 Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to this afternoon's event in the Ford School Policy Talk series Beyond Civil Rights, the Moynihan Report, and its legacy. I'm Sandra Danziger, professor of social work, research professor of public policy, and director of the Interim Steering Committee of the National Poverty Center. On behalf of our center and the poverty research community here at U of M and Dean Susan Collins of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, I want to welcome all of you here and all of you who are also participating via live web stream and Twitter. And I've been asked to say to ask you to please turn the sound off your cell phones if you haven't yet. So just about 50 years ago, in March 1965, this internal memo of 78 pages in length written from the Labor Department to the LBJ administration opened a Pandora's box and set off a firestorm that in some ways continues to this day. We'll learn a great deal this afternoon about how the Moynihan Report came about, what Moynihan's intentions were or might have been at the time, and what this report has meant for domestic social policy and the social science and social policy research community ever since. So first, I want to go briefly over our format and have and hope that you refer to your program for further details and speaker bios. Hope everyone got one of these. Our featured speaker, Daniel Geary, will go first and talk about his forthcoming book. And then our discussants will follow and our moderator will facilitate a brief dialogue between the speakers. Then just after 5pm, we'll aim to open up for questions from the audience. I'd like to remind you that if you have a question for our discussants, please write it on one of the cards passed out at the entrance and Ford School volunteers will begin collecting question cards at around 4.40. Our students, Marin, Alemu and Demar Lewis, who want to stand up, will collect your questions and ask questions. And if you're watching online, you can submit via your question, via Twitter, using the hashtag policy talks. So I'll now turn the podium over to Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Historian Joy Rodey, who will introduce the speakers. Thank you, Sandy. Thank you everyone for coming. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Daniel Geary. He's the Mark Piggott Assistant Professor of U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. And his work focuses on the intellectual and political history of the 20th century United States, particularly the mid-century United States. And we're here to hear about his new book, but I also want to recommend to you his first book, which is a wonderful biography of a very important sociologist. That book is called Radical Ambition, Sea Right Mills, The Left and American Social Thought. And today we're going to hear about his new book, forthcoming in June from the University of Pennsylvania Press. And you, as I already have, can order it ahead of time on Amazon. It's called Beyond Civil Rights, the Moynihan Report and its legacy. And it's a very sophisticated and you'll see a very welcome study of the report and its long and varied impacts on how we talk about race in America, and particularly how we talk about race and inequality in policy context. Commenting after Professor Geary's talk will be Anthony Chen, a political and historical sociologist from Northwestern University, and a former colleague here at the Ford School. And we're very pleased to have Tony back with us today. He's the author of The Fifth Freedom, Jobs, Politics and Civil Rights in the United States, which is a history of affirmative action in employment. And it's won more awards than I have time to tell you about right now. He's currently working on a study of the emergence of affirmative action in colleges in the United States. Also commenting will be Matthew Alemu, who's pursuing a joint PhD in sociology and public policy here at the University of Michigan. And he's currently conducting very important and interesting research about how disadvantaged black men understand their lives in the face of stigma and social oppression. So I'll turn it over to Professor Geary. Thank you very much for that lovely introduction. It's a pleasure to be here today. At a time when liberals and conservatives can't seem to agree on anything, they have joined together to celebrate the Moynihan Report. Written exactly 50 years ago today, or not today, but this around this time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family famously argued that the quote unstable family structure of many African-Americans as reflected in female headed families and at a wedlock burst would damage efforts to achieve full racial equality. Just last month, liberal pundit Nicholas Kristoff and conservative communist George Will both wrote comms praising Moynihan's conclusion that bolstering two-parent homes is essential to finding poverty. To be sure, Kristoff and Will draw opposite policy conclusions from the Moynihan Report. Kristoff argues for programs to bolster two-parent families while Will argues that government programs can only damage family structure. Nevertheless, both offer strikingly similar narratives of the controversy that surrounded the Moynihan Report, that it was misunderstood and that Moynihan was unfairly attacked from the left as a racist. The title of Kristoff's column in fact was When Liberals Blew It. Kristoff and Will, following in a tradition nearly as old as the report itself, misrepresent the history of the report, misrepresent the controversy over the report, and perpetuate a misguided approach to understanding, combating racial and class inequality. Remarkably, even 50 years after its publication, the Moynihan Report remains a warshack test inviting viewers to see in it what they want, as well as a litmus test reflecting deep ideological cleavages. In my talk today, I want to explain how a single document can be praised by Kristoff and Will, and indeed by President Obama and Paul Ryan, while nevertheless remaining anathema to many on the left. I will argue that the Moynihan Report controversy did not result from a misunderstanding of Moynihan's intentions, which is the most common current understanding of it, but rather it resulted from the report's own inconsistencies and its embodiment of a series of contentious assumptions about race, gender, and the role of government. These assumptions came under intense challenge in the late 1960s and 1970s. The 1965 document officially titled The Negro Family, The Case for National Action, is colloquially named after its author, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then an official in Lyndon Johnson's administration. Moynihan wrote at the dawn of a new era in American race relations. Key legislation in 1964 and 1965 had ended Jim Crow segregation, had given formal equality to African Americans, and had discredited overt arguments for white supremacy. Yet Moynihan's opening sentence warned, quote, the United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations. The crisis Moynihan wrote resulted from African American demands that went beyond civil rights to include economic equality. Moynihan was responding to civil rights leaders who had long advocated economic reforms designed to ensure a basic standard of living for all Americans. The 1963 march on Washington after all was a march for jobs and freedom. Yet Moynihan worried that achieving full racial equality would be hindered by what he viewed as the quote crumbling and, quote, deteriorating structure of many African American families. Family structure stood at the heart of what Moynihan notoriously labeled a tangle of pathology, evident in high rates of juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, and poor educational achievement among African Americans. Moynihan's thesis produced conflicting notions about how to combat racial inequality. Focus on male unemployment's destructive effects on families indicated the need for an activist state to surpass the limited anti-poverty measures enacted by Johnson during his war on poverty. In particular, Moynihan argued for full male employment and a guaranteed annual income. Moynihan later explained his strategy of appealing the family in order to win support from white Americans. This is a quote from Moynihan later on. He said, quote, by couching the issue in terms of family, white America could be brought to see the tired old issues of employment, housing, and discrimination in terms of much greater urgency than they evoke on their own. However, Moynihan undermined his case for national action by treating family pathology not simply as an effect of economic inequality, but as the primary cause of what he saw as the inability of African Americans to compete with other groups. Moynihan asserted that family structure was the, quote, fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community. He also speculated that poverty had become self-perpetuating. The situation, he wrote, may have begun to feed on itself. Well, if that were true, then African American inequality was an intractable problem that could not be effectively addressed by government action. The report's ambiguity proved useful for Moynihan, who sought a claim across the political spectrum, and for the Johnson administration, which adopted the civil rights movement's rhetoric about economic equality that failed to endorse the necessary measures such as the $100 billion budget advocated by civil rights leaders. The report's central inconsistency, whether family instability was a symptom of broader inequality or its primary cause, also explains why for five decades it has been cited by liberals favoring national