Freedom is Not Enough

In 2010, James T. Patterson wrote the book entitled Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle over Black Family Life.

Yes, freedom is not enough; nodding at oppression is not enough; liberals such as President Johnson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan are not radical enough, biblical enough.  A Jubilee type justice is required to end systems of oppression, release the oppressed, and repair the enormous damage done to black individuals, families and communities.

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson gave a commencement address Howard University.  "He outlined . . . the most far-reaching civil rights agenda in modern history."  He asserted that "freedom is not enough."  Blacks and especially the black family had been battered by "centuries of oppression."  Johnson declared that the "family is the cornerstone of our society. . . . When the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged.  When it happens on a large massive scale the community itself is crippled."  As a nation, we need to move beyond civil rights to equality.

Commenting on the speech, Martin Luther King observed, "Never before has a president articulated the depths and dimensions [of our problem] more eloquently and profoundly."

Daniel Patrick Moyniham, a liberal, had co-written the LBJ address.  It was based on a 78 page in house memo titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.  Much of what Moynihan wrote was accurate; he wanted to move beyond welfare to employment for black males.  But he made a fatal mistake, the same mistake that most well-meaning white Americans, including theologians and pastors, make.  He did not first write a 78 page report on The White Oppressor: The Case for National Action.

There was mention of white oppression as the cause of black family dysfunction, but no in depth analysis of the history of white oppression, the redesign of systems of oppression nor the type of justice required to release the oppressed.  While unintended, in some ways, the Moynihan Report ended up blaming the victim, blaming the dysfunctional black family, not the white oppressor.

Historian James Patterson excels in a careful examination of all the relevant literature on the black family by both black and white scholars, and what has happened to the black family in the last 45 years.  So I highly recommend that you read this good book.  One important book that he missed is Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.  In the same year that Freedom is Not Enough (2010) was published, a blockbuster book, The New Jim Crow, hit the streets of America; Michelle Alexander examined the newest system of oppression that profoundly damaged the black family and community---mass incarceration.

The definitive book on white oppression has not yet been written; Michelle Alexander and Ta-nehisis Coates have come closest to doing so.

LBJ, apart from the Vietnam War, was a remarkable president in many ways.  Important legislation was passed including civil rights, voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid.  These were much needed reforms, but not revolutionary enough to stop long-standing and continuing American oppression.  Later, LBJ refused to accept the Kerner Commission Report that bluntly stated that white oppression was the cause of the black riots.  So, 50 years later, in 2015 two forms of oppression---economic inequality and mass incarceration are ravaging ethnic families and communities.  Page 99 reveals that Moynihan didn't quite get it on white racism either though he went halfway on the issue.

At the same time that LBJ was pushing through significant reforms, MLK was also working hard on reforms in the South.  Toward the end of his short life, King said that for years he labored "with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there."  After years of significant but slow progress, King concluded: "I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values."  I think that if King were alive in 2015, he would still be talking about "a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

The Sabbath Year/Jubilee Year principles were radical; a socioeconomic revolution every seven years---cancel debt, free slaves---is required to stop oppression.  The American white church ignores the Jubilee.  This allows white privilege, white systems of oppression, to continues, redesigned, for 355 years.  Moynihan wanted jobs and socioeconomic equality for blacks; these are not possible apart from the Sabbath Year revolution.

In the gospel of Luke, the poor and near poor made up the majority of the population.  Jesus spent most of his time among the poor ministering to their needs.  The poor had many problems, but Jesus did not regard the poor as THE problem in society.  For Jesus the rich were THE problem.

So also in modern America.  The rich whites, the oppressors with power, are THE number one problem.  But most Americans, including most scholars, regard poor blacks, the dysfunctional black family as THE problem.  Between 1965 and 1980 "more than fifty books and five hundred journal articles addressed the effects of poverty and discrimination on black families."  There was no similar torrent of scholarship devoted to an in depth analysis of white oppression, not even from the church who had the best book ever written on oppression in their hands---the Bible.

Now some quotations from Freedom is Not Enough:  First the Moynihan thesis:

"The principal effect of exploitation, discrimination, poverty and unemployment on the Negro community has been a profound weakening of the Negro family structure."

"The primary challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain equality [especially socioeconomic] of results will now follow [after the civil rights revolution]."

Du Bois on Philadelphia (1899):

"The two greatest hindrances bedeviling black Philadelphia were economic: "the low wages of men and the high rents."

Du Bois, Frazier, Myrdal, Clark and Moynihan on the black family:

1.  blacks suffered from economic exploitation.
2.  slavery has disastrous long-range cultural effects.

An update from the December 17, 2015 Des Moines Register by lawyer James Benzoni titled "How state's demographics lead to its prison racial disparity."

"At any one time, about 25 percent of black males are involved in America's criminal justice system, whether prison, parole or probation or awaiting trial.  Just as in the days of slavery,  our society is systematically separating the black male population from their families and communities."