THE U.S. COMMISSION on Civil Rights Conference took place at the National Press Club in Washington this week. Policy analysts discussed the state of the black family, apparently without mentioning a word that was so crucial and yet largely ignored in the Moynihan Report of 50 years ago. That word is matriarchy.  Black society in America is matriarchal. Welfare helped push the black family in this direction, but an end to welfare, which has not yet been achieved, will not restore it as long as black women are sexually free and economically independent. 

The blogger Natassia, who is a commenter here, has put together a good summary of the conference proceedings. There are glimmers of sense in the remarks by conference participants, especially from Heather MacDonald and Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute. MacDonald said:

What I would do [in tackling the problem of black illegitimacy] is to spend every waking moment of our public policy discourse trying to revalorize fathers, and this will require taking on the National Organization for Women… We need to be able to say that, yes, there are fantastic, courageous single mothers who are able on their own to raise law-abiding civilized boys, but on average boys need fathers. And a culture needs to recognize that importance of fathers, and this is going to require taking on the feminist myth that women can do it all.

It is not only the National Organization for Women, but the entire culture that must be taken on for its glorification of female autonomy and sexual freedom and for its refusal to grant men anymore than a token role as fathers. Men don’t become fathers purely out of selflessness, or because they are cajoled and lectured into it. They become fathers to fulfill their natural inclinations as men and those inclinations include authority as well as responsibility. If this is what MacDonald means by “revalorizing” fatherhood, I agree. One way society formerly valorized fatherhood was by giving men the vote and denying it to women. This was symbolic recognition of male leadership for the average man. Another way society valorized fatherhood was by continually stressing the primacy of male achievement and discouraging female employment as something shameful to men.

Men withdraw when women take over. Society is either patriarchal or matriarchal, or tending toward one of these. It cannot be both.

                                                   — Comments —

Natassia writes:

[Patrick Moynihan, Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon Johnson] really believed that government could make a difference which is, as I see it, the central tenet of what American liberalism means to most people today. He said that the problem facing the Negro family was that there was a racist virus in the American bloodstream, that’s a quote, which caused, quote, three centuries of unimaginable mistreatment and which appeared most obviously in the weakness of the lower-class urban black family. He made it clear that he was not saying this was true of all black families, but this led to an out-of-wedlock birthrate in 1965 of around 25%. The word he used then was illegitmacy–even our words have changed. He talked about a black matriarchy, and in particularly [sic] drawing upon some language from Kenneth Clark … who wrote Dark Ghetto earlier in 1965. (He was, of course, a black psychologist.) [Moynihan] referred to this as a tangle of pathology, i.e. a sickness, which was really drawing the lower-class black family down.

Laura writes:

Thank you for the correction. It’s a word that should be used again and again in reference to black America.

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