action as well as by conservatives promoting racial self-help alone. As the report was released in August 1965, it won defenders as ideologically diverse as Martin Luther King and William Buckley. The report's ambiguity suggests that the controversy over it cannot be understood, as many scholars today argue, as a simple case of, quote, misunderstanding and misrepresentations to, quote, historian James Patterson. Misrepresentations did feed the debate, as they do in any significant controversy, but they did not occur solely on one side. If opponents sometimes missed Moynihan's liberal intentions, he and his supporters often ignored the substance of their criticisms by reducing them to assertions that Moynihan was a racist, a charge that few critics actually made. In fact, it is strange to make Moynihan out as a victim of the controversy, a claim he and his supporters have repeatedly put forth. For 50 years, the report has received overwhelmingly positive media coverage. Far from damaging Moynihan's career, the report launched him to a prominent professorship at Harvard University, to a top post in Richard Nixon's administration, and to a long career as a senator from the state of New York. Moynihan's report received such diverse and heated reactions, not only because of its own ambiguities, but also because it articulated assumptions widely shared among early 1960s liberals that came under intense challenge just around the time of the report's release. Most liberals in the early 1960s believed in the government's ability to alleviate economic inequality without reforming corporate capitalism, in the cultural assimilation of ethno-racial minorities, in the desirability of male-headed families, in the efficacy of social engineering by experts and government officials, and in the superiority of middle-class American values. And I'll go through a few of these. A document born of a liberal mindset that valued the perspective of trained elites. The Moynihan report generated challenges to establish experts' claims to understand African-American life. Black power advocates saw the Moynihan report as a classic illustration of white domination of the study of African-Americans and representing the need for African-Americans to define themselves. The black sociology movement called for the, quote, death of white sociology, and it contended that Moynihan's depiction of African-American culture as pathological falsely presumed a superiority of middle-class white norms. In his 1968 book with the wonderful title, Look Out Whitey, Black Power's Gonna Get Your Mama, Julius Lester took aim at Moynihan in a chapter entitled, Bang Bang, Mr. Moynihan. To Lester, Moynihan's pretension to racial expertise proved that whites thought, quote, they are greater authorities on blacks than blacks themselves. African-Americans could not trust whites, Lester maintained, quote, until they stopped going to the Daniel Moynihan's to learn about blacks but come to the ghetto to learn for themselves. Moynihan assumed the natural superiority of two parent nuclear families headed by a male breadwinner. He saw the, quote, matriarchal structure of African-American families at their chief weakness, and he explicitly supported taking jobs away from black men, or taking jobs away from black women in order to give those jobs to black men. Moynihan complained that a program in his own government department had hired African-American women instead of men. He observed, quote, you can stand in front of the Department of Labor any morning at 8.30, and it is a sight, spectacularly well-dressed, competent, beautiful young black women spending the day on the phone with the Attorney General and seeing ambassadors then coming home and asking the old man, what did you do today? And indeed, Moynihan was critical of government programs such as these. It's also critical of aid to families with dependent children or welfare because he saw these programs as inverting power dynamics between men and women in African-American families. Moynihan's support for the male breadwinner family norm fit with a broader mid-century liberal tradition that emphasized the need for men to be paid family wages so that women could focus on taking care of children. Moynihan's patriarchal assumptions were not widely contested on the report's release in 1965, but by the late 1960s, debate about the report became explicitly as much about gender as it was about race. Second-wave feminists challenged its patriarchal norms. Black feminists, in particular, were the report's most thoroughgoing critics. They charged that the report promoted racist stereotypes of black women as promiscuous and domineering. They targeted not only white liberals such as Moynihan, but also many male black power radicals who even while contesting Moynihan's right to opine about African-American life, often agreed with Moynihan on the need to restore black male authority in the family. One black feminist compared, quote, the brother, nattering away about how we've been lopping his balls off so long, is time to stand aside with, quote, people like Moynihan carrying on about our matriarchy and urging black women to confine ourselves to standing behind the men of our families. For black feminists pointing out that male black power radicals' gender ideology was no different from Moynihan's was a very effective argument. The combustibility of Moynihan's assumptions about race and gender was clearest in reactions to his report's most concrete policy for African-American advancement. The report actually had few direct policy suggestions. Its one main suggestion was this, recruiting more black men into the military. Moynihan's proposal fit a liberal strategy to provide jobs to bring up male breadwinners to stabilize African-American families and communities. In fact, Moynihan understood that recruiting more black men in the military could be done without legislative action, which was another bonus. This proposal also reflected a belief that success in American society required middle class values presumed to be lacking among African-Americans. In the army, Moynihan alleged, black men would learn discipline. The proposal also reflected Moynihan's belief that African-American men suffered from a matriarchal culture. The military would provide them with a quote, utterly masculine world, a world away from women, a world run by strong men of unquestioned authority. Moynihan's suggestion advanced during the rapid escalation of the Vietnam War met opposition from several fronts. Even though many black power advocates agreed with Moynihan's patriarchal ideals, they rejected military service as participation in an American imperialism that targeted non-whites abroad, just as it oppressed non-whites at home. Men involved in the anti-war and counter-cultural movements rejected Moynihan's equation of masculinity with submission to hierarchical discipline. And feminists viewed the plan as a brief for patriarchy. One feminist mock Moynihan for assuming, quote, women are so terrible that it is a fantastic relief to get away from them. Never mind that the military service is experiencing explosive racial problems, it is still better than being around women. The Moynihan report controversy proved especially significant for liberals. Attaining economic equality for African-Americans, unlike securing legal and political rights, exposed the limits of post-war liberalism, divided liberals, and enabled challenges to liberalism to surface with a renewed intensity. The Moynihan report controversy is sometimes mistakenly viewed as emblematic of a post-war liberal consensus that suddenly unraveled during the late 1960s, yet far from a stable consensus, post-war liberalism itself contained diverse and conflicting strands. The report reflected these contradictions and typified a post-war liberal mindset that recognized structural economic barriers to African-American advancement and yet was committed to meritocratic notions that individuals and ethnic groups exceeded based on their ability to compete in an open marketplace. The race-based economic inequality that Moynihan identified was so entrenched in American society that readers of his report could include either the government needed to enact the kinds of radical reforms advocated by civil rights leaders, or the government was simply incapable of addressing the problem. The report thus contained both the seeds of a left-wing challenge that deepened liberals' war on poverty and a neo-conservative attack on the welfare state. One way to track the controversy's impact on liberalism is to examine the trajectory of the report's author. In the late 1960s, Moynihan became one of the most prominent neo-conservatives, a set of post-war liberals who moved to the right. The report contained already a thread of neo-conservatism and the suggestion that government might be unable to solve a problem rooted in family structure. Neo-conservatives spun that into a blanket challenge to liberal social engineering. The controversy itself played a key role in pushing Moynihan and other neo-conservatives to the right. Ultimately, Moynihan concluded that those who most forcefully called for racial equality, that is radical African Americans and their allies, were responsible for the racial discord of the era. In a notorious 1970 memo to President Richard Nixon that was then later leaked to the press, Moynihan advised Nixon to carry out a policy of quote, benign neglect for discussing race. Nearly all interpretations in the Moynihan report surfaced by the mid-1970s indicating the crucial long-term impact that this decade, the first decade after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, had on American racial discourse. Nevertheless, the Moynihan report experienced a scholarly and media revival in the 1980s that has never fully dissipated. