Once again, local newsstands are providing more good reading for those of a conservative bent. In the November issue of Commentary magazine, author Mark Bauerlein reviewed Robert Weissberg’s “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools,” which proffered the theory that it’s America’s lazy, bored, unmotivated and, in some cases, downright dangerous pupils who are the source of our educational woes, not our institutions of learning.
The editors of Commentary scored again in the December issue with an article co-authored by Fred Siegel and Peter Cove. Siegel is a scholar-in-residence at Brooklyn’s St. Francis College; Cove is the founder of an organization called America Works, which has the goal of placing welfare recipients and former convicts in the work force.
“Moynihan: The Moment Lost” is the title of their article. Part of “the moment lost” they speak of is the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s failure to back much-needed welfare reform. But the other part is that nasty business that happened 45 years ago.
In 1965, Moynihan was an assistant secretary of labor in President Johnson’s administration. In mid-August of that year, a document that would become known as the “Moynihan Report” was released.
Officially entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the report noted that 25 percent of black households had no father. That, Moynihan erroneously noted, was a legacy of slavery.
Moynihan was accused of “blaming the victim.” His report was dismissed, and he was labeled a racist. But it wasn’t what Moynihan got wrong in the report that was important; it was what he got right.
Today nearly 70 percent of black households have no fathers. In 1965, Moynihan predicted with chilling accuracy what would happen if the trend of fatherless black homes continued. And, his critics failed to note, he quoted extensively from black sociologists to back up his claim.
One such comment Moynihan included in the report came from the esteemed black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier:
“As a result of family disorganization a large proportion of Negro children and youth have not undergone the socialization [that] only the family can provide. The disorganized families have failed to provide for their emotional needs and have not provided the discipline and habits [that] are necessary for personality development.
“Because the disorganized family has failed in its function as a socializing agency, it has handicapped the children in their relation to the institutions in the community. Moreover, family disorganization has been partially responsible for a large amount of juvenile delinquency and adult crime among Negroes.”
That was true in 1950 when Frazier wrote it, and it sure has heck is true today. But Moynihan’s main point is also true, and his critics would have quickly acknowledged it, had they bothered to read the report. The reason for the breakdown in the black family, Moynihan said, was the racial discrimination that led to a “crisis level” of unemployment among black men that went back to at least 1935.
At worst, Moynihan made the case for the race-based affirmative action his critics worship. At best, he made the case for reparations for slavery, a movement that was hot in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but has fizzled since then.
(Memo to reparations advocates: New York City Councilman Charles Barron saying at the “Millions for Reparations” rally in 2002 that he wanted to slap a white person “for my good health” helped your cause not one iota.)
You’d think it would have been conservatives who shut down discussion of the “Moynihan Report,” but sometimes liberals do our work for us.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
