The Kerner Commission at 50 | Center for Equal Opportunity

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission. This blue-ribbon panel was put together by President Johnson after the summer 1967 Detroit riots to analyze what caused such riots and how to prevent them, and it delivered, predictably, liberal claptrap.

There are a couple of new books that use the anniversary as a news hook and lots of newspaper articles about it — some of which I discuss below — so let me offer as a quick antidote this link to a Heritage Foundation panel discussion on the occasion of the report’s 30th anniversary.

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The Ignored Datum – The Economic Policy Institute, to continue this discussion, has published a thin (eight pages) report, “50 Years after the Kerner Commission,” which received nice coverage in places like the Washington Post and the New York Times. The report collects data and looks at how well African Americans are doing now versus 50 years ago in terms of education, employment, income, wealth, health, and incarceration, and the spin is very much “the glass is still half empty.”
But any intelligent analysis of continuing racial disparities has to come to grips with the fact that the out-of-wedlock birthrate among African Americans has tripled since the 1960s, so that now seven out of ten African Americans are born out of wedlock.

And being born out-of-wedlock correlates strongly with all those other numbers: education, employment, income, and so forth.

So, guess how much discussion there is in the report of that datum? That’s right: Not one single word.

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The New York Times Is Wrong: Schools Aren’t Resegregating – In analyzing a New York Times discussion of how our schools are supposedly resegregating, Robert VerBruggen makes excellent points, and I’d like to add just one more: The word “segregation” means deliberately separating, so that school segregation meant telling students that, because they were of one race, they were not allowed to attend schools with children of another race.

Thus, the number of segregated public schools in the United States now is . . . zero.

And my point is that those who declare that our schools are “resegregating” are trying to equate two very different phenomena: Jim Crow and voluntary residential-living patterns. (I know, I know: The Left will claim that sometimes these residential patterns are rooted somehow in institutional racism, but it’s still not 1954 and we shouldn’t be told otherwise.)

By the way, Congress made it clear that, for purposes of federal law in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, desegregation did not mean simply achieving some particular racial balance.

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One of Our Supporters Responds – When I published one of the above items about the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission, it prompted a longtime supporter of the Center for Equal Opportunity to send me this email:

“Well, 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of another landmark document: the 1968 memo created by Xerox CEO Joseph C. Wilson in which he specifically directs managers to hire under-qualified and outright unqualified minorities in order to reach his virtue-signaling hiring goals. The memo contains this particularly offensive passage:

‘[A]ll managers responsible for hiring — regardless of geographical location — will re-examine their selection standards and training programs. Our past efforts, by and large, have sought to find only the best qualified people for Xerox, regardless of age, race or religion. But that goal, however valid, has inadvertently excluded many good people from productive employment. We are, accordingly, going to change the selection standards that screen out all but the most qualified people.

‘We will also begin devoting special attention to minority employees of limited qualifications to make them genuinely productive in the shortest possible time. Hopefully we can maintain standards of performance throughout. Effective immediately, therefore, all Xerox managers are directed, on an individual basis, to begin this effort, pending a more systematic company-wide revision of standards. [W]e are planning to increase substantially our training of unqualified Negroes, and other minority members.’

“The stated goal of the civil rights movement [was] to follow the 14th Amendment and guarantee ‘the equal protection of the laws.’ With this memo, Wilson set in motion a policy other corporations continue to emulate to this day, and it’s a disgrace.”

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Failing Grade – Finally, the New York Daily News printed my brief response to Keith Powers’ op-ed urging New York City to adopt the Texas “top 10%” for admission to its special – top, highly selective – high schools (“Keep the test and spur true diversity,” March 15; the idea is to increase black and Latino admissions, and cap white and – especially – Asian admissions, by guaranteeing admission to some percentage of students from each high school, even if their scores are lower than other students’): “This is bad policy and illegal. It’s bad policy because the most qualified students will no longer be the only ones admitted. It’s illegal because it’s being adopted with the intent of favoring some races and ethnicities and disfavoring others, which violates the U.S. Constitution.”

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