Moynihan Report Research Articles

The Changing Historiography of the Moynihan Report

This paper discusses the ways that historians have studied and discussed the Moynihan Report throughout the decades following its release to the public, and how the interpretations and conversations regarding the document have changed over time.

Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach

Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach

Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity

Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity

Moynihan Report Still Connected to Racist Practices in Psychiatry

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ViewpointsFull AccessMoynihan Report Still Connected to Racist Practices in PsychiatryAnum Iqbal Baig, M.D., M.B.A., Ijeoma Ijeaku, M.D., M.P.H.Anum Iqbal BaigSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.B.A., Ijeoma IjeakuSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H.Published Online:27 Sep 2022https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2022.10.10.36Daniel Moynihan, assistant secretary in the Department of Labor during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, wrote a report in 1965 titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” better known as the Moynihan Report. According to an article in the June 24 Boston Review by Stephen Steinberg, Ph.D., distinguished emeritus professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Moynihan Report was written during the critical period when President Johnson planned to progress into “the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights” after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those two pieces of legislation desegregated American society and granted Blacks both civil and voting rights. Some observers have viewed the Moynihan Report as claiming that dysfunctional family structure and culture are the roots of Black poverty. We suggest that racist policies and institutional racism are responsible for inequities in the distribution of wealth and other socioeconomic commodities. As a result, these pervasive racist policies continue to have adverse effects on Black mental health.The Moynihan Report focuses on the “crumbling family structure and urban ghetto culture” in Black communities as fundamental causal factors of economic and health care disparities. While family structure can affect the economic status of Black households, it is only one of several social and political factors with such influence. Moynihan vaguely alludes to these factors by noting that “three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American.” He then states that “a national effort towards the problem of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.” Thus, the report oversimplifies this explanation and shifts the focus away from continued racist policies and cultural practices, which were chiefly responsible for contributing to inadequate Black employment.The Moynihan Report’s findings are undermined by the flawed argument that the “tangle of pathologies” are direct consequences of dysfunctional family structure, rather than a contributing factor to Black poverty. He concludes the report by stating that the U.S. federal government can attempt to solve this problem by creating programs “enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.” According to an article in the June 30, 2015, In These Times by Daniel Geary, Ph.D., M.A., the ambiguous language used in the Moynihan Report allows its use by some to justify racism and its resulting economic inequalities, leading to damaging consequences. Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor of U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin.The Moynihan Report is relevant today because of the continued presence of unresolved sociopolitical and economic issues mentioned therein. These matters continue to promote racism via racist policies that result in racial and health care disparities for Black people. Policies that perpetuate racial violence result in mistrust of the legal, political, and health care systems, thus leading to reduced access to mental health care. According to an article by Tahmi Perzichilli, M.S., L.P.C.C., posted May 7, 2020, in Counseling Today, the pervasive fear and mistrust of the health care system arise from historical reasons including the creation of “drapetomania” as a treatable mental illness that caused enslaved Blacks to want freedom, deinstitutionalization, use of the criminal justice system to control Blacks, and scientific racism. The unresolved sociopolitical and economic issues discussed in the Moynihan Report can be addressed through the enactment of anti-racist policies in every sphere of the American experience. Anti-racist policies are necessary to improve the overall well-being of Blacks as well as their access to mental health care. ■Resources“The Moynihan Report: The Negro Family, the Case for National Action”“The Moynihan Report at Fifty”“The Moynihan Report Is Turning 50. Its Ideas on Black Poverty Were Wrong Then and Are Now”“The Historical Roots of Racial Disparities in the Mental Health System”Anum Iqbal Baig, M.D., M.B.A., is a PGY-4 psychiatry resident and chief resident at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. She is also a second-year APA/APAF Leadership Fellow and a member of the Southern California Psychiatric Society (SCPS) Diversity and Culture Committee.Ijeoma Ijeaku, M.D., M.P.H., is the immediate past president of the SCPS and chair of the Diversity and Culture Committee. She is also an associate clinical professor at UC Riverside School of Medicine. ISSUES NewArchived

