Still Separate and Unequal

LAST week marked the 20th anniversary of the Kerner Commission's report on race relations.

.Last week rookie police officer Edward Byrne, age 22, died--shot executuion-style in a crack-related crime.

.At the funeral 10,000 police officers lined the pavement, helpless as their colleague was taken to his burial.

.In New York City half of all AIDS deaths occur among drug addicts using dirty needles. Ninety percent of this group are poor Blacks or Hispanics.

Unfortunately, these numbers add up, though many people may be afraid to look at the equation: problems of economic disparity are exacerbating racial conflict and tearing at society.

IN 1967, President Johnson called upon the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders (called the Kerner Commission for its chief, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois) to assess the country's racial situation. The commission concluded, in words all too honest and despairing for many to bring themselves to believe, that "we are moving toward two separate societies--separate and unequal."

This phrase has not lost its power to jar the senses about social injustice. The words themselves endure, and breathe fire into those who work to tear down existing social, economic, and racial barriers, whatever stands in the way of equality.

The phrase endures, but it can only flicker like a weak flame in the glare of continued social injustice.

We have not yet fallen as far as the words of the Kerner Commission portended. An overall increase in equal opportunity in education and jobs, affirmative action, workfare programs, and self-help and economic advancement on the part of minority groups have gone a long way towards correcting the ills of a society not so long ago littered with racial quotas and shockingly unjust segregation laws.

Twenty years later we may not have fallen so far, but a report prepared for the anniversary of the Kerner study reveals that we still have miles to go. Now the key issue is no longer legal barriers to advancement, but economic setbacks.

The new report draws the reader to the inner cities, where there exists "a persistent, large and growing underclass." In words which closely echo Kerner's assessment of Black ghettos in the 1960's, the inner cities are described as places of "crime, drug addiction, dependency on welfare and resentment against society in general and white society in particular."

WE are not moving toward two separate, unequal societies; they already exist: one rich, one poor.

Since the Kerner report, only the words have changed. No longer do we hear of ghettos, but now the inner city; no longer segregation laws, but crack, dirty syringes, government inaction, societal blindness.

The implications of this situation are too fully revealed in the fate of Edward Byrne. The circumstances of his death fit too well into the scenario depicted by the new report on civil disorders. South Jamaica, Queens-inner city. Poverty, crack-dealing, violent crime, a young man dead. And society is torn a more.

You can't help but feel angry when you look upon the dead man's mourning parents. Their son died for something, but for what?

You can't help but feel angry when you think of the society he died for. You think of the slow death so many face in inner city communities, of people dying from their poverty, drugs, and pent up anger, without any hope that things will get better.

Another police officer Stephen MacDonald, who was shot and paralyzed in a drug-related arrest two years ago, was asked on a television interview if he felt any hatred toward his attacker. MacDonald, move to tears, said no. He questioned what kind of society would cause a teenager to carry a gun and fill him with enough hatred to use it.

BYRNE'S murderer deserves to be punished. But it would be folly to think of that punishment as a solution to the problem of police officer murders or to the even larger problem of hatred between communities divided by economic inequality.

The Kerner report called for a "sustained and compassionate" government action in providing social programs and assistance. Two decades later it is time to heed that message. Our next president must realize that Reaganomics and the mythical "trickle-down" are but an empty dream. Our government must renew the social purpose it has abandoned during the Reagan years.

We just can't afford these types of statistics.