On the Kerner Report
People are marking the 50th anniversary of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, usually called the Kerner Report, after the Illinois Governor who chaired the effort. President Lyndon Johnson appointed the commission on July 28, 1967 while the rebellion was still raging on the streets of Detroit. The commission was charged with answering three basic questions about the uprisings that had been raging across America. Johnson asked, “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to keep it from happening again?”
After 7 months of study, interviews, and investigations the report identified white racism in employment, housing, education, social services, and policing as the direct cause of the uprisings. The mainstream media was especially criticized as having “too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and white perspective."
The recommendations in the report were not welcomed by most of the power structure. Johnson considered its recommendations political suicide in the coming elections. He had no intention of challenging the racism of white workers or middle-class folks who made up the base of the Democratic Party.
Many others were more critical of the report. Observing that the commission was made up primarily of politicians and “pillars of capitalism,” James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs wrote in Uprooting Racism and Racists, “The obvious contradiction of the Kerner report is that after diagnosing whites as responsible for racist oppression of blacks, the report goes on to make recommendations for the treatment not of whites but of blacks. As we pointed out at the time, ‘It is like saying that the way to keep white sheriffs, policemen, Ku Klux Klansmen, White Citizens’ Councilmen, Minutemen, Birchites, and other American fascists from lynching any more blacks is to put the blacks to work, send them to school and build more new housing developments in the ghetto.’ The victims are the ones who need rehabilitation, the villains are not even acknowledged to exist.”
The Boggses concluded that those who made up the commission were “not in the habit of using their power to expose or confront the crimes and barbarism of white racists.”
They explained, “From the outset, the Commission made it clear that its aim was to attack the root causes of racial disorder, not the root causes of racism.” They said, “The one line of attack against the root causes of racism leads ultimately …to a revolution against the system. The other against the root causes of racial disorder leaves the door wide open for a counter-revolution against those making a revolution against the system. For it should be obvious to anyone not blinded by racism that the root cause of racial disorder in Northern cities over the last five years is the revolt against racism. If blacks were ready to submit to racism, there would be no racial disorders.
Understanding the link between racism and capitalism was central to the Boggses’ thinking. They explained: “There has actually existed a horizontal platform resting on the backs of blacks and holding them down, while on top white works have been free to move up the social and economic ladder of advancing capitalism.”
They concluded, “The chief value of the Kerner report is that it has exposed, to all those willing to look, the counter-revolutionary dangers inherent in trying to end racism and at that same time maintain the economic and social system inseparable from it.”
“As long as the economic system of expansion by all means necessary (i.e. capitalism) and the philosophy corresponding to this system (i.e. materialism, individualism, and opportunism) continue to exist, this country will continue to produce a working class which is racist.
Their analysis of the Kerner report offers a critical way to understand the depth of the counter-revolutionary forces now dictating the direction of our country. They offer us a way to think about the future: “To succeed in destroying racism in this country, the revolutionary movement must overthrow the practice of putting economics in command of politics, which has been the governing principle of American development, and replace it with the practice of putting politics in command of economics.” Today this is still an urgent call.