|
Books by Ira Katznelson
Black Men, White Cities:
Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900-1930,
and Britain, 1948-1968 (1973)
Black Men, White Cities:
Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900-1930,
and Britain, 1948-1968 (1973)
Schooling for All: Race, Class, and the Decline of the
Democratic Ideal (with Margaret Weir;1985) /
Marxism and the City (1992)
Desolation and
Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after the Holocaust,
Totalitarianism, and Total War (2003)
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History
of Racial Inequality in America
* * * *
*
New Deal / Raw Deal
By Ira Katznelson
Hurricane Katrina's violent winds and waters
tore away the shrouds that ordinarily mask the country's racial
pattern of poverty and neglect. Understandably, most
commentators have focused on the woeful federal response.
Others, taking a longer view, yearn for a burst of activism
patterned on the New Deal. But that nostalgia requires a heavy
dose of historical amnesia. It also misses the chance to come to
terms with how the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s
contributed to the persistence of two Americas.
It was during the administrations of Franklin
Roosevelt and Harry Truman that such great progressive policies
as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were
adopted. But with them came something else that was quite
destructive for the nation: what I have called "affirmative
action for whites." During Jim Crow's last hurrah in
the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress
controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing
with welfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of
African Americans or treated them differently from others.
Between 1945 and 1955, the federal government
transferred more than $100 billion to support retirement
programs and fashion opportunities for job skills, education,
homeownership and small-business formation. Together, these
domestic programs dramatically reshaped the country's social
structure by creating a modern, well-schooled, homeowning middle
class. At no other time in American history had so much money
and so many resources been targeted at the generation completing
its education, entering the workforce and forming families.
But most blacks were left out of all this.
Southern members of Congress used occupational exclusions
and took advantage of American federalism to ensure that
national policies would not disturb their region's
racial order. Farmworkers and maids, the jobs held by
most blacks in the South, were denied Social Security pensions
and access to labor unions.
Benefits for veterans were administered
locally. The GI Bill adapted to "the southern way of
life" by accommodating itself to segregation in higher
education, to the job ceilings that local officials imposed on
returning black soldiers and to a general unwillingness to offer
loans to blacks even when such loans were insured by the federal
government.
Of the 3,229 GI Bill-guaranteed loans for
homes, businesses and farms made in 1947 in Mississippi, for
example, only two were offered to black veterans.
This is unsettling history, especially for
those of us who keenly admire the New Deal and the Fair Deal. At
the very moment a wide array of public policies were providing
most white Americans with valuable tools to gain protection in
their old age, good jobs, economic security, assets and
middle-class status, black Americans were mainly left to fend
for themselves.
Ever since, American society has been
confronted with the results of this twisted and unstated form of
affirmative action. A full generation of federal policy, lasting
until the civil rights legislation and affirmative action of the
1960s, boosted whites into homes, suburbs, universities and
skilled employment while denying the same or comparable benefits
to black citizens.
Despite the prosperity of postwar
capitalism's golden age, an already immense gap between white
and black Americans widened. Even today, after the great
achievements of civil rights and affirmative action, wealth
for the typical white family, mainly in homeownership, is 10
times the average net worth for blacks, and a majority of
African American children in our cities subsist below the
federal poverty line.
President Lyndon Johnson faced up to racial
inequality in "To Fulfill These Rights," a
far-reaching graduation speech he delivered at Howard University
in June 1965. He noted that "freedom is not enough"
because "you do not take a person who, for years, has been
hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting
line of a race and they say, 'you are free to compete with all
the others,' and still justly believe you have been completely
fair."
What is needed, he argued, is a set of new
policies, a dramatic new type of affirmative action for
"the poor, the unemployed, the uprooted, and the
dispossessed." He had in mind the kind of
comprehensive effort the GI Bill had provided to most returning
soldiers, but without its exclusionary pattern of
implementation.
This form of assertive, mass-oriented
affirmative action never happened. By sustaining and advancing a
growing African American middle class, the affirmative action we
did get has done more to advance fair treatment across racial
lines than any other recent public policy, and thus demands our
respect and support. But as the scenes from New Orleans vividly
displayed, so many who were left out before have been left out
yet again.
Rather than yearn for New Deal policies that
were tainted by racism, or even recall the civil rights and
affirmative action successes of the 1960s and beyond, we would
do better in present circumstances to return to the ambitious
plans Johnson announced but never realized to close massive
gaps between blacks and whites, and between more and less
prosperous blacks.
Without an unsentimental historical
understanding of the policy roots of black isolation and
dispossession, and without an unremitting effort to cut the Gordian
knot joining race and class, our national response to the
disaster in the Gulf Coast states will remain no more than a
gesture.
Ira Katznelson, a professor
of political science and history at Columbia University, is the
author of "When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History
of Racial Inequality in America."
* *
* * *
posted 18 November 2005 / update 3 July 2008 |
