Children of Incarcerated Parents

had contributed to apparent lower achievement by blacks in school. The report was
criticized for threatening to undermine the place of civil rights on the national agenda,
leaving "a vacuum that could be filled with a politics that blamed Blacks for their own
troubles."
In 1987, Hortense Spillers, a Black feminist academic, criticized the Moynihan Report
on semantic grounds for its use of "matriarchy" and "patriarchy" when he described the
African-American family. She argues that the terminology used to define white families
cannot be used to define African-American families because of the way slavery has
affected the African-American family.
Scholar Roderick Ferguson traced the effects of the Moynihan Report in his book
Aberrations in Black, noting that Black nationalists disagreed with the report’s
suggestion that the state provide Black men with masculinity, but agreed that men
needed to take back the role of the patriarch. Ferguson argued that the Moynihan
Report generated hegemonic discourses about minority communities and nationalist
sentiments in the Black community. Ferguson uses the discourse of the Moynihan
Report to inform his Queer of Color Critique, which attempts to resist national discourse
while acknowledging a simulteniety of oppression through coalition building.
African-American economist and writer Walter E. Williams has praised the report for its
findings. He has also said, "The solutions to the major problems that confront many
black people won't be found in the political arena, especially not in Washington or state
capitols." [7] Thomas Sowell, a black economist who is right-leaning politically, has also
praised the Moynihan Report on several occasions. His 1982 book Race and
Economics mentions Moynihan's report, and in 1998 he asserted that the report "may
have been the last honest government report on race". In 2015 Sowell argued that time
had proved correct Moynihan's core idea that African-American poverty was less a
result of racism and more a result of single-parent families: "One key fact that keeps
getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single
digits every year since 1994."
Political commentator Heather MacDonald wrote for National Review in 2008,
"Conservatives of all stripes routinely praise Daniel Patrick Moynihan's prescience for
warning in 1965 that the breakdown of the Black family threatened the achievement of
racial equality. They rightly blast those liberals who denounced Moynihan's report."
Sociologist Stephen Steinberg argued in 2011 that the Moynihan report was
condemned "because it threatened to derail the Black liberation movement."
Attempting to Divert Responsibility
Psychologist William Ryan coined the phrase "blaming the victim" in his 1971 book
Blaming the Victim, specifically as a critique of the Moynihan report. He said that it was
an attempt to divert responsibility for poverty from social structural factors to the
behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor.
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