Moynihan Report,

is good about Black families? Where are the assets of Black communities?

What

However, he set a dangerous example by identifying the main problem as Black people not living up to White middle-class ideals. This is a mold that researchers of Black people and cities willfully maintain to this day. One of the major goals of this book is to show that there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve.

negative reinforcement campaign that attempts to punish Black people

Adding insult to injury, we’re professionally trained and rewarded to make White people the default referent group that Blacks are measured against. In doing so, we acquire a tendency to center White people in our work.

Regression models are mathematically most stable if the referent group is the largest within the sample you are drawing from. For that reason, in the United States, data sources that make note of racial categories are generally presented sequentially, with “White,” the largest single racial group, listed first.

Racism is a common denominator for Black people; it’s a given. It’s much more useful, in many cases, to examine the variation within the Black population to see what factors and conditions can be attributed to differences.

Culture of poverty theories manifest themselves in a seemingly constant focus on how Black folk aren’t living up to White norms instead of probing how to dismantle systems that privilege White people at Black people’s expense.