Most people my age can remember the old Black face Vaudville /minstrel shows(1900 to as late as 1981) our parents used to tell us about and to see this on the TV
we had no idea what it meant or that it was a very racist time when(this also was going on in Europe during the same time and it was very popular there) this was going on,all we knew was that the people playing
in the show were supposed to be white but their faces were colored black to represent black people at that time because
they refused to have us playing our self in the show because to them that would be defeating the purpose and that was to make fun of black people and our color.
At that time they knew how this made us feel but they didn’t care because they were in charge and ruled us with an iron fist,much like they did us on a daily basis when you live during the time of jim crow and
slavery.This era was a hard time for us(1876 to 1965)and we had no say period.i just wanted to say that an actor who would sign on to do something like this at this particular time shows me that they didn’t care and don’t care about what we think nor do they think anything can or could
be done about it BUT in order to do it they had to find an actor who wouldn’t bring attention to the industry and they a person they could blame it on not to mention kick to the curb if it got to heavy to deal with
so at that time there was an actor who fit the profile(Robert Downey Jr)he was in and out of rehab and jail for the past 10 years and they thought he fit the script perfect because he had been given so many chances
till he created a scapegoat for them if they needed and for this particular film they needed it.I really don’t think he understood the importance of this role in how it furthered the idea and ideology of Racism and how it gave the green light to other overt or covert projects of this nature to be supported and created in an effort to bring back those old ways of thinking, which by the way, never left but it just became to expensive and bad for business in most of their eyes.Let me give you if you had not seen the film a little back drop to what it is about:Through a series of freak occurrences, a group of actors shooting a big-budget war movie are forced to become the soldiers they are portraying.
Here is the story line:A film crew is in Southeast Asia filming a Vietnam-war memoir. It’s early in the shooting, but they’re already behind schedule and over budget. On the day an accident befalls the novice director, the cast and crew are attacked by a gang of poppy-growing local drug dealers, except the cast and crew don’t realize these aren’t actors who are stalking them. The thugs kidnap Tugg Speedman, an actor whose star seems on the decline, and it’s up to the rest of the ragtag team to band together long enough to attempt his rescue. But will Tugg want to leave? Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>
The movie was released in August 13 2008,with an R rating,the budget was 92,000,000dlrs it also was filmed in Kaua’i Hawaii,
Opening Weekend:
$25,812,796 (USA) (17 August 2008) (3319 Screens)
Gross:
$110,416,702 (USA) (9 November 2008)
The total gross world wide to include Russia,Phillipines,UK and US
is 283,455,752million dlrs.
So clearly there is a market for films like this but at what cost to us because they can care less so we have to get off our butts and educate our selves and our kids to be mind full of stuff like this and don’t support it.
racism is clearly prevalent today and it also is very OVERT in the minds of other people looking to discriminate against us
and no one is going to care about you if you don’t care about yourself,this is why You need to Know!
      

12:57 a.m. EST, January 17, 2012
RUCKERSVILLE, Virginia — A 5-year-old is in police custody after allegedly stabbing three people.

Deputies were called to a mobile home park on Shady Grove Road in Ruckersville around 3:25 p.m. for a reported stabbing, Greene County Sheriff Steve Smith said.

Riverside   Neighbors say it stemmed from an altercation over a juice box.

Sheriff Smith says the child stabbed two other children and an adult with “an edged object.”

The victims were all taken to the University of Virginia Medical Center with non-life threatening injuries.

“I’ve heard of juveniles throwing temper tantrums, but I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” Sheriff Smith tells CBS 19.

At least one victim is related to the child, but authorities have not revealed which one or the nature of that relationship.

Smith says the 5-year-old is currently in police custody and is being evaluated.

Wednesday, December 14,2005 Black skin isthick and lush, sensuous to the touch, like satin and velvet made flesh. There’s only one patch of skin on a white man’s body that remotely compares to nearly every inch of a black man’s skin. The first time I caressed black skin, it felt like a luxury I shouldn’t be able to afford. I craved it more strongly than Carrie Bradshaw craved Manolo Blahnik shoes. That phrase, “Once you go black, you never go back” is all about the feeling of the skin.

