Kerner Commission - Criticism

Criticism

Conservative critics of the Kerner Report argue that the basis and findings of the report are deeply flawed. They contend that the report exonerates rioters for their behavior and places the blame for their actions on the larger society. The notion that racism created pathological social conditions that lead to the eruption of racial riots, as the Kerner Commission argued, was not supported by the findings of many uncited sociologists. The major riots took place in cities where blacks experienced the least racism; although Los Angeles, Newark, and Detroit were certainly not without racism, it did not compare with that in the deep South. This last point, however, that it is in the South where "true racism" existed (in past tense) is a myth itself, created to absolve the North of its subtle and continuing racism.

Abraham H. Miller, who won a Pi Sigma Alpha Award from the Western Political Science Association for his statistical refutation of some of the Commission's data analysis, stated, "There is considerable reason for rejecting the sociological and popular cliché that absolute or relative deprivation and the ensuing frustration or despair is the root cause of rebellion."

At a 1998 lecture commemorating the 30th anniversary of the report, Stephan Thernstrom, a history professor at Harvard University, stated,

"Because the commission took for granted that the riots were the fault of white racism, it would have been awkward to have had to confront the question of why liberal Detroit blew up while Birmingham and other Southern cities — where conditions for blacks were infinitely worse — did not. Likewise, if the problem was white racism, why didn’t the riots occur in the 1930s, when prevailing white racial attitudes were far more barbaric than they were in the 1960s?”

Critics of the report also attribute the cause of the riots to the size of the black community where the eruption occurred and the failure of the police force to respond swiftly and adequately.