On March 1, 1968, a presidential commission chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois issued what became an historic report on race relations in the United States. The nation, it concluded, was actually two societies: one white, the other black– “separate and unequal.” Much has changed since then, but America is still struggling with that reality.

Underlying the Kerner Commission’s warning of a divided America are two seemingly separate cracks in the foundation of American democracy. One is white racism, specifically aimed at denying the humanity of African Americans. The other is economic class inequality.

Public debate over the issues of poverty and race is often confused by an urge to prove that their roots lie in either one or the other. But the evidence of the last fifty years suggests that both these sources of oppression are closely connected and reinforce each other. And that we will never resolve the issues raised by the Kerner Commission unless we deal with them together.

The historic 1963 March on Washington was a demonstration for both “jobs and freedom,” as the march was titled. As Martin Luther King, Jr.—the iconic symbol of the struggle against racism—said in his last sermon before he was killed, “But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness.”[i]

 

FIFTY YEARS SINCE THE KERNER REPORT: THE GOOD NEWS

Think of economic opportunity in America today as a theater with not enough seats for all who are waiting in the line outside. The manager has various ways to decide who comes in. First come, first served is one way. Auctioning the tickets to the highest bidder is another. Still another is rationing access according to some characteristic—like race.

For most of the history of the United States, African Americans were not even allowed to get in the line.

Moreover, stirring up segregationist feelings was a way for economic elites to divert the anger of poor and working-class whites—who spent their lives in line but never got in—from the rich and powerful who excluded them. As President Lyndon Johnson remarked in 1965, all that white voters in the South ever heard from their politicians was “Negro, Negro, Negro!”[ii]

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the antidiscrimination legislation that followed, in effect told the managers of the economic theater that they had to let African Americans in the line. It was not an easy struggle: lives were lost, communities torn apart, and American politics was permanently altered.[iii]

Fifty years later, white bigotry has certainly not been eliminated from the American psyche. But for anyone who remembers the United States before the Civil Rights Act, much has changed.

Civil rights legislation forced whites to change the way they had behaved—that is, to acceptintegration as the law. But over time it also changed the way many white people thought and felt. The personal experience of sharing a lunch counter, a classroom, and a workplace with African Americans provided the space for white Americans to see their black fellow citizens—who, in the phrase of writer Ralph Ellison, had been largely “invisible”—as full human beings, like themselves.

The result was a steady erosion of what had been assumed to be white people’s permanent visceral resistance to integration. Changes in the law brought changes in the heart.

In-depth studies of polls by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago show a clear and substantial drop in segregationist sentiments among whites on issues of education, housing, and a wide array of social attitudes since the early 1970s. As younger generations of whites increasingly experienced integration as a normal part of life, acceptance of blacks as equals spread from the realm of public policy to the realm of personal beliefs.

Thus, between 1990 and 2008, the percentage of whites who thought whites were harder working than blacks fell from 65 percent to 42 percent. The proportion who thought whites were more intelligent than blacks dropped from 57 percent to 25 percent. The share of whites who would object to a close relative marrying a black person dropped from 57 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 2008.[iv]

In his May 2016 commencement speech at Howard University, President Barack Obama noted that, sixty years before, his father would not have been served in many restaurants in Washington, D.C. He then ticked off a list of improvements in the lives of black Americans during his lifetime: “We’re no longer only entertainers, we’re producers, studio executives. No longer small business owners, we’re CEOs, we’re mayors, representatives, Presidents of the United States.”[v]

Still, said the president, there was “much more work to do.” Amen to that.

 

AND THE BAD NEWS

The gap between the real wages of white and African American workers actually widened between 1979 and 2015—from 22 percent to 31 percent for men and from 6 to 19 percent for women.[vi]The wealth gap is even wider. White households have on average fifteen times more wealth than African American households.[vii]Black men, as President Obama noted, are six times as likely to be in prison as white men. And housing segregation, with its attendant impact on education, seems to be getting worse. As one study noted, “The typical black student now [in 2014] attends a school where only 29 percent of his or her fellow students are white, down from 36 percent in 1980.”[viii]

Some claim these numbers are evidence that government programs aimed at helping African Americans get into the theater of opportunity did not work. But the evidence does not show that. For example, poverty rates for black Americans dropped by almost 50 percent in the decade after the antipoverty programs began in the mid-1960s. Rather, something happened in the overall economy at the end of the 1970s that undercut the effect of civil rights and antipoverty programs for African American families: economic opportunities began to shrink for working people of bothraces.

The moral engine of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was driven largely by an organized demand for justice by African Americans and, in response, compassion and guilt among many whites—although probably not a majority. White resistance was strong and, in many places, violent. But the worst was overcome because of the decade long economic boom that expanded the number of available seats in the economic theater. Generally rising wages and increased financial security reduced the threat that economic opportunities for blacks would come at the expense of working-class whites.

