More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

The Moynihan Report, written in 1965 by an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Johnson, asserted that both racial inequality and the breakdown of the black family fostered poor racial relations. The backlash against the report shut down debate over structural contributors to the breakdown of the black family unit. Some blacks, especially those associated with the Black Power movement, were critical of the report’s emphasis on pathologies within the black family. This idea conflicted with the movement’s focus on the vitality of the black community. Vitriolic responses to Moynihan dissuaded academic research in this area until the mid-1980s. By 1996, the proportion of black children born outside of marriage had reached a high of 70%. These children were America’s poorest demographic and therefore, according to longitudinal studies, at a significant disadvantage. Such children are more likely to be school dropouts, become teenage parents, receive lower earnings, and experience cognitive, social, and emotional problems.

The decline in the proportion of married parents in the past 40 years was formerly offset by the number of parents who maintained a relationship. Increasingly, however, this is not the case. Black mothers in inner-city neighborhoods are eight times more likely than comparable Mexican American mothers to live in a single-parent household.