L’Affaire Kaepernick
Ebenezer: [shocked] Spirit, are these yours?
Spirit of Christmas Present: They are Man’s. This boy is Ignorance, this girl is Want. Beware them both, but most of all, beware this boy!
~ Charles Dickens – Scrooge: A Christmas Carol
L’Affaire Kaepernick has both provided the world with information but also proven out some heretofore uncertain but huge suspicions.
It is shown that ignorance is alive and well on a number of subjects like the First Amendment and history. It has also shown that people are incredibly stupid. People have been stampeding over themselves to voice their support of Kaepernick’s right to speak his mind and to stand by his principles. ‘Sportswriters’ – especially ignorant millennials [redundant] – have overwhelming written about Kaepernick’s freedom of speech rights and standing by principles. And that this discussion/dialogue is necessary. For what? It appears it is to generate more white guilt. Other athletes have voiced similar sentiments. All of these people have solipsistically supported Kaepernick due to their pure ignorance.
This is not a First Amendment issue at all. Kaepernick can do what he wants and say what he wants. He can say the moon is made out of blue cheese. He can do whatever he wants during the playing of the national anthem. Kaepernick disrespects flag of the US and it is offensive but so what. Let him. He is entitled to his opinion ever if it is wrong. So then he is stupid or ignorant or both. Like Adam Jones who has proven to be a real idiot.
The issue with Kaepernick is that his assertions are factually rubbish. That is a fact. And people are absolutely not willing to admit this because of the pressure of political correctness and fear of being painted a bigot and/or racist. Politically correct asinine words such as social justice are tossed about with impunity. And, according to Kaepernick, it is this mystical and delusional social justice item that is his reason for being a doofus.
And that is even a bigger tragedy than any of Kaepernick’s wrong assertions.
Kaepernick and the phalanx of dreck-writing ‘journalists’ (as well as the brown clown) have attempted to frame this – whatever it is- ‘thing’ along the lines of getting a dialogue started. What a load of crap. They, meaning blacks and guilt ridden sycophants, want the entire global white population to prostrate itself before black America and confess/apologize/admit that it is whites that are the cause of EVERY affliction and tribulation foisted upon blacks. Oh, and by way, give blacks all of their money and keep giving it. Blacks want a monetary tribute for past transgressions of anyone whether real or imagined and want whites to pay for all of it with all of their money now and whatever they make in the future. This is a heist. For blacks deserve it don’t you know.
Eric Holder was the Attorney General of the US under the brown clown administration. He is black. He is Democrat. He is a corrupt Democrat – which is really redundant. He famously said that America are a bunch of cowards for not talking about race relations. Notwithstanding that Holder did everything he could in the Justice Department prior to becoming AG to repeatedly stick a thumb in the eye of white America and to undermine the integrity of the DOJ – among other transgressions – he was right. But the cowards are not white Americans. The cowards are black Americans who will not admit that it is they who are the cause of the plight of blacks in America. They own it all. And they will not admit it. Cowards.
The Kaepernick-ites must have not seen the memo – from the dawn of creation or when the first salamander crawled out of the sea or since the big bank, whatever suits your fancy – that life is not about equal outcomes. And that is the subject of which they are addressing but with an overwhelming aroma of causation by Caucasians.
Before addressing this ignorance, L’Affaire Kaepernick is able to show that there are 5 different types of people:
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Knowledgeable and honest
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Ignorant and likely stupid– they don’t know because they don’t know and will never know
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Willfully ignorant – they don’t know because they do not want to know even though they can make themselves knowledgeable. Fear of finding the truth the most likely reason.
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Knowledgeable but dishonest – otherwise known as evil
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Pure evil – doesn’t matter is they are knowledgeable or not
In this case numbers 2-5 are predominant with the eponymous QB leading the way with numbers 2 and 3. And following very quickly have been many athletes and people who are pushing the boundaries of the categories that many subsets could be made up, most relating to politics with a healthy dose of stupidity poured upon it.
If people find it offensive that blacks are all painted with the same racial brush – tough. Blacks and black America treat all whites the same. The sins of some stain all. Well same goes for blacks.
In no particular order and by no means exhaustive, those of Kaepernick-esque thought share common ignorance of the following:
Solidly ignorance of the Constitution.
Woefully ignorant on history
Even less knowledgeable about economics and economic systems
Supremely ignorant on current events
The media are a despicable cadre of lying hypocrites.
