Creating Justice in a Multiracial Democracy: New Will for Evidence-Based Policies That Work
How do we heal our divided society? In this volume, foremost thought leaders provide recommendations for policy initiatives that will reduce economic inequality, racial injustice, and child poverty. After urban protests across the nation, the 1968 Kerner Commission concluded that America knew of the economic, education, criminal justice, public health, and housing policies needed but lacked “new will” to scale them up. The same holds true in the 21st century. Spelling out what works – and what doesn’t – is relatively easy. But how to create “new will”? Strengthen voter rights in the spirit of John Lewis and introduce creative messaging techniques. Organize new coalitions among the working class, the middle class, Blacks, Latinos, Indigenous people, Asian Americans, community-focused educators, and visionary leaders in the arts. Build moral fusion coalitions to revie the heart of democracy and advance a Third reconstruction. Balance outraged intensity with bridge-building persuasion. Expose the exploitation of Americans by the rigged system of market fundamentalism. Make clear how that exploitation is smoke-screened by privileged deniers. Base action on evidence and science, not on ideology, supposition, disinformation and misinformation.
Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report
The conclusions of the Kerner Commission should no longer shock us. We know that the unique challenges that festered in low income, predominantly Black communities during the 1950’s and 1960’s – which helped drive unrest and violence – did not magically appear. They were created. Policies like redlining, predatory lending, mass incarceration, forced segregation, over-policing, and the underfunding of education and transportation have walled off opportunity to Black families for generations and wreak havoc to this day. Low achievement in African American neighborhoods isn’t a function of low intelligence or low ambition on the part of any individual within a community – but rather, a function of broken policies implemented by those outside the community. We accept these premises.
But in 1968, the notion of institutional racism hadn’t yet entered the mainstream. The members of the Kerner Commission performed an act of intellectual daring: they sought to share wisdom that lay beyond the overused, and underdeveloped explanations for violence and discord. Instead, they took a hard look at the forces that exist at the center of our society.
Members of the Commission expressed the relationship between bad policies of white institutions and bad outcomes within Black communities in direct, unflinching terms: “What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
The members of the Commission were all white men, most of whom held elected office during their tenure of service to the project. They understood that they worked at the pleasure of the President Johnson, who established the Commission by executive order. Still, they had the moral courage to seek truth instead of papering over it – even if it meant defying the source of their own authority. Truth overruled political grace.
Governor Wes Moore
