DeWayne Wickham

Are there still two Americas, separate and unequal?

Yes, 40 years after the Kerner Report, a racial divide still exists. (TWO SIDES)

DeWayne Wickham

In February, a few days after Barack Obama won lopsided victories in Democratic Party presidential primaries in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, the San Francisco Chronicle gave the Illinois senator the ultimate American compliment.

"Obama's novelty is not that he is the first Black candidate for president, but that he is the first Black candidate who is not running as a Black candidate," the paper proclaimed.

In a nation still haunted by the federal government's mistreatment of Black hurricane victims in New Orleans and a New York City judge's recent acquittal of three police officers in the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old unarmed Black man in a hail of 50 bullets, this was a racially neutering compliment.

For many Whites, the term "Black politician" is a pejorative--a label that defines someone who won't give White America absolution for the continuing harm done by nearly 250 years of slavery and the Jim Crow century that followed. While the paper may have misread Obama, its characterization of him speaks to the desire of many Whites to catapult this country into a "post-racial era"--to move it beyond the stark racial divisions that the Kerner Commission warned us about 40 years ago.

In 1968, four years after Congress passed the first of three civil rights bills that ended the Jim Crow era, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Kerner Commission to study the causes of scores of race riots that broke out in this country during the 1960s. Its most famous finding was that the nation was at risk of becoming "two societies, one Black, one White--separate and unequal."

But this nation was already two societies when the commission's report was issued. It had been divided along racial lines by the Founding Fathers' insertion of the three-fifths clause into the Constitution. This racial gap was widened by the Supreme Court's rulings in the Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson cases. And in the 1960s it was deepened by the violent resistance to Black voting rights in the South, to open housing in Northern cities like Cicero, Ill., and to school integration in Boston, the "cradle" of this nation's democracy.

In 1968, race was the demarcation line between the American Dream and a life of despair and disenfranchisement. Now, 40 years later, race still matters in this country.

Sure, Blacks have made a lot of progress over the past four decades. Two Blacks have been elected governor since the Kerner Commission's report was issued--one in Virginia and the other in Massachusetts. Three Blacks have been elected to the U.S. Senate--two from Illinois, and one from Massachusetts. And there are currently 43 Blacks in the U.S. Congress, more than at any other time in history. Several Black entrepreneurs have joined the ranks of the nation's billionaires and the size of the Black middle class has grown dramatically.

But to say that America is no longer a nation sharply divided along racial lines is to pine for what ought to be, rather than to acknowledge a painful truth.

Here's the truth. For nearly every month of every year since the beginning of this century, Black unemployment has been roughly double that of Whites. And there's a lot of evidence that this employment gap has little to do with class--as many who proclaim the arrival of the post-racial era contend--and a lot to do with race.

Not only are Black job-seekers generally twice as likely to be unable to find work, but Blacks with more education often have a higher unemployment rate than Whites who didn't go as far in school. While Blacks with a high school degree had a 7.3 percent unemployment rate in 2007, the unemployment rate of White high school dropouts was just 6.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Household Data Annual Averages report. Also, Blacks with an associate degree were more likely to be jobless (4.8 percent) than Whites with just a high school diploma (3.9 percent).

If that doesn't make you want to holler, maybe this will: Blacks with a bachelor's degree or more had a higher unemployment rate (3 percent) in 2007 than Whites who only managed to complete two years of college (2.7 percent). And what about Blacks who found work? Last year the Census Bureau reported that at every level of educational attainment the median income of Blacks was less than that of Whites with the same amount of schooling.

All of this suggests to me that this nation's racial divide is still a yawning gap, that the post racial era has not yet arrived, and that Jim Crow has been replaced by Jim Crow Jr.--a less violent, but no less harmful form of American racism.

DeWayne Wickman is a columnist for USA TODAY and the Gannett News Service. He is also director of the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North Carolina A&T State University.

Source Citation:Wickham, DeWayne. "Are there still two Americas, separate and unequal? Yes, 40 years after the Kerner Report, a racial divide still exists. (TWO SIDES)."
Ebony 63.10 (August 2008): 132(1).
General OneFile. Gale. North Carolina A&T State Univ. 5 Aug. 2008
Document Type:Magazine/Journal
Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2008 Johnson Publishing Co.