00:01:49.260So the Moynihan Report was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, about whom more in a second, in 1965.
00:01:58.140And it has the title, and I will not be saying this word too often, but I have to say the title, The Negro Family, the Case for National Action.
00:02:05.960We'll call it the Moynihan Report from now on because I'm not super wild about that terminology, but okay.
00:02:11.600And as you say, like this report is ground zero for so many of our contemporary pathologies, right?
00:02:17.620Like, one thing I learned in researching this was that, did you know the phrase blaming the victim was introduced specifically in reference to the Moynihan Report?
00:02:33.100I feel like our listeners are getting a little sense of what is in the Moynihan Report if the phrase blaming the victim was coined to address it.
00:02:41.900Yeah, it's blaming the victim, the movie.
00:02:43.660Yeah. And I should say, like, as just a little bit of table setting, this is two white people discussing both a foundational text in discourse about African-Americans and a foundational text, even though sort of ex negativo, for black studies and African-American studies more broadly.
00:03:34.000Yeah. And this is like Jesse Jackson to Hortense Spillers to Carol Stack, Kathy Cohen, Roderick Ferguson. Like this is just a like plethora of really smart black scholarship critiquing this document and trying to like debunk some of its assumptions, which have been like really influential on American policy for a long time.
00:03:52.800Yeah. And so we decided we were going to just read through as much of the stuff as we could and synthesize as much of it as we can fit here. And this may well be a two-parter because of that.
00:04:04.000So yeah, so this is an episode about two things. So about a report that I think most people haven't read, but that had a ton of influence. Not all of it bad, I would say, but the vast majority of it bad. And I should say, part of what we wanted to do is just really read this document and sort of talk people through it.
00:04:21.140In talking about the report, we're also going to be talking about much bigger issues, right? It's about a particular version of liberalism that produced it and the version of neoconservatism that it enabled. And as you say, it is about the decades and decades of brilliant critiques from, yeah, from Jesse Jackson to Roderick Ferguson, basically.
00:04:39.640So let's see if we can like zoom out and just look at the legacy of the Moynihan Report, right? Because it has become kind of a shibboleth for people to refer to when they want to signal a kind of like, you know, baseline skepticism of multiculturalism, right?
00:04:59.960And it's also become a favorite talking point for people who already have liberal cred if they're about to steal some lines from the Republican Party.
00:05:25.080If you really agree with all of the things that he's written, if you think the time has come to stop worrying about whether what you feel is politically correct and just say what you believe and try to get this country back together again and start saving these children again, then you must become more intolerant of things that we take for granted.
00:05:44.440We cannot permit this country to continue to waste the lives of a whole generation of children.
00:05:52.800And that was, he's referring to Senator Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the author of the Moynihan Report, later became a senator at the time that he wrote the report.
00:06:03.040In 1965, he was working as sort of like a deputy secretary of labor under President Johnson, right?
00:06:09.420But this speech saying we need to take our country back, we need to, dare I say, make America great again, that was a speech given by President Bill Clinton.
00:07:20.260contributing to intergenerational poverty.
00:07:22.300Most famously, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was accused of racism in the early 60s
00:07:26.660when he raised alarms about the rise of out-of-wedlock births among the black poor.
00:07:31.860This willingness to dismiss the role that values played in shaping the economic success of a community
00:07:37.420strained credulity and alienated working-class whites,
00:07:41.380particularly since some of the most liberal policymakers lived far removed from urban disorder.
00:07:48.000So that book is The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama.
00:07:52.300So I think what we're like sort of dancing around here, right, is that the Moynihan Report is something that is understood as being transgressive against the pieties of the American left, right?
00:08:06.380You're not allowed to say that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right.
00:08:11.000But you and I are, you know, purveyors of reasonableness, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and this sort of center left wing of the Democratic Party that wanted to pitch itself as a kind of like conciliatory realism.
00:08:28.560They are willing to buck this liberal orthodoxy and say that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right.0.67
00:08:35.060And we should say that what Daniel Patrick Moynihan seems to have been right about in these men's estimation was that Black poverty was a symptom of Black gender relations, right?0.91
00:08:49.040And namely of the insufficient deference to patriarchal authority within the Black family.
00:08:54.100And that is like, that is what they're saying is a forbidden truth, right?0.73
00:08:59.180Well, they say family structures because they are still Democrats, so they have to euphemize a little bit. But yeah, that's what's behind it. I think you're right.
00:09:05.960Right. So do you want to just before we go a little further into the history of this report and its position in American political discourses in the decades since, do you want to just give a 10,000 foot synopsis of the Moynihan Report for our listeners? Because I imagine not everybody is familiar with this.
00:09:23.240It's true. Well, should we talk about him first? I think it's actually easier to understand. The document is a little difficult to place in time unless you know a little bit about him, I think.
00:09:36.900And there's also this kind of weird insider-outsider dynamic, right? Like, we've just quoted fully half of the Democratic presidents since he wrote the damn report, like, endorsing it, and yet they're both presenting it as this, like, forbidden wisdom that, like, the left and, frankly, liberals weren't ready for, according to them.
00:09:53.040And it's like, well, I don't know if like two out of four Democratic presidents and like all the Republicans, frankly, agree with this thing.0.88
00:09:59.480Not sure how heterodox this fucking thing is, but there is something about the way Moynihan goes about it that I think kind of gives us a little bit of a sense of why it had this kind of strange effect.
00:10:09.240Where on the one hand, it has informed, it's been social policy or has informed it in the United States since it came out.0.97
00:10:16.720And yet it's always sort of invoked as this like, oh, well, we're not allowed to say that he was right.
00:10:22.700Okay, so who was Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
00:12:46.640Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's some indication, I didn't read like a full biography of him, but like, not just poor, but in a kind of slightly disordered household. So like there is a little bit of recognition in there. Like his fixation on family structures is to some extent projection, right? He's thinking about his own upbringing.
00:13:08.140I think he had an absent father. It's like my impression. And his trajectory is basically that of a child of fairly modest means making major advances due to government programs, right? To government largesse. So just to give a couple examples, right? Went to New York Public High Schools, went to CCNY, which at the time was free to all New Yorkers.
00:13:30.300Then he served in the Navy for a bit and he went to Tufts, I think on the GI Bill, got a PhD from Tufts eventually and landed various academic jobs. And I should say like, you know, congratulations to him, but also like getting a job in the early 60s in academia, they were founding new universities like every week, right?
00:13:51.040Like, you'd have to be a communist to not be hired in a U.S. university at the time, which, again, is not to take anything away from his accomplishments.
00:13:59.360It's just to say that he sort of rides this elevator that comes with the enormous expansion of the U.S. federal government and state governments, frankly, during the Cold War.
00:14:10.160And his entire uplift is driven by public funding.
00:14:12.760That's very, very important, given that he becomes kind of an avatar for disinvestment in an interesting way, right?
00:14:17.960The Moynihan Report is often read as kind of a Bible for disinvestment, right?
00:14:22.360We can't give these people more money.
00:14:24.560We have to teach them the right values, right?
00:14:27.120This becomes kind of like the mantra of Reaganism.
