One of the advantages of looking at The Negro Family: The Case for National Action after 50 years is perspective. Perspective is a form of knowledge that allows us to see from a different vantage point and to bring new information to bear on a problem. In responding to Greg Weiner’s essay, I bring the perspective of time to bear on my own assessment of the Moynihan Report along with my perspective as a cultural anthropologist with a special interest in American and African American culture. It is easy to read the Report as being more prescient than it actually was,…
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Knowing what we know today about family breakdown among Americans and across the modern industrialized world, it seems that Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action mistakes the particular for the general and might reflect a misunderstanding of the decline of the family. Moynihan’s 1965 Report emphasizes the ways in which…
If there is one thing Pat Moynihan taught us, it is that talking about the family can be fraught with peril. Published at a time when nearly one in four African American children was born outside of marriage—seven times the rate for whites (see Figure 1)—the Moynihan Report gave a “faithful contemporaneous portrait” as Greg…
In assessing the Moynihan Report at 50, I have the privilege of far more thoughtful interlocutors than Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who was subjected to a digest of calumnies for the rest of his life—enjoyed on the original product. I am grateful to Scott Yenor, Robin Fretwell Wilson and Susan Love Brown for their thoughtful commentaries. Yenor…
Don’t get into theological arguments with Masters of Divinity, and don’t argue Daniel Patrick Moynihan with his most astute intellectual biographer! That is a good rule of prudence, but fools rush in . . . sometimes. Moynihan is mostly known in conservative circles for his emphasis on the limits of social policy, and my question concerns…