That the media are manifest in their dishonesty concerning the truth
That the media and people in general have a level of cowardice not yet witnessed on this planet
That blacks in America are patently bigoted and borderline racists
That blacks in America are race hustlers making them totally dishonest as they blame whites for everything wrong in black American. EVERTHING.
That blacks will accept NO responsibility for any of their actions
That blacks will perpetuate lies against whites – as Kaepernick-ites are doing- without giving it a moment’s thought regardless of the truth
That no politician or public figure has the courage to speak the truth
That no media outlet will speak the truth and confront the lies from black America
That this is about money and nothing else – reparations.
That the brown clown is as evil an individual as has ever walked the earth.
That the brown clown is a pathological liar.
The destruction of black businesses due to Democratic policies
In addition Kaepernick-ites, in their time of apparent, only to them, enlightenment, mention not one of the following:
The number of single head of household black families with no male head of the family –the destruction of the black family
Number of unwed black mothers
Number of abortions for black women
Reasons for the number of blacks incarcerated since they don’t think them criminals
Black on black crime
Black on white crime
Black police on black criminals
Black gangs and drugs
The misogynistic black rap music (the biggest oxymoron of them all) and it’s culture
School dropout rate for blacks
Blacks not wanting to learn because that is “being white”
Black mother’s choosing absurd made up names so they are not “white” names
The knockout game carried on by blacks on whites
Young black girls fighting
The decaying of inner cities run by Democrat politicians for 50 plus years
Or:
Affirmative Action
Civil Rights Act
Head start program
Welfare
Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, subprime loans
Black Justice of the Supreme Court
Black Attorney General
Black Head of Justice Department
Black Head of the US Armed Forces
Black Secretary of State
Black US Ambassador to UN
Black Senators
Black US House of Representatives
Black Governors
Black Mayors
Black movie stars
Black star athletes
Black CEO’s
Black astronauts
Trillions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money spent on programs over the last 60 years specifically targeting black Americans (and who the hell paid for all of that)
.
Kaepernick and the others are woefully ignorant of the items noted above. If he and they were in any way knowledgeable about the above subjects, this charade of conscience would never be happening. Kaepernick has some deep seeded bigotry and hatred for whites and he has decided to let that be known. If he thinks or believes his perceptions are correct, then he is blind to the truth and does not wish to know it. That is a major reflection of the type of person that is Kaepernick.
In spite of facts to the contrary – all supported by more figures and stats than can be imagined [see anything written by Heather McDonald and here is an easy one] – Kaepernick will not be see the folly of his perceptions. He would rather the earth be flat than know it is round. The evidence be damned.
If all the Kaepernick-ites truly wanted to get to the root problems of blacks in America they would – after first becoming knowledgeable – never vote for the Democrats or Democratic Party ever again. The Democratic Party were the founders of the KKK and their governance have kept blacks on the plantation for 150 years. An overwhelming majority of blacks don’t even know this. If Kaepernick knew this, would his actions be any different? It is more likely that Kaepernick would chose not to believe this fact because it would be counter to his actions which would cause him total embarrassment. Can’t have that of course, so perpetuate the lies and myths like Black Lives Matter.
That is the sorry state of racial relations in the US and round the globe. Ignorant voices supported by ignorant people, race baiters and hustlers, and deceitful politicians like the brown clown and Hillary Clinton. As long as people are unwilling to push back against this ignorance and hate, there will never be peace in America. And that is what they want in order to enrich themselves or become black saints after reparations are paid.
Not one issue that has destroyed the black family and black businesses over the last 60 years has been caused solely by the actions of white America.
If anyone pushes back, or doesn’t agree with the program, they are instantly marked as a bigot or racist, ostracized, threatened with violence or targeted for it, and told your opinions are nothing but hate with no value or exempt from any free speech cover No one is allowed to disagree and no one is EVER allowed to disagree with blacks on race because one would be labeled in the same way.
It is the lack of knowledge that has crippled blacks in America, not social justice. The term itself is offensive and is really code for its all whitey’s fault and the only way to fix it is for whitey to give me money. Furthermore, no one with any level of intelligence can honestly assign any blame to anyone or anything other than blacks and black culture itself for its self inflicted ails.
No one or thing has forced blacks to refuse to be educated; speak English correctly; form the Crips and the Bloods; to commit crimes; to indulge in drugs; to break laws; to swarm people and businesses; to be promiscuous; to forsake family life; to abuse women; or to create a better life for themselves. This is all on blacks; the black culture; black ‘leaders’; and black sophists. The Kaepernick-ites. It is on them.