At the beginning of that decade, Democratic president John Kennedy said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” [ix]And by the end of the decade, the active management of the economy was accepted by both parties. As Republican Richard Nixon said in 1971, “I am now a Keynesian.”[x]It followed, therefore, that poverty and the violence and national dysfunction that it engendered could be reduced, if not eliminated, by making sure that once African Americans had access to the line, they could get into the economic opportunity theater. Thus, the programs for the poor that followed the Civil Rights Act emphasized training and education that would lead to the upward-mobility jobs that were the path to the American Dream.

Central to this optimism was what seemed at the time to be an immutable economic law: that workers’ incomes were a function of their productivity. Show up for work and do a good job, and you will get ahead. For the three decades following World War II, the real wages of American workers had, in fact, roughly matched their productivity—that is, the average increase in wealth that the average worker produced. Between 1948 and 1973 worker productivity rose by 97 percent and real compensation (wages plus benefits) rose by 91 percent. The ticket to a better future was a steady job.

But after the 1970s, the economic law of wages became less immutable. Workers continued to produce more per hour of work, but their compensation (wages plus benefits) flattened out. Between 1973 and 2016, worker productivity rose by 73 percent, but their compensation rose by only 11 percent. In other words, the typical American worker, of whatever race, was not sharing in the wealth he or she was producing.

Inasmuch as most Americans must work for a living, the growing gap between the wealth that workers produced and their paycheck is the primary cause of the extraordinary upward redistribution of income and wealth over the last several decades. The share of total income claimed by the richest 1percent of the population rose from 9 percent in the late 1970s to 21 percent in 2014.[xi]It is as if, rather than expanding the number of the opportunity seats, the economy has been putting its wealth into making the existing seats more luxurious and adding bars and restaurants and other amenities for the people already there.

 

RACE AND INEQUALITY

Those who speak for the people with good seats inside the opportunity theater would have us believe that inequality is the result of natural forces beyond our control. Thus, for example, they claim that inequality is caused by workers not being able or willing to keep up with the educational demands of the new age of technology. According to this story, African Americans as a group have failed to close the black-white income gap because they have less education and training. In other words, the problem is them, not us.

It is a widely held opinion. But it is wrong! If the problem were automation, we would expect to see a dramatic increasein labor productivity, capital investment, and the wages of people who were still employed—especially young people with advanced education. Instead, labor productivity since the 1970s has slowed down, capital investment has decelerated,[xii]and in 2016, average real wages of young college graduates were just about where they had been sixteen years earlier.[xiii]

The root cause of the growth of inequality lies not in some inevitable and mysterious economic force but rather in deliberate policy choices that undercut the bargaining position of labor vis-à-vis investors. These include the following:

• The decline in unions. Overall, unions have been a vehicle for advancement for African American workers, whose rates of union membership are higher than their share of the workforce.[xiv]
• Trade policies that increased import competition from countries where wages are deliberately suppressed. This has dramatically shrunk the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs, a traditional ladder for upward mobility for working-class males.
• The deregulation of financial markets that has shifted investment from domestic production to financial speculation. This is another policy that closed off opportunities for the disadvantaged.
• The deregulation of labor markets, which reduced the rewards of work for those at the bottom.For example, if the federal minimum wage had continued to rise with productivity, by 2016 it would have been $18.85, rather than $7.25.[xv]

Moreover, most of the jobs the U.S. economy is producing require less, not more, training. Of the ten occupations projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to add the most jobs to the U.S. economy between 2012 and 2022, none require a four-year college degree.Two—registered nurses and nursing assistants—require some education and training beyond high school. Six do not even require a high school diploma.[xvi]Today, graduates of four-year colleges are taking jobs that previously went to graduates of two-year colleges, who, in turn, are taking jobs of high school graduates—and so forth, down the line. Moreover, in a desperate effort to get ahead, more people are going deeper into debt to further their education and training, only to find that they cannot earn enough to pay off their loans.

As the economist William Spriggs notes, “The media sees the victory of the civil rights movement in terms of viable black professionals like me. But the real accomplishment was in getting black working class good-paying union jobs. And just as we made that breakthrough, those jobs began to disappear.”[xvii]

The decline of opportunities is of course felt the most by the people with the least training, family connections, or luck. So, it should be no surprise that the poverty rate was 15 percent higher in 2015 than it was in 1979.[xviii]

 

THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

The erosion of opportunities for the working class in general has weakened support for programs aimed at helping African Americansin particular.

When there was a general expectation that the expansion of jobs at rising wages would continue, the case for special programs for people historically disadvantaged could be more easily made to whites on the basis of simple justice and fairness. They could see a future in which there would be enough for everyone. But now that these expectations have changed, the case for race-based programs—while morally justified—is politically harder to make.

