Children of Incarcerated Parents

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