00:14:30.380That's not where Moynihan himself is coming from.
00:14:33.340Moynihan was absolutely ready to just like throw cash around because that is how he himself had sort of come up.
00:14:41.100So again, maybe I'll quote from Daniel Geary here.
00:16:07.880I think the Catholicism part here is really, really important, right?
00:16:10.520Like this is a kind of Catholic liberalism that's about uplift, but that connects that uplift with moral suasion, right?
00:16:18.360That's saying if people live sinful lives, like there's something that should offend us, right?
00:16:23.880And so I do think that's important that like there is a social conservatism, what we would today think of as a social conservatism, right underneath the surface of what seems to have been a very genuine desire for greater racial equality.0.98
00:16:35.180So I'm going to devote my life, I, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, or at least this moment of my career to, you know, grappling with the moral emergency of black poverty.0.97
00:16:47.320But I'm also going to say that this is a product of their marriages being, you know, insufficiently traditional and of men not being in robust positions of authority in these homes and particularly of like black women being too powerful.0.99
00:17:03.100Yeah. So Moynihan is Irish Catholic, but it's worth comparing his trajectory to the neocons like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, or friend of the pod, Midge Dechter, right? These are also people who experienced the enormous sort of uplift that U.S. government was able to generate during the war years and immediately afterwards, and who, when they then looked at African Americans, always seemed to ask, hey, why did we do it? And they couldn't.
00:17:29.260And their answers all began skewing towards like, hey, maybe on some level, we're just better, right, as time went by. And Moynihan will be kind of a weird neocon himself. I think his starting point is further to the left. I think he doesn't go quite as far to the right, but this is to some extent his trajectory, right?
00:17:49.020Like, the idea that there is a culture of poverty that is holding people back and that no amount of government largesse is able to ameliorate, it's not a shocker that, like, Podorets would publish that, right?
00:18:03.260He's like, yeah, I fully agree, right?0.99
00:18:04.620The moral emergency goes from the suffering of these black people to their behavior that is seen as creating the suffering.1.00
00:18:25.040Like, you mean, like, you want to fix the outcomes, right?
00:18:27.880Like, if a kid, I don't know, like, is able to use the public school system effectively and make more money than, a lot more money than their mom, like, isn't that the outcome you want?
00:18:39.660Like, even if there's no dad in the picture, he's like, oh, maybe.
00:18:43.280It's not even quite clear where he thinks the real emergency lies, right?
00:18:48.720So given the second point, given the comparison to the neocons, it is worth saying that Moynihan was a Democrat and not some kind of Democrat in name only either.
00:18:58.540He was a Kennedy delegate at the 1960 convention, assistant secretary of labor for policy planning and research under JFK and LBJ, made major contributions to Johnson's war on poverty, which the Moynihan report sort of comes out of.
00:19:14.080He pushed for early affirmative action policies, et cetera, et cetera.
00:19:17.040So, like, right, like not some kind of covert right winger, right?
00:19:21.180No, this is a guy who, like, came to his, you know, brand of misogynist racism from, like, pretty robustly liberal values, which I think is what is so instructive about Moynihan.
00:19:31.560Exactly. And why someone like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama might find so much common ground with him, frankly.
00:19:39.200Sorry. Yeah, there's a really great line in the Daniel Geary book, Beyond Civil Rights, which really I can't recommend enough, where he points out that like Clinton and Obama and others sort of keep saying that like people misunderstood Moynihan.
00:19:52.780And he says like, no, the controversy had nothing to do with misunderstandings. It resulted, quote, not from critics' misunderstanding of Moynihan's reformist intentions, but from the report's ambiguities that allowed multiple interpretations, right?
00:20:06.520Like, in some way, I think what we're saying is this is a liberal who's living the contradictions of mid-century liberalism, right?
00:20:16.000And is tapping into a socially conservative vein of that liberalism.
00:20:21.000And it's all coming to the surface in that text.
00:20:23.920It's not that he's, like, a closet conservative.1.00
00:20:26.260It's not that he's a liberal and, like, these PC idiots are making too much of a big deal out of this.1.00
00:20:31.380No, it's about the conservative strain in mid-century liberalism, right?0.98
00:20:38.380So the third point I want to make is that by the 1970s, Moynihan did definitely make kind of a new conservative turn.
00:20:45.580He left government in the second Johnson administration because he was an RFK ally.
00:21:14.640And by then he sounded a lot more hawkish on what was required to deal with urban turmoil and urban decay.
00:21:20.420Of course, also between 1965 and 1975, the shape of the American inner city really changes and the look at the inner city really changes.
00:21:31.660White flight really kicks into overdrive, urban unrest and riotings and police crackdowns, all that stuff.
00:21:39.000He then joined the Nixon administration and served on the Urban Affairs Council, though his ideas, which included an early version of universal basic income, interestingly enough.0.77
00:21:48.400Yeah, so like he's never, right, like he's not completely switching.
00:21:51.500Well, this also illustrates, I think, the mutual ideological permeation of the parties in the mid-century, right?
00:22:00.460In a way that is, I don't want to say it's not happening now.
00:22:04.100It's just only happening in one direction.
00:22:06.100Yeah, I was going to say, John Fetterman seems to be doing it real well right now.
00:22:09.300But it's a different relationship to like partisan alignment on these issues in our era than it was in the 1970s.
00:22:17.320And I definitely think Moynihan is a product of that political condition.
00:22:21.460Yeah. And I mean, like, it's the kind of crossing of the aisle that flew under the flag of, like, realism, right?
00:22:28.320Like, oh, we tried being nice, and now maybe what Dick Nixon is saying is what we need, right?
00:22:34.220Like, there is a—I mean, this is what Clinton's Third Way was all about, right?0.53
00:22:38.120Like, the idea that it is realistic to have your sister soldier moment to throw minorities under the bus.
00:22:44.780Right. And the idea that like a white supremacist form of conservatism or a male supremacist form of conservative like social conservatism in particular gets the stamp of reasonable authenticity. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And to a degree like economic or fiscal conservatism like also has this veneer of responsibility. Right.0.93
00:23:03.980The liberals are where you go if you're dreamy and idealistic and the conservatives are where you go if you're an adult is sort of like emotional mapping of political difference at this time.
00:23:15.680Yeah. And I mean, that's still that's still the way. Right.
00:23:17.620I mean, if you think about it for a second, right, like the idea that we will get to what exactly the report suggests, but at least there's one reading where you can say he says giving money to poor people does not make them less poor.
00:23:29.720where you're like, I don't know, feels like it might, right?
00:24:02.560Like, it feels like numerically that's just true.
00:24:04.620Like, if I had $10,000 as opposed to $1,000, I think I'd be $9,000 richer.
00:24:09.700You know, not a math whiz or anything, but I feel like that's true.
00:24:14.460And so, yeah, the way kind of realism gets recoded and also gets kind of like laundered through our education system and through the institutions of higher learning, I think he's very much emblematic of that.
00:24:26.200So he's on the Urban Affairs Council. His ideas never really connect with any of Nixon's inner orbit. Nixon's busy with other things.
