Journal
ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
Volume 621, Issue -, Pages 260-280Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0002716208324803
Keywords
Daniel Patrick Moynihan; The Negro Family; Chicago; neighborhoods; durable inequality; poverty traps; racial stratification
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This article revisits neglected arguments of the Moynihan Report to yield insights for a contemporary understanding of racial inequality in American cities. The author argues that the logic of Moynihan's reasoning implies three interlinked hypotheses: ( 1) the tangle of pathology, or what today we call social dislocations, has a deep neighborhood structure, as does socioeconomic disadvantage; ( 2) the tangle of neighborhood inequality is durable and generates self-reinforcing properties that, because of racial segregation, are most pronounced in the black community; and ( 3) neighborhood poverty traps can ultimately only be broken with government structural interventions and macro-level policies. Examining longitudinal neighborhood-level data from Chicago and the United States as a whole, the author finds overall support for these hypotheses. Despite urban social transformations in the post-Moynihan era, neighborhoods remained remarkably stable in their relative economic standing. Poverty is also stubbornly persistent in its ecological concentration with other social disadvantages, especially in the black community.
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