In 1965, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, or the Moynihan Report, affirmed future U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s status as his era’s preeminent expert on race in the United States. Hailed as objective and held up as an exemplar of the public intellectual, Moynihan in fact contributed little original thought and led a segregated social and intellectual life that severely limited his knowledge of Black Americans

John Hoberman cuts through decades of media adulation and high-profile reverence to illuminate Moynihan’s shortcomings and the Report’s disastrous legacy. As a model of the eloquent scholar-politician, Moynihan answered the demand for a white authority figure to explain Black dysfunction. But his undoubted intellect and gift for language eclipsed a singular lack of qualifications and endowed the Report with an authority it did not deserve. Hoberman delves into the factors that raised Moynihan to the role of race expert while revealing the depths of his naïveté about white racial animosity and how policymakers would use his Report against Black Americans.

Incisive and in-depth, The Moynihan Myth is a long-overdue exposé of a deeply flawed race expert.

John Hoberman is chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping.

“The Moynihan Myth is an incisive dismantling of Moynihan’s reputation as America’s preeminent race expert and of the white liberal political culture that allowed his racism to elude the condemnation more readily directed at the right. Hoberman brilliantly shows how durable and damaging ideas about Black life were promoted by elite white saviors whose authority relied on a ‘white monopoly on racial knowledge.’ By exposing the side of Moynihan his defenders obscured, this book foregrounds the Black feminists, sociologists, and other intellectuals who resisted his pathologizing account of race, family, and policy.”
—Dorothy E. Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty