The Landmark Study on Race, Inequality, and Police Violence
June 28, 2021
New Yorker staff writer Cobb (The Substance of Hope) presents an astutely abridged and incisively contextualized version of the 1968 Kerner Commission Report on the racial uprisings that roiled U.S. cities between 1964 and 1967. Cobb’s concise introduction delves into the origins of the commission and highlights key findings, including the insight that even though police violence provoked the uprisings, “police were simply the spear’s tip of much broader systemic and institutional failures” in low-income Black neighborhoods. Cobb also details how “white racial resentment” over the unrest fueled a conservative backlash that led to the decadeslong “war on crime,” and sketches subsequent “conflagrations” sparked by the 1992 acquittal of four L.A. police officers in the beating of Rodney King and the 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The report itself is startlingly blunt (“White institutions created , white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it”) and remarkably prescient—readers will even find precursors to today’s movement to “defund” the police. In the appendix, Cobb briskly and persuasively tackles “frequently asked questions,” such as “Why do people burn down their own neighborhoods?” The result is an essential resource for understanding what Cobb calls the “chronic national predicament” of racial unrest.