Editing Kerner Commission (section)

== Criticism ==
Gary T. Marx, one of the Commission's consultant sociologists, wishes the report would have given every-day examples of the discrimination that existed in 1967.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Gary T. Marx |title="Two Cheers for the National Riot (Kerner Commission Report." Black Americans: A Second Look. |publisher=Basic Books |year=1970 |editor-last=J.F. Szwed |location=New York}}</ref>  Without them, it enabled whites to believe that the Commission was incorrect or talking about someone else.

Conservatives were critical of the cost of the Commission's many recommendations (there were over 170) at a time when the nation was already trying to fight both a domestic war on poverty and a war in Vietnam.  Said one congressman: "The recommendations of the President's panel can be summed up in three words. 'Spend more money.'"<ref>{{Cite book |last=Durward Hall |title=Congressional Record |date=March 4, 1968 |pages=4940}}</ref>

At a 1998 lecture commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Report, [[Stephan Thernstrom]], a conservative voice and a professor of history at [[Harvard University]], argued: "Because the commission took for granted that the riots were the fault of white racism, it would have been awkward to have had to confront the question of why liberal Detroit blew up while Birmingham and other Southern cities — where conditions for blacks were infinitely worse — did not. Likewise, if the problem was white racism, why didn't the riots occur in the 1930s, when prevailing white racial attitudes were far more barbaric than they were in the 1960s?"<ref>{{cite news |first=Howard |last=Manly |date=February 28, 2008 |title=An unfilled prescription for racial equality |newspaper=Bay State Banner |location=Boston |department=Black History |volume=43 |issue=29 |url=http://www.baystate-banner.com/issues/2008/02/28/news/blackhistory02280890.htm }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|date=2018-01-08|title=The Kerner Commission|url=https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/kerner-commission|access-date=2020-06-26|website=National Museum of African American History and Culture|language=en}}</ref>

Others refute this criticism by pointing to the importance of expectations—in Alabama and other states black people could only survive by "knowing their place"; in the North, Black people expected fair treatment.<ref>Scott Martelle, Detroit, Chicago Review Press 2012; Page 194-195</ref> In broader writings on revolution, this has been referred to as the [[Tocqueville effect]] or paradox.  This criticism also seems to ignore that there were serious/major riots in southern cities like Tampa, Houston, and Jackson (MS) and that the Black populations in northern cities like Detroit were larger than the entire populations of most southern towns and cities.  As for why there was no rioting in the 1930s, this was a time of such economic deprivation for so many people of every race, that had there been rioting, it would have likely been of a class nature rather than of a racial nature.