And I had the socially acceptable explanation for my craving. I used that paucity-of-available-white-partners rationale to explain my relationships with black men for several years. A white woman past forty is often passed over by her white-male contemporaries. She goes younger or ethnic or foreign-born or down the socioeconomic scale or darker or she spends lonely nights at home with her cats. Black men are happy to get the babe they couldn’t have when she was twentysomething and fertile. The laws of the marketplace do prevail. It’s not me, it’s themthem being the white guys who weren’t after me anymore, or so I claimed.

That’s a lie. The truth is, I attract about the same percentage of available white men my age (and far younger!) now as I did when I was thirtyand that’s not including the unavailable white men who want to play around anyway.

Enough white men want me that I was hardly facing enforced celibacy, but I don’t want them.

I want black men. They want me. We look at one another and exchange a visible frisson of sexual energy in the lingering glances. And our attraction is based first on race. We are not those couples who “happen to fall in love” with someone of a different race or more purposefully come together but out of some greater sense of interracial understanding and respect. Not as politically-correct men and women do we seek one another out. The Internet has made it a lot easier for us to find each other now. Men advertise: ebony seeks ivory. Women write: seeking tall, dark, and handsome. Very dark. We are not the same people who say: Race is not important. It is important to us. We have race-specific desires.

Even in a time when nearly 40 percent of single Americans have dated outside their race, that deliberate seeking of the specific other makes some people, especially black women, damned mad.

We are what they denigrate and castigate: white women and black men who choose one another because of our racial differences. They resent our taking their men. Black men are two and a half times more likely to marry a white woman than a black woman is to marry a white man. Black women can point to that statistic in justifying their wrath. But in truth, black sisters, we’re after the sex, not the ringand these guys aren’t the marrying kind anyway.

Yes, the sex!

The woman who goes after black men is a variant of sex journalist Susie Bright’s “white bitch in heat,” a woman who puts sex first even though women aren’t supposed to do that. According to one school of thought, white women turn to black men when their sex drives kick into higher gear and their social inhibitions recede into the rearview mirror. It’s a “yes, baby, now I’m ready for you” reaction.

When we get to the “yes, baby” place, they know it, and they are ready and waiting for us. Black men have more energy, style and edge than white men. They know how to flirt, a nearly lost art among the rest of us. A black man is so damned sexy because he knows how to make a woman feel sexy.

Black men have something white guys don’t have anymore: confidence in their masculinity, their sexuality. They clearly know they’re men. White men appear to be waiting for the latest sociological research study to let them know if they are men or not. Yet black men are gentlemen, something else white men no longer are. They make me feel like a woman, both respected and desired. I can let go of my inhibitions, my need to control, when I am with them. How many white men can treat a woman like a lady and ravish her too?

I often felt in my White Period that only during heated sex does that little layer of air bubbles between me and the world pop and disappear, leaving me open to intimate connection. It takes a lot of friction for two white people to get that close. These black men, so alive with erotic electricity, cut through the bubbles with a touch, a caress, a kissand they free meand I can truly touch them. I am like a pampered passenger in a Porsche with an expert driver at the wheel. I know I could suggest a route change, but I never really want to do that. On the other hand, the last time I had sex with a white man, we slogged along a bumpy road in a really old VW, the driver like the typical bumbling tv husband who would neither ask for nor accept the directions he badly needed.

My current lover, a handsome businessman, seduced me via eye contact at a neighborhood bar while I was eating burgers with a friend. Without saying a word, he paid the compliments, asked the questions with his expressive eyes. He didn’t move over to sit beside me and ask if he could buy me a drink until he knew the time was right. Both soft-spoken and assertive, he has impeccable manners and charm. I was kissing him in a cab 30 minutes after that drink.

On another night in that same bar, a different black man, an artist, knelt and kissed my knees.

