Referencing the Kerner Commission report has become rhetorical shorthand in some ways. For critics it suggests wasteful federal spending programs — for others, societal goals and potentials not yet met. In covering the 40th anniversary report USTODAY headlined its 40th anniversary coverage "Goals for Black America Not Met." The article raised some ire when quoting Robert Rector of Heritage Foundation: "Rector says the report ignores a major cause of poverty: single-parent homes. He says 70% of black children do not have a father in the home." That sentiment earned this response from Elliott Currie, a member of the Kerner Commission, 40th Anniversary Task Force: "The implication is that it's the heedless behavior of black men — rather than the strains of a blighted economy and a legacy of discrimination — that is responsible for the continuing crisis of poverty and racial disadvantage 40 years after the Kerner Commission."

SOURCE AND MORE:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03282008/profile.html

Racism is a fallacious value judgment.  If we were expressing this thought in mathematical terms, we would say

Race = value judgment.  BUT...

Value judgment <> race. 

Not all value judgments are racist.  This philosophical equation of the first and second statements are not associative or communicative, to borrow terms from math.  In logic, to reverse the equation results in a fallacy.  Changing the order of the statement changes the truth and the meaning.  In other words, not all value judgments are racist or about race. 

There is a difference. Racism is assigning a GREATER or LESSER value to a human being based on the color of their skin alone, in the absence of any evidence of their character, their beliefs, their actions, their words, their accomplishments or their failures.

So, racism is a type of value judgment based on prejudice and faulty assumptions associated with a person's race.

Not every value judgment is racist.  It is perfectly legitimate to assign a value to a person BASED on their character, their behavior, their accomplishments or their failures.  That is not racist.  If, however, you assign two people different values who have the same character, behavior, accomplishments and failures simply because they have a different appearance (race, ethnicity, etc.), then that is racist.

MLK said it best:  We should judge a person based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

I don't know if any one referenced this today in the discussion on race, but it case not, here it is.  March of this year marked the 40th anniversary of the release of the Kerner Commission Report.

If you are interested in racial issues and are not familiar with this report, you might like to watch the Bill Moyers video on the topic. It was presented a couple of months ago on PBS.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03282008/profile.html

We discriminate every time we judge. Is something good or bad? Do we like it or not? Is it beneficial to us or detrimental to us? That is discrimination.

Discrimination, as it is used in civil rights terms, connotes prejudice and a value judgment based on difference alone, not just a determination of difference. Pre-judging someone based on their race, ethnicity, gender, nationality or sexual orientation. It's the PRE part of prejudice that makes it wrong -- the assumptions we adopt and the criteria we use when evaluating, or assigning value to, some person or thing.

And racism is not just an action, it is, indeed, an attitude of prejudice which leads to prejudiced (in this case, faulted) actions or reactions.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said it best: We must judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.  But this leads to a conflict in our own attitudes as well.

Experience does inform judgment. If you have had a bad experience based on race or gender or ethnicity or sexual orientation, you must endeavor to resolve what real impact that connection truly has -- the distinguishing quality of the actor with the act. We have to resolve this conflict within ourselves without ignoring what we have learned from experience. These two factors must be objectively evaluated and their real relationship to each other resolved.

Our ability to understand the true nature of these relationships frees us from prejudice and allows us to view our own experience and fears in a more objective and complete light.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

The African-American community has clearly recognized and understood the implications of this pattern of racialized discourse, and has almost completly renounced and rejected the Clintons as a result.  Results from the Indiana and North Carolina primaries this week indicate that over 90% of African-Americans voted against the Clintons.

Since the election of a Democratic President in November depends so heavily on the African-American vote, all superdelegates need to be asking, in spite of Hillary Clinton's claims to the contrary:  Who really has "a much broader base to build a winning coalition on"?

http://policybusters.blogspot.com