The concept of benign neglect was coined by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) in a January 1970 memo to President Richard M. Nixon while he served as the latter’s Urban Affairs counselor.
The widely circulated memo, which was leaked to the press in March of that same year, read: “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect’.”
At that historical juncture, Moynihan declared, Americans needed “a period in which Negro progress” continued and “racial rhetoric” faded.
Moynihan believed that the antipoverty programs of the “Great Society” of the 1960s had failed miserably, not only because they had attempted to use money alone to solve the nation’s inability to properly educate the African American poor but also because they did not raise issues in reference to the viability of integration as a solution to U.S. racial problems.
To most liberals-especially many civil rights leaders of the period-Moynihan had provided the rationalization for what Swedish political economist Gunnar Myrdal, in his classic An American Dilemma (1944), labeled a “laissez-faire” or “do-nothing” approach to racial problems.
Most liberals at the time thought-and they thought correctly-that Moynihan’s concept was fatalistic-that is, that the intervention of the federal government on behalf of the African American could not alter the inexorable social forces that could only be assuaged by local initiatives. In short, the concept of benign neglect for all intents and purposes suggested that social programs that were endorsed and funded by the federal government created attitudes of dependency among the African American poor.
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