I am sure there must be some black men who aren’t good in bed. Personally, I have not experienced one who isn’t. (True, I am not dating down the socioeconomic ladder, but I didn’t do that when I dated white either, so the racial comparisons seem valid and fair.) They look better than white men, they touch and kiss and make love better than white men. Statistically, their penises are only a fraction of an inch bigger on average, but they seem bigger and harder.

White men over 40 have lost their waistlines and their zest for lifeif they ever had it. They carry resentments, grudges and extra pounds in their basketball bellies. Perhaps a good part of that bloat is unhappiness. Even the thin ones look flabby somehow and deeply aggrieved. They nurse the smallest perceived slight longer than their double shots of Scotch. Surely our culture as much as biology turns them into softer, spongier, less-interesting versions of their youthful selves just at the point where women and black men and other minorities are emerging strong. Society overvalues the white man, leaving him angry and bitter when he realizes, around age 40, that he’s not all that.

With the exception of some Italians, white men don’t turn me on anymore.

That admission puts me in the same category as the older man only interested primarily or exclusively in young women. While women my age scowl and frown at these aging, Upper West Side Boomers pushing strollers as the hand of the thin, blonde wife 20 years their junior rests lightly on their arm, I feel a kinship with the old goats. We are the same, me and that bald white guy, drawn to the exotic other, not caring that the object of our desire has no childhood memory of a Kennedy assassination or a typical WASP Sunday dinner of over-roasted beef, lumpy mashed potatoes and soggy vegetables.

Analyze the roots of attractions all you wantlike scientists have doneand you won’t come up with a perfect explanation for why we crave what we do. Desire rises from our depths and is gloriously oblivious to the good opinion of others. Yet until recently, I pretended that my lust was an equal-opportunity craving, because that seemed like the right thing to do.

Halfway through the first glass of wine in my last date with a white man, I realized that little clouds of sadness and self-pity were regularly fluffing off his psyche like the dust clouds kicked up by that dirt-smudged “Peanuts” character as he walks through Charlie Brown’s life. This guy was at least mildly depressed, and I wanted to tell him to exercise, lose weight, trim the combover and get interested in something outside yourself. I would have walked out on him immediately, but he seemed to expect that. I couldn’t deliver the blow to his ego proffered like the naked neck of a martyr to the ax. My Southern cousins would describe his general demeanor as a “hangdog air.” Into the second glass of wine and glancing longingly at the exit, I wanted to hang that dog myself when he mentioned that his face was flushedI hadn’t noticedbecause he’d taken a Viagra “just in case.”

What did he think would entice me more: That he assumed sex was probable because I’m a sex journalistor that he would need chemical help if sex did occur?

I cannot even imagine a black man bungling an attempted seduction in such a sad way.

That was my last token white guy. I recently came out of my racial-preference closet and told my friends, “I love black men. I’m not attracted to white men over 40, and I’m not dating them anymore. Really, it’s not them, it’s me.

Nobody was surprised.

Hypertension is the most common cardiovascular disease.  It doesn’t exclude any gender, race or age group. However, African-Americans are at higher risk for this serious disease than any other race or ethnic group. African- Americans are developing hypertension at younger ages than other groups in the United States.

American Airlines is a proud supporter of Komen & Circle of Promise

High rates of high blood pressure in African-Americans may be due to the genetic make-up of people of African descent. One alarming fact about having hypertension is there are no warning signs or symptoms. Hypertension- (also known as high blood pressure) can lead to stroke, heart attack and death.  Many individuals discover they have this “silent killer” through a routine visit with their physician.  Thankfully, there are options that people with hypertension can choose and commit to lowering their hypertension to live a healthier life.

