Most known for the Moynihan Report, a 1965 report that studied poverty in African-American communities and concluded that, rather than structural or systemic momentum from an explicit racial hierarchy, the primary reasons for continued cycles of poverty could be attributed to problems with “ghetto culture.”
William J. Ryan responded to the report with a major rebuttal in his 1971 book Blaming the Victim, where is where the term “victim blaming” was coined in reference to a fallacy that confused cause-and-effect, assuming that culture affected the cycles of poverty instead of poverty affecting the culture of a community. This included observations like single-mother households and births out of wedlock.
Specifically, Ryan responded that the report “seduces the reader into believing that it is not racism and discrimination but the weaknesses and defects of the Negro himself that account for the present status of inequality between Negro and white.”