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the report was increasingly appropriated by conservatives. Drawing on neo-conservative ideas but pushing them even further, Reaganite conservatives argued that liberal welfare policies, not racism, caused racial inequality. To William Bennett, for example, the lesson of the report was that quote, the most serious problems afflicting our society today are manifestly moral, behavioral, and spiritual, and therefore remarkably resistant to government cures. At the same time, the report continued to hold appeal for liberals. Most notably, starting the 1980s, the prominent sociologist William Julius Wilson revived the report's analysis of black social pathology to promote reforms to address race-based economic inequality. Wilson declared that he was quote, following in the footsteps of Moynihan, and Wilson has been one of the report's staunchest supporters for the past 25 years. In my view, Wilson and other liberals have erred in hitching themselves to the Moynihan report, a document that embodies not only the ambitions of 1960s liberalism, but also all of its shortcomings. At its best, the report called for national action to ensure social and economic equality for African Americans, not just the legal equality that had been ostensibly granted during the civil rights movement. But at its worst, the report conflated racial equality with patriarchy. It encouraged Americans to focus on African Americans' cultural traits rather than on political economy. Despite Moynihan's liberal intentions, it directed attention toward family structure as a primary cause of inequality, instead of work, taxes, housing, and education. Racial and class inequality are again on the national agenda today, just as they were 50 years ago when Moynihan wrote The Negro Family, yet an ambiguous and flawed government report written a half century ago is hardly a good starting place for discussing these issues in our own time. The uncritical commemoration of the Moynihan report by conservatives and many liberals threatens once again to distract from the real causes of inequities and injustices in American society. It is high time that we stop celebrating the Moynihan report. Thanks so much to Sandy for the invitation and Cliff for organizing everything and to Joy for the flattering introduction. It's a real treat to participate in today's conversation. Let me begin with a few words of praise for what Professor Geary has done. I think his work on the Moynihan report is really important and well done. It's an yes, it's an incredibly nuanced and textured account. Yes, it's based on some incredible archival finds, but it's much more than that. At its core, what stands out to me about Professor Geary's book is that it's a corrective. It's a corrective in the sense that it fully historicizes intellectually and politically the Moynihan report, maybe for the first time, despite all the writing that's been done on it over the years. In his hands, the report comes across convincingly as a document, as he says in his epilogue, that embodies not only the ambitions of 1960s liberalism, but also all of its shortcomings. What he's done more over enables us to understand what otherwise seemed like irresolvable puzzles or what other authors have had to sweep under the rug as inconvenient truths that in order to maintain assemblance of a coherent take on the book, on the report. For instance, how is it that both MLK and Michael Harrington could have praised a document that was lambasted by some on the left as blaming the victim, and why is it that the report comes across more like a litmus test or a Rorschach test of political ideology than anything else? Professor Geary has arrived at a parsimonious interpretation that readily survives Occam's razor. The reason why the Moynihan report has elicited such a heterogeneous and contradictory set of reactions, often among the same constituencies. The reason why experience is recurring bouts of controversy over time is that it is a fundamentally ambiguous document that reflects the quote diverse and conflicting unquote strands of postwar liberalism. That's a compelling way to think about the report I think and one that helps us to make good sense of what otherwise seems incredibly confusing. So it also say that I think your book, Professor Geary's book, also makes an important and significant historiographical contribution, and that is that it helps us to appreciate the significance of the 1970s for racial politics and racial discourse in the United States. There's a pretty big stream of work now that adds up to the argument that the world as we know it today economically, socially, politically, intellectually is a world that the 1970s gave us in one way or the other. Here I have in mind books like Niall Ferguson and Charles Meyers, Shock of the Global, Bruce Schulman's The 70s, Jefferson Cowys Staying Alive, and Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade. But nobody's really made the point about political discourse around racial inequality as sharply and carefully as Professor Geary has, at least to my knowledge, which is fallible. But the book is fantastic in this regard, and it appears in moments when he writes, for instance, that nearly all interpretations of the reports, reports surfaced by the mid-1970s, indicating the crucial long-term impact of the decade after the 1964 Civil Rights Act on American racial discourse. So that's an argument I think he successfully pulls off. The third thing I'd like to do in addition to saying thanks for inviting me out here and be sure to get Dan Geary's book when it's released on July 7th, is I'd like to try to connect what Professor Geary's done with my own work on the history of race, conscious, affirmative action policies, and college admissions. I do think there might be a connection. I would love to try to suss out what it is. So with a co-author, Lisa Stalberg, I've been digging into the archival records of a number of colleges and universities among the Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and others to try to understand where affirmative action came from. The dominant narrative is, as so far as there is one, is that affirmative action is a product of campus unrest or the urban riots of the late 1960s. So what we found in the archival record in our research is evidence of a different story. At schools like Michigan, Cornell, and UCLA, we find that college administrators are adopting affirmative action as early as 1963 and 1964. Men like Rogers Haynes and Harlan Hatcher at Michigan, James Perkins at Cornell, and Franklin Murphy at UCLA all led schools that observed an open door policy at mid-century. And yet their campuses were nearly as lily-wide as Ole Miss. These men believed that their institutions could not stand apart from the tides of social change, and they were inspired by events of the early 1960s, Birmingham, March on Washington, to do something different. For them, even before LBJ enunciated at Howard in 1965, freedom was not enough, and so they launched experimental admissions programs targeted at quote-unquote disadvantaged students, which included mainly but not exclusively African-American students. So these programs usually recruited applicants from specially selected local urban high schools that were known to be heavily minority in their population, and a light thumb was placed on the scale at the time of admission. So Lisa and I call this the first wave of affirmative action, and we've been sketching out the argument that the first wave is really a product of the racial liberalism of white elites in the early to mid-1960s, and Professor Geary's work on the Moynihan report offers a strong parallel and really helps us get a better feel for what we might mean. Moynihan's language reflected the conviction on the part of many racial liberals that a quote-unquote new and special effort would be needed to address racial inequality. That quote, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable treatment, unquote, meant that African-Americans weren't simply quote-unquote not equal to other groups in their, quote, ability to win out in the competitions of American life. Those are quotes from the Moynihan report. And a different approach was required in public policy. So now having now read your work, it occurs to me that maybe the same strand of racial liberalism may have the behind the first wave of affirmative action. As U of M president Harlan Hatcher said to the U of M faculty in 1963, it was about an initiative that eventually became affirmative action at Michigan. It was vitally important for the university to begin examining its, quote, practices with respects to students from deprived backgrounds. Their preparation does not permit them to be competitive initially, but they do have the ability to work once the handicaps of poor training have been removed. So that's Harlan Hatcher in 1963. In much the same spirits, Jim Perkins of Cornell would say in later years, in a speech to the United Negro College Fund, the Brown case as well as a, quote, rise of a visible concern for the equal treatment of minority groups at the beginning of this decade, jolted college leaders out of their uneasy slumber, quote, are conscious stirred in its sleep. We dreamt that we were not doing what we should, and we woke to find that this was indeed so. A passive policy would only guarantee a continuation of de factoed exclusion, and we correctly included that in order to increase the black student population, we would have to encourage black students to apply and re-examine SAT scores