Prior to being exposed as an abuser of woman, Bill Cosby was excoriated for speaking about the idiocies of black culture and self harming black actions. But that is long forgotten and dismissed because of Cosby’s abhorrent treatment of women. The irony is beyond the pale.
Unless Kaepernick and the rest of the black athletes educate themselves and honestly self evaluate their fellow blacks as the sole cause of the plight of black America, nothing will ever improve. Generations of bigoted blacks wrapped in the blanket of victimhood will blame whites for whatever hurdles in life that are placed in front of them.
If Kaepernick and Adam Jones and Carmelo Anthony and the rest refuse to be educated – to be the willfully ignorant – then the racial landscape will remain as it is.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an uber-liberal member of the Democratic party and US Senator and would never be considered a conservative or Republican. In 1965 he authored a report on the state of blacks in America. Essentially he believed the programs developed by the US government – the Democrats – were destroying blacks in America and removing their will to better themselves and the notion of self reliance. Further, these programs were destroying families and businesses. 50 years on, Moynihan was absolutely correct. Moynihan’s own Party and its policies that convinced blacks to elect Democrats – and continues to do so – has destroyed the black family in the US and black business along with it. For an added bonus, it gave enormous numbers of unwed black women with children; overflowing welfare rolls; soaring abortion rates among black women; exploding incarceration rates among blacks; rampant drug use among blacks; and condemned further generations of blacks to be chained to the Democratic Party plantation.
No doubt Kaepernick; Adam Jones, Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James, and other black athletes are unaware of this report. What are the chances that they would read it? Highly unlikely. And if they did, their mindset is fixed and permanent and they would never consider or voice any opinion that would criticize blacks. Outside of being called Uncle Toms, they don’t have the backbone or intestinal fortitude to speak the truth to the power of black lies promulgated by black America and odious, despicable groups like Black Lives Matter.
Instead the Democrat Party will be supported by blacks thereby permanently enslaving them and ensuring the destruction of the US. These are the “useful idiots” Lenin spoke about.
Don’t want to be a useful idiot or ignorant and know the truth – then read on. As public service and learning tool, what follows is a review of Moynihan’s report which explains everything:
The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies
Rejecting the Moynihan report caused untold, needless misery.
Kay S. Hymowitz
Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.
So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.
To go back to the political and social moment before the battle broke out over the Moynihan report is to return to a time before the country’s discussion of black poverty had hardened into fixed orthodoxies—before phrases like “blaming the victim,” “self-esteem,” “out-of-wedlock childbearing” (the term at the time was “illegitimacy”), and even “teen pregnancy” had become current. While solving the black poverty problem seemed an immense political challenge, as a conceptual matter it didn’t seem like rocket science. Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legal barriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance, just as poor immigrants had.
Conditions for testing that proposition looked good. Between the 1954 Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal racism had been dismantled. And the economy was humming along; in the first five years of the sixties, the economy generated 7 million jobs.
Yet those most familiar with what was called “the Negro problem” were getting nervous. About half of all blacks had moved into the middle class by the mid-sixties, but now progress seemed to be stalling. The rise in black income relative to that of whites, steady throughout the fifties, was sputtering to a halt. More blacks were out of work in 1964 than in 1954. Most alarming, after rioting in Harlem and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1964, the problems of the northern ghettos suddenly seemed more intractable than those of the George Wallace South.
Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts. One in particular caught his eye. Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.” In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order.
Convinced that “the Negro revolution . . . , a movement for equality as well as for liberty,” was now at risk, Moynihan wanted to make several arguments in his report. The first was empirical and would quickly become indisputable: single-parent families were on the rise in the ghetto. But other points were more speculative and sparked a partisan dispute that has lasted to this day. Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. Though black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had already introduced the idea in the 1930s, Moynihan’s argument defied conventional social-science wisdom. As he wrotelater: “The work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, toestablish at some level of statistical conciseness what ‘everyone knew’: that economicconditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so.”
But Moynihan went much further than merely overthrowing familiar explanations about the cause of poverty. He also described, through pages of disquieting charts and graphs, the emergence of a “tangle of pathology,” including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto—or what would come to be called underclass—behavior. Moynihan may have borrowed the term “pathology” from Kenneth Clark’s The Dark Ghetto, also published that year. But as both a descendant and a scholar of what he called “the wild Irish slums”—he had written a chapter on the poor Irish in the classic Beyond the Melting Pot—the assistant secretary of labor was no stranger to ghetto self-destruction. He knew the dangers it posed to “the basic socializing unit” of the family. And he suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of blacks, since their “matriarchal” family had the effect of abandoning men, leaving them adrift and “alienated.”
