Spatial Equality and the Kerner Commission Report: A Back-to-the-Future Essay
![handle is hein.journals/nclr71 and id is 1517 raw text is: SPATIAL EQUALITY AND THE KERNER
COMMISSION REPORT: A BACK-TO-THE-
FUTURE ESSAY
JOHN 0. CALMORE*
The goals and beliefs that Americans had about themselves are
no longer tenable. And as a society, we are no longer prepared
intellectually or spiritually for the world we actually live in. Our
reaction is to want to go somewhere where we can hunker down
and pretend we will find peace-somewhere the way we imagine
things were, or should be.
-Jim Dator, a futurist at the University of
Hawaii, December 1992.1
I. INTRODUCTION
In tracing the development of race consciousness, particularly dur-
ing the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Gary Peller ob-
served that the national commitment to a centralized policy of
integration virtually ignored the integrity and health of black institu-
tions.2 In his words, [i]ntegration of dominant institutions, rather than
reparations from one community to another, became the paradigm for
racial enlightenment.3 The demand for spatial equality is a call for a
paradigm shift in these terms and for a new day of racial enlightenment.4
* Associate Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. B.A. 1967, Stanford
University; J.D. 1971, Harvard Law School. I gratefully acknowledge that this Essay was
supported with a 1992 summer scholarship grant from Loyola Law School. Over the years,
many of the views expressed here have been refined and informed through the critical com-
ments of attorneys Mary Lee, John Powell, and Florence Roisman.
1. John Balzar, California's Image: Fad to a Funk, L.A. TiMES, Dec. 19, 1992, at Al,
A32 (quoting Jim Dator).
2. Gary Peller, Race Consciousness, 1990 DUKE L.J. 758, 820-34.
Editor's Note: The contributors to this Symposium have used the terms African Ameri-
can, black, and black American, often interchangeably, in their articles. The North Car-
olina Law Review has elected to defer to its contributors' choices in the absence of any
universally accepted racial or ethnic designation.
3. Id. at 843.
4. Peller notes that the reappearance of race consciousness in critical race scholarship
partly reflects our attempt to reopen a political discourse that was closed off in the 1960s.
Id. at 847. This Essay is a case in point. At least one speaker has vilified my position as
1960s retreaded black-nationalistic, black-power separatist rhetoric. Remarks of a white
liberal speaker at the Conference on Homelessness, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Villanova
Law Review (Nov. 1990). His comments really were retreaded from the 1960s, when black
power advocates were called black neo-segregationists and advocates of apartheid. Then](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/nclr71&div=49&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Spatial Equality and the Kerner Commission Report: A Back-to-the-Future Essay
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