Imagine people working at dead-end jobs at Burger King for $10 an hour. One is an African American from a poor neighborhood whose family has been in America for three hundred years—in slavery or slavery-like conditions—and whose last job also paid $10 per hour. A second is an older white man whose family has been here for a hundred years and who used to work in a factory for $22 an hour but who cannot retire because his promised pension disappeared when the company filed for bankruptcy and relocated overseas. Another is a recent undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, worried that immigration agents may walk in and deport him at any moment. Add a fourth: the white college graduate who owes $40,000 in student debt and cannot find a job that will allow her to pay it off.

All now feel they have a grievance. The African American whose forebears did not voluntarily immigrate to American for a better life but were kidnapped and brought here in chains may still have a stronger moral claim for compensatory help than the white or Latino coworker, but this will not make much of an impression on his or her fellow workers who have their own struggle for survival in a dog-eat-dog labor market.

Today, the majority of American millennials, generally defined as those born in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, will do worse than their parents. Seventy-six percent of all workers believe they will retire on less than their parents did. Again, black Americans do worse, but they share a disappointing future with the others. One study concludes that the effect of the Great Recession that began in 2008 will have reduced the wealth of black Americans in fourteen years by 40 percent. The number for white Americans is 30 percent.[xix]

Moreover, as public budgets are squeezed, eligibility rules for programs for the poor have been tightened. Since African Americans have lower incomes, they appear to make up more of such programs’ beneficiaries, and this increases the perception among whites that these programs are not for them.

Thus, fertile conditions have been created for the recent rise of demagogues, ready to channel the disappointment and anger of the white majority into scapegoating African Americans and other minorities—just as they did in President Lyndon Johnson’s time. So it is no accident that, over the last decade of rising inequality and the slow recovery from the Great Recession, polls show that both black and white Americans think that race relations have gotten worse—the share of blacks who say that race relations are good having dropped from 61 percent to 49 percent between 2008 and 2015; the share of whites who say that, from 70 percent to 55 percent.

 

SOLIDARITY: THE WAY FORWARD

James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”[xx]It is time for all of us to face the fact that under the present distribution of bargaining power, there will be no natural return to the circumstances of the 1960s that led to the civil rights breakthrough of that era. The U.S. economy no longer dominates the world as it did. Economic growth is essential, and we could arguably have grown faster since the crash of 2008, but there is little prospect now of a sustained economic boom strong enough to overcome the maldistribution of income and wealth that currently characterizes our society.

This certainly does not mean that we do not need stronger and more vigorous programs that strike at the special barriers that African Americans face. But the political support needed to return to the historic task of creating a truly integrated society also requires a return to a more fair and equal distribution of income and wealth for all. The African American poor and working class will not prosper unless the nonblack poor and working class prosper as well. If it does not, the social disintegration the Kerner Commission warned about will surely accelerate. Our future may well see an America divided in more than just two ways, to wit: a superrich of 1 percent; an upwardly mobile group of integrated professional elites of perhaps 10 percent; and a vast splintered group of whites and blacks and other minorities in a bitter—and increasingly racist—struggle for the crumbs from the tables of the well off.

Facing these new divisions of both race and class requires that whites and blacks see themselves as being in the same boat, although they might have gotten there in different ways. The essential task is a political movement that can forge a new social contact. The elements needed to revive that contract are not a mystery. They are built on the easy-to-understand idea that by virtue of being a citizen—not by virtue of your race, gender, or special talent or the wealth of your parents—you have certain rights and obligations:

• A right to a job in which you share in the wealth you are creating and an obligation to work at it to the best of your ability
• A right to benefit from the investments previous generations have made in your productivity and an obligation to invest for the generations to come
• A right to protection against ill health and the infirmities of old age and an obligation to support social insurance
• A right to bargain collectively and an obligation to help create more productive workplaces
• A right to create a business and an obligation to support the community in which it prospers
• A right to consume the products of a global economy and the obligation to insist that they be produced in a way that does not exploit other workers

We do not lack an understanding of at least some of the ways of getting from here to there. Popular support for movement to raise the national minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour suggests the possibilities. Raising the minimum wage will apply to all workers, whatever their race or ethnicity—and it is popular with the general public, for whom redistribution of income makes sense if it is connected to the notion of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.[xxi]

We need to build on these and other efforts that lay out practical steps that can involve the vast majority of Americans who must work for a living. In this regard it may be time to revive an effort that started in American communities in the 1970s around the bicentennial celebration of U.S. independence. In cities and towns across the nation, open forums, town meetings, and commissions were set up to discuss and debate the simple question of what our community should look like twenty-five years from now. People discussed everything from land-use planning to racial integration and produced some remarkable, forward-looking plans. But after 1980, the notion of planning for a common future was set aside by a political philosophy of radical individualism, in which it was each person for him- or herself in a brutally competitive world.

