The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies

I recently got into a debate with a liberal, pro-feminist friend about why blacks in America are in such economic, social and legal dire straights in the inner cities of America.

When I told him it was primarily due to the destruction of the nuclear family which was largely caused by LBJ's "The Great Society" welfare policies, he got mad (he is a hardcore, card-carrying union member leftist liberal Democrat) and tried to tell me that it was Senator Moynihan that was most concerned with the state of the Black nuclear family and that the "Great Society" was a success and that LBJ was the greatest civil rights President the US has ever had.

Because of this disagreement, I was inspired to do a bit of research and came across a great article on just this topic in the City-Journal archives.

The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies

Prompted by Moynihan’s still-unpublished study, [lyndon B.] Johnson delivered a speech at the Howard University commencement that called for “the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil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 happens on 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.”

Moynihan and LBJ were initially on the right track...but the Black leaders of the era and the feminist movement that actively promoted the destruction of the nuclear family as "Patriarchal Oppression" shouted down Moynihan's and LBJ's calls for strengthening the Black Families as the answer to the lower income poverty and ghetto pathology. Instead, they called such analysis "racist" and "sexist" and than went on to enact the "Great Society" welfare state that made black men unneccesary to support their families and completely dismantled the structure of the nuclear family, exacerbating the pathologies of poverty in the American ghettos.

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.

Thus the impetus to enact family destroying legislation that comprised the so-called "Great Society."

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.

Ahhh...gotta love limousine liberalism - good enough for me but not for thee.

The misery of the poverty stricken ghettoes of Black America owes it's existence to feminists and their poisenous, anti-family policies of the 60's.