By Scapegoating the Black Family — The Psycho-Social Problems of Whites Ignored: The White Family — A Case for National Action

The Cleaver Family: From the TV show, "Leave it to Beaver" (circa
1960). The show depicted what was considered the epitome of the
"perfect American family." (Photo from Wikipedia Commons)

By Sikivu Hutchinson
In the recent swirl of epic violence, mayhem and gun-besotted hysteria that has become the lifeblood of corporate media, no one is asking about the problem of white families.

In 1965, then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a landmark study on the “problem” of the black family. It was the year of the Watts Rebellion and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, two events that shook the core of American apartheid. Drawing from the work of black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, Moynihan argued that the structure of black families contributed to the underdevelopment of black communities.

According to Moynihan, “The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening. The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure.” Perhaps more than any other public policy paper, the Moynihan Report, titled “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” indelibly framed the black family as a permanent category of crisis and an object of investigation. For Moynihan, the stabilization of black families was a matter of national importance because their abnormality threatened to undermine U.S. domestic stability.

True to the national stereotype, black women’s outsized role in black families was the culprit. For Moynihan black families exhibited “a tangle of pathology” due to a topsy turvy “matriarchal” structure which emasculated black men by robbing them of their “natural” head of household role. Put bluntly, “Negro children without fathers flounder and fail.” As a result, unemployment, crime, violence, poverty, babies having babies and low education levels all stemmed from the fundamentally aberrant nature of black families. In Moynihan’s world, black dysfunctionality and the insidious effects of chronic poverty could be remedied by allowing blacks equal access to “normal” family structures—i.e., straight, white, middle class and nuclear; the tribe of Dick, Jane, Father, Mother, and Spot which has harbored many of America’s white mass murderers.

Post-Moynihan, the normalcy of the white family, as an invisible standard of racial, gender and national identity, was implicitly understood within the context of the pathological black family. The ghost of the Moynihan Report hovers over every discussion of violent “pathological” out of control black youth. From Cosby, to Obama, to Paul Ryan, to Bill O’Riley, the supposedly criminal inclinations of black youth elicit shrill pro forma condemnations of black parenting, single mothers and absentee fathers.

Predictably, the recent rash of school and public shootings largely committed by white youth of the Millennial generation have not led to any mass appraisal of the state of white families. While the parade of angry “disaffected” white male shooters and mass murderers increases weekly, public policy mavens have not convened to diagnose the failings and afflictions of the white family. In the aftermath of each act of epic carnage, white parents have been called on to reflect on the behavior of their children, often expressing bewilderment over the motivations for Johnny’s rampage while pointing the finger at mental illness, wayward peers or violent video games.

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