00:24:35.940Yeah, he's got some fraud to commit. Yeah.
00:24:37.900Yeah, you know, wiretapping, bombings in Southeast Asian countries without admitting to it, you know, just like king shit.0.96
00:24:45.300And he later served as ambassador to the UN, which I feel like is still kind of the job you give to a member of the opposite party if you want to keep him quiet.0.97
00:28:15.400the report was trying to argue that this way
00:28:18.540the federal government was basically incentivizing
00:28:20.720the breakdown of black families, right?
00:28:22.680That the federal government was destroying families
00:28:24.960through its attempts at ameliorating racism.
00:28:28.980So like one of the things you do have to know about welfare programming in the decades before the Clinton welfare reform bill is that, yeah, it was dependent in order to get it.
00:28:41.820Welfare recipients didn't just have to prove that they were poor.
00:28:45.160They had to prove that they were poor and that there wasn't a man who could be supporting them and wasn't.
00:28:49.960The idea was that women and children's poverty was not the collective responsibility of the state or the community to ameliorate, that it was the responsibility of whichever man had fathered those children or whichever man that impoverished woman was supposed to belong to.0.54
00:29:09.120Right. So you really had to do quite a bit of work to prove your own chastity, to prove your singleness, to prove that there wasn't some guy you were sleeping with who should take on your children as your own, to prove that you didn't have, you know, a man who just didn't want to work.
00:29:25.800Right. Like you had to make it so that your poverty was a problem that your citizenship might entitle you to some sort of remedy for.
00:29:36.560Yeah, as opposed to it being a man's problem, right? So, like, women are not construed as, like, people who have their independent claims that they can make on the state in this sort of worldview of how the family functions, right? Men are supposed to be the first intermediary.0.99
00:29:51.380Yeah. But now a question for you. How do you prove the absence of a man, right? Like, I guess Moynihan seems to think, and I mean, maybe he's right, but there are hardly any people interviewed and no people interviewed in the report. He just kind of looks at some data. But like, wouldn't it be easy to say, oh, there's no one, you know, you just like tell your boyfriend to like go take a walk if like someone visits or like, how was this tested?
00:30:15.040There are reports of not only like home visits, which are still a feature of a lot of like welfare administration. Right. To like check if there was a man in the house. But there's also reports of people like talking to your family and friends, you know, like to try and figure out if you were lying. You know how like not that this is a problem you ever had, but like a friend of mine did a green card marriage. Right.
00:30:37.420And one of the things she had to do was, like, buy an extra toothbrush and use it a lot so it looked like this person she was marrying to get a green card.
00:30:50.360Not only that they were in a relationship, but, like, that they were living together constantly.
00:30:54.460This is something that she had been told to do by other people who had gone through.
00:30:57.320You know, the level of surveillance is more expansive and intimate than you would think when you're trying to get money.
00:31:23.760Women are just going to throw out their husbands because they can get more from the government by being single than they can by having a dual income household.1.00
00:31:54.940Here's how he put it in the Godkin lectures that he gave at Harvard in the 1980s, which were published in 1986 as the book Family and Nation.
00:32:05.440The individual had been our primary unit of measurement, men, women, children, all lumped together.
00:32:10.780Our employment statistics counted as equally unemployed a father of nine,
00:32:14.760a housewife coming back into the labor market in her 40s,
00:32:17.840and a teenager looking for a part-time job after school.
00:32:21.140The minimum wage required by law to be paid to any of these persons was exactly the same.
00:32:26.300If they should somehow have the same level of earnings, which would have been easy enough,
00:32:30.540and were to lose their jobs, the amount of unemployment insurance paid to each
00:32:56.900So wait, he's saying this sounds like an argument
00:33:00.580for the family wage as applied to, like, the welfare, right?
00:33:04.280Like, no, no, no, no, no, we should be paying the man with nine children more0.90
00:33:08.800than we should be paying the single mother0.74
00:33:12.480or the housewife just coming back into the labor force.0.64
00:33:16.160Yeah, like, on the one hand, like, the idea that families with dependents
00:33:21.160might need extra help seems totally uncontroversial,
00:33:24.660but, like, there's more going on here, right?
00:33:26.800Like, A, he's saying, well, these people are not themselves equal, right?
00:33:32.840It's not that, like, some people might require a little bit more of a leg up.
00:33:36.660He's saying, like, the fact that we're treating them equally is a problem, right?
00:33:40.700Like, there's a kind of corporatism almost going on here, where the family as a unit is sort of, like, the central node of society for him, right?
00:33:48.840Like, why shouldn't a person losing their job get unemployment based on how much they made, right?
00:33:55.080Like, does it matter whether they're a single mom or whether they're a dad or whether they're a kid that only had that one job?
00:34:02.200Well, it matters if you see the role of the government as to incentivize a specific kind of conduct in private life, right?0.51
00:34:08.420Like, if you see the government as having an interest in encouraging heterosexual marriage, if you see them having an interest in encouraging childbearing, right?
00:34:20.440This is not a wildly divergent set of assertions about like what the government's interests are and what the government can do in pursuit of those interests from what you see in terms of like the briefs filed by anti-abortion state attorneys general now saying things like, well, you know, our birth rate is declining and our teen pregnancy rate is a part of that.
00:34:43.840And we need to, you know, this is out of Idaho, like we need to encourage a certain kind of personal conduct and we get to use the resources, our state resources, to encourage that kind of private sexual and reproductive conduct.
00:34:55.460You know, this is straight up like the breakdown of the family stuff we see today.
00:34:58.000Exactly. In fact, would you be shocked to learn that a few pages later, Moynihan basically bemoans that, quote,
00:35:04.380at some level of awareness following the Second World War, the quote unquote bourgeois family had become politically suspect in the intellectual circles where a good deal of social thinking began.
00:35:15.180I know. He's like, you're mad at ladies in your circle again.
00:35:18.600Like, this isn't actually about the black family.0.67
00:35:20.540This is about like women who have jobs around you and you're being real weird about it.
00:35:27.140This is about women he knows who read The Feminine Mystique, which came out two years before, and who are getting grand ideas that maybe domestic life is not all that they are suited for.
00:35:40.180Exactly. But all of it in the name of a group that he's very much not describing.
00:35:45.080This is the other part that I really wanted to highlight for you that, like, he's not just saying, hey, the way we're delivering help to our poorest members of our society is ineffective, right?
00:35:57.140he's really saying elite thinking about this is to blame.
00:36:23.880And so maybe Moynihan is sort of trying to go against that.
00:36:27.640But at the same time, it is kind of hilarious to assume that a good deal of social thinking began in these like intellectual circles where the quote unquote bourgeois family had become politically suspect.
00:36:40.900Among the masthead of the partisan review.
00:36:44.200I'm not sure if that's how the administration like thinks through its like delivery of aid to families.1.00
00:36:51.220I mean, I think feminists at the time would have had some things to say about the gender politics shared and distributed among the masthead of the partisan review.
00:36:58.600But, you know, this is also something that you see a lot because, like, technically, he's blaming the cultural attitudes of the elites for the cultural attitudes of the poor.
