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Top of the pile
86
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
84/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Jelani Cobb, Matthew Guariglia
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
July 27, 2021
New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb and Columbia University professor Matthew Guariglia contextualize and abridge the groundbreaking 1968 report by President Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, drawing parallels between its dramatic findings about systemic racism and today's political debates on the subject.
What The Reviewers Say
The report itself remains remarkably salient and readable. Cobb’s and Guaraglia’s edits draw attention to misconceptions regarding the key players in civil unrest then and now: police, protestors and the media. On policing, the report does a great job of detailing how police-community confrontations were 'merely a spark' inciting unrest by embedding officer misconduct within larger structural inequalities — segregated neighborhoods, substandard housing and low-paying (or no) jobs.
With a perceptive introduction by historian Cobb...this version of the report, co-edited by historian Guariglia, is indeed essential for what it presents and why its findings still matter. This edition includes the vital parts of the original report; it largely omits individual accounts of many examples of unrest in the 1960s and lets the accounts from Detroit and Newark stand for the rest. As the original report insisted, and as this version does as well, white American society must understand these issues and act immediately and forcefully to correct these wrongs.
A timely distilled version of the powerful report on racism in the U.S..
... an astutely abridged and incisively contextualized version of the 1968 Kerner Commission Report.