Simple changes to your diet are an easy way to start lowering your hypertension. Here are four foods that can be added to your daily menu for beneficial results for a healthier you.

bananas

Bananas- They are high in potassium and loaded with fiber, vitamins and minerals.

spinachSpinach- Dark green vegetables are another food that is full of magnesium and contains folate which is an important mineral to help lower hypertension. If you’re not a fan of spinach, Collard greens can be substituted.

garlic

Garlic- This is a multi-use item that can be added to your meat and vegetables or taken raw. Although people are concerned with the odor and having bad breath, eating the raw cloves daily is the best and direct way to intake for maximum results.

tomatoes

Tomatoes are also high and rich in potassium. They give a double dose of positive effects for your liver and kidneys.

Applying these popular refrigerator items into your menu will definitely help to lowering your hypertension and have added results for your body and soul.

Well….I can’t speak for anybody else but i would not have done it under any circumstances,most people don’t understand that home ownership is the easiest and most direct rout to wealth,maybe if current home owners would teach at least one person that is renting to shoot for ownership maybe things like this wouldn’t happen. Sungod

(LaWanda Flake/Detroit News)

A mother living in Detroit has traded in her four-bedroom home for a 2006 minivan.

LaWanda Flake, a 36-year-old, disabled mother of six traded in her four-bedroom, three-bath house, located in one of the city’s better neighborhoods and valued at $96,000 for a 2006 Chevrolet Uplander with 85,000 miles, valued at between $5000 and $8,500.

“I had a lot of good offers, some from out of state. It turned out I took one of the first offers I got because I felt like it helped us both,” Flake told the Detroit News. “They needed the house more than anyone I spoke with. They kept telling me it was a blessing to them. I really feel like I made a good decision.”

Flake said she posted the house offer on Craigslist because she needed a new car in order to get her children to school on time because the city’s bus system was proving unreliable. Flake has an irregularly updated Twitter account, where you can see some of her complaints about the bus system.

Now, there are a couple of details that make this story far less crazy than it sounds at first. Number one, Flake and her six children are not living in the minivan. They’ve relocated to a three-bedroom home nearby that she was able to purchase on a $4,000 land contract.

And even though the house was once home to Diana Ross and the Supremes, Flake purchased it last year at a foreclosure sale for $3,600, not its near six-figure retail value. The house reportedly has several thousand dollars worth of necessary repairs waiting for the new owners, including a new furnace and water heater.

A $96k home traded for minivan with $85k miles

The family who purchased Flake’s home has decided to stay anonymous for now. Flake agreed to not mention their names in the story, but she did note that she received several more lucrative offers for her home, including a Montana couple who offered Flake her choice of one of their four vehicles. And a man who recently moved back to Detroit from Las Vegas offered in trade his 1996 Bentley Brooklands luxury sedan, valued at about $20,000. A third trade offer was for a 1996 Corvette.

“I said, Oh wow! What am I going to do with a Corvette? I can’t do anything practical with a Corvette,” Flake said.

Of course, with the current state of property values in Detroit, it sounds like Flake could have traded in one of those cars for another two or three houses.

By Chris Isidore @CNNMoney

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received the biggest federal bailout of the financial crisis. And nearly $100 million of those tax dollars went to lucrative pay packages for top executives, filings show.

The top five executives at Fannie Mae received $33.3 million in 2009 and 2010, while the top five at Freddie Mac received $28.1 million. And each company has set pay targets of as much as $17 million for its top managers for 2011.

That’s a total of $95.4 million, which will essentially be coming from taxpayers, who have been keeping the mortgage finance giants alive with regular quarterly cash infusions since the Federal Home Finance Agency (FHFA) took control of the companies in September 2008.

Fannie CEO Michael Williams and Freddie CEO Charles Halderman, each received about $5.5 million in pay for last year, and they could receive more when their final deferred compensation for 2010 is set. All the executives receive a significant portion of their pay in the year or years after they earn it.

The CEOs’ pay targets for 2011 are about $6 million a piece, though Halderman might not get much of that money since he’s announced plans to leave Freddie sometime in 2012. He must still be at the company in order to receive the deferred compensation. His base pay for 2011 is $900,000, with most of the rest of his compensation coming in deferred payments.

