The Mismeasure of Minds by Staub Michael E.;

Author:Staub, Michael E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Poverty, Self-Indulgence, and Public Policy

The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, written by political scientist (and assistant secretary of labor) Daniel Patrick Moynihan and published by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Policy Planning and Research in 1965, likely still remains best remembered—and reviled—for making an argument that the African American community suffered from a “tangle of pathology.” Chief among these pathologies, or so Moynihan held, was that the black family “has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.”48 Intended to call attention to the long-term damages caused by white racism, the Moynihan Report achieved an opposite effect, quickly becoming “the focal point for one of the more vociferous public debates about policy in the history of the nation,” while Moynihan himself “was pilloried as a racist and the foremost neoconservative on matters of race.”49 The backlash against the Moynihan Report was sustained and intensely hostile.50 As historian Ellen Herman observed, civil rights activists and their supporters assailed Moynihan for implying that the problems that afflicted the African American family “were primarily personal and psychological” instead of acknowledging how “racial oppression produced social pathology rather than vice versa.” Thus, or so his critics asserted, what Moynihan suggested was that “institutional racism and discrimination could be deemphasized or even eliminated as a terrain of governmental action.”51 The Moynihan Report represented, psychologist and political activist William Ryan famously declared in 1971, a classic case of “blaming the victim.”52 This characterization has largely stuck to the Moynihan Report for more than half a century.53

At the same time, the Moynihan Report brought little that was new to light in its explanations for the root causes of African American poverty. Rather, what the Moynihan Report did was cull analyses from several well-regarded expert texts in the behavioral and social sciences. For instance, its discussions of black family life made repeated references to A Profile of the Negro American by social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew.54 And psychological research informed the report in at least one additional and important respect.

This had to do with the psychological roots of juvenile crime and delinquency. Citing several of Mischel’s early experiments, the Moynihan Report accepted as simple fact that an individual’s ability to defer gratification correlated with that individual’s family structure. Children in “fatherless homes” sought out “immediate gratification of their desires,” and those youth (in their “hunger for immediate gratification”) were, in turn, “more prone to delinquency, along with other less social behavior.” Turning back to the work of Pettigrew, the report added that boys from “high delinquency neighborhoods” raised in “stable, intact families” were able to resist—and rise above—the misfortune of their surroundings.55 Although it has been largely unnoticed in the voluminous scholarship on the Moynihan Report, the report thus promoted a hypothesis that gratification delay enabled persons to advance socioeconomically, while self-indulgence condemned persons to a life replete with personal problems and squandered opportunities.

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