Daniel Geary's detailed examination of the Moynihan report's inception and reception provides a long-overdue historical treatment of this landmark document, which set the agenda for the post-civil rights era's discussions of race, culture, and inequality. Published in 1965 as a spur to federal social policy addressing endemic black poverty, Geary shows how Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action encapsulated the hubris of postwar racial liberalism. Moynihan leapt into his study without any prior knowledge about black America, assuming, like many other white scholars and officials, that his own “ghetto,” immigrant roots and social-science expertise made him an instant authority on the subject. Aiming to find a way to garner white support for addressing black economic inequality, Moynihan chose to focus on what he presumed to be an irresistible cultural case for attacking black poverty, and specifically male unemployment, by drawing attention to the putatively woeful state of the patriarchal family and predominance of an emasculating “matriarchy” among African Americans. Equally confident about his methods, Moynihan rested his case on a mountain of aggregate, statistical data, the sine qua non of technocratic and scholarly evidence in the postwar era.

Much to Moynihan's disappointment, the report failed to bring about any new policy initiatives. Instead, he was astonished that his arguments and approach became touchstones for a vociferous, wide-ranging, and long-lasting controversy among black power advocates, second-wave feminists, and neoconservatives, all of whom were finding their voices in the mid-1960s by defining themselves for and against the assumptions on which the report was based. Black scholars and activists, as well as Labor Department statisticians, questioned Moynihan's expertise, especially in his reliance on and interpretation of aggregate statistics, which betrayed his ignorance of the dynamics and diversity of the national black community. Feminists challenged Moynihan's unquestioning assertion of the patriarchal family as an essential bulwark institution in American life, as well as the destructive logic of his explicit agenda to elevate black men at the expense of black women – and hence families – as an antipoverty strategy. The greatest conflict emerged over the report's ambiguity about whether the “pathology” of the black family was the cause or effect of black poverty, resulting in both an outcry from critics about “blaming the victim” rather than the racism of American social institutions for black inequality, and praise from neoconservatives who embraced the idea that African Americans’ problems were internal and cultural, thus negating the need for any further government action on behalf of black citizens.

Both despite and because of these controversies, Geary demonstrates, the Moynihan report inexorably shaped and still influences the national discussion on racial inequality in the academy, media, and government. Indeed, the emergent fields of black sociology, anthropology, and history, as well as much post-civil rights black activism, were all shaped at their inception by a preoccupation with refuting Moynihan's assertions. Notwithstanding these many powerful and relentless critiques, neoconservative arguments about the need for racial self-help to heal the black family have remained so dominant that even many African American critics of other aspects of the report still posit that uplifting black men and reviving paternal responsibility are key to ending black poverty. The hegemonic power of this perspective demonstrates how the mainstream dialogue about race and poverty continues to revolve around the cultural arguments initiated by Moynihan. In the end Geary questions the report's ongoing salience. He argues that its shoddy social science and dubious focus on the black family as black poverty's key indicator or cause hardly qualify its persistence as a vehicle for understanding expanding inequality in the United States, especially when the debates it sparks diminish attention to more salient structural issues.

This is a complex story to narrate, but Geary does an exemplary job in telling it. The book is deeply researched, and leads the reader on a superbly curated and interpreted tour of the enormous diversity of responses to the report published over the last half-century, as well as their legacy. From time to time, much like the Moynihan report's treatment of black family structure, Geary may overstep the line in interpreting the report as the cause rather than a symptom, in this case of greater ideological forces driving post-civil rights discussions of racial inequality. However, these lapses are understandable given the enormous and ongoing influence of his subject on American scholarship, activism, and policymaking.