# Moniyhan's at risk 1965 Negro Family vs 2016 White Working Class Trump Voting Family **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 12, 2017, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moniyhans-at-risk-1965-negro-family-vs-2016-white-working-class-trump-voting-family/779695 "2017-02-12T21:26:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2017, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moniyhans-at-risk-1965-negro-family-vs-2016-white-working-class-trump-voting-family/779695/1 "2017-02-12T21:26:06Z")
In 1965 then Sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report titled [“The Negro Family: The Case For National Action”.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action) In it he laid out the thesis that the American black family was at risk. Cited as one of the main causes of this was black single mother households and the resultant poverty caused by high out of wedlock birth rates. [An annotated version of the report is here](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632/)with the statistics. > [@](#): > > Nearly One-Quarter of Negro Births are now Illegitimate. > > Both white and Negro illegitimacy rates have been increasing, although from dramatically different bases. The white rate was 2 percent in 1940; it was 3.07 percent in 1963. In that period, the Negro rate went from 16.8 percent to 23.6 percent. What is the current out of wedlock birth rate for American working class/ middle class white females? > [@](#): > > The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (known as the Moynihan Report, 1965) was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor[1] under President Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States. In 1976, Moynihan was elected to the first of several terms as US senator from New York and continued to support liberal programs to try to end poverty. His report focused on the deep roots of black poverty in the United States and controversially concluded that the high rate of families headed by single mothers would greatly hinder progress of blacks toward economic and political equality. > > Moynihan argued that the rise in black single-mother families was caused not by a lack of jobs (that would soon be the case, however, from the loss of jobs due to industrial restructuring) but by a destructive vein in ghetto culture, which could be traced to slavery times and continued discrimination in the American South under Jim Crow . ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2017, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moniyhans-at-risk-1965-negro-family-vs-2016-white-working-class-trump-voting-family/779695/2 "2017-02-12T22:27:52Z")
Out of wedlock births have gone up for everyone. They went up much more for blacks. They appear to be a bit lower for white working class people than they were for blacks when Moynihan published his report ([cite](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43667.pdf)- pdf), if that’s what you mean. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![slash2k](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@slash2k](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/slash2k)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moniyhans-at-risk-1965-negro-family-vs-2016-white-working-class-trump-voting-family/779695/3 "2017-02-13T00:14:24Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > They appear to be a bit lower for white working class people than they were for blacks when Moynihan published his report ([cite](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43667.pdf)- pdf), if that’s what you mean. Could you clarify which page of the PDF has rates of non-marital birth for the white working class? I didn’t see it. I do find from your cite that for all white women, 29.3% of births in 2013 were to the unmarried, which is higher than the 22% rate for black women in the early 1960s that so alarmed Moynihan. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moniyhans-at-risk-1965-negro-family-vs-2016-white-working-class-trump-voting-family/779695/4 "2017-02-13T00:32:20Z")
“Out of wedlock” births is no longer really relevant. There has been a staggering revolution in the proportion of couples who are living “out of wedlock” and having children voluntarily as a couple, but still statistically classified as out of wedlock. Furthermore, the divorce rate is so high, the number of children born in wedlock and being raised by a single mom by the time they start school, may exceed the number of out-or-wedlock births in 1965. The criteria for impact does not lie in the number born out of wedlock, but the number being raised by one parent. Marriage is no longer a useful metric for that. ---
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moniyhans-at-risk-1965-negro-family-vs-2016-white-working-class-trump-voting-family/779695/5 "2017-02-13T00:32:24Z")
I’m not sure “out of wedlock” births are still a good metric for whether or not families are in trouble. Some couples stay together their whole lives without getting married, and many families are married at the time of the birth of their children, but not much longer. Some out of wedlock children are raised in perfectly fine households, and some, of course, are not. I think if you want to argue that White Working Class people are having problems, you need to find another way to assess that. ETA: Ninja’d by **jtur88.** ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moniyhans-at-risk-1965-negro-family-vs-2016-white-working-class-trump-voting-family/779695/6 "2017-02-13T01:14:07Z")
“Out of wedlock” also isn’t a permanent situation. My niece was born a year before her parents were married (although they had been living together). They are still together 23 years later. But according to the statistics, she was born “out of wedlock”. Doesn’t matter that her parents were living together the whole time. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moniyhans-at-risk-1965-negro-family-vs-2016-white-working-class-trump-voting-family/779695/7 "2017-02-13T15:39:04Z")
Things have evolved. The main data point now is single-parent household. It doesn’t matter if the parents are/were married. It’s how many are around. So consider the deprived Tiffany Trump. She was born out of wedlock. That’s bad. But her parents got married shortly afterwards. That’s good. They split up less than 4 years later. That’s bad. Her father remarried. That’s good. She spent most of her time with her single mother. That’s bad. The toppings contain potassium benzoate. 🙂