A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood

A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood

After Sexology

AbstractIs sexology over? What does one do with its history, at once a seemingly remote relic and a persistent logic of biopolitics today? “Sexology and Its Afterlives” begins from the premise that the history of sexology lives in the infrastructures of the present. Locating the afterlives of sexology in material and aesthetic form, this introduction to the special issue engages the largely unmarked detritus of a disaggregated sexological project, whose components have found renewed life in the biopolitical apparatus. The contributors to this issue identify not only familiar sites of sexological persistence (the sex-segregated public toilet) but also less immediately obvious ones (the Moynihan report, redlining, the army base) as executing the unfinished business of the sexological project. This breadth of sexological diffusion makes its analysis a necessarily interdisciplinary prospect, and the contributors call on disability studies, trans studies, Black studies, women-of-color feminism, visual culture, and the history of sexuality, generating emergent concepts, including crip-of-color critique (Kim), binary-abolitionist praxis (Stryker), a “trans-mad” aesthetic (Crawford), and a shift toward expressivity as a framework (Musser). Across the issue, newly imagined sites of collective politics come into view as a payoff for working through the stalled-out imaginaries of sexological binarisms.

HUMBLE PIE IS COLD COMFORT Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit

HUMBLE PIE IS COLD COMFORT Comment on M. Sandel’s <i>The Tyranny of Merit</i>

Zippin’ Up My Boots, Going Back to My Routes

This discussion essay on Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands considers the contrasting ways the dominant society and the people of the African diaspora approach and regard research into family histories. Beginning with reflections on the somewhat dreaded though seemingly benign question, “Where are you from?,” the essay explores the shortcomings and racial biases of popular genealogical websites, contrasting these with the deeply and profoundly nuanced ways Carby’s book tackles fundamental questions, shortcomings, and difficulties in endeavors to trace ancestry. Along the way, the essay references Alex Haley’s Roots and then takes up the Moynihan Report and Maury Povich’s daytime TV show, Maury, both of which, the author asserts, reflect the pathology of depicting the black father as absent and deviant. The essay concludes with considerations of an inevitably settled yet nevertheless creatively fertile “mixed upness” of the creation of African diaspora family histories.

From builders to their tools: crafting ‘poverty knowledge’ from “the Moynihan Report” to today

ABSTRACT Critics often cite the “Moynihan Report” to illustrate how cultural diagnoses of poverty blame the victims and ignore the structural roots of inequality. This paper considers how the tendency to attribute such dangerous analyses to researchers’ individual shortcomings leaves the underlying analytical elements that generate cultural diagnoses. Rather than focus on those who build “poverty knowledge,” we advocate for more attention to the analytical tools that continue to encourage cultural diagnoses today. We use the “Moynihan Report” as a mirror in which we can see how static theories of culture and atomistic units of analysis encourage cultural diagnoses. They obscure the ongoing, collective work of reproducing inequality, including the work of race-making and racialization which help sustain economic exploitation, making it dangerously easy to locate blame and responsibility on particular persons or groups of persons. Transgressing the roots of inequity requires a relentless confrontation with these analytical tools.

“My Daddy … He Was a Good Man”: Gendered Genealogies and Memories of Enslaved Fatherhood in America’s Antebellum South

While the last few years have witnessed an upsurge of studies into enslaved motherhood in the antebellum American South, the role of the enslaved father remains largely trapped within a paradigm of enforced absenteeism from an unstable and insecure familial unit. The origins of this lie in the racist assumptions of the infamous “Moynihan Report” of 1965, read backwards into slavery itself. Consequently, the historiographical trajectory of work on enslaved men has drawn out the performative aspects of their masculinity in almost every area of their lives except that of fatherhood. This has produced an image of individualistic masculinity, separate from the familial role that many enslaved men managed to sustain and, as a result, productive of a disjointed and gendered genealogy of slavery and its legacy. This paper assesses the extent to which this fractured genealogy actually represents the former slaves’ worldview. By examining a selection of interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s (the WPA Narratives), this paper explores formers slaves’ memories of their enslaved fathers and the significance of the voluntary paternal presence in their life stories. It concludes that the role of the black father was of greater significance than so far recognised by the genealogical narratives that emerged from the slave communities of the Antebellum South.