00:42:20.300Right. Like he keeps redefining what he's measuring to make it fit the ideological project that he has going in.
00:42:26.420It's also interesting to me that like he's kind of I don't know, this is just a very like Democrat thing to do, even though this guy agreed with and hung out with Republicans a lot.
00:42:34.860This is such a Democrat thing to do because he's working for Lyndon Johnson and publishing a big report about how Lyndon Johnson's like signature civil rights program has failed.
00:42:44.280He's like, you know, because Democrats always secretly believe that the Republicans are right and deserve to govern and deserve to win more.
00:42:51.520So he's just like shooting his boss in the foot, right?
00:42:55.020Like the Moynihan Report is positioning itself as being like kind of opposed to the rest of the Johnson administration's civil rights regime, right?
00:43:05.280Like I think this is another place where there's a kind of split personality here.
00:43:08.780On the one hand, like, it can easily feel, given what happened with the report afterwards, it can easily seem like this is kind of a fifth column within this kind of liberal project, and this is how it's going to all get killed.
00:43:20.200But he says at the end of the report, there is, however, a profound change for the better in one respect.
00:43:26.360The president has committed the nation to an all-out effort to eliminate poverty wherever it exists, among whites or black people, and a militant, organized, and responsible black movement exists to join that effort.
00:43:37.580So he's kind of, he's either super pessimistic about like, oh, this is never going to work.
00:43:42.220But at the same time, he's also almost too optimistic.
00:43:44.480He's like, look, we have a civil rights movement that's doing a great job.
00:43:47.220We have an administration that's finally taking this stuff seriously.
00:43:49.780And it is true, this wasn't something that had been on previous administrations' radar, right?
00:43:53.920So he either thinks like the Johnson administration is going to last forever,
00:43:56.780or he thinks like he's already preparing for what comes after, maybe both at the same time.
00:44:02.220I should say that this is Roderick Ferguson's point, I think, in his book, Aberrations in Black.
00:44:06.840where he says, like, it's easy to look at this document and think,
00:44:10.560hey, this is a closet reactionary who's just trying to roll back civil rights.
00:45:04.540what if mid-century liberalism but forever, right, going on here?
00:45:08.560Like, he's not, I think Ferguson is exactly right.
00:45:10.940It's not as easy as, like, this guy is just a fake.
00:45:16.120Like, it's scarier than that in some way.
00:45:18.500So do you want to tease out a little bit of, like,
00:45:20.900what are the contradictions that he's, like, bringing to the fore
00:45:24.060that he's a product of so we can think a little more deeply
00:45:27.240about, like, this moment in, like, American capitalism
00:45:30.020and how it's coming to bear on the Black family?
00:45:32.240Yeah. So I think the contradictions are basically, what is the role of racism in organizing American public life and what can be done to overcome it, right? There's a question of like, is the difference that you observe between black and white families in 1965 just a coefficient of racism or is there something else going on, right?
00:45:53.960And I think Moynihan, in different chapters of this report, which, by the way, for our readers, is available on Wikipedia and is not very long, like, it very consistently gives both answers, right?
00:46:06.460I think that's what Ferguson is thinking about, right?
00:46:08.820And right down to the question of whether it's sanguine about this project or ultimately a defeatist project, right?
00:46:14.860Like, is it trying to explain why this won't have worked in a few years?
00:46:18.300Or is it saying, hey, if we do it this way, I think it will work.
00:46:22.020And given that we now have eternal democratic majorities, I think we can finally do this, right?
00:46:28.000I think he usually sort of occupies both sides of these kinds of like pretty stark questions.0.54
00:46:34.860And as Ferguson is saying, the reason it doesn't become obvious and the reason that someone like Obama or someone like Clinton can draw on this stuff or someone like Kearney can draw on this stuff is that these contradictions are kind of all displaced onto the black family.
00:46:49.080Like, it becomes this kind of, basically it does whatever Moynihan needs it to do at any given point in the report.
00:46:55.520That might be a good moment to segue to talking about Moynihan's method, right?0.99
00:46:59.480Because you talked about how he says that, you know, by all of these empirical measures, Black people seem to be doing better, but they're not really doing any better.
00:47:11.240Is that true? What does he mean by that? Like, what is he talking about?
00:47:15.380Right. The claim is exactly the community has, in recent years, has probably been getting worse, not better. I should have talked to a historian before this. I can't speak to whether that's true or not. But I'm guessing Moynihan is probably not totally wrong. Just sort of thinking about what I've learned in economics, right? The New Deal and post-World War II programs, if you think about the Federal Housing Administration, if you think about GI Bill, et cetera, et cetera, were, of course, huge wealth generators. And Black Americans were often excluded from those, right?
00:47:43.680There's that wonderful book by Richard Rothstein, Color of Law, sort of points out that the
00:47:48.260federal government, in fact, was making sure that they were excluded from it.0.98
00:48:06.240But it's interesting that Moynihan doesn't seem to be referring to any of that.
00:48:09.840Because as I said, right, he says, indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. The gap between the black community and most other groups in American society is widening. And as we were saying, I feel like dollars of income, standards of living, years of education seem like pretty good gauges for whether a community is doing better or worse than before, right? A little strange to say like, well, don't look at any of that stuff.
00:48:37.060But that's because Moynihan wants to build up to his main point,
00:49:03.460is the one that I've decided is the indicator I want to focus my report on, right? Because,
00:49:08.500you know, I care about it. The family is important because the family is important, right?
00:49:13.480It's circular, but it's also, it's a tautology, right? He's not really,
00:49:17.400does he make a case for the significance of the family on the merits or does he consider that
00:49:23.420self-evident? Well, so this is where I think he's full-on correlation equals causation.
00:49:28.780He does have data where he tries to show that basically what he calls illegitimacy rates are higher and divorces are higher, right?
00:49:38.340And we can get into the specific data in a second.
00:49:41.260But then he's like, oh, and see, that's the only thing that could explain this.
00:49:44.600And you're like, yeah, or I don't know, like the racism that all these people were living in, right?
00:49:48.760In the end, Moynihan, he's mostly responding to difference, even though, as he'll make clear, he's aware that this difference is not innate or cultural.
00:49:57.820But he kind of seems to notice two differences.
00:50:00.840Like, well, obviously, those both must explain each other, right?
00:50:04.380He knows that it's an output of racist policies.
00:50:07.540Why do more African-American families in 1965 live in multigenerational household?
00:50:12.560Well, it's because it's an effect of redlining, right?1.00
00:50:16.000Matriarchal structures can be effects of incarceration, et cetera, et cetera, right?1.00
00:50:23.160I mean, it's also interesting to me that he's not just identifying these differences, right?
00:50:27.280Like, it would not be crazy to me that these empirical differences in the typical style of American families across racial lines are, like, demonstrable, right?
00:50:53.720But his solution, his solution to the problem of, like, single mothers are more likely to be in poverty than married couples raising children are.
00:51:05.580His solution to that is not make it easier for single mothers.
