The Moynihan Report

As a black man, I’ve heard my parents tell stories of being denied service in restaurants, of being turned down for apartments, and other experiences in the general racial climate in America during the 1960s. By all accounts they were too focused on immediate survival to worry about such things that were outside their control, but it must have been a difficult time. Yet surprisingly despite what today would be considered withering racism, in general, somehow back then black people were better off relative to whites and other races than today when there is a black president in the white house. How can this possibly be? In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, seeing that the well-being of black families was moving in the opposite direction from programs that ostensibly were aimed at helping, wrote a report called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”, also known as the Moynihan Report. The report in essence stated that government programs and policies were incentivizing the breakdown of the black family, and that since the black family is so important to the well-being of the black community, these …show more content…
Take the criminalization of marijuana, which was legal until a campaign in the early 1900s advertised that it would in effect cause black men to go crazy and rape white women, though the drug was felt to be something that whites could handle. The point is that laws and policies made by some central bureaucracy run by a demographic that doesn’t share your individual interests, are laws and policies that may in the end harm your community. Today somewhere on the order of 25% of black men have been in prison, often due to those same drug laws, if not due to the punitive child support laws also mentioned in the Moynihan report as in the end being potentially harmful to black women and children. It’s hard to argue that any laws which criminalize 25% of a population are laws that serve this