Ending the Obsession With Race

“The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.”
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

By the time Daniel Patrick Moynihan penned a famous memo to President Richard Nixon in 1970 he had been in the forefront of authoring or sponsoring nearly every federal government program to help alleviate racism in America. Foremost of which was the 1965 Moynihan Report that warned of the dire need for the government to use its power to codify laws and economic programs to help achieve that goal.

That report, coupled with the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, propelled the Johnson Administration and later Nixon Administration to take the lead in battling entrenched racial discrimination across the country.

So in less than a decade the federal government had done its part by essentially making discrimination illegal everywhere in America, thus laying the foundation for the black community to gradually move up the economic ladder by eliminating the discriminatory barriers that had held them back for over a century.

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