Trump has not said how he plans to spend the $54 billion military increase, leading some analysts to call it “a budget in search of a strategy.” How would costly weapons help in Yemen, facing famine because U.S.-armed Saudi Arabia is blockading its port?

Mr. Trump welcomes a nuclear arms race and says he wants to be “top of the pack.” In conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he rejected Putin’s proposal to extend the START Treaty capping U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals at 1,500 nuclear weapons. Those already represent levels of destructiveness that would devastate both nations and endanger life on Earth. Russia might put its forces on launch-on-warning, increasing the risk of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.

Trump’s proposal is as dangerous as it is cruel. Congress should reject it.

Entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, it warned that the United States was on the verge of a “new crisis in race relations.” Using lots of data, Moynihan showed that an increasing number of African-American children were growing up in homes headed by single women. As a result, he argued, they risked entrapment in “a tangle of pathology,” living in neighborhoods with high rates of delinquency, crime, and poverty.

Moynihan, who later became a United States Senator, cited the effects of slavery, prejudice, and the economic problems of black men among the causes. While he offered no solutions, his report was the basis for President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 graduation speech at Howard University, which called for a new and “more profound” stage of the Civil Rights movement, focused on achieving “equality as a fact” not just “equality as a right.”

Nonetheless, Moynihan’s report was widely denounced as “blaming the victim,” holding blacks responsible for their own plight. Policy experts and political leaders for over a generation disputed his analysis or avoided it, although more accept it today.

Yet, in the Baltimore neighborhood where rioting occurred, nearly 40 percent of families, containing even more children, are headed by a single parent, while the poverty-rate is twice the city’s, just as Moynihan would have expected. What the Baltimore riots show is that we are still a long way from achieving “equality as a fact,” or even knowing how to do so.

Sources:

Moynihan Report
Johnson commencement address
James T. Patterson, Freedom is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life – from LBJ to Obama, Basic Books, 2010.
Baltimore (Sandtown) demographics

You see, dad sincerely believed that his experience was normative and indeed for him and most whites it probably is. This should not be surprising. My family’s social circle was 100% white, as was my dad’s workplace and my school environment. We only came into conversational contact with other whites, who like my dad, could not recall ever just walking down the street and being accosted by the police. We all reinforced each other’s experience.

When I went to college in Wyoming all my friends were white. Later, I came to graduate school in St. Louis. There I came into contact with some black professors who related stories about being hassled by police for no reason. And we remember the case of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates arrested by police trying to get into his own home.

In St. Louis I began to talk with blacks about race. But I’m embarrassed to say that it took events in Ferguson for me to really realize that if a person is black and especially black and poor they can be accosted by police on a weekly basis.

Suddenly I began to “get it” at a gut level, which sadly my dad did not have a chance to do. Events in Ferguson began to open my eyes to some differences in growing up white and growing up black.

Will events in Ferguson prompt other white people to see more clearly?

I hope so.