The Academia Report with Prof. Drea Two Narratives. One Nation. Two Diagnoses. One America.

Part 1 examines two landmark federal reports produced during the 1960s—the Moynihan Report (1965) and the Kerner Report (1968)—both commissioned by the U.S. government to diagnose the condition of Black America. Though written within three years of each other and addressing the same crisis, these reports offered radically different explanations. The Moynihan Report argued that family structure had become the primary barrier to Black progress, shifting attention toward household instability, employment, and social behavior. The Kerner Report, by contrast, declared that America was moving toward “two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal,” placing responsibility squarely on structural racism, segregation, housing policy, policing, and economic exclusion. This lecture places both reports in their full historical context—slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, segregation, and mass incarceration—and challenges the long-standing practice of treating these forces as background rather than as active systems shaping outcomes. It confronts America’s era of benign neglect, when structural reform was abandoned in favor of cultural blame, and asks why one narrative was absorbed into political language while the other was ignored. This is not a debate show. This is a historical and intellectual reckoning. Two Narratives. One Nation is the beginning of a multi-part lecture series examining how policy, power, and narrative have shaped the modern Black experience—and how the stories a nation chooses determine the solutions it is willing to pursue.

The Negro Family: The Case for National Action