The Negro Family: The Case For National Action - Reception and Following Debate

Reception and Following Debate

From the time of its publication, the report has been sharply attacked by Black-American and civil rights leaders as examples of white patronizing, cultural bias, or even racism. The report has, at various times, been condemned or dismissed by the N.A.A.C.P, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Among the complaints lodged at the "Moynihan Report" are the stereotyping of the black family and black men, inferences of inferior academic performance by Black-Americans, portrayals of endemic crime and "pathology" in the black community, and a failure to recognize both cultural bias and racism in standardized tests. The report was criticized for threatening to undermine the place of civil rights on the national agenda, leaving "a vacuum that could be filled with a politics that blamed blacks for their own troubles."

African-American economist and writer Walter E. Williams has praised the report for its findings. He has also added in response, "The solutions to the major problems that confront many black people won't be found in the political arena, especially not in Washington or state capitols."

Political commentator Heather MacDonald wrote for National Review in 2008, "Conservatives of all stripes routinely praise Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescience for warning in 1965 that the breakdown of the black family threatened the achievement of racial equality. They rightly blast those liberals who denounced Moynihan’s report".

Sociologist Stephen Steinberg explained in 2010, that the Moynihan report was condemned "because it threatened to derail the black liberation movement."

Criticism of the specific claims made in the report helped draw attention away from the ghetto and toward white researchers. The report has since been commonly understood by US sociologists as driven by an emphasis on the effects of structural inequality and the historical context from which "deviant" activity emerges.