00:51:10.020It's compel people to remain in marriage, right?0.99
00:51:19.380Basically, his prescription is make them more like the white family, right?0.95
00:51:23.560He says, the white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability.0.79
00:51:28.840By contrast, the family structure of lower class African-Americans is highly unstable and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown.0.59
00:51:36.640It also assumes that white middle class families is working out really well for everyone, which I think there is a nascent social movement emerging that is about to contest that idea.0.89
00:51:48.600Yeah. But this idea that like the white middle class nuclear family is a perfect ideal that needs to be aspired to and maintained and even enforced through policy and law is like it's just very conspicuous to me.0.89
00:52:02.540I also love complete breakdown. Like what's a complete breakdown? It sounds so catastrophizing, right?0.93
00:52:08.240It also looks at single black mothers raising their children with limited resources and does not see the fortitude or determination or ingenuity or thrift of those women.0.86
00:52:21.220It sees the moral crisis of their sex lives.0.76
00:52:32.000Like the very fact that they're doing this, the very fact that they're managing is horrifying to him.
00:52:37.860Right. They should be dainty flowers who are suffering more, I guess. Like, this is something that we talked about before is, like, anti-Black racism tends to be a masculinizing racism.
00:52:47.360You see it really clearly in the Moynihan Report where Black women are masculinized and thereby rendered monstrous. You know, they are women who are independent.0.97
00:57:09.680It's not like, okay, being born or growing up in poverty makes you more likely to be poor because you have fewer resources to vote to.
00:57:17.120Like, education and vocational training.
00:57:18.920You have, like, fewer opportunities for networking.
00:57:21.820it's growing up in poverty makes you more likely to be poor as an adult
00:57:25.440because you only saw adults being poor.
00:57:27.840So that's the only way you know how to be.
00:57:29.700It's just like the causal mechanism is so bizarre.
00:57:33.000Still think being poor is cool, kids?0.99
00:57:37.320And I have to say, it's just mid-century as fuck, right?0.99
00:57:40.060Like some Americanized Freud is thrown in here, right?0.99
00:57:42.760But basically, it's this moral theory of the family, right?
00:57:46.480Nobody thinks more about what it's like to be rich than a poor person, by the way.
00:57:49.880Like, they actually, like, spend a tremendous amount of psychological energy on the notion of, like, how to not be poor anymore and what it would be like to live as a rich person.
00:57:59.880And, like, I guess this is, like, where Moynihan, like, also being, like, a kid of the lower middle class, like, matters probably.0.98
00:58:06.500Because, like, think of the fucking Kennedys.0.98
00:58:08.820Like, what kind of behavior are they modeling for their kids?1.00
00:58:11.660Like, those are rich people have messed up families.
00:58:19.400I hear there are high rates of illegitimacy among early modern monarchs, you know, like they tend to, they tend to have a lot of bastards and a lot of wives.0.99
00:58:28.980Yeah, yeah. And if you, if you're thinking that maybe people should aspire to be more like the family on succession, then, I mean, I guess fair play to you, but it's, you know.0.96
00:58:37.140There's at least three wives, yeah, in there.
00:58:39.320Yeah, yeah. So, but that's the thing, right? Like, there are all these things where we can say, like, okay, like, I can see how Freudian could make this argument, right? But it's very important to note that I don't think he's saying that the problem with the non-normative family is that it can't take care of kids as well. It's that non-normative families have a hard time socializing kids, right?0.97
00:59:01.420Like, we're starting to get a little bit of the, like, super predator stuff here, right?
00:59:06.720Like, these kids are so, like, incapable of, like, functioning in society that we're creating this, like, like, I noticed the he, he, he throughout.
00:59:16.800Like, on some level, that's just, like, generic masculine in 1965.0.83
00:59:20.620But on the other hand, like he's imagining an African-American boy who will grow up without social attachments, who will rove the streets of whatever part of town Daniel Patrick Moynihan is afraid to go into, you know, like this is sort of the incipient young black male body of backlash politics, right?
00:59:43.280You're talking about you mentioned earlier, like mass incarceration as being one cause of like unstable heterosexual partnerships in black communities in our time. Right. Yeah. He's running before the age of mass incarceration. Right. Yeah. When there's tremendous amount of poverty, but black men are not incarcerated at anything like the rates that they are now.0.56
01:00:05.560What he is doing, in fact, is seeding the logic that will enable mass incarceration to become public policy later, right?
01:00:14.160These young Black men are depicted as animalistic in this later politics of, like, tough-on-crime legislation that increases the Black incarceration rate.
01:00:26.300And he is supplying this, like, Freudian justification for treating them as animals, right?1.00
01:00:32.900They were raised by single mothers, and they were not properly socialized, and now they wear their pants too baggy, and we need to put them all in prison.1.00
01:01:30.200Like, the question becomes, like, where do we, quote, unquote, all become Americans, right?
01:01:35.400Like, does public education draw us out of our individual communities and families and teach us kind of the civic virtue that sustains the United States?
01:01:44.780Or does that have to happen in our communities?
01:01:47.280And I think Moynihan is very much on that latter side.
01:01:50.500Like, we're not creating Americans the way we need to.
01:01:53.760Well, not just in our communities, but in our homes, like by our mommies and daddies or who make us citizens.
01:01:58.840It's like the revolutionary era concept of Republican motherhood, but like applied to the institution of the nuclear family itself, right?
01:02:08.080Republican marriage, Republican parenthood is this civic duty that creates capable citizens and at which black people are seen to be failing.
01:02:18.840Exactly. And this difference is what he's trying to explain.
01:02:21.020What is this perceived failure that he wants to diagnose, right?
01:02:24.400And we should be clear, what people have drawn out of this report for going on, what is it, like 60 years now, is that it's kind of Black people's fault, right?0.96
01:02:38.680At the same time, it is important to note that, like, this is very much a Johnson administration document in the sense that he's fully acknowledging the role of racism in all this.
01:02:47.940Yeah. So, like, what is Moynihan's, you know, book of Genesis for, like, you know, racial difference in marriage patterns? Like, where does he see this disparity and, you know, to his mind, inferiority of the black family as coming from?
01:03:05.780Yeah. So he says, quote, there are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American bloodstream still afflicts us. So that's the first reason.
01:03:15.400And then here's the second part, and it's so strange.
01:03:19.040Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatments have taken their toll on black people.
01:03:25.420The harsh fact is that as a group at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competition of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing, end quote.
01:04:11.140Now, you can see why people, especially who work in Afro-pessimism, are interested in this, because like this is kind of a, yeah, you're right, it's an epigenetic account of intergenerational trauma. At the same time, I do think it ends up in a really odd and problematic place that I think we'll have to talk about.
01:04:28.380For now, I think it's important because we're just still kind of talking about methods here.
01:04:32.460I think this is where Roderick Ferguson is exactly right.
01:04:35.060This feels like a kind of liberalism that acknowledges the huge problem of racism and
01:04:40.020the fact that what we're experiencing as inequality in the present day are largely
01:04:45.720outputs of historic injustices, but then gets super tetchy about not always being in charge
01:04:52.700of how that problem is supposed to be mitigated or addressed, right?
01:04:55.940The Moynihan Report doesn't talk to a single Black mom or any other member of the families it's supposedly so interested in, right?
