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The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan1
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (from here on referred to as The Report), known in popular vernacular as The Moynihan Report (1965), celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2015. In 1965, amidst a backdrop of Black urban rebellion, Moynihan's anxiety about the crumbling fabric of the negro family headed by the Black matriarch inspired his characterization of the black family as a "tangle of pathology."2 Alongside the sociologist's attempts to police and sur-veil unruly Black urban life through producing the 'Black family' as an object of knowlegde and problem for national security, Moynihan also reaffirmed the family as the singular epistemic mode of knowing and regulating the self and American (or US) civil society. Moyhihan affirmed for the United States that, "The family is the basic social unit of American life."3
Since The Report's publication, Black scholars and activists have felt compelled to respond to The Report and its legacy that has marked Black single mothers, Black genders, sexualities and family formations as self (and nationally) destructive. Since it's introduction into mainstream public discourse in 1965 the Black Matriarch has embedded itself in the US imaginary in an almost archetypal fashion. In fact it has become the primary discourse used to both imagine and speak about the 'Black family' specifically as a problem and thus an object of disquiet. Black academic 'feminists' and Black women activists have critiqued both Daniel Patrick Moynihan's and Black bourgeois attempts to castigate Black female headed households as perverse and deviant.4 Black feminists have labored to illumine the ways that the "controlling image" of the Black matriarch forecloses upon the possibility of imagining viable non-nuclear family formations, vilifies Black single female sexual autonomy, reinforces an ethos of personal responsibility and disavows structural inequality making it almost impossible to imagine a politics of redistribution. To date, Black feminist and queer scholarship continues to propose Black matriarchal, non-heteropatriarchal and queer models of affirming Black family life in an attempt to counter the legacy of pathologization left by The Report.
However, after fifty years of ever-evolving and increasingly nuanced Black feminist responses to The Report