In 1965, former NY senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote “The Negro American Family: The Case for National Action.” Moynihan was then assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration. While admitting that rising black unemployment was even then at “disaster” levels, Moynihan linked poverty not to joblessness, but to higher rates of children born “out of wedlock.” He blamed single-parent, female-headed families, not racism, for educational differences, higher welfare rolls, urban “isolation,” and crime. And he attacked the black family as a “tangle of pathology” caused by centuries–long history of slavery and Jim Crow.

Moynihan’s report was released during the growing anti-racist upsurge against capitalist-inspired exploitation and oppression of the 1960s. Thus, the rulers were forced to temporarily shelve its more brazen conclusions. Moynihan’s arguments introduced the term “benign neglect” which became the ideological basis for attitudes toward low-income workers that shaped Nixon administration welfare policies of the late 1960s. They also helped spawn an academic industry, which invented the concept of “culture of poverty” to explain racist unemployment and poverty, while covering up continuing discrimination and segregation.

In the 1980s, as urban industrial jobs increasingly vanished and unemployment increased sharply, this push to the right accelerated. Racist ideologue Charles Murray, who later co-wrote “The Bell Curve,” produced “Losing Ground,” which blamed social welfare programs for unwed mothers, unemployment, and crime. Murray and others promoted the racist and sexist imagery of female-headed black and Latino families as symbolic of the urban “underclass”. These Nazi–like myths helped provide the rationale for the increasing welfare cuts of the Reagan years, which in turn laid the groundwork for the Clinton-led bipartisan “welfare reform” of the 1990s.

Today, “culture-of-poverty” ideas, correctly seen by anti-racists in the 1960s as the other side of “genetic inferiority” garbage, have become “mainstream.” Obama, Clinton, and McCain all embrace some aspect of “getting tough with the ‘underclass.’” Politicians of all stripes trumpet the success of “welfare reform,” even as unemployment shoots up and more workers fall deeper into economic misery. The bosses and their political mouthpieces remain nervous, however, about the possibility of working-class rebellion against layoffs, soaring food and gas prices, more hospital closings, and bigger wars. At the same time that the media is promoting the idea that racism in the U.S. has been overcome, the rulers feel the need to sharpen their racist knives for more vicious attacks on our class.

(Part two will discuss how Bill Cosby and Barack Obama are using the bosses “culture of poverty” against the working class to build U.S. imperialism.)