Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Timesseries “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basictruths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty islargely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapseof the nuclear family in the inner city.
By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent ofblack children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far morelikely than married mothers to be poor, even after apost-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likelyto pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try tododge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that singlemotherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyonefrom the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is alargely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vastmajority of higher-income women wait to have their children until theyare married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separateand unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken,and far too often African-American.
So why does the Times, like so many who rail againstinequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty andsingle-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue theconfrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention inpolite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when aresounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civilrights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department ofLabor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled“The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic reportprompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits tomake a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decisionabout how to frame the national discussion about poverty.
To go back to the political and socialmoment before the battle broke out over the Moynihan report is toreturn to a time before the country’s discussion of black poverty hadhardened into fixed orthodoxies—before phrases like “blaming thevictim,” “self-esteem,” “out-of-wedlock childbearing” (the term at thetime was “illegitimacy”), and even “teen pregnancy” had become current.While solving the black poverty problem seemed an immense politicalchallenge, as a conceptual matter it didn’t seem like rocket science.Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legalbarriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance,just as poor immigrants had.