I was considering fisking Julian Zelizer’s article at Atlantic, “Is America Repeating the Mistakes of 1968?”. I reconsidered and will now merely pass it along.
If you’re not aware of it, the Kerner Report was a report on race relations in the United States published in 1968, the work of a commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and headed by then Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner (a year later Kerner would be convicted of accepting bribes, the first of four Illinois governors to be convicted for various corrupt practices, but that’s another story).
Nearly every prediction of the Kerner Report has proven factually wrong. For example, it predicted that many if not most American cities would have majority black populations by 1985. That did not happen. What actually has happened is that black populations in major American cities peaked around 20 years ago and have been falling.
Anybody who believes that nothing has changed in the nearly 50 years since the Kerner Report was published is a blind fool and anyone black or white over the age of 60 can testify to that.
Have we achieved some sort of racial parousia? Far from it as events of the last year or so have have dramatized so graphically. But enormous progress has been made. Unfortunately, the young don’t realize just how bad things were so they can’t possibly appreciate how much better they are now.
Yes! The events of the last few years have shown that we have not achieved nirvana (race version especially). A lot of this was hidden away. Smartphones have revealed some stuff people would rather not know. Social media, for all of its evils, has let information spread that would have been suppressed , or at least not disseminated in the past.
All that said, things are still so much better than they were. We had real honest to goodness race riots when I was in boot camp. They had a blanket party for the guy they thought might be gay. Other than the military, not much was really integrated at all. Women in management? No way.
As other people have said, our children remain our best hope. They seem less affected by our prejudices. It is remarkable how we are less affected by those of our parents. One of my older nurses, Irish, is married to a German guy. She is from coal country. Her grandparents had forbid her mother from dating any of the German boys. Fascinating stuff. I find it interesting that nearly all of the older folk still hate the Welsh, who were the managers in that area. I can’t even tell who is Welsh, but they can.
Steve
Sundown towns no longer exist, redneck grandmothers show off their bronze babies at Walmart, yet on Sunday, theres your church and my church, while Monday sees thats my civic group thats y’alls. And lets not even get into the Korean Baptist vs Chinese Baptist church furball.
Things change but at their own pace.
The solution will come naturally. White people will move away from minorities. Without any minorities to abuse, there will be no protests claiming abuse. White cops will stop working in minority areas, and the minority run police forces will be the best in the whole wide world – or not.
What is interesting is that nobody uses Chicago or Detroit as a shining example of how a city should be run. Of course, the outrage in those and other cases is that the white people left the cities.
The percentage white population in Chicago (45%) has been fairly stable for the last 20 years. The preliminary evidence is that by the 2020 census it will have increased slightly. The black population on the other hand appears to be decreasing.
A lot of this was hidden away. Smartphones have revealed some stuff people would rather not know.
World Star Hip Hop! 30 Second Fights!
Wait, that’s not what you mean?