro family at all; it is about some Negro families. The picture of prevalent pathology it presents just does not fit reality and is a gross injustice to the overwhelming majority of Negro families, which are as stable as any in the nation.
Further, the statistics it quotes leave out factors which put its findings in doubt. Nowhere among the many charts in the report is there a breakdown of comparative statistics which contrast figures for Negro families with those for white families of compar able income. What appear to be racial differences in regard to family stability are more probably class differences, which Negro lower-class families share with whites.
Again, figures which purport to show Negro crime and illegitimacy rates as higher than those of whites do not take into account such hidden factors as the police propensity for arresting Negroes more readily, and the ease with which better off white families can conceal illegitimacy and abortions. Too often the figures which show such shocking disparity in family stability are the result of these “hidden” factors. The pejorative implications of the report’s figures just do not stand-up to examination of the causes behind them.
The findings of the report, whatever the failings of its statistics, do give a picture of some of the social ills which affect many Negroes. However, family instability has been presented in the press and elsewhere as being the cause of Negro failure to achieve equality. This is a gross distortion. It is instead the result of patterns of discrimination which deny to Negro citizens the same chance to hold a job and earn a decent living that the white American has.
The real message of the report, obscured by the unfortunate emphasis on the distorted figures, is that unemployment among Negroes, twice the white rate and affecting perhaps 25 percent of Negro men, has effects which go beyond the economic, harming the social fabric of family life. The poverty and unemployment which afflict disproportionate numbers of Negroes: in the United States take a tremendous toll from the,man who is jcbless, the housewife who is forced into the labor market to make ends meet, and the child denied the atmosphere he needs to grow up properly motivated.
The problems the Negro family faces today are caused by its economic disadvantages, which are in turn mainly the result of the discrimination and unequal treatment of teday — not chiefly the result of slavery, as the report argues. The sooner we get off the side track of peripheral issues and back on the main road of current basic causes, the sooner the Negro will attain the will attain the ; equality to which he is entitled.
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