Howard French: China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race
When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States.
The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.
What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.
This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.
The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? ...
Read entire article at NYT
The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.
What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.
This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.
The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? ...