Children of Incarcerated Parents
Children of Incarcerated Parents
Children of Incarcerated Parents
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conciseness what 'everyone knew': that economic conditions determine social<br />
conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so."<br />
Background<br />
While writing The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, Moynihan was<br />
employed in a political appointee position at the US Department <strong>of</strong> Labor, hired to help<br />
develop policy for the Johnson administration in its War on Poverty. In the course <strong>of</strong><br />
analyzing statistics related to black poverty, Moynihan noticed something unusual:<br />
Rates <strong>of</strong> black male unemployment and welfare enrollment, instead <strong>of</strong> running parallel<br />
as they always had, started to diverge in 1962 in a way that would come to be called<br />
"Moynihan's scissors."<br />
When Moynihan published his report in 1965, the out-<strong>of</strong>-wedlock birthrate among blacks<br />
was 25 percent, much higher than that <strong>of</strong> whites.<br />
Contents<br />
In the introduction to his report, Moynihan said that "the gap between the Negro and<br />
most other groups in American society is widening." He also said that the collapse <strong>of</strong> the<br />
nuclear family in the black lower class would preserve the gap between possibilities for<br />
Negroes and other groups and favor other ethnic groups. He acknowledged the<br />
continued existence <strong>of</strong> racism and discrimination within society, despite the victories<br />
that blacks had won by civil rights legislation.<br />
Moynihan concluded, "The steady expansion <strong>of</strong> welfare programs can be taken as a<br />
measure <strong>of</strong> the steady disintegration <strong>of</strong> the Negro family structure over the past<br />
generation in the United States."<br />
More than 30 years later, S. Craig Watkins described Moynihan's conclusions:<br />
Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production <strong>of</strong> Black Cinema (1998):<br />
The report concluded that the structure <strong>of</strong> family life in the black community constituted<br />
a 'tangle <strong>of</strong> pathology... capable <strong>of</strong> perpetuating itself without assistance from the white<br />
world,' and that 'at the heart <strong>of</strong> the deterioration <strong>of</strong> the fabric <strong>of</strong> Negro society is the<br />
deterioration <strong>of</strong> the Negro family. It is the fundamental source <strong>of</strong> the weakness <strong>of</strong> the<br />
Negro community at the present time.' Also, the report argued that the matriarchal<br />
structure <strong>of</strong> black culture weakened the ability <strong>of</strong> black men to function as authority<br />
figures. That particular notion <strong>of</strong> black familial life has become a widespread, if not<br />
dominant, paradigm for comprehending the social and economic disintegration <strong>of</strong> late<br />
20th-century black urban life.<br />
Influence<br />
The Moynihan Report generated considerable controversy and has had longlasting and<br />
important influence. Writing to Lyndon Johnson, Moynihan argued that without access<br />
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