The salary filings were all made by the companies in early 2011, but received relatively little attention until a recent report by Politico, the political news Web site, which highlighted about $12.8 million in bonuses the executives received for last year.

That published report sparked a political firestorm on Capitol Hill that could lead to legislation to put strict limits on pay at the two firms. But it only told part of the story. The full extent of salary, deferred pay and bonuses are only found in the filings.

Rep. Spencer Bachus, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has scheduled a vote in his committee Tuesday on his own legislation that would suspend the compensation packages of top executives at the firms.

“The fact that the top executives of these failed companies are receiving multi-million dollar pay packages, plus millions more in bonuses, is an added insult to the taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill,” Bachus said in a statement announcing plans to hold the vote.

The Democrat-controlled Senate Banking Committee also plans to hold a hearing on the matter on Tuesday. Additionally, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is set to call Edward DeMarco, the acting director of FHFA, and the CEOs of the two firms, to a hearing on the pay packages on Wednesday.

Sixty senators from both parties have already sent a letter to DeMarco asking that he change the compensation policy of the two companies. FHFA has final say on pay at the two companies.

“The idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which rely on taxpayer funding to stay afloat, must offer excessive bonuses to its executives to attract effective management strains credulity,” the letter said.

DeMarco responded to the senators saying that the executives who were running the companies in 2008 when the problems occurred have left without any golden parachutes, and that effective management is needed to make sure that taxpayer losses at the firms do not rise and the companies continue to function. He said current executive pay at the firm is about 40% less than before the bailouts.

“I need to ensure that the companies have people with the skills needed to manage the credit and interest rate risks of $5 trillion worth of mortgage assets and $1 trillion of annual new business that the American taxpayer is supporting,” he wrote.

Spokespeople for Fannie and Freddie declined to comment ahead of the hearings.

The latest cost estimate from FHFA is that the two bailouts will end up with a net cost to taxpayers of about $124 billion through 2014, though that figure could rise as high as $193 billion. Even the lower cost estimate will make it the most expensive bailout of the financial crisis — far more costly than bailing out the nation’s banks or automakers.

The CEOs and the other top executives at Fannie and Freddie get all their pay in cash, and none of it in company stock , which is generally deemed worthless.

The company filings that disclosed the pay back in February also defended the pay based on the work they had done.

Fannie’s filing said that under Williams’ leadership, the company “made solid progress in managing credit losses on its pre-2009 book of business, acquired a 2010 book of business with a strong credit profile that is expected to be profitable, and achieved substantial progress in making the company more operationally disciplined and efficient.

Sola Odunfa: Saluting soldiers
‘Sodom and Gomorrah’
Fight for the dead
Return to Harare

In our series of viewpoints from African journalists, former BBC Focus on Africa deputy editor and Ghanaian government minister Elizabeth Ohene recalls meeting The Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh, who was re-elected last week, after he seized power in a coup in 1994.

As I followed the election news coming out of The Gambia last week, my mind invariably went down memory lane.

It came as no surprise that President Yahya Jammeh was declared winner with 72% of the vote, giving him a fourth five-year term.

Seventeen years ago when Mr Jammeh – then aged 29 – staged a coup that overthrew The Gambia’s first President Sir Dawda Jawara, I went to report from the country and I met the fresh-faced young man who sounded like all the other young military men in Africa at the time.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

Seventeen years ago he hadn’t yet acquired all the titles that are now obligatory adjuncts to his name but he already certainly had illusions of grandeur”

Mr Jammeh’s inspiration and role-models were Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, Valentine Strasser of Sierra Leone and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

I had a memorable interview with him then and again in 1996 when he was under intense diplomatic pressure to return the country to constitutional rule.

I remember he tried to sound confident and even authoritative but every once in a while his nerves failed him.

And last week, when BBC Focus on Africa’s Umaru Fofana asked him if he would accept defeat if he lost, Mr Jammeh asked if he looked like a loser, to applause from the crowd around him.