Returning to the idea of citizen participation in planning the future of our communities is a way to truly take back our government from the rich and powerful. And the progress in decreasing racial polarization in the several decades after the Kerner Report gives some confidence that bringing people together in forging a joint vision for the future in neighborhoods, towns, and cities could be a major step in turning the country’s attention to the still-unfinished work.

 

originally published: Chapter II-3 in “Healing Our Divided Nation, Edited by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis. Eisenhower Foundation/Temple University Press. 2018.

 

NOTES

 

[i]Carl Herman, “‘Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution’: Dr. King’s Last Sermon to You,” Washington’s Blog, January 16, 2013, available at http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/01/remaining-awake-through-a-great-revolution-dr-kings-last-sermon-to-you.html.

[ii]Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at a Fundraising Dinner in New Orleans,” October 9, 1964, available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26585.

[iii]Among other things, as Johnson predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party lost its traditional base in the South.

[iv]John Wihbey, “White Racial Attitudes over Time: Data from the General Social Survey,” Journalist’s Resource, August 14, 2014, available at https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/race-society/white-racial-attitudes-over-time-data-general-social-survey.

[v]“Obama’s Full Remarks at Howard University Commencement Ceremony,” Politico, May 7, 2016, available at http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/obamas-howard-commencement-transcript-222931.

[vi]Valerie Wilson and William M. Rodgers III, “Black-White Wage Gaps Expand with Rising Wage Inequality,” Economic Policy Institute, September 20, 2016, available at http://www.epi.org/publication/black-white-wage-gaps-expand-with-rising-wage-inequality.

[vii]Rebecca Tippett, Avis Jones-DeWeever, Maya Rockeymoore, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity, Jr., “Beyond Broke: Why Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Is a Priority for National Economic Security,” May 2104, available at http://globalpolicysolutions.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Beyond_Broke_FINAL.pdf.

[viii]Richard Rothstein, “Brown v. Board at 60,” Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014, available at http://www.epi.org/publication/brown-at-60-why-have-we-been-so-disappointed-what-have-we-learned.

[ix][ix]John F. Kennedy. Remarks at Municipal Auditorium. Canton, Ohio. September 27, 1960.  http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=74231

[x]The New York Times, January 4, 1971

[xi]Institute for Policy Studies, “Income Inequality in the United States,” available at http://inequality.org/income-inequality (accessed September 15, 2017).

[xii]Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz, “Robots, or Automation, Are Not the Problem: Too Little Worker Power Is,” Economic Policy Institute, February 21, 2017, available at http://www.epi.org/publication/robots-or-automation-are-not-the-problem-too-little-worker-power-is.

[xiii]Teresa Kroeger, Tanyell Cooke, and Elise Gould, “The Class of 2016: The Labor Market Is Still Far from Ideal for Young Graduates,” Economic Policy Institute, April 21, 2016, available at http://www.epi.org/publication/class-of-2016.

[xiv]With some exceptions among the building trades, unions have been well ahead of business in supporting the civil rights movement. The 1963 March on Washington was led by two African American labor leaders and largely financed by the autoworkers and other industrial unions.

[xv]Economic Policy Institute, “The Top Charts of 2016,” December 22, 2016, available at http://www.epi.org/publication/the-top-charts-of-2016-13-charts-that-show-the-difference-between-the-economy-we-have-now-and-the-economy-we-could-have.

[xvi]Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment Projections to 2022,” Monthly Labor Review, December 2013, available at https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/occupational-employment-projections-to-2022.htm.

[xvii]Jeff Faux, The Party’s Not Over(New York, Basic Books, 1996), 215.

[xviii]Federal Safety Net, “U.S. Poverty Statistics,” available at http://federalsafetynet.com/us-poverty-statistics.html (accessed September 15, 2017).

[xix]Jen Wieczner, “Most Millennials Think They’ll Be Worse Off than Their Parents,” Fortune, March 1, 2016, available at http://fortune.com/2016/03/01/millennials-worse-parents-retirement.

[xx]As Much Truth as One Can Bear” in The New York Times Book Review (14 January 1962); republished in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2011), edited by Randall Kenan

[xxi]Bruce Drake, “Polls Show Strong Support for Minimum Wage Hike,” Pew Research Center, March 4, 2014, available at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/04/polls-show-strong-support-for-minimum-wage-hike/; Ariel Edwards-Levy, “Raising the Minimum Wage Is a Really, Really Popular Idea,” Huffington Post, April 13, 2016, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/minimum-wage-poll_us_570ead92e4b08a2d32b8e671.