When Affirmative Action Was White:
An Untold History of Racial Inequality in
Twentieth-Century America. Ira Katznelson
Which is why we still need affirmative action.
Don't think we are now living in some type of post-racial wonderland simply because we now have a black president, and will for the next four years—voters willing. We know that economic inequity has deepened the divide between the rich and the rest of us, and we have blinders on if we fail to see the relationship between social class and race/ethnicity in our society. Key to the development of a middle class is education beyond high school, yet when we live in a country which still has de-facto segregation in much of K through 12 education, we cannot make the old segregationist argument that "separate, is equal."
Schools Are More Segregated Today Than During the Late 1960s was the headline of an article in The Atlantic over the summer.
Ironically, Mitt Romney's father George attempted to address this, pointing to housing discrimination as a root cause.
Forty years ago, George Romney, Mitt’s father, resigned as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development after unsuccessfully attempting to force homogenous white middle-class suburbs to integrate by race. Secretary Romney withheld federal funds from suburbs that did not accept scatter-site public and subsidized low and moderate income housing and that did not repeal exclusionary zoning laws that prohibited multi-unit dwellings or modest single family homes—laws adopted with the barely disguised purpose of ensuring that suburbs would remain white and middle class.
Confronted at a press conference about his cabinet secretary’s actions, President Nixon undercut Romney, responding, “I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest.” This has since been unstated national policy and as a result, low-income African Americans remain concentrated in distressed urban neighborhoods and their children remain in what we mistakenly think are “failing schools.” Nationwide, African Americans remain residentially as isolated from whites as they were in 1950, and more isolated than in 1940.
Crickets from Romney on the
Fisher v. University of Texas case.
NBC's Martin Bashir talks about Mitt Romney gutting affirmative action in Massachusetts, as did an article in the Huffington Post.
The looming decision we are faced with from the Supreme Court as they sit to decide the fate of affirmative action in our nations colleges and universities is not simply a matter of higher education, nor is this discussion one that should be examined as solely the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.
All of the seething resentment about "entitlements" and "reverse discrimination" (a Bakke era term I abhor) that you hear presented as a rationale to dump the programs, are rooted in history, one that we often fail to acknowledge. The playing field is not only not level, it was rigged, and still is.
(Continue reading below the fold.)
In order to understand this, we must examine history. One of the books that details that history, upon which we now stand today, is Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.
From a NY Times review:
Katznelson's principal focus is on the monumental social programs of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal in the 1930's and 1940's. He contends that those programs not only discriminated against blacks, but actually contributed to widening the gap between white and black Americans -- judged in terms of educational achievement, quality of jobs and housing, and attainment of higher income. Arguing for the necessity of affirmative action today, Katznelson contends that policy makers and the judiciary previously failed to consider just how unfairly blacks had been treated by the federal government in the 30 years before the civil rights revolution of the 1960's.
I wrote about the impact of the G.I. Bill and segregated suburbia in "
How Integrated is your neighborhood?" Katznelson goes much deeper into just how post WWII programs set the stage for minority exclusion from upward mobility.
Katznelson reserves his harshest criticism for the unfair application of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, a series of programs that poured $95 billion into expanding opportunity for soldiers returning from World War II. Over all, the G.I. Bill was a dramatic success, helping 16 million veterans attend college, receive job training, start businesses and purchase their first homes. Half a century later, President Clinton praised the G.I. Bill as ''the best deal ever made by Uncle Sam,'' and said it ''helped to unleash a prosperity never before known.''
But Katznelson demonstrates that African-American veterans received significantly less help from the G.I. Bill than their white counterparts. ''Written under Southern auspices,'' he reports, ''the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.'' He cites one 1940's study that concluded it was ''as though the G.I. Bill had been earmarked 'For White Veterans Only.' '' Southern Congressional leaders made certain that the programs were directed not by Washington but by local white officials, businessmen, bankers and college administrators who would honor past practices. As a result, thousands of black veterans in the South -- and the North as well -- were denied housing and business loans, as well as admission to whites-only colleges and universities. They were also excluded from job-training programs for careers in promising new fields like radio and electrical work, commercial photography and mechanics. Instead, most African-Americans were channeled toward traditional, low-paying ''black jobs'' and small black colleges, which were pitifully underfinanced and ill equipped to meet the needs of a surging enrollment of returning soldiers.
The statistics on disparate treatment are staggering. By October 1946, 6,500 former soldiers had been placed in nonfarm jobs by the employment service in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled ones by blacks. In New York and northern New Jersey, ''fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites.'' Discrimination continued as well in elite Northern colleges. The University of Pennsylvania, along with Columbia the least discriminatory of the Ivy League colleges, enrolled only 46 black students in its student body of 9,000 in 1946. The traditional black colleges did not have places for an estimated 70,000 black veterans in 1947. At the same time, white universities were doubling their enrollments and prospering with the infusion of public and private funds, and of students with their G.I. benefits.
We not only need to level the playing field, we need to make sure that kids of color have a bat, ball and equipment.
Vanessa Cárdenas at The Center for American Progress writes:
Most kids today under 1 year old are of color, and by 2023 the majority of youngsters under 18 years of age will be children of color. People of color today make up about 36 percent of the workforce and according to Census Bureau projections, by 2050 one in two workers will be a person of color. Yet today 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 chief executive officers and 89 percent of lawyers are white. And our legislative bodies follow a similar trend: 87 percent of Congress is white (85 percent in the House and 96 percent in the Senate). By 2018, 63 percent of jobs will require some college education or better. Yet today only 13 percent of Latinos and 20 percent of African Americans earn that level of degree.
Our neighbor to the south,
Brazil, has recently adopted the most sweeping affirmative action program in the hemisphere "requiring public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for the largely poor students in the nation’s public schools and vastly increase the number of university students of African descent across the country."
Only one senator voted against it. Their Supreme Court had voted 7 to 1 to uphold the constitutionality of a scholarship program for black and mixed race students, which had been challenged.