Healing is still needed and America’s racial wounds are still raw, according to the 50-year update released Tuesday by the Eisenhower Foundation as part of its ongoing follow-up to the original report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission.
Former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris of Oklahoma, a co-editor of the new report and last surviving member of the original commission, said of the new findings: “Racial and ethnic inequality is growing worse. We’re resegregating our housing and schools again.” He also said poverty and income inequality have worsened since the original study, commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson in response to civil unrest in numerous American cities in the 1960s.
The new report says the percentage of people living in deep poverty — less than half of the federal poverty level — has increased since 1975. About 46 percent of people living in poverty in 2016 were classified as living in deep poverty — 16 percentage points higher than in 1975.
The full report is in a 488-page book, Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years After the Kerner Report, which was published this week by Temple University Press.
According to the Eisenhower Foundation website, the Kerner update “unites the interests of minorities and White working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work — and not work.”
Dr. Greg Carr, associate professor of Africana Studies and chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, said the core issue is being overlooked.
“This is not going to be fixed until we address and eliminate racism ‘root and branch,’” Carr said, quoting former Howard law school dean Charles Hamilton Houston. “Until we begin to address the deep, structural socioeconomic inequality —and call it by its name — frankly, I don’t see that happening. And unless and until we do that, I don’t see us making any more progress.”
