At the Wall Street Journal Jason Riley reminds us that Pat Moynihan was right about the social dysfunction that plagued our inner cities:
Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the future senator’s report on the black family, the controversial document issued while he served as an assistant secretary in President Lyndon Johnson’s Labor Department. Moynihan highlighted troubling cultural trends among inner-city blacks, with a special focus on the increasing number of fatherless homes.
“The fundamental problem is that of family structure,†wrote Moynihan, who had a doctorate in sociology. “The evidence—not final but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.â€
[…]
History has proved that Moynihan was onto something. When the report was released, about 25% of black children and 5% of white children lived in a household headed by a single mother. During the next 20 years the black percentage would double and the racial gap would widen. Today more than 70% of all black births are to unmarried women, twice the white percentage.
You can argue about the reasons for this. I think it’s that over a century of racism, Jim Crow, and badly constructed social programs made black men superfluous in the family. They sought social support elsewhere and frequently that was in street gangs. That lead to violence and crime. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I think we should be concerned that inner city African Americans were a harbinger of things to come to the larger society. I don’t relish the prospect of ours becoming a country in which men are seen as burdens to the self-realization of women.
If you worked for a Republican presidential campaign, you’d be for to resign in shame for saying this.
Regarding your last sentence: It’s already happened.
Actually, I’m not being totally fair. For some women a certain type of husband has become a luxury item. At a couple of recent business conferences my wifec has received envious responses from other women when she reported having a stay-at-home husband. This has been a radical shift in recent years.
Actually families headed by women and lacking men are the norm in Africa, so the so-called dysfunctional family is the usual black pattern. The modern welfare state probably facilitates the practice, but its roots are likely genetic. Moynihan would not have known any of this.
Black dysfunction in general is genetic.
If genetic & widespread throughout a populatiprinthen probably not dysfunction but an adaptation to environmental pressures.
I’ve always thought he was also correct in advocating ‘benign neglect’ of that particular issue. Damn shame he tilted so far toward the neo-conservatives there at the end.