Penn symposium looks at Kerner Report, 40 years later: What’s changed?

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report, which shocked America with its conclusion that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."

The report was commissioned in the wake of the urban riots of the 1960s. Four decades later, the racial gap still exists.

For the past two days, academics and journalists have conducted a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania called "Kerner Plus 40."

The closing panel - titled "Where do We Go From Here?" - met yesterday to discuss how racial socio-economic inequality should be addressed.

"That's a tall order," said Michael Delli Carpini, discussion moderator and dean of Penn's Annenberg School for Communication. "I don't think any of us are going to be able to come up with definitive answers, but hopefully we can point in the direction of what we need to do as journalists, as citizens, as researchers and educators."

At the heart of the discussion was Kerner's notion of two separate, unequal societies and what can be done today to bridge them.

"A lot of what we've learned since Kerner is that we find ourselves in a different moment, a different place," said Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology at UCLA.

"We're confronted with a lot of the same problems we were confronted with in 1968. We've seen some progress in certain spheres, but a lot of the underlying structure has remained largely unscathed."

Claude Barnes, a professor of political science and criminal justice at North Carolina A&T State University, compared the present condition of inequality in America to a sinking ship.

"As it stands right now, we are really talking about moving around chairs on the Titanic," he said.

"It seems to me that we have to find ways to shift the dialogue and the conversation that has dominated America's minds over the past 40 years in order to have a real conversation about race."

Questions from the audience included one on how nonblack minorities fit into these two unequal societies, differences between the government's response to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and the mainstream media's reluctance to report anything racist.

The discussion ended with the panelists' suggesting solutions to solve the quandary of racial inequality in America.

Some ideas proposed included bringing black nationalism back into the conversation, instituting mandatory national service, and establishing a national truth commission, the purpose of which would be to conduct an ongoing dialogue on the miseducation of blacks.

Camille Charles, a Penn associate professor of sociology, suggested that our society must take large strides on a national level to resolve the largely ignored issue of race in America.

Quoting her former graduate-school advisor, she said, "Until we are ready to talk about massive, large-scale reparations, there is nothing to talk about, and there is nothing that can be done." *