Word: moynihan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fortunate that Daniel Moynihan has seen fit to re-define his position in the light of recent criticism; this redefinition provides an opportunity to discuss the real issues involved in the Moynihan Report, The Negro Family...
...main criticism of The Negro Family came from middle-class liberals, black and white. The charge was that the report raised the spectre of Negro inferiority. Moynihan was at complete liberty to demolish these arguments, as he does in his Commentary article. Obviously certain problems--illegitimacy (that is, reported births out of wedlock), lack of education, inferior housing, and unsanitary living conditions--simply go along with poverty and discrimination...
...charge of subtle racism is an irrelevant one; a much more serious charge--one that reflects not on Moynihan's motives but upon his competence--is that the Moynihan Report proposed a program that was simply unworkable within the framework of national and local power relations. This flaw, I think, not only from Moynihan's basic orientation, but from his misunderstanding--until recently--of the nature of the political and administrative process in this country...
...government, as the Liberal Left and Moynihan fail to recognize, is not an instrument for the initiation and sustenance of social change. Its purpose is to institutionalize social change when it occurs--to legitimize the new order. It is somewhat naive, as the leaders of the War on Poverty have by now recognized, to expect a government body which rests on consensus to foster social change. As Moynihan himself says, "A quest for peace of this kind gives maximum leverage to the group with the most intransigent and assertive opinions, and the greatest ideological discipline" -- or, simply, the group with...
...Moynihan's whole emphasis is on the crucial role of unemployment in understanding all of the problems of Negro pathology: he presents one statistical correlation after another, showing that illegitimacy, desertion, and all the other symptoms show an unbelievably high correlation with changes in Negro unemployment: he marshals an enormous amount of evidence demonstrating--completely contrary to Payton's allegations throughout his essay--that Negro unemployment is very much more serious than the unemployment statistics indicate...