More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, inother words meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”
Astonishingly, even for that surprising time, the Johnson administration agreed. Prompted by Moynihan’s still-unpublished study, Johnson delivered a speech at the Howard University commencement that called for “the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.” The president began his speech with the era’s conventional civil rights language, condemning inequality and calling for more funding of medical care, training, and education for Negroes. But he also broke into new territory, analyzing the family problem with what strikes the contemporary ear as shocking candor. He announced: “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” He described “the breakdown of the Negro family structure,” which he said was “the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice.” “When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged,” Johnson continued. “When it happenson a massive scale, the community itself is crippled.”
Johnson was to call this his “greatest civil rights speech,” but he was just about the only one to see it that way. By that summer, the Moynihan report that was its inspiration was under attack from all sides. Civil servants in the “permanent government” at Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and at the Children’s Bureau muttered about the report’s “subtle racism.” Academics picked apart its statistics. Black leaders like Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) director Floyd McKissick scolded that, rather than the family, “[i]t’s the damn system that needs changing.”
In part, the hostility was an accident of timing. Just days after the report was leaked toNewsweek in early August, L.A.’s Watts ghetto exploded. The televised images of the South Central Los Angeles rioters burning down their own neighborhood collided in the public mind with the contents of the report. Some concluded that the “tangle of pathology” was the administration’s explanation for urban riots, a view quite at odds with civil rights leaders’ determination to portray the violence as an outpouring of black despair over white injustice. Moreover, given the fresh wounds of segregation, the persistent brutality against blacks, and the ugly tenaciousness of racism, the fear of white backsliding and the sense of injured pride that one can hear in so many of Moynihan’s critics are entirely understandable.
Less forgivable was the refusal to grapple seriously—either at the time or in the months, years, even decades to come—with the basic cultural insight contained in the report: that ghetto families were at risk of raising generations of children unable to seize the opportunity that the civil rights movement had opened up for them. Instead, critics changed the subject, accusing Moynihan—wrongfully, as any honest reading of “The Negro Family” proves—of ignoring joblessness and discrimination. Family instability is a “peripheral issue,” warned Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League. “The problem is discrimination.” The protest generating the most buzz came from William Ryan, a CORE activist, in “Savage Discovery: The Moynihan Report,” published in The Nation and later reprinted in the NAACP’s official publication. Ryan, though a psychologist, did not hear Moynihan’s pointthat as the family goes, so go the children. He heard code for the archaic charge of black licentiousness. He described the report as a “highly sophomoric treatment of illegitimacy” and insisted that whites’ broader access to abortion, contraception, and adoption hid the fact that they were no less “promiscuous” than blacks. Most memorably, he accused Moynihan of “blaming the victim,” a phrase that would become the title of his 1971 book and the fear-inducing censor of future plain speaking about the ghetto’s decay.
That Ryan’s phrase turned out to have more cultural staying power than anything in the Moynihan report is a tragic emblem of the course of the subsequent discussion about the ghetto family. For white liberals and the black establishment, poverty became a zero-sum game: either you believed, as they did, that there was a defect in the system, or you believed that there was a defect in the individual. It was as if critiquing the family meant that you supported inferior schools, even that you were a racist. Though “The Negro Family” had been a masterpiece of complex analysis that implied that individuals were intricately entwined in a variety of systems—familial, cultural, and economic—it gave birth to a hardened, either/or politics from which the country has barely recovered.
By autumn, when a White House conference on civil rights took place, the Moynihan report, initially planned as its centerpiece, had been disappeared. Johnson himself, having just introduced large numbers of ground troops into Vietnam, went mum on the subject, steering clear of the word “family” in the next State of the Union message. This was a moment when the nation had the resources, the leadership (the president had been overwhelmingly elected, and he had the largest majorities in the House and Senate since the New Deal), and the will “to make a total . . . commitment to the cause of Negro equality,” Moynihan lamented in a 1967 postmortem of his report in Commentary. Instead, he declared, the nation had disastrously decided to punt on Johnson’s “next and more profound stage in the battle for civilrights.” “The issue of the Negro family was dead.”
