In 1967, President Johnson convened an 11-member panel of politicians, activists and business leaders to get at the root cause of race riots and racial unrest in American cities. This group, known as the Kerner Commission, released their findings in a report on February 29, 1968. One of the central findings of the report was that “white racism” was the cause of much of the structural inequality that existed in the US at the time. Five decades later, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, it seems that little has changed when it comes to black home ownership, unemployment and incarceration rates.
In some cases, African Americans are worse off today than they were before the civil rights movement culminated in laws barring housing and voter discrimination, as well as racial segregation.
- 7.5 percent of African Americans were unemployed in 2017, compared with 6.7 percent in 1968 — still roughly twice the white unemployment rate.
- The rate of homeownership, one of the most important ways for working- and middle-class families to build wealth, has remained virtually unchanged for African Americans in the past 50 years. Black homeownership remains just over 40 percent, trailing 30 points behind the rate for whites, who have seen modest gains during that time.
- The share of incarcerated African Americans has nearly tripled between 1968 and 2016 — one of the largest and most depressing developments in the past 50 years, especially for black men, researchers said. African Americans are 6.4 times as likely than whites to be jailed or imprisoned, compared with 5.4 times as likely in 1968.
While the numbers are incredibly discouraging, we also have to understand them in context. Though plenty of research has been done to help us understand the full extent of racism in the United States, as a society, we still remain ignorant about its impact and how to rectify it. It’s important to understand that this is not about individual failings. Too many people who don’t understand the full scope of structural racism will say that times have truly changed and that we’ve progressed enough in society that if black people just get an education and work hard, they will have the same opportunities in life as everyone else.
This is simply untrue.
Without a level playing field, there is no such thing as equal opportunity. This doesn’t mean that certain individuals cannot be successful. Most of us can name a few examples where black entertainers, politicians, business leaders and professionals have overcome the odds and risen to the top of their industry. But after centuries of consistent systematic disadvantages, black Americans, as a group, face challenges that cannot be surmounted solely by hard work and determination. Instead, our attention must be on how to address those disadvantages through policy and practice.
The wealth gap between white and black Americans has more than tripled in the past 50 years, according to Federal Reserve data. The typical black family had zero wealth in 1968. Today the median net worth of white families — $171,000 — is 10 times that of black families.
The wealth black families have accumulated is negligible when it comes to the amount of money needed to meet basic needs during retirement, pay for children’s college education, put a down payment on a house, or cope with a job loss or medical crisis, [John Schmitt, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute said].
The lack of economic progress is especially startling, given that black educational attainment has improved significantly in the past five decades, Schmitt said. African Americans are almost as likely as whites to have completed high school.
Schmitt’s point is that though there has been a large increase in black educational attainment, there has not been economic progress among blacks in America. This directly contradicts the notion that education is the key to success and can overcome racism. While 23 percent of blacks now have college degrees, white high school dropouts are still wealthier than black college graduates. And blacks are still 2 ½ times more likely to live in poverty than whites.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the Economic Policy Institute report is that it shows where we are headed and it is not forward, but instead backward. We are moving toward a country with greater poverty and segregation than in 1968.
The gains children of color made when efforts continued to desegregate schools in the 60s began to reverse by 1988. Court decisions that loosened oversight of previously de facto segregated schools resulted in a huge change: In 1988, almost half of all students of color went to majority-white schools. Today that number has plummeted to 20 percent. Poverty is such a problem, the study concluded, that if it is not mitigated, America's very democracy is threatened.
The last living member of the original Kerner report, Fred Harris, served as a co-editor for the 2018 report. Harris sums the state of race and inequality in America today with these thoughts. "I was 37 when I served on the (Kerner) Commission," Harris told NPR. "Whoever thought that 50 years later, we'd still be talking about the same things? That's kinda sad."
Who can disagree with him? Not only is it sad, it also demonstrates that America, for all its talk of promise and exceptionalism, is also deeply and irredeemably flawed. For every step toward progress we take, we take two or three giant steps back. And if we are in the same place as we were in 1968 or 1988, can that really be considered progress?