Beyond Civil Rights

Mapping the Contours of Black Juvenile Delinquency: The Journal of Negro Education, 1945-1975

“…24 The report would be central to Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and subsequent shift to the War on Crime. 25 As Elizabeth Hinton has shown, the War on Poverty drew upon a consensus about black urban criminality that had a direct origin in the urban unrest of the mid-60s, and it created federal policies that were meant to have a prohibitive effect on future rebellion. Federal intervention in law enforcement was animated by a belief in the innate criminality of black Americans, and the government effectively, though perhaps unintentionally, created a network of overlapping systems and practices that eventually led to the contemporary phenomenon of mass incarceration.…”

“…White sociologists saw the threat to their power and began to lash out at what they perceived as unfair attacks and calls for the end of white sociology. 27 While many black sociologists came to reject the pathological framing of scholars such as Moynihan, some, such as Kenneth Clark saw critiques of Moynihan as an issue of academic freedom. Clark himself was excoriated by black intellectuals for his own depictions of urban poverty.…”

“…29 In response, a distinctly Black Sociology came about in the 1960s. 30 Black sociologists spoke back to Moynihan and integrationist technocrats, mounting an offensive against white liberals who proclaimed themselves to be racial experts. 31 Research boycotts and pointed questions about funding, formed the bedrock of this social activism.…”

The Making of a Neocon

“…But Moynihan had produced his policy memo as a member of the Johnson administration, and his chief detractors were political adversaries, journalists, and civil rights activists located outside the academy, while Herrnstein's opponents emanated from within it. 125 Wilson was sufficiently alarmed by the fratricidal dimensions of the Herrnstein affair that he wrote an open letter to the student newspaper in an effort to clear the air. Wilson was not sure if the browbeating of his friend Herrnstein constituted "legal harassment," or, for that matter, if it even ran afoul of the university's policy as then construed, but it certainly went "beyond the bounds of civility."…”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Politics of Tragedy

“…63 Despite the report's attention to structural factors, Moynihan's critics have long taken issue with his essentialist focus on the family at the expense of other causal effects, notably those of structural racism, claiming that his approach was patronizing and that it facilitated new forms of racism that "blame the victim." 64 But Moynihan's insistence that only massive government aid to help reconstitute the black family could finally break the cycle might be best explained in terms of his belief that black family life proved tragic because it was trapped in a cycle of misery historically conditioned by structural racism.…”