The Moynihan Report Characterizes Black Culture as Communal Pathology

Doro is an ideal consumer who is both part of a “race,” “nation,” or “empire” (those terms being as confused and intertwined for Doro as they were for Burroughs) and its predator. This depiction of Doro highlights the ways in which a hyper-extended consumerism and an exceptionalist definition of nation both necessarily bring with them a permanent underclass—without which the empire would collapse—both feeding and being destroyed by those in the dominant position, and who themselves also work to maintain and expand the people/nation/empire itself. The history of racism that lurks in the background of the Moynihan Report is here revealed. The economic and other oppressions of the African American population are not indirect results of an amorphous history of externally applied oppression that leads to an internal communal “pathology,” which in turn can be “corrected” only by the dominant culture, as Moynihan would have it, but is rather a direct and continuous requirement of the continued stability of white, upper-class dominance. Butler thus exposes the liberal evasions of the Moynihan Report and the logic that undergirds it.

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Butler, however, shows that the white and patriarchal social pattern, because it relies on the maintenance of certain other patterns, is itself pathological.22 And, because of its reliance on its necessary abjected other, this dominant pattern can actually be overtaken or rewritten into a dominant black matriarchal society.