The Controversial Moynihan Report (text)
The Core Of It!
By James Farmer, National Director
The Controversial Moynihan Report
“Moynihan Report”
As if living in the sewer, learning in the streets, and working in the pantry weren’t enough of a burden for millions of American’ Negroes, I now learn that we’ve caught “matriarchy,” and “the tangle of Negro pathology” … a social plague recently diagnosed by Daniel Moynihan in his celebrated report on “The Negro Family.”
After tracing the long history of Negro oppression in this country, Moynihan concludes that our current difficulties are rooted in the effects of that oppression dramatized in the shattered Negro family, stripped of its male and going to Hell in a basket.
On the surface, this would seem to be a fairminded exercise in the Life Sciences but in fact the Moynihan Report, which seems to have been given a good deal of currency by the present administration, is another one of those academic efforts to get our eyes off the prize.
By laying the primary blame for present-day inequalities on the pathological condition of the Negro family and community, Moynihan has provided a massive academic cop-out for the white conscience and clearly implied that Negroes in this nation will never secure a substantial measure of freedom until we learn to behave ourselves and stop buying Cadillacs instead of bread.
This well-enough intentioned analysis provides the fuel for a new racism… it succeeds in taking the real tragedy of black poverty and serving it up as an essentially salacious “discovery” suggesting that Negro mental health should be the first order of business in a civil rights revolution.
Nowhere does Moynihan suggest that there may be something wrong in an “orderly and normal” white family structure that is weaned on race hatred and passes the word “n____” from generation to generation.
Nowhere does Moynihan suggest that the proper answer to a shattered family is an open job market where this “frustrated” male Negro can get an honest day’s work.
And nowhere does Moynihan suggest that high illegitimacy rates in the black community may be partly explained by the fact that birth control information and covert abortions are by and large the exclusive property of the white man.
I say all this because I’m angry… really angry and I intend to spell out this anger in just one more effort to convince somebody, anybody, down in the places of power that the cocktail hour on the “Negro Question” is over and that we are sick unto death of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold and slobbered over while the same evils that are the ingredients of our oppression go unattended.
It has been the fatal error of American society for 300 years to ultimately blame the roots of poverty and violence in the Negro community upon Negroes themselves. I honestly felt that the Civil Rights and Voting laws indicated that we were rid of this kind of straw-man logic, but here it is again, in its most vicious form, handing the racists a respectable new weapon and insulting the intelligence of black men and women everywhere.
I intend to devote a good deal of space to this Moynihan Report for a number of reasons. First and most important, it is fast becoming the scriptural basis for several new brands of bigotry, even without the consent of its authors.
Secondly, it has been specifically hailed by the American right wing and is currently being used to “explain away” the Negro Revolution as the hysterical outburst of a mentally unbalanced sub-culture.
Third, it provides a documented basis for men in elected authority to divert practical anti-discrimination programs into an open season on “pathological” Negroes.
And fourth, the report is especially bad in that it contains a great number of statistical facts, misread, misinterpreted and warped into a series of conclusions that could make Robert Shelton into a holy prophet. In many ways, this report, when studied carefully, emerges in my mind as the most serious threat to the ultimate freedom of American Negroes to appear in print in recent memory.
I cannot possibly in the course of this article cover even a small part of the report’s analyses and conclusions. I will deal with those in subsequent columns. I must say, however, that I am convinced that the author or authors of this document did not consciously intend to write a racist tract… but the fact that it may be used as such makes their innocence inexcusable.
They have forgotten that we are bottled into our ghetto and held down not simply by the restraints of our past, but by the clear and present acts of subtle and unsubtle discrimination that continue to destroy our option for self change and make our life a living Hell. And to forget that while focusing on “the tangle of Negro pathology” is very much like curing Yellow Fever by painting the patient white and ignoring the mosquitoes.
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