01:05:03.660Like, it comes out of a certain racial liberalism.
01:05:06.400On racial issues, it is liberal, but it is part of a gender backlash, right?0.90
01:05:12.360Like, our anti-racism must be about restoring Black men to their rightful place of superiority within the family.0.97
01:05:56.220Gender hierarchies in the family, he thinks, are natural, and any revision of them is deleterious, right?
01:06:02.060As you were pointing out earlier, this is a year after the Civil Rights Act.0.69
01:06:05.520It's also two years after the Feminine Mystique.
01:06:08.000Maybe that's the more significant inner text to consider here, because in the end, this is a text about gender backlash, including, frankly, for white people, right, while still sort of like doing it all in a service of supposed racial liberalism.
01:06:24.020Right. And it does something that a lot of gender backlash does, which is it takes a group of women or a subset of women who are already seen to be deficient or contemptible, right?
01:06:35.880In this case, it's Black women. In our era, it's often trans women. But, you know, Black women also still very popular scapegoats for this purpose. And it makes them responsible for the deterioration of what is seen as a broader gender order, right?0.98
01:06:49.740If only these black women were more feminine, more complacent with the gender hierarchy, more amenable to this dictate of power that men or black men by rights have over them, then this racial oppression would not be so acute.0.87
01:07:10.380This is, by the way, like a strain of thinking that you do see in Black nationalist thought over the like couple decades around this, right?0.55
01:07:18.460There is a Black nationalist or Black masculinist tradition that does sort of blame Black women's independence or resilience for like Black men's like perceived lesser status.
01:07:33.000Yeah. And I think it's important to note, again, Ferguson is so right.1.00
01:07:36.300There are two strains running through this that contradict each other, right?
01:07:40.140On some level, Moynihan is saying what happened to African-Americans is sui generis.
01:07:44.800It could never happen to any other group.
01:07:46.480And so therefore, obviously, they're going to be in a different position than others, right?0.82
01:07:49.520Like he says that it's just like it's so rebarbative what was done to these people or to their ancestors, right?0.99
01:07:55.660It's just so unparalleled in human history, he thinks, which I think is frankly pretty admirable.0.98
01:08:00.600So many people can't get themselves to say that today.0.83
01:08:03.640But at other times, he's basically saying, like, oh, if white women were to start living like black women, we'd have the same problems, right?0.99
01:08:11.740At which point, like, you're like, shit, like, now this is just a straightforwardly gender conservative text, right?0.99
01:08:16.980Right. This might bring us to a nice point that I think Cortez Spillers makes.0.98
01:08:22.040When she suggests that the gender hierarchy that Moynihan is advocating and sort of making himself a defender of in this report becomes this kind of like backdoor way of restabilizing those racial categories.
01:08:36.940So ethnicity, she writes, in this case, freezes in meaning, takes on constancy, assumes the look and the effects of the eternal.
01:08:46.840So she thinks this is a basic American myth in a new getup.
01:08:50.760And I think the reception of the report has pretty much borne out that verdict, right?
01:08:55.380Like, we talk about the Black family to talk about what Black people are like.
01:08:59.920Because the post-Civil Rights Act era, it's more acceptable to moralize gender than to moralize race.
01:09:06.040Yeah. Spiller's article, by the way, we should say, is Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe.
01:09:10.840It's essential. Everybody should read this. Yeah.
01:09:13.220Everyone should read it. It is also fiendishly difficult.
01:09:20.280You have to read it a few times before it starts to click. Yeah.
01:09:23.760Yeah. And I should say that there's every chance that we're misreading certain parts of it. But like, this is what I take her point to be. Like, I was sort of steel manning it again and saying, like, look, there's a difference here between there's a racial liberalism entwined with a gender conservatism.
01:09:39.380And Spiller's point, at least in that part of the article, I take to be, no, that difference actually cannot be maintained, right?
01:09:49.120Basically, he uses the gender stuff in order to reintroduce racial difference as natural in ways that, like, if you pressed him on it, he probably wouldn't own up to, right?
01:09:59.040But he can do it sort of through gender.
01:10:01.080Spillers also, I think, points out that essentially Moynihan is kind of recapitulating a very specific gaze that does feel like a pretty, a real American obsession, let's say, right?
01:10:13.180Moynihan's Negro family, she writes, borrows its narrative energies from the grid of associations from the semantic and iconic folds buried deep in the collective past that come to surround and signify the captive person, right?
01:10:26.300The problem with blacks to Moynihan is the black body, right?0.91
01:10:32.980It's his job as a G-man, as a sociologist, right, to assess its value and its contribution to the American polity, right?1.00
01:10:41.580And Hortense Spillers is basically like, huh, wonder where you learned that?1.00
01:10:46.380Looking at black bodies and evaluating how—1.00
01:10:50.120How much they're worth and how to integrate them into a white American project, right?
01:10:55.080She says, quote, a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless, right?0.50
01:11:03.060She's not saying like, oh, he's being a slave owner or slave purchaser in that moment.
01:11:08.380She's like, he cannot but be, right?0.91
01:11:10.500Like the obsession with and the readiness to evaluate black bodies, black life in the United States, like it always partakes of this, right?0.99
01:11:20.600And the fact that he's kind of calling for daddy and he's calling for white daddy, like, is not an accident here, right?0.58
01:11:28.140Like, and that in some way the federal government is supposed to be the one that helps stabilize the black family, right?
01:11:33.600Like, is plantation logic behind this on whatever level of awareness she says, I think?
01:11:39.140I don't know what Moynihan thought about Hortense Spiller's point, but the fact that this guy kind of, as I said earlier, like was really touchy when it came to the people he was talking about speaking back to him, that he was really ready to sort of know what was best for black people and that he seemed deeply invested in that is a total through line.
01:12:05.080And I found this interesting article in the New York Times while researching this.
01:12:09.000So in February 1990, Moynihan had a kind of cancel culture controversy.
01:12:13.080He had a lectureship, a distinguished lectureship at Vassar, and he had to quit that because
01:12:18.860he was apparently giving a lecture on his old topic, the U.S. as a model of ethnic
01:12:24.000cooperation, says the New York Times, I don't have the actual title, right?
01:12:27.280And a county official who was of Jamaican descent challenged him on racial inequality
01:12:32.820And his reply to her was, according to the students who were there, if you don't like it in this country, why don't you pack your bags and go back where you came from?
01:12:50.020Anyway, the point of the anecdote is not just that Moynihan sucked shit.0.99
01:12:54.020It's that gender and ethnicity for him clearly were ways of raising questions about who belonged, right?0.98
01:13:01.340and about the terms on which someone could be part of what he would probably call the American
01:13:06.240experiment. This is someone who feels very empowered to assess and it feels very allergic
01:13:12.680to difference on its own terms, right? Like it has to be sort of shot through
01:13:18.060a majoritarian, benevolent, beneficent white liberalism.0.72
01:13:24.280So that might take us to chapter three.0.71
01:13:26.880Yeah. So we're going into chapter three of the Moynihan Report, where we sort of get to the parts that we can tell that it's not a total fake out, right? It's not a total bad faith object. It is, as both Ferguson and Spiller point out, it's a more complicated object than that, right?
