Thread by @AlsoACarpenter

Unfortunately, this tweet will be taken by far to many White Americans as confirmation of their belief that the difficulties and disparities confronting African Americans is a familial pathology within their own culture.

This "explanation" was largely popularized by Nathan 1/

https://twitter.com/JustinEGiboney/status/1493950463393382403

2/ Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the first a Harvard professor and the latter a U.S. Senator) in the 1960s.

It's helpful to compare Moynihan's diagnosis and prescription with Dr. King's in the same era.

The celebrated Moynihan Report (1963) gave the language and

3/ justification for inaction and victim blaming to Nixon in particular, and the U.S. at large.

Moynihan blamed the difficulties in the Black community on the supposedly pathological Black family. We read that the

“Negro family is the fundamental source of the weakness of the

4/ "Negro community at the present time. ... At this point the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world."

Describing the " broken homes" of "the Negro community," Moynihan writes that

"the mother is forced to work (as

5/ "the Negro mother so often is), when the father is incapable of contributing support (as the Negro father so often is), when fathers and mothers refuse to accept responsibility for and resent their children, as Negro parents, overwhelmed by difficulties, so often do, and when

6/ "the family situation, instead of being clear-cut and with defined roles and responsibility, is left vague and ambiguous (as it so often is in Negro families)."

In a policy paper written a year later, Moynihan concludes that

"a community that allows a large number of young

7/ "men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder … that is not only to

8/ "be expected, but they are very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.”

The government, therefore, should do nothing. The problem laid squarely in the lap of Black Americans made pathological by slavery. In fact, they deserved what they were getting.

9/ But Dr. King also addressed this issue at the same time, but came to very different conclusions.

In his book Where Do We Go From Here?, he recognized the potential dangers of ideas like Moynihan's, understanding it could be used to justify social and governmental inaction and

10/ victim blaming:

"As public awareness of the predicament of the Negro family increases, there will be danger and opportunity. The opportunity will be to deal fully rather than haphazardly with the problem as a whole—to see it as a social catastrophe brought on by long years

11/ "of brutality and oppression and to meet it as other disasters are met, with an adequacy of resources. The danger will be that the problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify further neglect and to rationalize continued oppression."

12/ King's diagnosis and prescription, therefore, was quite different. In his "Address at Abbott House" in 1965, he argues,

"The most optimistic element revealed in this review of the Negro family’s experience is that the causes for its present crisis are culturally and socially

13/ "induced. What man has torn down, he can rebuild. At the root of the difficulty in Negro life is pervasive and persistent want. To grow from within the Negro needs only fair opportunity for jobs, education, housing and access to culture. To be strengthened from the outside

14/ "requires protection from the grim exploitation that has haunted [the community] for 300 years."

The "root" is "persistent want"; the solution is "fair opportunity" and "protection from ... exploitation."

15/ Again, in Where Do We Go From Here?, King argues that the problems in the "Negro community" are structural, not familial:

"Depressed living standards for Negroes are not simply the consequence of neglect. Nor can they be explained by the myth of the Negro’s innate

16/ "incapacities, or by the more sophisticated rationalization of his acquired infirmities (family disorganization, poor education, etc.). They are a structural part of the economic system in the United States."

Again, structurally imposed poverty is at the root.

17/ Finally, later in the book he gets very specific:

"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income."

18/ By addressing poverty by such means,

"[t]he dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement.

19/ "Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated."

Of course King also believed in personal responsibility and that bad actions lead to bad outcomes, therefore counseling

20/20 his community not to wait for society-wide solutions before taking personal action; but, again, the root lied elsewhere for King.

I hope this may help some understand the racist approach vs. King's antiracist approach. (And hopefully not too many typos.)