My Mamma says that alligators...

All though it took a lot of energy to keep on track, I found "Changing American Families" interesting. The parts of the Moynihan report that were focused on the idea of "the matriarch subjugation of black men" and the criticism of it by Staples and others were the most interesting to me. I thought it was weird that Daniel Moynihan said that the resason for so many of the black Americans problems was that they were dominated by women. Obviously this guy wasn't Italian or Irish (or if he was, he wasn't a real one), because that'w how my extended family works. My Grandma sits at the top of the pyramid and any significant family event, she is there. Any family reunion is organized by her and any major plans are run by her first.
Another thing that caught me by surprise was the fact that Moynihan had the gall to say that family disorganization was the cause of racial problems associated with "dilapidated housing, poverty, unemployment, and inferior enducation". You take a group that has been kicked down, barred from society and told their less they are less the rest of the people and you want to blame it on the way they run their families? Some bad thinking is going on there (or lack of thinking).
That it was so influential and redrew the entire lines of civil rights, so it was not only between color, but gender as well, is probably due to the changing times. With such new ideas being discussed on a national level, it seems only natural that a few bad ones sneak in a well among the good.
Because what was really going on in black homes was different from the idea of the "nuclear family", I think that they had a problem with that. That the idea of a community that relied on each other, instead of hiding their problems from the neighbors, was so different, it was easier to redraw the battle lines between white and black, by changing the focus back onto the black families and their differences from the whites at the time.
I personally like some of the ideas presented about other ethnic and color ways of family. The idea of helping your neighbor and having multiple families really appeals to me and also the idea of making "Networks...of both kin and non-kin." I think to say one way of how a family or family system is run is a terrible idea and shows that you don't understand what the others are presenting and what you could share with them also.