According to Michele Wallace, Daniel Patrick Moynihan used statistics from the United States Department of Labor describe a "Black Matriarchy", Wallace writes: "Although no one would admit it, Moynihan had managed to provide authoritative support for something a lot of black men wanted to believe anyway: that the black woman had substantial advantages over the black man educationally, financially and in employment”.[4]
The Moynihan Report
In 1965, he was one of the most respected Democrats to ever live. In this year Moynihan had issued a report to the Department of Labor that was known as: The Moynihan report. Within in this report he believes that the fundamental problem is the family structure. The evidence that he used was the simple fact that the Negro Family in the urban ghettos was crumbling. On one hand the middle class group had managed to save itself, but the poor uneducated working class has all but disintegrated. According to Moynihan the cause of this family structural problem was the absence of the father in the Black home. He stated that “In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is out of line with the rest the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” He also points out that the reason that Black Matriarch system doesn’t work is the fact that the rest of American Society functions properly under the Patriarchal system, and when you try to change that balance it will tend to have negative results. Another point that he makes in the report is that with the presence of Black matriarchy in Black homes is that the children are learning more often that leaving families behind is an acceptable thing, especially with males. The report also states that “Back in 1965 when The Moynihan Report was written, on average 36% of Black children were living in broken homes at any given moment. That number has risen since then for both whites and non-whites, but today’s numbers for Blacks are alarming: Nationwide 70% of Black children are born into single parent households, while in Asbury Park estimates have been as high as 90%. The poor Black family has continued to disintegrate.”
He therefore generated a reaction that facilitated black men to blame matriarchy for the loss of male power within the family setting. Moynihan also theorized a relationship between “the professional and educational advancement of black women to the high juvenile delinquency levels, high crime levels, poor educational levels for black males”.[4]
Chapter IV:Tangle of Pathology
Also in 1965 in Chapter IV: Tangle of Pathology he goes into great detail about the struggle between middle-class and non-middle-class African Americans as a result of matriarchal power structures that directly conflicted with the Patriarchal power structure of dominant American Culture. Moynihan believes that because of three hundred years of oppression and mistreatment that African Americans were forced into the matriarchal society. “Research showed that this notion was consistent with the education disparity between African American men and women, 66.3% of nonwhite males did not graduate from high school, as opposed to 55% of nonwhite females. Likewise, while 7.3% of nonwhite females attended college, only 4.5% of nonwhite males attended college, and all the way through, the females performed better in class.” Moynihan goes into great detail discussing the reverse rolls between husbands and wives and more broadly, males and females within the African-American community. He cites the connection between gender and education, stating that “Negro females were better educated than Negro males, and this remains true today for the Negro population as a whole.” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s use of “Black Matriarchy,” a term that is negatively positioned within the African culture and subjugated within an American patriarchal system, gave rise to an antagonistic relationship between African American men and women." Showing that the women were beginning to move up in society where as the men were falling by the waist side. As Michele Wallace would state in her book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, “Moynihan had managed to provide authoritative support for something a lot of black men wanted to believe anyway: that the black woman had substantial advantages over the black man educationally, financially, and in employment” (Wallace 110). In essence, the black woman’s position within the African “family nucleus” or lack thereof, would be that of oppressor to the oppressed African male, creating a “crisis in manhood” for which the black male projects his anger onto his female counterpart, or as stated by Whitney Young, “To this situation, he may react with withdrawal, bitterness toward society, aggression both within the family and racial group, self-hatred, or crime.” (U.S. Department of Labor—Ch.IV. The Tangle of Pathology) It should be noted that the African American woman did not ask to be a matriarch; she was given the title by default. In today's society we that the Black Family still constructs itself under a Matriarchy system instead of the Patriarchy system that America's society is used to, which why Blacks are still get lower paying jobs, are ranked low in society, and are committing the most crimes. All of these issues that are affecting Blacks today basically sum up everything that drove Senator Moynihan to come up with the Moynihan Report and take a deeper look into Black Matriarchy.
Black Matriarchy and Today's Society
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan died on March 26, 2003 but his Moynihan Report did not end in 1965; in fact this particular report is still relevant to our society today. According to Moynihan at the beginning of his report most Americans lacked the awareness of how much weaker the Black family was as a result of this Matriarchal system. In studies it showed that at the time of the report just one in four black babies were born out of wedlock which made him want to dig a little to figure out where the disconnect was taking place. It was also known that almost one-fourth of Negro families were headed by females in 1965, since it was already instilled in the Black male that it was alright to leave their families behind instead of staying and being the heads of households. He also points out the fact that: today less than half of all black women ages 25 to 29 have ever even been married, Americans may not remember that the black marital problem Moynihan worried about in 1965 was a divorce-separation rate that left 1 in 4 ever-married urban black women living “with husbands absent or divorced.”
In her 1979 book Wallace claimed that in actuality black women had the lowest earning power, held the lowliest positions within organizations and corporations, and often required more education to obtain these positions than men.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Thursday, January 3rd 2013 at 1:35PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