Well, not exactly.
Over the next 15 years, the black family question actually became a growth industry inside academe, the foundations, and the government. But it wasn’t the samefamily that had worried Moynihan and that in the real world continued to self-destruct at unprecedented rates. Scholars invented a fantasy family—strong and healthy, a poor man’s Brady Bunch—whose function was not to reflect truth but to soothe injured black self-esteem and to bolster the emerging feminist critique of male privilege, bourgeois individualism, and the nuclear family. The literature of this period was so evasive, so implausible, so far removed from what was really unfolding in the ghetto, that if you didn’t know better, you might conclude that people actually wanted to keep the black family separate and unequal.
Consider one of the first books out of the gate, Black Families in White America, by Andrew Billingsley, published in 1968 and still referred to as “seminal.” “Unlike Moynihan and others, we do not view the Negro as a causal nexus in a ‘tangle of pathologies’ which feeds on itself,” he declared. “[The Negro family] is, in our view, an absorbing, adaptive, and amazingly resilient mechanism for the socialization of its children and the civilization of its society.” Pay no attention to the 25 percent of poor ghetto families, Billingsley urged. Think instead about the 75 percent of black middle-class families—though Moynihan had made a special point of exempting them from his report.
Other black pride–inspired scholars looked at female-headed families and declared them authentically African and therefore a good thing. In a related vein, Carol Stack published All Our Kin, a 1974 HEW-funded study of families in a Midwestern ghetto with many multigenerational female households. In an implicit criticism of American individualism, Stack depicted “The Flats,” as she dubbed her setting, as a vibrant and cooperative urban village, where mutual aid—including from sons, brothers, and uncles, who provided financial support and strong role models for children—created “a tenacious, active, lifelong network.”
In fact, some scholars continued, maybe the nuclear family was really just a toxic white hang-up, anyway. No one asked what nuclear families did, or how they prepared children for a modern economy. The important point was simply that they were not black. “One must question the validity of the white middle-class lifestyle from its very foundation because it has already proven itself to be decadent and unworthy of emulation,” wrote Joyce Ladner (who later became the first female president of Howard University) in her 1972 book Tomorrow’s Tomorrow. Robert Hill of the Urban League, who published The Strengths of Black Familiesthat same year, claimed to have uncovered science that proved Ladner’s point: “Research studies have revealed that many one-parent families are more intact or cohesive than many two-parent families: data on child abuse, battered wives and runaway children indicate higher rates among two-parent families in suburban areas than one-parent families in inner city communities.” That science, needless to say, was as reliable as a deadbeat dad.
Feminists, similarly fixated on overturning the “oppressive ideal of the nuclear family,” also welcomed this dubious scholarship. Convinced that marriage was the main arena of male privilege, feminists projected onto the struggling single mother an image of the “strong black woman” who had always had to work and who was “superior in terms of [her] ability to function healthily in the world,” as Toni Morrison put it. The lucky black single mother could also enjoy more equal relationships with men than her miserably married white sisters.
If black pride made it hard to grapple with the increasingly separate and unequal family, feminism made it impossible. Fretting about single-parent families was now not only racist but also sexist, an effort to deny women their independence, their sexuality, or both. As for the poverty of single mothers, that was simply more proof of patriarchal oppression. In 1978, University of Wisconsin researcher Diana Pearce introduced the useful term “feminization of poverty.” But for her and her many allies, the problem was not the crumbling of the nuclear family; it was the lack of government support for single women and the failure of business to pay women their due.
With the benefit of embarrassed hindsight, academics today sometimes try to wave away these notions as the justifiably angry, but ultimately harmless, speculations of political and academic activists. “The depth and influence of the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s are often exaggerated,” historian Stephanie Coontz writes in her new book, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. This is pure revisionism. The radical delegitimation of the family was so pervasive that even people at the center of power joined in. It made no difference that so many of these cheerleaders for single mothers had themselves spent their lives in traditional families and probably would rather have cut off an arm than seen their own unmarried daughters pushing strollers.
Take, for instance, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, who wrote a concurring assent in the 1977 Moore v. City of East Cleveland decision. The case concerned a woman and her grandson evicted from a housing project following a city ordinance that defined “family” as parents—or parent—and their own children. Brennan did not simply agree that the court should rule in favor of the grandmother—a perfectly reasonable position. He also assured the court that “the extended family has many strengths not shared by the nuclear family.” Relyingon Robert Hill’s “science,” he declared that delinquency, addiction, crime, “neuroticdisabilities,” and mental illness were more prevalent in societies where “autonomous nuclear families prevail,” a conclusion that would have bewildered the writers of the Constitution that Brennan was supposedly interpreting.