Back in 1996, a few of the friends that he started out with had already fallen out with him and I took a deep breath when someone in the capital, Banjul, told me I should be careful and not think that I was protected by my BBC badge.
‘Murders’

A quote from my old notebook reads: “If he thinks you are threatening his position, you will disappear.”

I don’t remember what I made of that warning but I recall being more amused than frightened by Mr Jammeh’s antics.
The post-independence leaders of The Gambia and Guinea, Sir Dawda Jawara (r) and Sekou Toure (R), in this file photo Post-independence leader Dawda Jawara (l) was toppled by Yahya Jammeh

Fast forward to the year 2005, when a group of 44 hapless Ghanaians and nine other West Africans were to experience what happens when the president of The Gambia is perceived to be under threat.

The security forces arrested and killed them, suspecting they were mercenaries when they were, in fact, migrants trying to make their way to Europe.

Mr Jammeh eventually paid $500,000 to Ghana in compensation for those murders.

Seventeen years ago he hadn’t yet acquired all the titles that are now obligatory adjuncts to his name but he already certainly had illusions of grandeur.
Continue reading the main story
President Yahya Jammeh

Overthrew The Gambia’s first president as a 29-year-old army lieutenant in 1994
Has won four widely criticised elections
Accused of not tolerating opposition or independent journalists
Claims he can cure Aids and infertility with herbal concoctions
Warned in 2008 that gay people would be beheaded
Eight men sentenced to death last year after being accused of plotting to overthrow him

You had to be blind not to see that he would be better for The Gambia than Mr Jawara was, Mr Jammeh told me.

His belief that The Gambia has achieved more during his 17 years in office then during 400 years of British rule must have occurred to him later.

When I heard Umaru’s interview with him, he came across as unabashed, unapologetic and indeed quite proud to say that The Gambia was “hell for journalists” – even in those early days journalists were not his favourite people and some learnt the hard way not to upset the young leader.

The bit I couldn’t have predicted was Jammeh the healer. Not only did he announce in 2007 that he had discovered a herbal cure for HIV/Aids, he now has a cure for infertility as well.

The government’s official website carries reports of barren women being kept in villages for the president’s wonder cure.

Aged 46 and with no apparent likelihood of Gambians being tempted to lose their marbles at polling booths, the chances are His Excellency Sheikh, Professor, Alhaji, Doctor Yahya AJJ Jammeh will be around for a long time as President and Commander in Chief of the Republic of The Gambia.

The Arab Spring might find it difficult to cross the Sahara desert.

In West Africa, our weather pattern does not include spring – we have only dry and rainy seasons.

I only wish I had the opportunity to interview him again. I suspect he won’t talk to me now.

By Reza Sayah,

Woman suspected of cooking husband

Islamabad (CNN) — A Pakistani woman is being held on suspicion of killing her husband, cutting him up and trying to cook the pieces, Karachi police said Friday.

Zainab Bibi, 32, was arrested in connection with the murder Tuesday of her husband Ahmad Abbas, police said.

Her 22-year-old nephew, Zaheer Ahmed, is accused of helping Bibi stab Abbas to death and carve his body into small pieces.

Police said she wanted to cook her husband’s body parts so she could dispose of them without being caught.

Police: Wife turns husband into stew

Neighbors raised the alert when they detected a foul odor in the neighborhood, police said.

Pakistan’s domestic satellite channel ARY News spoke to Bibi in the police station where she is being held in the southern city of Karachi.

In an interview broadcast late Thursday, she claimed to have killed her husband because he wanted a physical relationship with their daughter — and said she did not regret her actions.

“I killed my husband before he dared to touch my daughter,” she told ARY News.

Journalist Nasir Habib contributed to this report.

Published September 28, 2010 | By Janie

Many say the 1965 report predicted the implosion of the black family. Sociologist Herbert Gans disagrees.

