On America: Jelani Cobb on The Essential Kerner Commission Report with Arva Rice

The Kerner Commission Report, released a month before Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, is among a handful of government reports that reads like an illuminating history book—a dramatic, often shocking, exploration of systemic racism that transcends its time. Yet Columbia University professor and New Yorker correspondent Jelani Cobb argues that this prescient report, which examined more than a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967, has been woefully neglected.

In an enlightening new introduction, Cobb reveals how these uprisings were used as political fodder by Republicans and demonstrates that this condensed edition of the Report should be essential reading at a moment when protest movements are challenging us to uproot racial injustice. A detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing, the Report has never been more relevant, and demonstrates to devastating effect that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and still tragically repeat it.

As Cobb demonstrates, the report’s central findings were that it was never a single incident, never a single police officer, that was the sole factor behind the frustration that so many Americans felt, but that unaddressed systemic economic, social, and political inequalities made the whole of America into a powder keg, easily combustible at any moment. Cobb argues that just as Republicans used the 1968 Days of Rage to instill fear in the American populace and bolster Richard Nixon’s presidential race, so too do we, in the wake of last summer’s BLM protests against the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, face the same terrifying potential.