Kull, Andrew. The Color-Blind Constitution . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992: 188

Riots in hundreds of cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, culminating in the epidemic of violence that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, convinced policymakers at every level that something extraordinary had to be done to improve the lot of black Americans. The common wisdom was distilled by the report of the Kerner Commission, appointed to investigate the causes of the 1967 riots:

"[T]he development of a small but steadily increasing Negro middle class while the greater part of the Negro population is stagnating economically is creating a growing gap between Negro haves and have-nots. This gap, as well as the awareness of its existence by those left behind, undoubtedly adds to the feelings of desperation and anger which breed civil disorders. Low-income Negroes realize that segregation and lack of job opportunities have made it possible for only a small proportion of all Negroes to escape poverty and the summer disorders are at least in part a protest against being left behind and left out.... What the American economy of the late 19th and early 20th century was able to do to help the European immigrants escape from poverty is now largely impossible. New methods of escape must be found for the majority of today's poor."

Although the "new methods of escape" recommended by the commission still echoed the employment and welfare strategies of Rustin and Moynihan, the architects of post-1968 racial policy never commanded even a fraction of the resources whose availability such proposals presupposed. This penury of means assured that the programs actually undertaken would be largely limited to the policies of racial preference. The older prescription for equality of results was discredited in the eyes of the policymaking elite, not because its liberal ideals had become any less attractive, but because they now seemed unattainable. Proclaiming the need to achieve "equality of results," Moynihan's assumption in 1965 was
still that the nation could help the black lower class attain the preconditions of such equality: equality of competitive skills, of "human ability." By 1968 the idea that the nation would agree to pay the price in dollars was probably less plausible than ever; but what seemed clear in any event, after the riots, was that it would take too long. "The vital element of time," the Kerner Commission suggested, was simply not available. In the face of a sudden and universal conviction that the whole process would cost too much and take too long, it was inevitable that equality of results would come to be sought by different means. The obvious alternative was to address the results directly, rather than the preconditions; though the "equality of results" that could be achieved in this manner would necessarily be something different. Expenditure was minimized, because the really expensive part of the traditional prescription-substantial government intervention to alter the lives of the truly disadvantaged-was being abandoned.

Racial policy in the aftermath of the riots was made in the absence of a popular mandate, sometimes (as in the case of school busing) in the face of the popular will, by courts and federal agencies rather than the national legislature. Judges and administrators can effect only those policies they have the means to carry out: normally, those that require neither the levying of taxes nor other forms of political affirmation. The consequences of this fundamental limitation have been profound for American policy on racial matters since 1968. While the Kerner Commission proposed a broad range of programs requiring massive public expenditure-for education, housing, job creation, and welfare reform-those "new methods" that were most decisively given effect were the relative few that courts and agencies could require others to pay for.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu