Joan Walsh: When White People Lack “Bourgeois Values”

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large.

...Now Republicans are taking their judgments about and disapproval of African-American marriage and family patterns and applying them to white people, too. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared a “crisis” in the “Negro family” because “nearly one-quarter of Negro births are now illegitimate,” he wrote. Today the birthrate to white single mothers is even higher – and it’s climbed particularly sharply for white women who dropped out of high school, as well as those who didn’t go to college. Interestingly, rates of divorce and single-motherhood are lowest among the affluent and well educated, and that’s true in black as well as white families....

All most people remember about the infamous “Moynihan report,” if they remember it at all, is that it blamed a “tangle of pathology” for the troubles of poor black families headed by single mothers. Moynihan’s analysis said more than that. He blamed African-American poverty on slavery, Jim Crow and enduring racism — in the North and South, de facto and de jure. He showed how historic and persistent black male unemployment and underemployment contributed to the problems of divorce and single parenthood. He also believed welfare for single mothers made the problem worse, and at a time when liberals advocated to expand welfare programs and advance welfare rights, this made Moynihan a conservative, whose ideas about the black family were immediately attacked as “blaming the victim.”

That had always been my take on Moynihan, until I read his entire report, as well as the memo he wrote to President Lyndon Johnson to sell it, just last year. Both have their moments of what we’d call racial insensitivity or ignorance today. But overall, they were a call to address the lasting economic effects of slavery and discrimination that would not be ameliorated by lifting restrictions on voting rights or integrating lunch counters. And if Moynihan thought he could opine freely (some would say offensively) about the troubles of black families, it was because there was little he said in the report that he hadn’t said of his own people, Irish Catholics.

Raised in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen by his mother, after his father abandoned the family, he had seen a lot of what he identified in poor black families in his own community. When he agreed to write the Irish Catholic chapter in “Beyond the Melting Pot,” the 1963 book on race and ethnicity he co-authored with Nathan Glazer, he confessed to Glazer that “for a good while I was interested in the subject only as it provided an explanation for the things that were wrong with the way I was brought up.”  And in his report on the black family, he compared their troubles, especially in Northern cities, to those experienced by the rural Irish exiled to urban America 100 years earlier: “It was this abrupt transition that produced the wild Irish slums of the 19thCentury Northeast. Drunkenness, crime, corruption, discrimination, family disorganization, juvenile delinquency were the routine of that era,” Moynihan observed.