In the Fabric of Research: Racial and Gender Stereotypes in Survey Items Assessing Attitudes about Abortion

AbstractWe investigated the content of survey items to assess whether and how racist and sexist stereotypes are woven into the fabric of research on attitudes about abortion in the United States. We collected and analyzed a comprehensive set of survey items (456 items from 80 studies) used in peer‐reviewed research published from 2008 to 2018 in representative and nonrepresentative studies of U.S. respondents. Our analysis was guided by historical narratives that have been influential in shaping representations of women and reproduction in the United States (e.g., the Moynihan Report). With this background, we developed three themes pertaining to how individuals’ attitudes about abortion are measured: we found that items rely on (1) moral, (2) sexual, and (3) financial evaluations of women seeking abortion care. These themes highlighted implicit and explicit judgments of women, including representations of them as unwilling to partner with men and as fiscally and sexually irresponsible. We argue that survey items meant to objectively assess abortion attitudes draw on negative racial and gender stereotypes and that these stereotypes then travel widely under the veneer of scientific objectivity. Critical methods, such as the item bank analysis described in this study, are crucial to discern how inequality, prejudice, and discrimination can be reproduced in the fabric of research methods. In our discussion, we offer suggestions for researchers to reduce these and related forms of bias in survey‐based abortion research.

Creating Environments that Matter: The Role of Cultural Capital and Social Support in Developing a Positive Academic Identity

BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO. 1 | 15 82 No.1 CREATING ENVIRONMENTS THAT MATTER: THE ROLE OF CULTURAL CAPITAL AND SOCIAL SUPPORT IN DEVELOPING A POSITIVE ACADEMIC IDENTITY By Renique Kersh, Joseph Flynn, and Ashley Palmer Introduction African Americans have a rich tradition in education and academic success. Enslaved Africans learned to read at the risk of punishment and even death. Luminaries like Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, Septima Clark, and countless others were trailblazers in emphasizing the education of African Americans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conversely, the history of African Americans in education has been wrought with challenges. Despite the social significance of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, school desegregation had the unintended outcome of practically erasing the presence of African Americans, within administration as well as in the curriculum.1 Consequently, although African American educational achievements have been made, progress has been painfully slow.2 Historical Framework: Socio-Cultural Impacts of Schooling on African Americans In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan released The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,3 also known as The Moynihan Report. The report indicated that there was a growing gap in the quality of life for African Americanscomparedtootherracialgroups.Moynihanimplicatedracismasafactorinthewideninggapofpoorandworking class African American nuclear families and declared that a culture of poverty was cementing within this community. His hypothesis was met with criticism, most notably for its victim blaming.4 Despite valid critiques, The Moynihan Report has gone on to shape the way educators think about and engage African American students in the classroom. Cultural deprivation theorists believed, as James Banks wrote, “Schools must help low-income students to overcome the deficits that result from their early family and community experience.”5 Cultural deprivation gave way to the notion of cultural difference, a theory that low-income and African American students were not seeing academic success because their cultural experiences were neither recognized nor embraced in schools. Cultural difference theorists believed that pedagogies and practices ought to be reformed to embrace the cultural lenses of these students and their communities. Cultural deprivation made a resurgence in the 1990s through the “at-risk” paradigm, which, as it gained popularity, became a broad catch-all for state and federal agencies’ identification of African American students for special education, suspensions, and expulsions. Academic Identity Although education is presumed to level the playing field, the complicated, often deficit-centered experiences many students of color carry impact their perceptions of the educational system and how willing they are to engage in it.6 According to Harper,7 for many African American students, the K-12 journey leads to a constructed understanding and belief of inferiority within academic settings. Academic identity is formed through the internalization of messages and the external engagement and interactions in social and cultural settings that reinforce or negate messages of inferiority and feelings of being an imposter. These socialized beliefs create patterns that can impact students’ academic identities as they enter colleges and universities. 16 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 1 82 No.1 Academic identity relates to a student’s perception of themselves as academically capable. It is associated with a degreeofconfidenceinone’sabilitytoengageinchallenging scholarly pursuits.8 For African American students, managing constant cycles of negative social messages in school, including messages of failure and deficit, can lead to an inferiority complex that spurs underperformance, lowlevel tracking, and aversion to taking risks in the classroom or throughout their educational experiences.9 Colleges and universities often reinforce these deficit concepts by ignoring issues related to campus climates that leave students feeling like they don’t belong.10 Imposter Syndrome The imposter phenomenon often impacts high-achieving students, women, and underrepresented students, and results in a student’s perception that they don’t belong in an academic setting.11 College students who experience this phenomenon are subject to anxiety and an increased sense of vulnerability, self-consciousness, and fear of failure.12 For African American students, these sociopsychological factors may impact their willingness to fully engage in educationally purposeful activities, which involve highly intellectual discourse and may be a relevant deterrent to gaps in achievement.13 Social Support Initiativesthatprovidesocialsupportstounderrepresented students as they enter college have proven...

