Thirty years after the historic Kerner Commission predicted a deepening racial divide in America, an offshoot group is lamenting how true that prediction turned out to be.
That’s a mistake, in my humble view. I think the group should be celebrating how wrong the prediction turned out to be.
The Kerner Riot Commission was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson and headed by former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner during a period when the nation was having about 100 civil disturbances a year. The commission famously predicted that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white–separate and unequal.”
The latest follow-up comes from the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, a private-sector project which includes some Kerner veterans and was formed to continue the commission’s work.
This month, the foundation released its latest report and, like its predecessors, the report argues that the racial gap is not only real but getting worse.
Reaction to the report from blacks and whites across the nation has been a huge, collective yawn.
The reaction has mostly fallen into two major camps. There are those who say they don’t believe it and those who say they knew it all along.
I fall into a third camp. It is the realistic camp. It is the camp that says we are doing better and worse at the same time. So we should celebrate our successes and learn from our mistakes.
Not everybody wants to hear this. It is easier for many of my friends, particularly the liberal black ones, to argue that we haven’t made any progress, so they can more easily justify aggressive race-specific (meaning blacks only) remedies.
And it is easier for many of my other friends, particularly the conservative white ones, to argue that we blacks have made all the progress that anything but our own bootstraps can help us make, which absolves them of any responsibility.
The Eisenhower group pretty much falls into that first liberal group. Its last report was released five years ago, a year after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. We Americans felt pretty divided during those days of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, for good reason.
But take a closer look. Unlike the riots in the 1960s, black people did not make up the majority of the arrests made during the Los Angeles riots, and many black-owned businesses were burned right along with white- and Asian-owned businesses.
What’s that about one divide? Obviously we have several. Some are racial, but most are economic.
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On this question, even the Kerner veterans practice a bait-and-switch technique. The foundation’s report announces a racial divide but speaks mostly of a class divide. In a very quick paragraph, it acknowledges the tremendous economic and political progress the new black middle class has made, then it goes on for the rest of its 200 pages to report what most of us already know, that the plight of today’s black poor is actually worse than it was 30 years ago.
Obviously, we have become more than two nations.
Economically, the gap between poor blacks and better-off blacks has been widening faster than the gap between poor and better-off whites.
Politically, the Democrat Party has become blacker over the past 30 years, while the Republican Party has become the white-flight party. Yet, during the same period, black mayors and other black elected officials have grown from near-zero to several thousand. Black political clout has grown. The next challenge is for blacks to be properly represented in both major parties.
Socially, over the past 30 years whites have de-tribalized in many ways, welcoming such black icons as Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby and Colin Powell into their hearts. At the same time, many blacks have re-tribalized, looking inward to strengthen black institutions and offer aid and counseling to those underprivileged African-Americans whom the civil rights revolution left behind.
Discrimination still dogs the black middle class, but, most of it is a minor nuisance compared to the oppression so many of us have overcome.
The biggest divide in this nation today is between the movers and shakers and those who get moved and shaken. Over the last 30 years, many of us have begun to move from the underclass to the upperclass. More will follow. The biggest defining economic difference is education. The better educated we are, as African-Americans, the more choices we have for better income and living standards.
In this regard, the new Kerner follow-up report is right on target. It advises us to invest more heavily in programs that work, like Head Start, Job Corps and enriched after-school programs.
But we also need something the report, which is heavily focused on government action, fails to address. We need a spiritual revival. Those of us who escaped poverty kept going in our relentless pursuit of education and success because our families and communities infused us with a relentless optimism. We had hope. We need to spread it around.