We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

The frame for this essay is Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), a Nixon-era call for a jobs program aimed at Black men. Moynihan argues in the report that such jobs will create the conditions for Black men to take their rightful places as patriarchs and breadwinners at the center of Black nuclear families.

Moynihan was a liberal sociologist who supported Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and civil rights agenda, but his answer to what ailed Black Americans was to be found in the Black family instead of in the lack of civil rights legislation. Coates’s gloss on Moynihan is that Moynihan saw Black families as dysfunctional and pathological because slavery and discrimination had led to an outsized number of families headed by Black women. If this pathological, matriarchal family structure was not remedied, Black Americans were sure to succumb to crime and other effects that would have a negative impact on America.

In Chapter 4 of his report, Moynihan claims that this “tangle of pathology” made Black Americans outliers in an American society built on the patriarchal, nuclear family. Even Moynihan admitted to leaving out how best to solve the problems he highlighted. The take-home message for most readers was that Black people and their broken families—not White supremacy—were the problem. The quiet release of the report gave the impression that Moynihan was trying to minimize some unpleasant truth. Conservative critics of civil rights seized on the report as support for their law-and-order politics; a crackdown on Black people, whom they saw as crime prone, was in order.

Moynihan gained a reputation as a racist as a result of these conservative fellow travelers. He also became dedicated to examining public policy on the issue of race. Nixon hired him, and Moynihan proposed a basic income program for families. When that liberal policy died in the Senate, Moynihan left the Nixon administration to teach at Harvard, where he advanced the idea that the supposed Black matriarchy was leading to an increase in crime.

Coates points out that over the past 60 years, rates of incarceration for Black men have indeed climbed, but the cause is not Black pathology. The conservatives won the policy argument, with the result that masses of Black men are caught up in the “Gray Wastes” because America chose to create a “carceral state” rather than addressing the enduring impacts of White supremacy. The carceral state is a “social service program—providing healthcare, meals, and shelter” during incarceration (231), but it makes it impossible to secure any of these needs after incarceration.

The US incarcerates more people than any other country, even authoritarian ones, and the rates of incarceration are not correlated to rises and falls in actual crime rates, according to research Coates cites. The burden of these outsized rates of incarceration falls most heavily on Black men, and the concurrent and subsequent unemployment they suffer as a result has a negative impact on their families. Children of incarcerated parents get into more trouble at school. While a parent is incarcerated, he or she frequently loses contact with family, friends, and any social support.

The problems don’t stop after release, either. Coates includes an interview from Tonya, an ex-offender who found that wide open spaces were frightening after 18 years of confinement. Ex-offenders also find that the habits that served them well inside, such as not making eye contact to avoid conflict, make them seem untrustworthy outside. Being an ex-offender makes securing employment difficult. Coates documents that a "black man without a criminal record fared worse that a white man with a criminal record" (240), so racism exacerbates the issue of unemployment after release.

The carceral state exists in the context of an American culture in which Black people are considered to be inherently criminal. That assumption can be found in America from the inception of slavery to the present day. After the legal end of Jim Crow laws, the criminalization of Black people continued with stop-and-frisk policies and the excessive use of force by the police in encounters with Black men like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. This excess of force and policing does not result in safer Black communities, however, because the police are less likely to pursue Black criminals who victimize Black people.

This underpolicing makes sense once one realizes that the primary purpose of policing Black people is to address “white anxiety about social control" (251), especially as White people became fearful of Black activism and self-assertion during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Richard Nixon capitalized on these anxieties by instituting “tough on crime” policies. Violent crime rose anyway, but Nixon and his ilk were not really interested in lowering crime: This approach gave them cover for policies tailored to re-institute social controls and deny social supports to Black Americans.

In the 1980s and 1990s, politicians and administrations across the political spectrum continued this work by advancing mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. The narrative of the inner city as a place overrun by crack addicts and children exposed to drugs in utero who grew up to be “super-predators” was so seductive that even Black leaders took up the call for tough-on-crime policies in urban settings. The result was much higher rates of incarceration for Black people versus White people for drug crimes, despite comparable rates of drug use.

Politicians in more conservative rural states framed prisons as industries that could create jobs for their white constituents, making the plunder of Black labor and bodies for White use explicit. On the other side of the political spectrum, Democratic stalwarts like Bill Clinton, Texas governor Ann Richards, and New York governor Mario Cuomo got in on the act with tough-on-crime bills. Clinton has since admitted that his support for crime bills that criminalized large numbers of Black Americans was a mistake. Coates sees the actions of such politicians as ongoing acts of cowardice, especially since governors in liberal states like Maryland have refused to use their pardon power to vacate excessive sentences that even the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional.

Having documented the impact of the carceral state on Black families, Coates returns to his critique of Moynihan’s argument. Moynihan ignores the impact of “compound deprivation”—being stuck in the worst neighborhoods, on top of bad housing, on top of having access only to people just as deprived—on Black families. Compound deprivation creates a situation in which Black families are confined to environments that make it impossible to have any kind of upward mobility. Coates documents these compound impacts on the Black family and concludes by arguing that the Black family is no match for these forces, despite Moynihan’s belief that it could be.

Despite the obvious flaws in Moynihan’s prescriptions, liberals and conservatives—even Obama—are once again pushing social programs and labeling Black families and Black women as the causes of Black failure to thrive. These solutions are dead ends. So are criminal justice reforms that release a small number of low-level offenders; politicians are too scared to embrace such reforms in any case. Coates notes that before publishing his report, Moynihan argued that financial compensation—reparations—might address the seemingly intractable problems of Black poverty. On this, Coates can agree.