When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

by Ira Katznelson

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 then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

“First, Negroes are trapped—as many whites are trapped—in inherited, gateless poverty.” Such poverty is deeper and more distinctive. “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.

Racism, to be sure, was not confined to the South. Irrespective of where they lived, most white Americans before the civil rights era were indifferent to Jim Crow.

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.37 The most important instances concerned categories of work in which blacks were heavily overrepresented, notably farmworkers and maids. 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.

Their goal was to maximize the flow of federal funds while maintaining local responsibility to ensure the continuing viability of the southern racial order.

Not until 1954, when Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and southern Democrats finally lost their ability to mold legislation, were the occupational exclusions that had kept the large majority of blacks out of the Social Security system eliminated. And even then, African Americans were not able to catch up, since the program required at least five years of contributions before benefits could be received. Thus, for the first quarter century of its existence, Social Security was characterized by a form of policy apartheid,

southern representatives had two choices when confronted with the administration’s recommendation for a largely inclusive and nationally oriented bill: “make it either less inclusive or less national.”

Du Bois tartly observed that “the world is astonished, aghast, and angry! But why? . . . England has been seizing land all over the earth for centuries with and without a shadow of rightful claim: India, South Africa, Uganda, Egypt, Nigeria, not to mention Ireland. The United States seized Mexico from a weak and helpless nation in order to bolster slavery. . . . This is the world that has grown suddenly righteous in defense of Finland.”21 Why, he asked, should not he and other African Americans believe that the war, at least in part, was a campaign to deepen white control?

How, Walter White wished to know, could the United States “fight a war for freedom” with a segregated army?

“What point is there in fighting and perhaps dying to save democracy if there is no democracy to save?”31 “Who wants to fight,” Roy Wilkins, editor of The Crisis, demanded the following year, “for the kind of ‘democracy’ embodied in the curses, the hair-trigger pistols, and the clubs of the Negro-hating hoodlums in the uniforms of military police?”

The picture in our country is marred by one of the strangest paradoxes in our whole fight against world fascism. The United States Armed Forces, to fight for World Democracy, is within itself undemocratic. The undemocratic policy of jim crow and segregation is practiced by our Armed Forces against its Negro members.

the GI Bill “enabled millions of working class Americans to go to college, buy their own homes, and become, in reality, members of the middle class.”

Veterans Administration mortgages paid for nearly 5 million new homes. Prior to the Second World War, banks often demanded that buyers pay half in cash and imposed short loan periods, effectively restricting purchases to members of the upper middle class and upper class. With GI Bill interest rates capped at modest rates, and down payments waived for loans up to thirty years, the potential clientele broadened dramatically. The balance decisively tilted away from renting toward purchasing. Between 1945 and 1954, the United States added 13 million new homes to its housing stock. In 1946 and 1947, VA mortgages alone accounted for more than 40 percent of the total,

Though the law contained no racial distinctions, the assignment of powers to the states ensured discriminatory treatment for blacks.

In the South, virtually no black veteran was given access to skilled employment by the USES, despite having had occupational training and work in the military. By channeling African American veterans into “black jobs” in the North as well as the South, the agency reinforced the existing division of labor by race.104 By October 1946, 6,500 former soldiers had been placed in non-farm jobs by the USES in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semi-skilled positions were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled by blacks.

In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supported home purchases by non-whites.

landlords, they were not by definition self-employed. A survey of thirteen Mississippi cities by Ebony magazine found that of the 3,229 VA guaranteed home, business, and farm loans made in 1947, precisely two had gone to blacks.

The Nixon administration, far from opposing these new measures, expanded the policy by further applying the doctrine of “disparate impact” (rather than “disparate treatment”).11 Seeking to embarrass organized labor, and enlarge a growing schism between the civil rights movement and white members of unions who might be persuaded to shift their votes to the Republican Party, Nixon enforced the Philadelphia Plan first drafted by Johnson’s Department of Labor in 1967, which required that minority workers in the notoriously discriminatory construction trades be hired in rough proportion to their per centage in the local labor force.

affirmative action has done more to advance fair treatment across racial lines than any other recent public policy. If affirmative action did not exist, the United States would be a vastly more segregated country. Without such efforts, most white Americans would have far less contact with their fellow black citizens. This post-1965 affirmative action has made our schools and our workplaces much more diverse.

Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan reasoned in practical terms. He argued that prohibiting such hard targets in the name of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be excessively ironic. “A law triggered by a Nation’s concern over centuries of racial injustice,” he wrote, should not be used as the reason to prohibit “race conscious efforts to abolish traditional patterns of racial segregation and hierarchy.”