In its bumbling way and with far-reaching political consequences, the executive branch also offered warm greetings to the single-parent family. Alert to growing apprehension about the state of the American family during his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter had promised a conference on the subject. Clearly less concerned with conditions in the ghetto than with satisfying feminist advocates, the administration named a black single (divorced) mother to lead the event, occasioning an outcry from conservatives. By 1980, when it finally convened after numerous postponements, the White House Conference on the Family had morphed into the White House Conference on Families, to signal that all family forms were equal.
Instead of the political victory for moderate Democrats that Carter had expected, the conference galvanized religious conservatives.
Later, conservative heavyweight Paul Weyrich observed that the Carter conference marked the moment when religious activists moved in force into Republican politics. Doubtless they were also more energized by their own issues of feminism and gay rights than by what was happening in the ghetto. But their new rallying cry of “family values” nonetheless became a political dividing line, with unhappy fallout for liberals for years to come.
Meanwhile, the partisans of single motherhood got a perfect chance to test their theories, since the urban ghettos were fast turning into nuclear-family-free zones. Indeed, by 1980, 15 years after “The Negro Family,” the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks had more than doubled, to 56 percent. In the ghetto, that number was considerably higher, as high as 66 percent in New York City. Many experts comforted themselves by pointing out that white mothers were also beginning to forgo marriage, but the truth was that only 9 percent of white births occurred out of wedlock.
And how was the black single-parent family doing? It would be fair to say that it had not been exhibiting the strengths of kinship networks. According to numbers crunched by Moynihan and economist Paul Offner, of the black children born between 1967 and 1969, 72 percent received Aid to Families with Dependent Children before the age of 18. School dropout rates, delinquency, and crime, among the other dysfunctions that Moynihan had warned about, were rising in the cities. In short, the 15 years since the report was written had witnessed both the birth of millions of fatherless babies and the entrenchment of an underclass.
Liberal advocates had two main ways of dodging the subject of family collapse while still addressing its increasingly alarming fallout. The first, largely the creation of Marian Wright Edelman, who in 1973 founded the Children’s Defense Fund, was to talk about children not as the offspring of individual mothers and fathers responsible for rearing them, but as an oppressed class living in generic, nebulous, and never-to-be-analyzed “families.” Framing the problem of ghetto children in this way, CDF was able to mount a powerful case for a host of services, from prenatal care to day care to housing subsidies, in the name of children’s developmental needs, which did not seem to include either a stable domestic life or, for that matter, fathers. Advocates like Edelman might not have viewed the collapsing ghetto family as a welcome occurrence, but they treated it as a kind of natural event, like drought, beyondhuman control and judgment. As recently as a year ago, marking the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, CDF announced on its website: “In 2004 it is morally and economically indefensible that a black preschool child is three times as likely to depend solely on a mother’s earnings.” This may strike many as a pretty good argument for addressing the prevalence of black single-mother families, but in CDF-speak it is a case for federal natural disaster relief.
The Children’s Defense Fund was only the best-known child-advocacy group to impose a gag rule on the role of fatherless families in the plight of its putative constituents. The Carnegie Corporation followed suit. In 1977, it published a highly influential report by Kenneth Keniston called All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure. It makes an obligatory nod toward the family’s role in raising children, before calling for a cut in unemployment, a federal job guarantee, national health insurance, affirmative action, and a host of other children’s programs. In a review in Commentary, Nathan Glazer noted ruefully that All Our Children was part of a “recent spate of books and articles on the subject of the family [that] have had little if anything to say about the black family in particular and the matter seems to have been permanently shelved.” For that silence, children’s advocatesdeserve much of the credit—or blame.
The second way not to talk about what was happening to the ghetto family was to talkinstead about teen pregnancy. In 1976 the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm, published “Eleven Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done About the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancy in the United States?” It was a report that launched a thousand programs. In response to its alarms, HEW chief Joseph Califano helped push through the 1978 Adolescent Health Services and Pregnancy Prevention and Care Act, which funded groups providing services to pregnant adolescents and teen moms. Nonprofits, including the Center for Population Options (now called Advocates for Youth), climbed on the bandwagon. The Ford and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations showered dollars on organizations that ran school-based health clinics, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation set up the Too Early Childbearing Network, the Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored “A Community Strategy forReaching Sexually Active Adolescents,” and the Carnegie, Ford, and William T. Grant Foundations all started demonstration programs.