as predictive of academic performance for the disadvantage. So I guess I would want to know, I would not put to Dan the question of whether he agrees with our interpretive move, to sort of, to say that affirmative action policies in the first wave are sort of motivated or the impetus for is this strand of racial liberalism that maybe is the same strand that is behind the Moynihan report. Our evidence suggests that college leaders were closely attuned to protest and demonstrations of the church-led southern-based civil rights movement, which helped catalyze their belief that freedom is not enough. Where did this strand of racial liberalism come from Moynihan's part? How is it that Moynihan and other liberals who were part of this strand of racial liberalism became committed to the idea that it was the role of public policy to respond robustly for inequalities that had accumulated over the flow of time? Professor Geary's answer to this question I think holds great interest for anyone who wonders if a similar belief or conviction in the need for a robust approach to public policy is anywhere in the cards for us today. Good afternoon. When I first thank Cliff, Sandy and Joy for inviting me part of such a you know accomplished panel. As a grad student I don't have to get a chance to to speak in front of such nice decor, so it's nice to contribute to and participate in such an important conversation. I just want to express my extreme gratitude for inviting me. But in terms of Dan's work particularly, Dan highlights how the multiple interpretations of the Moynihan report have offered conflicting ways to deal with the growing crisis of the black family. The report has served as a means to justify government supports to improve the welfare of long-come black families and black men. It has also been encouragement to those who wish to ignore the precarious influence of race and the way it mediates the potential forward mobility of these families. In general the Moynihan report has contributed to or inspired several areas of sociology including first it extended from growing culture of poverty literature at the time. Beginning with Oscar Lewis who attempted to understand exactly how poverty through what Moynihan would call the Tango pathology reproduces itself and the means through which that happens. Lewis explains culture among the poor is a result of an adaptation to social, economic and political conditions of poverty. In framing culture of poverty as an adaptation to one's material surroundings we can understand the appeal to liberals that Dan mentions as his notion screams for government intervention to provide resources to improve the material conditions of the poor. However some of the scholarship including the Moynihan report tends to overemphasize the role that norms and values play in the way individuals in poverty make sense of the world. Specifically in much work in this genre tends to presume an almost dysfunctional view of the world observed by children in poverty which reduces their ability to take full advantage of opportunities for mobility as they become adults. Such a view assumes and lends itself to ideas that children and adults who grow or grew up in poverty don't espouse mainstream values explaining its post-racial era appeal to conservatives as Dan also highlights. And in the time since the Moynihan report much work has sought to and successfully challenged this idea. Another area that's also benefited from or challenged the Moynihan report is issues related to the black community so attempted to understand how the black community operates and the network's embedded in it most notably Carol Stack and her seminal piece All Our Ken challenges the stereotype of black families as dysfunctional and self-destructive. Stack presents a complex network of real and fictive kin working together with few resources to survive and so by fictive kin she speaks out embedded in these communities are lots of symbolic familiar relationships where you know everyone is someone's cousin you know folks have multiple mothers uncles things like that and that among these networks exist complex rules about topics such as gifting and childrearing and overall she shows how a single parent household is not automatically equal to social disorganization. Also one of the most notable works complimenting the Moynihan report was that of William Julius Wilson and his seminal pieces The Clining Significance of Race and Truly Disadvantaged. Wilson reaffirms the class distinctions made by Moynihan and argues that structural forces like deindustrialization and spatial mismatch from employment significantly reduced the opportunities from ability among there have been poor and particularly many black families and especially black men. He argues that men's growing isolation from work decreases their opportunities to be stable providers and the emasculation from not working causes their eventual exit from the home and as Dan highlights Wilson's work adds fuel to the ambiguous fire and that his idea of the declining significance of race appealed to conservatives and his focus on structural issues appeals to the public program inspired liberals. Overall we see that the ambiguity of the report that Dan beautifully lays out in his work in many ways shaped the landscape through which later sociological work would be understood and to whom it would appeal. Either a value driven racially blind right or structurally conscious public intervention is left. In regards to black men which is my main topic of area or of interest where I focus on black men and absent fatherhood another piece that was greatly influenced and extended from the morning report was that of Elliott LeBeau in his famous text tally's corner published soon after the morning report it attempts to address and investigate the black men that morning sees as succumbing to a matriarchal culture. In the text LeBeau seeks to elevate black men as a source of analysis and challenged a public perception of black men as well as the culture of poverty suggested by morning hand by capturing how the societal disenfranchisement of men systematically leads to their decline in the workplace and in the home. In the seminal piece LeBeau describes how men's presence on street corners is an outcome of the multiple sites of disenfranchisement in their day-to-day lives and not a desire to avoid work as many thought at the time. Overall all these work stemming from and responding to the morning hand report have been helpful but another avenue of research that gets lost in the ambiguity of morning hands language is how do we understand absent fatherhood and of itself. Morning hand links growing absence to growing unemployment and poverty which steers discussions of absent fatherhood and direction that encourages a solution specifically focused on putting them to work or alleviating their income poverty. Additionally when talking about the tangle of pathology morning hand overlooks the possibility of the pathologic effects of absence itself where absence gets perpetuated through what I would call a tangle of absence that involves many across generations as current trends today would suggest. In the years since the morning hand report rates of absent fatherhood in the black community have nearly tripled and far exceed that of other racial groups. This trend that me necessitates need to better grapple with and understand exactly what absent fatherhood is for the people who experience it and specifically insert budding grad student my work asks how do men who grow up without father's experience absence and make meaning of it and what impact does their experience with absent have on their current or future fatherhood status. In my ongoing work I've begun interviewing low-income black men in the detroit area many of which experience some type of absence from their fathers to capture their life stories growing up into the present and what I'm finding so far in my preliminary analysis exhibits how the pain and experience of not having a father around both physically and emotionally can shape how men interpret their own potential as fathers their understandings of what it means to be a good father and how they make sense of their own status in their children's lives. Additionally embedded in the ambiguity of morning hand's work isn't just a patriarchal assumption about the man's role in the home but also a problematic assumption at full-time employment equates to fatherhood. In the preliminary work I've done so far interviewing low-income fathers about their absent fathers none correlated their father's absence to his employment status. Rather they talked about the particular feeling stemming from the physical void left by their father in their lives absent of his working status and so you know by that I mean no man I've spoken with so far suggested that if only my father had been employed he would have been present or suggest that they can specifically cite his unemployment to their absence in his life. And so overall in revisiting the morning report it is imperative that we also re-examine the assumptions that we make in terms of the presumed link between employment present fatherhood and the stability of the black family that in many ways remains in crisis 50 years later. Thank you. Thank you I'm now going to turn it over for about 10 minutes I think we'll let our panelists speak to each other so Dan if you'd like to begin by responding. Yes just thank you for those you know very interesting and informative comments I'll just briefly comment so that we can then get to further discussion but Tony the as far as affirmative action you know makes total sense to me that this would emerge out of the racial liberalism of the