Benign Neglect

phrase from a memo from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to President Richard Nixon.

published in Ny Times in Jan1970, I can only find this excerpt (from Deborah Wallace):

You are familiar with the problem of crime. Let me draw your attention to another phenomenon, exactly parallel and originating in exactly the same circumstances: Fire. Unless I mistake the trends, we are heading for a genuinely serious fire problem in American cities. In New York, for example, between 1956 and 1969, the over-all fire-alarm rate more than tripled from 69 000 alarms to 240 000. These alarms are concentrated in slum neighborhoods, primarily black. In 1968, one slum area had an alarm rate per square mile 13 times that of the city as a whole. In another, the number of alarms has, on an average, increased 44 percent per year for seven years.

Many of these fires are the result of Population Density. But a great many are more or less deliberately set. (Thus, on Monday, welfare protectors set two fires in the New York State Capitol.) Fires are in fact a "leading indicator" of social pathology for a neighborhood. They come first. Crime, and the rest, follows. The psychiatric interpretation of fire- setting is complex, but it relates to types of personalities which slums produce. (A point of possible interest: Fires in black slums peak in July and August. The urban riots of 1964-1968 could be thought of as epidemic conditions of an endemic situation)".

The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of "benign neglect."The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades. The Administration can help bring this about by paving close attention to such progress-as we are doing-while seeking to avoid situations in which extremists of either race are given opportunities for martyrdom, heroics, histrionics, or whatever. Greater attention to Indians, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans would be useful.