By: Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.

In March 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The report argued that the breakdown of the Black family was the core obstacle to Black progress in the United States. Moynihan’s conclusion was simple and direct: fix the Black family, and the African American would advance. Most significantly, the report constructed a paradigm that centered cultural deficits as the root cause of Black positionality in the United States, and called for a solution grounded in a behavioralist approach that focused on changing values and modifying Black conduct, manner, and actions. The goal was to repair the “broken” Black family.

The question I pose is: “Why did Moynihan write this report in the first place, and why was this report such a crucial component of the nation’s domestic, as well as its international agenda?” The Moynihan Report was published at the height of the Cold War and during an era of wars of national liberation across the global South. In this geopolitical moment, newly freed nations were aligning themselves either with the capitalist camp, led by the United States, or the socialist camp, led by the Soviet Union.

In this global context, Black conditionality was problematic. African Americans were an oppressed and exploited people, systemically and structurally locked in the nation’s basement by the workings of racial capitalism. Blacks were doubly exploited—at the workplace and in their living place. And only the radical transformation of U.S. capitalism could truly free them — and the government had absolutely no intention of doing that.

The bottom line—Blacks have always been locked in the nation’s economic basement, and they always will be, unless the economic system is changed. America made a conscious choice. Instead of liberating Blacks, the government pursued a policy of deceit and trickery based on racial liberalization and predatory inclusion—a political project designed to create the illusion of freedom and progress while preserving the underlying structures of Black exploitation.

In this contentious struggle between socialism and capitalism, America faced a contradiction. It needed to maintain the subjugation of Blacks while simultaneously projecting the image of the nation as a land of freedom, democracy, and opportunity for all. This contradiction forced policy makers to answer the question: If Jim Crow had fallen, and legal discrimination had been abolished, why were Blacks still locked in the nation’s economic basement?

The government called on Daniel Patrick Moynihan to answer this provocative question. And he responded by inventing the “crisis” of the Negro family and identifying its “breakdown” as the root cause of the ongoing concentration of Black people in the nation’s economic basement. 

The Moynihan Report was a racist piece of propaganda designed to hide the reality that Blacks were an internally exploited people, indispensable to the functioning of racial capitalism. This racist deployment of history and social science as propaganda has a long history. W.E.B. Du Bois, in his 1935 classic, Black Reconstruction, brilliantly exposed the use of history as a form of propaganda. He argued that American historians—and social scientists, I might add—used their scholarship to distort history by altering facts and creating a false narrative about Black people and White American life and culture. As DuBois put it, “It is propaganda like this that has led men … to insist that history is lies agreed upon…” 

In closing, I follow DuBois in positing that the Moynihan Report also falls into the category of social science as “racist lies agreed upon” —the report is nothing more than a Cold War ideological project designed to hide the racialized oppression and exploitation of Black people under racial capitalism. And it was intended to project, both domestically and internationally, the big, beautiful lie that the United States is a land of freedom, democracy, and opportunity for all–including the African American.

Bibliography

Anderson, Carol. Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Jenkins, Destin, and Justin Leroy, eds. Histories of Racial Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021

Katz, Michael B., Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader. “The New African-American Inequality.” Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (June 2005): 75–108.

Krippner, Greta R. Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

McNally, David. Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025

Phillips-Fein, Kim. Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 1965.. https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/webid-moynihan

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