Daniel Bell's Dilemma: Financialization, Family Values, and their Discontents

Daniel Bell's Dilemma:Financialization, Family Values, and their Discontents Stefan Eich Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books, 1976). Melinda Cooper, Family Values. Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017). Amassing a mountain of etymological conjectures and anthropological reports that ranged from Iroquois family structures to the communal land ownership of archaic Russian villages, in the last years of his life Karl Marx concluded that Charles Fourier had been right. The modern family, Marx explained in his ethnological notebooks from the early 1880s, "contains in itself in miniature all the antagonisms that later develop widely in society and its state."1 Indeed, the patriarchal family itself had developed historically on the back of slavery. "In its primary meaning," Marx excerpted from the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), "family had no relation to the married pair or their children, but to the body of slaves and servants." Just as Fourier had argued, the status of civilization was mirrored by its family structures and the rise of capitalism had gone hand in hand with a patriarchal revolution against matriarchy and common ownership. This meant inversely, as Fourier concluded, that the surest and most rapid path to social progress was the march of women toward their liberty. In 1968, four years before excerpts from Marx's late ethnological notes were first published, Daniel Bell also turned to Fourier. Bell, like Marx, acknowledged Fourier's prophetic quality. Referring to the sexual revolution [End Page 241] sweeping through American campuses and bedrooms, Bell worried about what he dubbed the "psychological utopia of individual release."2 The prophet of such "orgiastic chiliasm," he declared in the American Scholar in the fall of 1968, had been Fourier. "Family life, the key social institution of the civilized state," Bell explained, "was Fourier's most compelling example of an unnatural institution, holding men in its iron grip, bringing misery to all its members."3 As the journal announced, Bell's next, long-awaited monograph would dissect Fourier's untimely anticipation of the utopia of sexual liberation. Bell was far from alone in his concern about the state of American sexual mores and family structures at the time. Already in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on "The Negro Family" had caused a stir by reframing black urban poverty around "the deterioration of the Negro family."4 Moynihan, a sociologist then serving in the Johnson administration as Assistant Undersecretary of Labor, argued in the report that "the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well."5 By the early 1970s anxieties about the counter-cultural sexual liberation directly echoed Moynihan's account of black family breakdown. It was during these years that the economist Gary Becker began to extend his account of human capital from education into reproduction to develop an "economic theory of marriage."6 Throughout the 1960s Becker had been Bell's colleague at Columbia, but in the wake of the student protests on Morningside Heights in the spring of 1968 both turned their backs to Columbia. Bell moved on to the sociology department at Harvard. Becker returned to the University of Chicago. In his theoretical papers Becker had largely refrained from spelling out the political implications of his theory of family economics, but as the introduction to his unifying Treatise on the Family (1981) made clear, his account self-consciously tapped into anxieties about divorce [End Page 242] rates and single mothers that had been building up in the course of the 1970s. As Becker declared in the book's opening sentence, "the family in the Western world has been radically altered, some claim almost destroyed, by the events of the last three decades."7 ________ Becker's hyperbolic assessment forms the opening epigraph of Melinda Cooper's brilliant Family Values.8 As Cooper shows in her important revisionist account, financialization and neoliberal depoliticization were never opposed to family values...

Licia’s Lectures on Nothing

Licia’s Lectures on Nothing

The Political Life of Black Motherhood

Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal theory” as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood . Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away. . . . We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering , one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible . Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube , posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA . Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory...

Book Review: Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy

Book Review: Daniel Geary, <i>Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy</i>

Review: Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy by Daniel Geary

Review: Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy by Daniel Geary

Greenbaum, Susan. 2015. Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty. Rutgers University Press.

Greenbaum, Susan. 2015. Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty. Rutgers University Press.

Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 276. Cloth $40.69, Paper $27.50.

Daniel Geary, <i>Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy</i>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 276. Cloth $40.69, Paper $27.50.

Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty

Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty