“All Blacks Are Angry”

This chapter examines the continuing disparities between Whites and Blacks through extensive social science data and studies of the impacts of systemic racism. It first utilizes what demographers call the dissimilarity index to measure housing segregation in major metropolitan areas; cities with heavily Black populations, such as Detroit, have become “hyper-segregated” with almost total “social isolation” of Blacks. The chapter then examines the long-standing academic and political debates over the causes of systemic racism, beginning in 1965 with a government report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, by a young Labor Department aide, Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan. He found the main cause of Black poverty and increasing single Black motherhood in the “pathology” of a “matriarchal” Black family structure in which males are neither needed nor welcome. Moynihan’s report spurred an angry rebuttal in a book by psychology professor William Ryan, Blaming the Victim, which found the main cause of Black poverty in the systemic racism of White society and culture. The chapter then looks at social science studies by William Julius Wilson (explaining the “racial invariance” of White and Black crime); psychologist John Dollard (explaining the prevalence of Black-on-Black crime with the “frustration-aggression-displacement” theory); and Black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs (explaining “Black rage” as rooted in White control of institutions that exclude or discriminate against Blacks). The chapter concludes with a look at the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s and the resulting mass incarceration of Black men.