early 1960s you know of which Moynihan was was a part. It's remarkable that this period of the early 60s is a period when many whites even many white liberals are fully confronting the weight of American racial history. Moynihan is a great example of that I mean Moynihan has no research background on African Americans you know prior to writing the Moynihan report basically I mean before 1963 he didn't think very much about African Americans and you know didn't think much about race as a problem he did write this book Beyond the Melty Pot with Nathan Glazer that sort of clued him into some of these issues but Glazer wrote the chapter in that book on on African Americans so you know this is a period when many white elites are beginning to confront this as an issue for the first time I think and it's remarkable to to remember this and this is even long after the the Brown decision. Now when they do that however there's a well-established tradition of what you and I would also call as very awkward phrase but racial liberalism you know basically liberal views on race that emerge out of World War II that are associated you know perhaps most famously with Gunnar Myrdal's book an American Dilemma that really suggests that the main problem facing that American society is how to extend equal citizenship to African Americans but also has a number of assumptions you know he thinks African American culture is is a pathological variant of white culture that those are his terms he thinks that you know there was not going to be a big problem assimilating African Americans to American society doesn't require radical transformation doesn't require radical economic transformation. It mirrored on many like him including African American intellectuals that in some ways contribute to racial liberalism although so having something different people like E. Franklin Fraser and Kenneth Clark you know there's a well-established body there that's at least two decades old that Moynihan and I suppose your folks as well can turn to in the early 60s when they start to pay attention. Now Matthew I would just point out that you're exactly right that you know Moynihan has begun this this tradition that sort of equates you know male unemployment with absence you know that these he sees as the same thing you know I mentioned that Moynihan's most specific policy suggestion the report is military service well African America joined the men joined the military it's not going to actually be around his father's right I mean so that's not when he Moynihan isn't thinking about father's actually being around you know he's thinking about more than setting you know providing for the family allowing the mothers then to do the work of primary work of child rearing and the father's to be setting I suppose a positive role model but they're not actually they don't actually like to be around that much and he's criticized by this by many many of his critics actually point to this and say look your your model of family is impoverished because your model is the man is just off at the office as a Bremler he's not actually part of the family the other thing there is that Moynihan had a very statistical understanding of African American families I mean basically he he gathered the statistics he was in the federal government so he could gather a lot of statistics but you know he didn't do you know he I don't think he had ever met an African American family he didn't he didn't do any ethnographic work he just assumed you know oh my goodness you know 25 percent of families there's no man there well this must be a female that headed family and the father must be absent you know just based on these statistics and people like Carol Stack you mentioned criticized Moynihan it's a look to if you really want to understand African American families you need to do an ethnographic study you need to go you need to understand how people live you need to understand the culture you can't just infer it from from these statistics you know so I would just you know I suppose highlight those those two points and my research set that fit with with what you were saying all right I'll use my moderators privilege to ask a question so um I have two questions actually and I'm not sure that either of them are particularly easy to answer so one is um Dan you closed with a with a really I mean you have a very powerful critique of this document and the way that it has been continually used so as a historian I'm sort of picturing revisionist 30 years from now coming back and saying oh they threw out the Moynihan report is there anything at all that we shouldn't disregard I think is the first question and the second question is I mean I'm very compelled by your argument for why this rhetoric is bankrupt for dealing with the issues that we need to deal with today and so thinking about Matt's research thinking about the research of many people in this room what are the kinds of rhetorics that we can push to and that we can respond with when we have people like Nick Kristoff bringing up the Moynihan report again and again and that's for all of you not just for Dan yes well as to whether there's anything positive in the in the Moynihan report I think I think there there I think there is I hope I suggested some of the positives I mean this is not exactly appropriate but Robert F. Kenney had a great quote about Moynihan he said Moynihan he knows all the problems and is against all the solutions you know so to some degree Moynihan had his finger on a very real issue you know at a pivotal time I mean I think he was right to say you know civil rights act voting rights act are not enough you know we need to look at economic equality and that's the you know he was absolutely right to do that I think where where things got derailed and possibly not necessarily through his own intentions you know I think it to some degree at the time he honestly thought by talking about family that maybe this would be a way to talk about this this inequality but in fact what he did was you know got people to focus on family rather than on the other issues which are which are more important and I think that's probably the you know the lesson for today is that of course people should research African American families they should talk about the how afric families are related in complicated way to to economic and social inequality but if you're only talking about families and you're not talking about other important things like you know like taxes like employment you know it seems like those are the places you know to start and to think that you as William Julius Wilson others think you're going to start with family and get people to care about those other things I think is a very dangerous idea that 50 years has shown it doesn't work so you know that that's how I would respond I suppose to your questions but I'd be interested here with the other panelists I have to say um well prior to reading Dan's work I've never been so critical of the document itself in terms of a political statement but you know for me the morning report was also always a jumping off point you know such that to me I don't believe the black family would have been of concern to many if more than hadn't brought it to the foreground and I think that the work that it inspired you know it's been very helpful to you know scholars like me trying to to write about I look at I mentioned Ellie LaBose you know peace you know who himself you know used the report to say hey we haven't really talked about black men before we focused on women and children and the fact that this work can inspire scholars to do things like that I think is to me what this document makes the most I'll just jump in and say one of the I one of the people I interviewed was a guy by the name of Robert Staples who was one of most one of his most important critics and wrote a lot about the African family in the 60s and 70s and he said to me you know he he was a severe critic of the Moynihan report but he said he did say Moynihan hadn't done this you know this this whole field of research would not have come about so he he actually credited Moynihan in some way even though he entirely disagreed with the report I'm not sure I have anything to add so are you guys ready hi everyone thank you sorry for the technology technological difficulties my name is Marin Alemu I'm a second-year MPP student here at the Ford School of Public Policy with a particular interest in education policy so this is a very very important and relevant talk for me so thank you all for being here first question for you um are there policy writers who help us move beyond fixing families versus fixing economic structures should repeat the question yeah absolutely are there policy writers who help us move beyond fixing families versus fixing economic structures I'm thinking of the work here by Catherine Eden it's a book called being the being the best I can or is it doing the best I can doing the best I can doing the best I can the recently came out when she looks at low-income fathers or and Camden on New Jersey many African-American but not all that's a book that I think successfully looks at this issue some of the issues brought about by the Moynihan report but doesn't get caught in the issue of trying to try family structure to larger you know inequalities and she has some very interesting findings there that counter you know what certainly what someone like Moynihan thought that she finds that many of these fathers are very involved in their children's lives that they actually resent the fact that they're meant to be the primary breadwinners many of them say they say you know you think to me is just a paycheck is something that's that