‘Separate, Unequal’ 30-Year-Old Conclusions On Poverty, Race Still Apply, Follow-Up Report Finds
Thirty years after a presidential commission declared “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal,” that dire warning has become reality, according to a report to be released Sunday.
“The Kerner Commission’s prophecy has come to pass,” states the report from the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, a group founded to continue the work of the commission, which was appointed by President Johnson to probe the causes of rioting in urban America in the 1960s.
The new report notes that substantial racial progress has occurred in the three decades since the Kerner Commission released its ground-breaking report. The black middle class has grown to unprecedented levels, black business has expanded and the number of black elected officials continues to increase.
But even with those gains, inequalities with troubling racial dimensions are becoming more deeply rooted in American society, the report concludes.
“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and minorities are suffering disproportionately,” said the report, co-authored by foundation president Lynn A. Curtis and former Democratic senator Fred R. Harris. The report lists an array of racial and economic statistics to back its bleak conclusions. While the American economy booms, most adults in many inner cities do not work in a typical week. The top 1 percent of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, the report says. The United States is first in the world among industrialized nations when it comes to wage inequality.
In addition, 40 percent of minority children attend urban schools, where more than half of the students are poor and fail to reach even “basic” achievement levels. With 1.5 million prisoners, the United States incarcerates more people than any nation in the world, and one in three young African American men are in prison, on parole or probation.
“The private market has failed the inner city. The prison system is a symbol of discrimination. A class and racial breach is widening again as we begin the new millennium,” the report said.
Not all black leaders were impressed with the findings. Robert S. Woodson Sr., a black conservative who heads the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, said Friday the report rehashes earlier Kerner Commission updates and offers recommendations too general to be useful.
He accused the authors of being “stuck in the ‘60s” and seeing the world only through a “prism of race.”
The report’s conclusions parallel those of two other reports issued by the Eisenhower Foundation that update the Kerner Commission’s work. It calls for the expansion of initiatives it says have the proven ability to close the nation’s economic and racial gaps, including Head Start, well-structured after-school programs, targeted job training and community-sensitive police strategies.
“The main phrase that we use is replication (of programs) on a scale that is equal to the scale of the problem,” Curtis said in an interview. “There is a lot of stuff that works. All we have to do is fully fund it. It is not like there is a lot of magic involved in this.”
The report scoffs at supply-side economics - the idea that tax breaks for the rich and corporations will stimulate investments and benefits that will trickle down to the middle class and the poor. The report denounces enterprise zones, the federal job training program for out-of-school youth and prison construction. It also cites the ineffectiveness of boot camps, which the Clinton administration has supported. And it says volunteer work - something the administration promoted at a 1997 summit in Philadelphia - can’t be expected to single-handedly rebuild poor neighborhoods and individuals.
Critics, however, dismissed the reports central findings as out of sync with the nation’s increasingly complex social and racial realities.
“At the core of the Kerner report is this notion that blacks are trapped in the inner city and poverty and whites are in the suburbs. But here, there is no mention of the fact that you have had a massive movement of blacks from inner cities to suburbs” since 1968, said Stephen Thernstrom, a Harvard University professor who is co-author of “America in Black and White,” which charts the nation’s racial progress over the past half century.
“If you look at social contact, it has increased markedly. Interracial dating is up. Interracial marriage, the same,” Thernstrom continued. “Whatever the fault lines are in our society, the idea that it is the old-fashioned black and white seems to me fairly simplistic.”
xxxx The report cites programs that help narrow the poverty gap, including: Head Start, afterschool youth centers, urban school reform, school-to-work programs, job training, placement and retention, inner city economic development and crime and drug prevention.