There was just one small problem: there was no epidemic of teen pregnancy. There was an out-of-wedlock teen-pregnancy epidemic. Teenagers had gotten pregnant at even higher rates in the past. The numbers had reached their zenith in the 1950s, and the “Eleven Million Teenagers” cited in the Guttmacher report actually represented a decline in the rate of pregnant teens. Back in the day, however, when they found out they were pregnant, girls had either gotten married or given their babies up for adoption. Not this generation. They were used to seeing children growing up without fathers, and they felt no shame about arriving at the maternity ward with no rings on their fingers, even at 15.
In the middle-class mind, however, no sane girl would want to have a baby at 15—not that experts mouthing rhetoric about the oppressive patriarchal family would admit that there was anything wrong with that. That middle-class outlook, combined with post-Moynihan mendacity about the growing disconnect between ghetto childbearing and marriage, led the policy elites to frame what was really the broad cultural problem of separate and unequal families as a simple lack-of-reproductive-services problem. Ergo, girls “at risk” must need sex education and contraceptive services.
But the truth was that underclass girls often wanted to have babies; they didn’t see it as a problem that they were young and unmarried. They did not follow the middle-class life script that read: protracted adolescence, college, first job, marriage—and only then children. They did not share the belief that children needed mature, educated mothers who would make their youngsters’ development the center of their lives. Access to birth control couldn’t change any of that.
At any rate, failing to define the problem accurately, advocates were in no position to find the solution. Teen pregnancy not only failed to go down, despite all the public attention, the tens of millions of dollars, and the birth control pills that were thrown its way. It went up—peaking in 1990 at 117 pregnancies per 1,000 teenage girls, up from 105 per 1,000 in 1978, when the Guttmacher report was published. About 80 percent of those young girls who became mothers were single, and the vast majority would be poor.
Throughout the 1980s, the inner city—and the black family—continued to unravel. Child poverty stayed close to 20 percent, hitting a high of 22.7 percent in 1993. Welfare dependency continued to rise, soaring from 2 million families in 1970 to 5 million by 1995. By 1990, 65 percent of all black children were being born to unmarried women.
In ghetto communities like Central Harlem, the number was closer to 80 percent. By this point, no one doubted that most of these children were destined to grow up poor and to pass down the legacy of single parenting to their own children.
The only good news was that the bad news was so unrelentingly bad that the usual bromides and evasions could no longer hold. Something had to shake up what amounted to an ideological paralysis, and that something came from conservatives. Three thinkers in particular —Charles Murray, Lawrence Mead, and Thomas Sowell—though they did not always write directly about the black family, effectively changed the conversation about it. First, they did not flinch from blunt language in describing the wreckage of the inner city, unafraid of the accusations of racism and victim blaming that came their way. Second, they pointed at the welfare policies of the 1960s, not racism or a lack of jobs or the legacy of slavery, as the causeof inner-city dysfunction, and in so doing they made the welfare mother the public symbol of the ghetto’s ills. (Murray in particular argued that welfare money provided a disincentive for marriage, and, while his theory may have overstated the role of economics, it’s worth noting that he was probably the first to grasp that the country was turning into a nation of separate and unequal families.) And third, they believed that the poor would have to change their behavior instead of waiting for Washington to end poverty, as liberals seemed to be saying.
By the early 1980s the media also had woken up to the ruins of the ghetto family and brought about the return of the repressed Moynihan report. Declaring Moynihan “prophetic,” Ken Auletta, in his 1982 The Underclass, proclaimed that “one cannot talk about poverty in America, or about the underclass, without talking about the weakening family structure of the poor.” Both the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times ran series on the black family in 1983, followed by a 1985 Newsweek article called “Moynihan: I Told You So” and a 1986 CBS documentary, The Vanishing Black Family, produced by Bill Moyers, a onetime aide to Lyndon Johnson, who had supported the Moynihan report. The most symbolic moment came when Moynihan himself gave Harvard’s prestigious Godkin lectures in 1985 in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of “The Negro Family.”