01:13:45.340He says there, American slavery was profoundly different from and in its lasting effects on individuals and their children, indescribably worse than any recorded servitude, ancient or modern, right? Moynihan seems genuinely horrified by U.S. racism, unlike most of the people who draw on him, right? He doesn't deny that the U.S. has a long history of racism and that much of his and our contemporary world is its output, right?
01:14:11.460Okay. This reminds me a little of stuff you've said about Germany's reckoning with the Holocaust, right? They're like, it's so terrible, it's so terrible, it's so terrible. And in a way, the performative, like quasi-self-flagellating reckoning with the past becomes a way to not have to, like, confront its ongoing legacy in the present.
01:14:32.820Yeah, it becomes a way of elevating yourself as the ultimate arbiter, right?
01:15:58.480Like, he is genuine in this horror at American slavery, but he is unable to read any difference that he perceives in the African-American community as either people making do with imperfect situations in a world structured by racism and economic inequality that often is overlaid over that matrix, or people just living lives differently for reasons that may not be of concern to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, right?
01:16:26.440Like, all of it has to be an output to this historic wrong that's been committed against them.
01:16:31.900It reminds me a little bit of Spiller's point, right?
01:16:34.320Like, because he sees black people not as Americans who have value for the American project in their own right, but as like this problem to be solved, right?0.99
01:16:45.460So he's always trying to find an ideologically coherent explanation for their behavior or a policy fix for the problem that is black people,
01:16:54.660which is different, really, than seeing Black people as, like, your fellow citizens.0.95
01:16:59.040Exactly. And it all boils down into the figure of the missing Black father, right? So he says,
01:17:05.660unquestionably, these events worked against the emergence of a strong father figure. The very
01:17:10.380essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut.
01:17:15.380Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became0.78
01:17:20.120almost a national style, not for the black male.0.91
01:17:23.500The sassy, I'm going to bleep that, was lynched.0.99
01:17:26.740In this situation, the black family made but little progress1.00
01:17:29.120towards the middle-class pattern of the present time.0.97
01:17:32.000Right, so notice he's saying like defective black masculinity0.98
01:17:35.240is an output of racial terrorism, basically, right?0.99
01:19:07.460queer of color critique and queer theory,
01:19:09.680like why queer theory gets interested in this.0.97
01:19:11.220Because they're like, well, our whole point is we get rejected by mainstream society.
01:19:15.940And in being rejected, we discover cool and awesome ways of relating to each other that are not as boring as what Betty Friedan wanted to escape so badly, right?
01:19:24.000Like, Boyd has like, no, no, no, that's defective.
01:19:26.280And I feel like a lot of liberation movements from the 60s and 70s onwards have been like, no, like, this is fine, right?
01:19:33.640Like, our coping mechanisms can be, like, things can be a conditioned response and still be productive and maybe better.
01:19:41.220Right. And it's worth pointing out also, I don't want to sort of have Ferguson and Spillers kind of here sort of disembodied and sort of taken out of context. Spillers is kind of making the point, as I say, at the beginning of kind of what we think of today as intersectionality studies, trying to sort of point out that like here, gender and racial categories really overlaying in interesting ways.
01:20:00.780Ferguson is doing this in the book that kind of establishes queer of color critique in the
01:20:06.600scholarly debate. And his point is to say that really the kind of simplistic queer theory
01:20:13.080resistance to the family in some way has to grapple with the fact that the black family
01:20:18.560has been problematized in the way that Moynihan does, meaning like maybe that rejection does not
01:20:23.940come as easily or is actually not as unproblematic as it would be for like an Armistead Mop-In or
01:20:29.160Or, you know, an Adrienne Rich or something like that, right?
01:20:55.040There's also that kind of a weird strain of anti-urbanism here.
01:20:57.540He observes that, of course, a lot of this, right, like one reason we didn't bring up why the DC numbers are so strange is because this is still happening during massive migration waves, right?
01:21:07.700Like these are not the same people necessarily that are living in the District of Columbia between 1940 and 1964, meaning he's starting to think of the African-American family as the urban African-American family, right?
01:21:20.380Like these are the people he has to see on his way to work in New York or whatever, right?
01:21:24.780He's not thinking about black sharecroppers or something like that.0.90
01:21:27.940He's thinking about the black people who are on the subway with him, right?
01:21:32.020And there too, I think, we're starting to get into the mass incarceration era in some way, right?
01:21:38.100Where the paradigmatic African-American male that's being imagined is also an urban individual.
01:21:44.500Should we maybe talk briefly about his chapter on the tangle of pathologies?0.98
01:22:17.800An overbearing mother, a too strong phallic mother who is not sufficiently chastened by paternal authority in the home will create a sexually dysfunctional, like socially maladjusted male child.0.79
01:23:00.580We have to do an episode on momism because the bad mother or the wrong mother, especially of a male son, is just this well of scapegoating and pathologization.
01:23:12.940that is just like, they never define their terms,0.98
01:23:42.720It's unnatural. It's bad for the economy. It's bad for the human soul. Who is going to, you know, mine your coal or whatever men say when they when they are trying to scold women out of independence? Right.
01:23:58.240Like who's going to mine your crypto? Who's going to play those video games? I know some women who can play them fine on their own.
01:24:04.560What? Even this you've taken away from them.1.00
01:24:08.920But it's this idea that male characteristics, but really specifically male leadership and male authority that commands deference is what is like, you know, psychologically, but really like civilizationally important to human development.
01:24:24.900Yeah. I think that's important, right? Like this is in an important way, not just to racistics, it's the sexist things.
01:24:37.720And this is where Spillers is exactly right.1.00
01:24:39.220This is about way more than the Black family.1.00
01:24:42.520Like, this is his theory of society, right?0.94
01:24:46.060The patriarchal family is, like, on the back of the Black family, basically.0.89
01:24:50.460The patriarchal family is, for him, what distinguishes white culture from Black culture.0.95
01:24:54.640It's what keeps white culture from following black culture into, quote, the deterioration of the social fabric, right?0.89
01:25:01.900I would love him to describe what he thinks that means, like the total deterioration of the family, the deterioration of the social fabric.0.97
01:25:10.700Are we all just going to be fucking each other?1.00
01:25:12.060You know, you let women have a little control over the household money or a little bit of independence and dignity in the public sphere.0.99
01:25:21.600And suddenly, you know, everything's on fire.
01:25:33.560Yeah, there's a very small, largely, like, reformist, incrementalist, liberal feminist movement that's emerging around, like, D.C. and, like, democratic right politicos.
01:25:44.560So, like, women, Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have met at parties and work events who would have annoyed him, right?
01:25:53.540And the reason I bring this up is because I think in this way it is really already a backlash text, right?
01:25:58.840Like so much of disinvestment, neoliberalism, and sort of de-industrialization was kind of done to African-Americans and in African-American areas first and then happened to everyone else, right?
01:26:13.140And usually their suffering from it was then relentlessly personalized and moralized.
01:26:18.620Like, well, like it's their fault, right?