many of them report to her and they view that negatively she suggests some interesting policy policy solutions as well as in terms of giving these fathers rights fatherhood rights you know that the state treats them solely in terms of providing child support payments and doesn't actually give them you know the right to be with their children for a certain amount of time so there's some interesting suggestions there so I think in some ways though you know when we're talking about in the public way you know about families inevitably will be discussing social policies you know you know if we're talking to the public arena you know the it's the sort of question of what is what can we as a society you know due to to help families out you know rather than say a private conversation so I think you can't you can never leave that discussion behind when you're talking about families in the public arena I actually thought of Eden right away actually and I think ties her most to the Moynihan report and her work is that you know if Moynihan is encouraging us to help men become better providers you know she's her work is challenging this idea that you know men are redefining their role as fathers that they're not solely providers and they're finding alternative means to to be fatherly that's being more emotionally connected to their children finding other ways to provide non-financial ways and I think in a way kind of undermines Moynihan's assumptions about this idea that fathers should be providers financially whereas these men are finding alternative ways to be fathers in their children's lives. Good evening my name is DeMarla Lewis I'm a first year MPP and I'm interested in issues relevant to economic justice so looking at disparities within health education and how those affect socioeconomic mobility and so you know thank you all for coming here today and the first question that I'm going to read for you is this if the Moynihan report was embraced by the right and the left where did the war on drugs come from as its thrust was the jail minority men so effectively or I can repeat the question if the Moynihan report was embraced by the right and the left where did the war on drugs come from as its thrust was to jail minority men well I think I mean I think the war on drugs was what it was in many ways bipartisan although it's interesting I quoted William Bennett I mean he was the Reagan's drugs artist anyone's most responsible for the war on drugs it's Bennett and it's this tremendous disassociation for him to say oh well these are problems that can't be solved by by government jurors and here he is and I would agree with the person who asked that question you know here he is locking up a lot of you know a lot of men women as well but mostly men and so you know men can't they can't be good fathers or participants in their families that they're in jail you know and that's I think one of the problems with the way that the the debate is framed well can government do something can and not do something what it leaves out is what is government doing that's actually hurting you know and this you know the war on drugs I think could be one of the main things that that you would have to say is is damaging families you know I don't I'm not sure I could put my finger on the fly on where the war on on drugs came came from but I do think that there's lots of really interesting work that can be consulted to so that you begin to arrive at your own sense of where it came from and so I would recommend Naomi Murakawa's latest book I think it's called the first civil right Veshla Weaver who's a political science professor at Yale has also written a number of important articles and I believe a book now on the topic Bruce Western has has some work that kind of touches on the origins and then Michael Tonry the author of my malign neglect I think is a person you might consult as well for for some answers that you could begin to put together for yourself so thank you we have another question from the audience and it is as follows didn't liberal then it starts with a question didn't liberals blow it twice with Moynihan in fact because of the Moynihan report they did not trust him when he got President Nixon to propose a guaranteed annual income in 1969 so they oppose the family assistance plan which would have greatly increased welfare benefits in the south can you comment that's true when when Nixon when Moynihan is in the Nixon administration he gets him to propose this family assistance plan now the reason why that plan feels is not because of opposition by liberals is because Nixon backs away from it silently Nixon kills the plan not not liberals it was opposed by welfare rights activists because they were hoping for something better in my view they did they did miscalculate but it wouldn't have raised benefits in the outside of the south would you know at all the other thing about the family assistance plan is Moynihan and Moynihan helps Nixon do this they frame it in very conservative terms you know they frame it in terms of even though it in fact is a guaranteed income payment they don't frame it in that way you know they frame it as a kind of an anti-welfare measure of many kinds and you know they use it to sort of advance this view of of the poor as as as lazy and you know this is the payment that's going to go to people who really work so they're crafting the rhetoric that they're crafting you know it's quite conservative even as the the measure itself you know would have been you know would have been a small liberal offense thank you next question from the audience the universal declaration of human rights includes economic rights the Moynihan report seems to be a turning point to the for the American right denying basic economic rights how did the left go wrong let me review the question the universal declaration of human rights includes economic rights the Moynihan report seems to be a turning point towards the American right in denying basic economic rights how did the left go wrong well for the right i'm not sure it's a i mean the right would have always opposed economic rights but there is a danger in the mid-1960s because of the growth of the of the civil rights movement um and uh had really pushed on the agenda um you know the racially inequality and all on all these aspects so people like William Buckley are very worried that um you know either buckley's main concern even though he um he did support southern segregationists for for a time but he's not he's mainly concerned about you know economic issues but he's really worried that the that the civil right movement is going to generate you know some some form of you know a further form of of a liberal government or social democratic measures and so he's he actually they he uses effectively uses the Moynihan report to argue against this by saying this is this is really a family issue it's not uh it's not about economics um you know i think Moynihan and liberals went wrong Moynihan in any case on other lips other liberals went wrong and how they concede of economic inequality i mean it's a somewhat convoluted way i mean Moynihan thinks that economic equality is mainly through that there is fair competition in an open marketplace uh and the the reason why African-Americans aren't competing is because they're not well prepared you know so if they had better families then they'd be better prepared than they could compete equally uh but what he's overlooking is that the the marketplace uh is not open and it's not a fair competition uh and that um you know the there are other ways of going about rectifying these inequalities that would be more more direct uh i would only add that um you know to the response to the question where did the left go wrong part of the part the answer partly depends on what what you mean by left and what you mean by go wrong and uh and um so one way to think and you know since the question i think is motivated by a concern about where what happened to the economic focus in public policy like you know and one way to answer the question might be to say you know whatever whatever possibilities there might have been for a more robust involvement of the government in economic activity uh you know may not have been eclipsed in the mid 1960s because they had already been eclipsed by the late 1940s if you believe the line of historians like Nelson Liechtenstein and the argument that he makes about the social democratic possibilities in the Truman administration and how some of the compromises and decisions by labor leaders like Walter Ruther led uh you know the potential for some kind of corporatist arrangements at least in the area of labor relations to get to get kind of shunted aside and if you believe the argument of Alan Brinkley then the left went wrong in 1937 uh just at the end of the second new deal uh on the heels of a big recession and uh Roosevelt's uh error of commission with trying to pack the court and overreaching and there was the moment according to Brinkley and his sympathizers when something very much more robust than what we eventually wound up with in the post-war period there was the moment when we lost it for good so uh so part of the part of the answer depends on what do you mean by left and what do you mean by went wrong so um another question that we have from the audience a dominant narrative in American society right now centers on inequality race is on the outskirts of this conversation but does not seem to be the focus of either major party how can we shift the conversation on inequality to include race without repeating the mistakes of the moin hen report yeah that's an excellent question um you know I think um let's make sure that the