We have been in this place before.

Read some history to illuminate today’s news.

What became known as the Kerner Commission was appointed to investigate the urban riots of the mid-1960s. The findings would not be much different if it was repeated today.

The president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, addressed the nation on June 27, 1967:

“The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack- mounted at every level-upon the conditions that breed despair and violence. All of us know what those condItions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions-not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is sirnply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America….”

Unfortunately, I literally cannot imagine our president expressing a sentiment anything like that today.

The Kerner Commission Report is a available as a free pdf.

According to Wikipedia:

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Kerner Report, the Eisenhower Foundation in 1998 sponsored two complementary reports, The Millennium Breach and Locked in the Poorhouse. The Millennium Breach, co-authored by former senator and commission member Fred R. Harris, found the racial divide had grown in the subsequent years with inner city unemployment at crisis levels. The Millennium Breach found that most of the decade that followed the Kerner Report, America made progress on the principal fronts the report dealt with: race, poverty, and inner cities. Then progress stopped and in some ways reversed by a series of economic shocks and trends and the government’s action and inaction.

Harris reported, “Today, thirty years after the Kerner Report, there is more poverty in America, it is deeper, blacker and browner than before, and it is more concentrated in the cities, which have become America’s poorhouses.”

From a summary published by the Eisenhower Foundation:

Since the Kerner Commission, there have been other important trends:
• From 1977 to 1988, the incomes of the richest 1 percent in America increased by 120 percent and the incomes of the poorest fifth in America decreased by 10 percent during a time of supply-side tax breaks for the rich and against the poor.
• In the words of conservative analyst Kevin Phillips, this meant that “the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.” The working class also got poorer. The middle class stayed about the same in absolute terms, so it, too, lost ground relative to the rich.
• During the 1980s, child poverty increased by over 20 percent, with racial minorities suffering disproportionately. Today, the child poverty rate in the United States is 4 times the average of Western European countries.
• Today, the top 1 percent of Americans has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. In terms of wealth and income, the U.S. is the most unequal industrialized country in the world, and is growing more unequal faster than any other industrialized country.
• Since the Kerner Commission, the U.S. has had the most rapid growth in wage inequality in the Western world, with racial minorities suffering disproportionality.
• America’s neighborhoods and schools are resegregating. Two-thirds of African-American students and three-fourths of Hispanic students now attend predominantly minority schools — one third of each group in intensely segregated schools.
• In urban pubic schools in poor neighborhoods, more than two-thirds of children fail to reach even the “basic” level of national tests.
• America’s housing policy for the poor and minorities has become prison building. Over the 1980s and early 1990s, we tripled the number of prison cells at the same time we reduced housing appropriations for the poor by over 80 percent. Only 1 in 4 eligible poor families now can get housing.
• States now spend more per year on prisons than on higher education, while 10 years ago spending priorities were just the opposite.
• In the early 1990s, 1 of 4 young African-American men was in prison on probation or on parole. By the late 1990s, 1 of 3 young African-American men was in prison, on probation or on parole.
• Today, the rate of incarceration of African-American men in the U.S. is 4 times higher than the rate of incarceration of Black men in South Africa during the pre-Nelson Mandela apartheid government.