For the most part, liberals were having none of it. They piled on Murray’s 1984 Losing Ground, ignored Mead and Sowell, and excoriated the word “underclass,” which they painted as a recycled and pseudoscientific version of the “tangle of pathology.” But there were two important exceptions to the long list of deniers. The first was William Julius Wilson. In his 1987 The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson chastised liberals for being “confused and defensive” and failing to engage “the social pathologies of the ghetto.” “The average poor black child today appears to be in the midst of a poverty spell which will last for almost two decades,” he warned. Liberals have “to propose thoughtful explanations for the rise in inner city dislocations.” Ironically, though, Wilson’s own “mismatch theory” for family breakdown—which hypothesized that the movement of low-skill jobs out of the cities had sharply reduced the number of marriageable black men—had the effect of extending liberal defensiveness about the damaged ghetto family. After all, poor single mothers were only adapting to economic conditions. How could they do otherwise?
The research of another social scientist, Sara McLanahan, was not so easily rationalized, however. A divorced mother herself, McLanahan found Auletta’s depiction of her single parent counterparts in the inner city disturbing, especially because, like other sociologists of the time, she had been taught that the Moynihan report was the work of a racist—or, at least, a seriously deluded man. But when she surveyed the science available on the subject, she realized that the research was so sparse that no one knew for sure how the children of single mothers were faring. Over the next decade, McLanahan analyzed whatever numbers she could find, and discovered—lo and behold—that children in single-parent homes were not doing aswell as children from two-parent homes on a wide variety of measures, from income to school performance to teen pregnancy.
Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, McLanahan presented her emerging findings, over protests from feminists and the Children’s Defense Fund. Finally, in 1994 she published, with Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent. McLanahan’s research shocked social scientists into re-examining the problem they had presumed was not a problem. It was a turning point. One by one, the top family researchers gradually came around, concluding that McLanahan—and perhaps even Moynihan—was right. In fact, by the early 1990s, when the ghetto was at its nadir, public opinion had clearly turned.
No one was more attuned to this shift than triangulator Bill Clinton, who made the family a centerpiece of his domestic policy. In his 1994 State of the Union Address, he announced: “We cannot renew our country when, within a decade, more than half of our children will be born into families where there is nomarriage.” And in 1996, despite howls of indignation, including from members of his own administration (and mystifyingly, from Moynihan himself), he signed a welfare-reform bill that he had twice vetoed—and that included among its goals increasing the number of children living with their two married parents.
So, have we reached the end of the Moynihan report saga? That would be vastly overstating matters. Remember: 70 percent of black children are still born to unmarried mothers. After all that ghetto dwellers have been through, why are so many people still unwilling to call this the calamity it is? Both NOW and the National Association of Social Workers continue to see marriage as a potential source of female oppression. The Children’s Defense Fund still won’t touch the subject. Hip-hop culture glamorizes ghetto life: “ ’cause nowadays it’s like a badge of honor/to be a baby mama” go the words to the current hit “Baby Mama,” which young ghetto mothers’ view as their anthem. Seriously complicating the issue is the push for gaymarriage, which dismissed the formula “children growing up with their own married parents” as a form of discrimination. And then there is the American penchant for to-each-his-own libertarianism. In opinion polls, a substantial majority of young people say that having a child outside of marriage is okay—though, judging from their behavior, they seem to mean that it’s okay, not for them, but for other people. Middle- and upper-middle-class Americans act as if they know that marriage provides a structure that protects children’s development. If only they were willing to admit it to their fellow citizens.
All told, the nation is at a cultural inflection point that portends change. Though they always caution that “marriage is not a panacea,” social scientists almost uniformly accept the research that confirms the benefits for children growing up with their own married parents. Welfare reform and tougher child-support regulations have reinforced the message of personal responsibility for one’s children. The Bush administration unabashedly uses the word “marriage” in its welfare policies. There are even raw numbers to support the case for optimism: teen pregnancy, which finally started to decline in the mid-nineties in response to a crisper, teen-pregnancy-is-a-bad-idea cultural message, is now at its lowest rate ever.
And finally, in the ghetto itself there is a growing feeling that mother-only families don’t work. That’s why people are lining up to see an aging comedian as he voices some not-very-funny opinions about their own parenting. That’s why so many young men are vowing to be the fathers they never had. That’s why there has been an uptick, albeit small, in the number of black children living with their married parents.
If change really is in the air, it’s taken 40 years to get here—40 years of inner-city misery for the country to reach a point at which it fully signed on to the lesson of Moynihan’s report. Yes, better late than never; but you could forgive lost generations of ghetto men, women, and children if they found it cold comfort.
The End.