conversation it you know doesn't get sidetracked into family as uh as the primary discussion uh that would be I suppose my uh you know my answer let's um you know let's talk about the other things that are going on that are important you know I was sort of as things were developing last year and the protest movement Ferguson was growing you know I was just waiting for people to to refer to the moin hen report as a way to kind of take the discussion in another in another direction and it you know it did occur in some cases so I mean that would be um you know my worry about people like uh Christoff and will you know keeping up the moin hen report in this contemporary conversation is that they're they're sidetracking the discussion from where it needs to be well I know in my own work you know in absent fatherhood and I would love to and and believe that absent fatherhood is is not a black problem um but for me the focus on on black men particularly is the fact that you know one can't deny that statistically black men black homes suffer more from this issue than the families and not to negate um that is problematic to all but you know for me my way of maintaining the the racial um aspect is to is to note that you know this population more often than not suffers from this you know issue and so I maintain that by you know focusing our research on this population which often gets kind of like a negated for the largest you still be focused on absent father in general but I don't want to ignore the fact that some people suffer from this more than others I just I just added that that I think the moin hen report controversy shows us that you can't you can't actually discuss class inequality in us without discussing race um that these issues are are intertwined they need to be discussed at the same time and I think the the strategy of William Julius Wilson which to some extent Obama had paid he to uh you know he had what he called a hidden agenda that uh you're going that uh you know essentially you'd have programs would especially benefit um uh african-americans but you would present it in in class terms because racial terms are so divisive uh but I think that's very well first of all to call something a hidden agenda is somewhat self-defeating um but secondly you know to to think that that's uh uh effective is is problematic because race will always uh enter into the conversation uh in the U.S. so it needs to be it needs to be addressed openly I don't think you can see things as a solely racial issue there's a the class component to as well but these are overlapping they they can neither neither part of that could be can ever be forgotten next question from the audience um what are your opinions on hr 40 congressman Conyers proposal to study reparations I mean it's something that personally I um you know I would uh favor I mean reparations certainly would be a more um direct way of addressing some of the um you know the inequalities that are present in American history I mean reparations were paid to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II uh you know so why shouldn't they be paid to uh the descendants of slaves and people who suffered from uh you know racial discrimination that is directly affected wealth creation today on the other hand uh you know politically it's it's obviously not a it's a non-starter politically so you know we should we should recognize that it's uh you know a good idea in theory but uh one that perhaps not too much attention should be invested in because it's not one that's likely to uh to prevail um I do I do believe that more work should be done to to better understand and tie the issues that that plague black communities to slavery um and some work I've done you know one can kind of locate um a kind of a systematic removal of of men from the home as early as the plantation um that in many cases men were were removed and power wasn't still done to slave owner um and that is something that though we can't particularly trace historically to the present I think it is something that needs more research to better show um the need for something like a reparation um next question from the audience is uh for you Matt um and it's for you because uh you mentioned that the um since the Moynihan report has been issued that the rates of single mothered families have tripled in the black community and the question is to ask if you are aware of how it has um similar how it's an influence that are impacted the white community um during the same time times time span so how has the Moynihan report um you know influenced the single mother families like what is the rate of single mother families in the white community it and how does that compare to the black community since the Moynihan report was issued and was that uh and what does that do to okay um so I was like three questions and yeah um I mean so you know first no one can't deny that absent fatherhood or um you know the growing rate of single parent households has increased across the board um so that in no way negates that it's not a general issue and lots of research has shown that you know in general the way we think about you know what a nuclear family is you know has changed um that it's okay now for mother to be a single mother and that is not the same stigma that years ago and that um those things are changing across the board so I don't think that um it's just a black a black issue and I think in some cases for whites it has increased over like 20 percent since the Moynihan era um but again that rate compared to the way the blacks increased was just not a significant um and what was the second and what was uh what was that increased due to for the yes uh that I'm not sure but I mean like at least in the black community when I've studied I mean one can trace the two issues around unemployment issues around crime adverse policies like child support enforcement that uh for men who did want to support their children could be jailed or in some way punished for not paying these supports um so lots of issues I think over time have definitely influenced the removal of the black man from next question from the audience how can you begin to reconcile um the Moynihan's reports importance of families with the strong current emphasis on the importance of families in k through 12 educational success and achievement I mean I'm not an expert on um you know on current research um I do think there are questions about um you know I suppose what the what the independent variables are there I mean because um you know two parent families also tend to uh correlate with more affluent families um you know so I'm not sure the exact research that's that's fitting there I mean I think it's um it's a very good thing for a child to have you know a loving involved family there's no there's no question about that um that doesn't necessarily need to be you know two parents in the way that Moynihan thought you need to take a closer look at what the individual families are um you know but I would certainly agree with that I had to take a closer look at the research but I don't know that you can narrow you can easily you know if you were just to go research to say two parent families versus you know one parent families of course you would find the kids from two parent families doing better but is it because um they have two parents or is it because of other factors that correlate with that I think it's a very tricky thing to to tease out and I personally am not convinced that the two parent family thing is the central factor that's being put forward by many as here's another question from the audience and this is for you Dan in your experience what is the difference in perspective on U.S. civil rights or the Moynihan report more specifically in Ireland versus the United States well that's a very interesting question I mean the of course the there's strong support for for you know U.S. civil rights movement in Ireland there was at the time and there's still strong memories of that I mean it was co-correlated at the time with the struggle for Catholic rights in Northern Ireland which for a time had a movement that called itself the civil rights movement after the U.S. and adopted much of the iconography I don't think the Moynihan report is much known there it's interesting to think though about Moynihan's Irishness as connecting to the report because it did connect to the report Moynihan thought that and actually he was from a family where the father had abandoned the family when he was a young boy and Moynihan thought because he was Irish and the Irish have been discriminated against and because he didn't have a father that he really understood African American families he drew that analogy on the one hand it did lead him to be I think more epithetic but on the other hand I think it led him to kind of confuse what his situation was with the situation of African Americans in the 1960s I don't think their situations were actually as parallel as he as he drew them and he we made that parallel often even in a time magazine interview he said he said quote Patty is just like Sambo using the you know using the the slurs for both Irish and and an African American so you know he he often made that point and drew on his Irishness to say because I'm an ethnic American I understand what it's like to be you know to be an African American okay next question from the audience since the publication of the Moynihan report and Bill Wilson's The Truly Disadvantage there appears to have been a movement away from the lease at least within sociology studying the structure of black families as it relates to poverty and inequality how can scholars better or more effectively study the black family on its