• By: The Du Bois Review

The oft-repeated tropes about the breakdown of the black family can be traced, in large part, to a 1965 Department of Labor report called The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, also known as the Moynihan Report. With then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan as the principal author, the report tied the decline of the nuclear family within the black community social pathology, increasing welfare dependency and chronic poverty. Sociologist Herbert Gans offers a critique of The Moynihan Report in the Fall 2011 issue of the Du Bois Review.

According to the abstract, “The Moynihan Report of 1965 will soon be fifty years old, and some social scientists now venerate it as a sterling application of social science data and analysis by the federal government. This author, who was directly involved in events connected with the release of the Report, does not agree; this article examines the shortcomings of the Report.”

Below is an excerpt of Gans’ analysis:

Moynihan’s initial knowledge of research about the Black community appears to have come from the work of Nathan Glazer (1963), who had begun his own discussion of the Negro family in Beyond the Melting Pot with observations on the female-headed family, illegitimacy, child abandonment, and related problems. For his observations on the harshness of American slavery, Moynihan drew from Glazer’s (1963) recently written introduction to Stanley Elkins’ Slavery. Beyond that, the Report included only brief quotations from the work of Franklin Frazier, Kenneth Clark, Thomas Pettigrew, Margaret Mead, and a few other social scientists.

In later years, some of Moynihan’s writing appeared in academic books and journals, and he came to know and work with many important social scientists. Still, in 2000 his biographer and friend, Godfrey Hodgson, wrote: “He thinks anecdotally. He thinks in narrative … He is an intellectual … but not an academic” (page 23). As quoted in Weisman (2010), Moynihan himself once wrote in the same vein, “I do not have the stamina for a professor. I can’t study like that … ” (page 12).

In any case, the Report was flawed in a number of ways. First, Moynihan could even then have been criticized for failing to look at studies of the poor Black family and community other than those by Frazier (1939) and Clark (1965). For example, he might have quoted from Drake and Cayton’s (1945) Black Metropolis which, in a few pages, offers a more comprehensive and balanced analysis of the situation of poor Black families.

Further, as an Assistant Secretary of Labor, Moynihan should have been able to obtain more recent analyses from the Black sociologists, most of them directly or indirectly connected with Howard University in Washington D.C., who were then studying and writing about the Black community.

Second, and more seriously, Moynihan apparently looked at the poor Black population with a belief system which viewed any family form that did not include a two-parent nuclear unit as unstable and pathological. Moynihan must have known or could have found out that stability and family structure were not perfectly correlated, and that a two-parent family could be unstable and a single-parent one, stable.

Moynihan was aware that jobless Black men were not good candidates for marriage but he was seemingly blind to the effects of socioeconomic class on family structure. As a result, he failed to see that poor people lacked many of the material and nonmaterial resources that make a two-parent family possible, and that for poor Blacks, the single parent family was sometimes the only solution. He also did not consider the ways in which it was adaptive and in fact provided a modicum of stability for a population living under conditions of high economic instability.

Although little research had been done on the single-parent family when Moynihan wrote the Report, Black family researchers would also have been able to tell him that single-parent families were not necessarily single-parent households, and might have included a female grandparent or other relative. In addition, unmarried mothers often had some help from the fathers of their children and were surrounded by a familial support network.

Moynihan could also have learned that the single-parent family was found in most societies in which large numbers of males were unemployed or underemployed. He must have known from his writings on the Irish that during economic crises husbands leave or are often pushed out of two-parent families. By describing a family structure that could be found in many economies suffering from male joblessness as pathological, Moynihan was in fact defining deviance up.

Moreover, Moynihan did not seem to know that the children of single mothers were considered statistically normal and socially acceptable in the poor Black community. Instead, Moynihan viewed their legal status through the lens of White mainstream respectability, and saw it as an indicator of both family instability and pathology.

Read the entire article for free in the Du Bois Review on Cambridge Journals Online:

“The Moynihan Report and its Aftermaths: A Critical Analysis“ by Herbert J. Gans
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, Volume 8, Issue 02 (2011), pp. 315-327.  Copyright © 2011 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.