The Kerner Commission Fifty Years Later: Evidence Based Policy And New Will

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading “toward two societies, on black, one white, separate and unequal.” In 2018, the Eisenhower Foundation published a fifty year update of the Kerner Commission and concluded that America has made relatively little progress in reducing poverty, inequality and racial injustice. But the Kerner Update argues that, fifty years later, a great deal more is known about what works. And about what doesn’t work. We therefore need to scale up what works and scale down what doesn’t work. In this context, the panel will discuss how the Kerner Commission did not anticipate the mass incarceration that in many ways has become the nation’s racially biased housing policy for the poor. Composed mostly of white moderate men who carried the imprimatur of the political establishment, the original Kerner Commission nonetheless agreed on the need for “new will” among the American people to legislate significant economic and education investments for the truly disadvantaged and the working class. With the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, that new will never was generated – and remains unfulfilled. In many ways, the challenge today is how to integrate pursuit of evidence based policy, communication of what works, avoidance of alternative facts, reform of social media and generation of new will.

Sub Unit

• Area V. Correlates of Crime / 29. Poverty and Social Class

Chair

• Alan Curtis, The Eisenhower Foundation

Discussants

• Elliot Currie, University of California

• Delbert Elliott, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Nicol Turner-Lee, Center For Technology Transfer Brookings Institution