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July 12 - July 17, 2020
Why did the disparity between white and black Americans widen after the Second World War despite the country’s prosperity?
“even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”
You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders as you please.
Johnson’s playing field metaphor evocatively underscored a compensatory approach to racial justice.
the president was announcing a theory justifying compensation for past racism that found its “grounding not in the Constitution or statutes or in liberal traditions of equal treatment. Rather the social force that justified the new doctrine of race-conscious affirmative action was history itself, in the form of past discrimination.”20
The dilemma he raised about what to do next remained an open question. But if the president provided only a first draft of adequate answers, he did pose just the right questions by directing the attention of his audience to past causes and future possibilities.
The first and most fundamental is a historical account of the moment when affirmative action was white. The second is a line of argument about race and affirmative action. The third is an approach to policy today.
“Negro poverty is not white poverty.” The differences, he hastened to explain, “are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.”
Unlike blacks, the white poor, many of whom had escaped its shackles, “did not have the heritage of centuries to overcome, and they did not have a cultural tradition which had been twisted and battered by endless years of hatred and hopelessness, nor were they excluded—these others—because of race or color—a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in our society.”
the wide array of significant and far-reaching public policies that were shaped and administered during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were crafted and administered in a deeply discriminatory manner. This was no accident.
The federal government, though seemingly race-neutral, functioned as a commanding instrument of white privilege.
Because no bills could be legislated into law without the assent of the members of Congress from that region (a result of the balance of partisanship between Republicans and Democrats, the composition of the Democratic Party, and rules that required filibuster-proof votes in the Senate), public policy had to be tailored to meet their preferences, most notably their desire to protect Jim Crow.
Put more abstractly, the core institutions of America’s liberal regime—its pattern of congressional representation and its party system—placed the South’s practices at the center of Washington’s politics and policymaking.
Even after the massive non-southern realignment in 1932 and 1936 that rendered southern representatives a numerical minority within the Democratic Party, the core of its senior members and its leading edge of continuity and legislative influence remained southern.
As the great agent of social policy change in the New Deal and postwar periods, this Democratic Party partnership of “strange bedfellows” produced a series of “strange deals” that, together, constituted a program of affirmative action granting white Americans privileged access to state-sponsored economic mobility.34
whenever the nature of the legislation permitted, they sought to leave out as many African Americans as they could. They achieved this not by inscribing race into law but by writing provisions that, in Robert Lieberman’s language, were racially laden.
These groups—constituting more than 60 percent of the black labor force in the 1930s and nearly 75 percent of those who were employed in the South—were excluded from the legislation that created modern unions, from laws that set minimum wages and regulated the hours of work, and from Social Security until the 1950s.
they successfully insisted that the administration of these and other laws, including assistance to the poor and support for veterans, be placed in the hands of local officials who were deeply hostile to black aspirations.
they prevented Congress from attaching any sort of anti-discrimination provisions to a wide array of social welfare programs such as community health services, school lunches, and hospital construction grants, indeed all the programs that distributed monies to their region.
New national policies enacted in the pre–civil rights, last-gasp era of Jim Crow constituted a massive transfer of quite specific privileges to white Americans. New programs produced economic and social opportunity for favored constituencies and thus widened the gap between white and black Americans in the aftermath of the Second World War. And the effects, as we will see, did not stop even after discriminatory codes were swept aside by the civil rights movement and the legislation it inspired.
By not including the occupations in which African Americans worked, and by organizing racist patterns of administration, New Deal policies for Social Security, social welfare, and labor market programs restricted black prospects while providing positive economic reinforcement for the great majority of white citizens.
the discretionary power available to state and local officials, virtually all white, to maintain this differentiated system of payments.
Southern congressional power ensured that all the various New Deal programs possessed this segmented character. “Once a state had received a grant, it controlled expenditure; state law defined the authority of relief agencies, executive orders were issued by the governor or by the relief director he appointed; the legislature decided what money should be appropriated from state resources.”
Their goal was to maximize the flow of federal funds while maintaining local responsibility to ensure the continuing viability of the southern racial order.
By keeping temporary relief offered by the federal government in the first phase of the New Deal in local hands, the South’s heritage of bigotry was both reflected and reinforced in patterns of spending and administration.
However unevenly administered, African Americans were offered some governmental protection against wretched conditions for the first time since Reconstruction.
Social Security, as passed and signed by President Roosevelt in August 1935, produced a stark outcome. Across the nation, fully 65 percent of African Americans fell outside the reach of the new program; between 70 and 80 percent in different parts of the South.
THE WAR PROVED TO BE a particularly important junction for white ethnic Americans, chiefly the children of Catholic and Jewish newcomers who had arrived in the United States from the 1880s until the closing of the immigration gates in 1924. Military training, wartime service, postwar benefits, and integration into a common American purpose brought many of these newcomers into their first robust contact with the white and mainly Protestant America from which they had lived at a physical and symbolic distance.
If, for Jews and Catholics, the war marked the first moment of full inclusion via the pathway of military service and benefits, for blacks, the war was the last moment of formal exclusion from equal citizenship by the federal government.
military service made it possible for very poor individuals with little experience outside their home environments to enter a “modern” world. The opportunity to travel, witness diverse experiences and patterns of upbringing, meet fellow blacks from all parts of the country with varied class backgrounds, and experience a wide range of world views broadened their horizons.
Perhaps most important, military service offered black soldiers the most basic and elementary requisite for an active participation in political, social, cultural, and economic life: literacy.
the substandard educational opportunities and achievements of blacks, especially southern blacks, had been deployed as an instrument to keep their numbers in uniform down. But, over the course of the war, this had proved an unsustainable policy.
By amplifying the bill’s achievements for returning black soldiers without sufficiently underscoring the high and often impassable barriers placed in their path, such an appraisal can be deceptive. When we take into account the legislative history of the statute and the way in which its various programs were administered, we come to see a rather different, more accurate picture. On balance, despite the assistance that black soldiers received, there was no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the GI Bill.
affirmative action during the Democratic administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had been exclusively white. Johnson’s government turned this pattern on its head. After the Howard speech, a form of affirmative action emerged that opened access for blacks to jobs and places in higher education from which, in the main, they had been excluded.
As part of the quest for civil rights in the Kennedy years, affirmative action did not yet connote compensatory treatment or special preferences.3 Rather, it simply implied positive deeds to combat racial discrimination.
during the Nixon presidency, largely without the agreement of Congress and outside public view.5 Federal agencies and federal courts soon required that employers and educators take race into account in order to rectify the second-class status of African Americans.
affirmative action in this new century has reached something of an impasse. Its principles are insufficiently articulated, its legality is still in question, and its reach remains far more limited than Lyndon Johnson had hoped.
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke stands out because it both defended and circumscribed affirmative action on grounds that established clear, indeed principled, standards.
Crucially, though, Powell also found that race could legitimately be used as a “plus” in making decisions on admission.32
In the half century since Brown v. Board of Education, the depth of racial segregation in most American schools, neighborhoods, and families has persisted. Of course, strict legal segregation has ended for schoolchildren, but, to date, racial integration, both in the North and the South, has not proceeded in the face of the pervasive residential separation of the races in suburbs as well as cities.43
The constellation of concentrated poverty, poor access to jobs, derisory housing conditions, high rates of incarceration, and challenges to traditional family formation continues to define issues of race and racism in the United States.
the brutal harms inflicted by slavery and Jim Crow are far too substantial ever to be properly remedied.