own terms without falling into the same traps of racism classism and sexism I have very good question difficult question I mean you know and again I'm a historian non-associologist I mean I do think the Eden book is is a really great example of and I think Matthew's work suggests some of the ways that we can be you know getting around this I mean we shouldn't you know there shouldn't be you know just because I think there are political problems with the Moynihan report doesn't mean people should stop researching you know African American families or indeed all families you know that research should should continue I'm not sure that I agree that it's necessarily slowed down since the Moynihan report I mean often the and this is something Wilson repeats but people say well after the Moynihan report you know he was so attacked that people didn't study the African American family for so long and that's just it's just demonstrably false I mean in fact that's where it was going before the opposite is the case there's a tremendous explosion of research of African American families much of it anti-Moynihan you know but it's still the research is being done throughout the 60s and 70s and into the 80s I think that that research continues in many veins but I think the you know personally I would think people who are doing work that is looking at structural issues looking at statistics but also has a very strong ethnographic component you know I would find the most the most compelling I've been strongly resisting trying to rip your microphone away but now just to sort of piggyback on that Matt if you would you talk a little bit about your methodology and your approach because I think that that offers maybe one way for us to see to see a very particular answer to this question I think that you know and I agree that you know much work has you know been uncensed to this advantage in that I think an important you know way that I like to approach my work and that I think differs sometimes that I'm less concerned with you know why black folks are in this case you know black men aren't meeting a particular standard you know I'm more interested in you know how does this phenomenon work so for my case is how does absent fatherhood work and I'm less concerned with asking you know how can black men be more like you know present middle-class white men and I think that's in a way or approach that you know new work has taken such as Kathy Eden's work and I'm thinking of folks that have been having David Harding where it's understanding better how the the environment you know different environmental factors structures influence or plague these families and keep them from meeting standards versus just asking why they're not meeting it better understanding from their context why and how and how they feel about these phenomena how it impacts the way they make mean of the world of themselves and how that can not just affect them but also impact future generations to come what hasn't been done for me in absent with studies that studies absent fatherhood is that normally we kind of focus on it as just like an attribute of one's life for me it's more of a focus of how does this happen to carry over for so many generations such that it has tripled since the morning report so that's the way that I tackle it if you could recommend any research from african-american scholars that have done work on studying the black family post the morning report what would you suggest who would your reference well I mean if we're looking immediately after the after the report I mentioned Robert Staples before the other person I mentioned is a woman named by the name of Joyce Ladner who along with Carol Stack was the first to do research that was focused on the experience of african-american women as a book called tomorrow's tomorrow very interesting book that in some ways holds up holds up quite well interesting thing about Ladner is that she was at Washington University in St. Louis her advisor was a guy by the name of Lee Rainwater and Rainwater was Moynihan's biggest defender he actually wrote the first book on the Moynihan report called politics of controversy with one of his graduate students and so Rainwater is one of Moynihan's biggest supporters and he did this big ethnographic study of Pruitt Igoe a sort of notorious public housing estate in St. Louis and and his student Joyce Ladner then comes to completely different conclusions than than Rainwater had Rainwater was very pro Moynihan used to use the research to to back Moynihan whereas Ladner was on the totally opposite side of things but I think she did some very interesting work in the in the 1970s and in some ways still holds up well I'd first give a shout out to my advisor I think it's here Al Young whose work I think greatly contributes to the cultural sociality that we've seen around understanding better how certain environmental factors for him its social proximity but also I'm thinking of more recent stuff like keeping it real understanding better how kind of the another challenge of kind of like this oppositional culture idea that you know kids don't do well in school because they don't want to act right so that's a text I think greatly gets at how like kind of schools devalue and or don't don't allow children to use their kind of their own influences to develop themselves in school those are the two most that stand out to me that have been done last question as I understand we're running short on time so we've talked a lot about what work can be done from a scholarly perspective but you know we're here in the policy school and so you have people who are going to be going out into the policy world making decisions on programs and policies and so given what we've talked about today what is one piece of advice that you would give to them and to those who are going to be making decisions on programs and policies pertaining to social welfare well again very good and a tough question I mean I think well our discussion about I mean you know one of the first things would be to look at the at the situation with incarceration and prisons I mean I think you know sort of first first do no harm you know and I think the you know sort of perverse the way the conservatives have proffered this idea that it's sort of welfare policies that have you know that it's government's been doing harm rather than things like you know mass incarceration on the other hand I think you know we should we should still look at some of the things that were connected to the Moynihan report I mean that would would strengthen not just families but you know all individuals I mean things like employment you know higher wages increased unionization also policies that I think it's problematic to look at policies that uh are directed only at men I mean William Joyce Wilson does this too I mean he makes a eligible male you know he has a statistic of marriageable males among African Americans and it's based on their employability but you know another policy approach that many critics Moynihan said at the time and it's still relevant is well if you don't have you know two parent families then it's a real problem you know that if in most cases you know the the main provider is a woman it's a real problem that women aren't paid enough as men it's a real problem that they're not getting extra support for the government for single parent families so if you if you really want to provide you know for children maybe look at making those families that are there more viable you know rather than to trying to recreate some kind of ideal you know two-parent family so that would be another thing I would suggest one thing I might say is you know as as you march out into the real world from policy school and try to think about you know what to do with what you've learned here is is I think it's important to bear in mind like you know or to be mindful of the quality of the evidence that people are basing their claims on and you know and then and you know to develop a taste for different kinds of evidence yourself as you take classes in policy school and begin to form some opinions about what is credible evidence what is not credible evidence when do I believe something when do I not believe something because I think that having that sensibility that'll be a compass for you as you navigate the pretty turbulent real world when people are making lots of conflicting claims and citing evidence to try to back their point up and having a feel yourself for what credible evidence is I think is a you know it's like a good skill to have and will serve you well and the returns on that are very high over the course of a career so that's what I would say um as a former MPP student who went into the real world and came back you know I like to remind people and I truly believe that I think it's important to remember that you're a person before you're a policymaker I think that you know we all have the capacity to contribute with our own biases and and kind of like world experiences and like you know you mentioned with one hand himself coming from an absent father home and all the ways in which he tried to assume an identification with black families he's still in a lot of ways got it wrong and to remember I think be you know heighten our awareness that you know outside of like thinking we have the answer we also contribute to the problem in some ways and I think constantly being aware of the ways in which we as people can stymie policy is important to be aware of along the way well thank you very much I'm going to thank our speakers and our moderators and the good questions it came from the audience and we're we want to welcome you to a reception outside in the in the grand hall