Revisiting The Moynihan Report – Atlantic Magazine (June 17, 2013)

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Urban Institute revisits Daniel Moynihan’s "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action" and finds that a lot has changed. Mostly for the worse: “These demographic trends are stunning. Five decades after Moynihan’s work, white families exhibit the same rates of non-marital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace.

“That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.”

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http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/revisiting-the-moynihan-report/276936/