01:26:20.700And then suddenly it happens to everyone else and like, oh, no, this is a social problem, right?
01:26:24.520Like, it's like, no, it's always been a social problem.
01:26:26.540In some way, Moynihan, I think, is an early pioneer of that kind of theoretical move.
01:26:30.740All the freaking out about divorces out of wedlock birth stuff that people will do about the sexual revolution is in the future.0.60
01:26:38.320But he's trying it kind of out on African-Americans.0.76
01:26:41.300They're guinea pigs for, like, the backlash politics of the future.
01:26:44.360Exactly. Which will then be transferred to white women, to, you know, Latino women and Asian women, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Like it becomes, this is the place where you try out your backlash politics first because, you know, people be racist and, and you can workshop it there before you apply it to everyone.1.00
01:27:01.400Yeah. You know, like the notion of taking a marginalized community off in the black community. I don't want to like draw too close a parallel because I think these bigotries function differently, but I do see a lot of anti-trans stuff as being like, oh, clearly you're auditioning to say this about cis women, but you're saying it about trans people first, or you're making this argument that applies to cis women in an argument about like whether you're going to let this fucking 16 year old play volleyball.
01:27:28.480And that has a much broader implication.
01:27:32.680Exactly. You're exactly right to say that, like, you know, it's not the same oppression, but like the move.
01:27:45.700Something I've learned about from writing about it for quite some time is that it's got a few chess moves that it does over and over and over again.
01:27:54.200Like Lucy pulling the football, it just always works somehow.
01:27:58.480And you can't really build up cultural tolerance to it because it's just too diffuse.
01:28:18.320It just kind of like, it tries to stall things.
01:28:20.740I mean, it does in the end also go back, but it won't admit that, right?
01:28:24.060It's not like, I want to do this thing again.
01:28:26.000It's kind of saying it's sort of not honest about its own temporality.
01:28:30.300And I think that's what makes it so deeply corrosive to, like, a society to, like, no longer be able to tell when it's moving ahead.
01:28:36.600Like, say what you will about Moynihan, like, he did have some sense of, like, what he thought ought to happen next and what wasn't happening, right?
01:28:43.660Like, I think he and I would be shouting at each other about the details of this until the cows came home.
01:28:49.420But, you know, like, the Johnson administration still had a kind of sense of, like, well, obviously, like, when he's saying, like, elimination of poverty.
01:28:56.000Like, who would say that today, right?
01:28:57.400He's just, like, confident, like, yeah, that's what the president wants to do, so let's do it.
01:29:01.020We're putting a man on the moon and we're limiting poverty.
01:29:06.300There's an idea of, like, what progress will look like.
01:29:08.180But he's already in this kind of almost tragic way, sort of seeding the kind of backlash temporality that will undo all of that.
01:29:15.040Yeah, the backlash is, it claims that it's trying to prevent a bad future, right?
01:29:21.320It always intervenes before that future has even like been articulated, right? Like we conceive of backlashes as coming later in time from the social movement that provokes them when in fact they tend to emerge like near simultaneously, right?
01:29:35.260Yeah. And it sort of can evoke a alternative way of life with grounding in an imagined past.
01:29:45.520Exactly. That is better. But in what it actually does is sort of like warp something for a different, worse future.
01:29:51.640Exactly. The first article about whether Me Too had maybe gone too far happened like a week after the first article that used Me Too.
01:29:58.700Harvey Weinstein. Yeah. Yeah. And it was about preventing further disclosure.
01:30:02.420Oh, actually, the first, no, the first article about whether Me Too had gone too far happened before it was called Me Too.
01:30:28.560So what does he say that the future should look like?
01:30:31.540I feel like the Moynihan report is like a lot of nonfiction writing and then at the end they have
01:30:36.960to have a proposal for the future beyond just diagnosing the problem they have to have a
01:30:41.460prescription and then this is always the weakest part of the book they're like it's like always
01:30:45.500like oh we must imagine differently and they make that into like five or eight thousand words and
01:30:53.520you're like wow you really had no idea what to say here yeah but does Moynihan have anything to say
01:30:57.920He does. I found this part extremely confusing. So maybe I'll just read you a few.
01:31:02.740Because he doesn't know his argument. Sorry.
01:31:05.240So he basically says, quote, here's where the true injury has occurred. So in the family structure, basically, unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come too little. Right.
01:31:16.500OK, so we need to fix the black family, according to his metrics, in order to uplift black people more broadly. That's his idea. OK, so what does he propose we do?
01:31:27.540Aha, glad you asked. Quote, in a word, a national effort towards the problems of Black Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.
01:31:36.440Okay, but like how? He's like, no, this needs our attention. We must fix the problem by giving it our attention. It's just like, let's get some content, buddy.0.97
01:31:45.060So Moynihan quotes the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, quote, the disorganized families have failed to provide for their emotional needs and have not provided the discipline and habits which are necessary for personality development.
01:32:06.200Quote, since the widespread family disorganization among black people has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in family life required by American society, the mitigation of this problem must await those changes in black and American society, which will enable the black father to play the role required of him.0.82
01:32:24.100Oh, my God. So it's just like restore the hierarchical gender order of the private sphere. It's just man on top of woman. That's it.0.90
01:32:36.200How would you even affect that? How would you be able to measure when you had achieved it? Like, give me an actionable step for your misogynist little fantasy about black women. Like, you're not even like saying what you want to do.
01:32:47.020It sounds so nuts, right? Because he's kind of saying there's definitely a reading here that says we shouldn't do welfare until they fix their shit, right?0.99
01:32:56.680But if they fix their shit, they won't need welfare.1.00
01:32:58.960Yeah, like it's like, what the fuck is even happening? Like, are you just rolling back the war on poverty or what's the plan here?1.00
01:33:05.180Like, I don't think that's ultimately what he's arguing, but like you can see why, you know, stalwarts of like small governments have liked this.0.94
01:33:12.720Because it really does sound like he's saying, just pump the brakes on all the do-gooder shit until there's a culture of poverty here.0.96
01:36:08.960This is ambiguous in exactly the way that America has been lying to itself
01:36:12.460about what it's doing about racial inequality for going on since 1964, basically.
01:36:18.420And that is, to me, the most deleterious thing about this, right?
01:36:22.800Like the racism, whatever, he's 1965, he's a white guy,
01:36:25.440there's going to be some racism in there.
01:36:26.520The scary part is how it's not just straightforwardly neoconservative.
01:36:31.300It knows exactly how to speak the language of liberalism and of concern and of penance for, you know, racialized plunder, for racialized violence, for racial terrorism.
01:36:42.680And yet the solutions it comes to are ones that Ronald Reagan could look at and be like, see, we're doing all that, namely nothing.
01:37:00.660Adrienne, thank you so much for this wonderful discussion. I learned a lot. I think our listeners will, too. So now the next time you hear the words Moynihan Report, you'll be armed and dangerous and ready to argue. And the next time you're at Penn Station, you'll have another reason to be mad. Like, yet another.
01:37:22.360If you listen all the way through, you should rate and review us on iTunes and subscribe to our Patreon and support us and love us because we love you.