Four other justices (Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Byron White) rejected the white student Allan Bakke’s challenge. They reasoned that race-blind policies in a race-conscious society can make access by minorities too difficult.

Powell also found that race could legitimately be used as a “plus” in making decisions on admission.

Then, as later, supporters cited the need to rectify deep racial harms. Color-neutral policies, so soon after slavery, mocked the meaning of equality.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s language about equal protection for all citizens has provided the bedrock argument for resistance to the way affirmative action has been conducted since 1965. It is not favored treatment as such that is in question. After all, any public policy, whether about taxes, welfare, or trade, confers advantages on some with costs paid by others. Legislation always sorts people into categories and ranks. Rather, it is preferential treatment for a group based on race.

Antonin Scalia argued that Powell had been wrong to uphold affirmative action in any form. Restorative justice, he claimed, is inherently not right and not constitutional. “The affirmative action system now in place,” he wrote, would produce perverse results that would “prefer the son of a prosperous and well-educated black doctor or lawyer—solely because of his race—to the son of a recent refugee from Eastern Europe who is working as a manual laborer to get his family ahead” because it “is based upon concepts of racial indebtedness and racial entitlement rather than individual worth and individual need; that is to say, because it is racist.”

Writing in the mid-1970s, the sociologist Nathan Glazer remonstrated against “the new concept of ‘affirmative action’ that . . . assumes that everyone is guilty of discrimination; it then imposes on every employer the remedies which in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could only be imposed of those guilty of discrimination.”

Justice Thurgood Marshall observed in 1978, in criticizing the admission of Allan Bakke to Davis, “that, after several hundred years of class-based discrimination against Negroes, the Court is unwilling to hold that a class-based remedy for that discrimination is permissible.”

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” Johnson declared, in seeking to understand these “deep, corrosive, obstinate differences.” Now as then, the call for color-blindness implicitly scorns these social realities. At best, it is sightless. At worst, it is a soft version of bigotry.

Such utilitarian arguments tend to be shallow. Their ambitions are too small. They fail to make the case for corrective justice except on prudential or practical grounds. Rather than argue forthrightly that the purpose of affirmative action is to put a definitive end to the caste status of blacks in American life and thus also put an end to white privilege, or another such lofty goal, they identify aims that arguably could be attained by other means.

a pragmatic calculus, once offered, has to be considered in full. After all, it must be conceded, under some circumstances affirmative action can increase racial animosities, reduce standards in hiring and admissions, and damage the self-respect of its beneficiaries. To argue for affirmative action simply in pragmatic terms thus opens its various programs to cost-benefit calculations. Without a larger context of principles and priorities, it usually proves impossible to sort out when a system of preferences is compelling and when it is not.

It would be callous to ignore the tremendous and devastating impact of racism on American life. In light of the particular harms inflicted on blacks in multiple institutional spheres, it has to be possible to override the understanding that equal protection ordinarily applies to individuals, not racial groups, in order “not only to end discrimination,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has argued, “but also to counteract discrimination’s lingering effects.”

The history of advantages offered to most whites and denied to many blacks in New Deal and Fair Deal policies is a particular story of targeted official institutional bias and great consequence. By understanding how the playing field fashioned by such fundamental public policies as Social Security, the Wagner Act, military segregation, and the GI Bill was racially skewed by design, and how their powerful negative effects have compounded in the past two generations, Lyndon Johnson’s specific type of affirmative action can be advanced.

Discussions about affirmative action usually begin with the 1960s, when its beneficiaries shifted from white to black. Such historical amnesia has weakened the case for affirmative action. The usual sole focus on present imbalances produces claims for racial rectification without offering enough historical justification to bring its benefits to most African Americans.

Since all the major tools the federal government deployed during the New Deal and the Fair Deal created a powerful, if unstated, program of affirmative action for white Americans, the case for even more extensive affirmative action is more compelling than current arguments favoring such policies.

Combining Powell’s principles and Johnson’s ambition propels us back to the moment when key national policies advantaged whites. They also push us forward to a framework for public policies that can respond to the injuries inflicted by officially sanctioned racism. Though motivated by a desire to protect Jim Crow, many of the methods those programs used were adopted on a non-racial basis. A renewed, extended program of affirmative action could offer a reciprocal possibility. Affirmative action could be established in ways that at least partially transcend race, even while primarily rectifying racial injustice.

During the foundational period of the 1930s and 1940s, these federally backed instruments, especially those created by the GI Bill for veterans, used redlining, local control, and overt discrimination to make it very difficult, often impossible, for blacks to qualify for mortgages. As in the other areas of public policy discussed in this book, the results that can be traced directly to public policy here were profound and long-lasting. Missed chances at homeownership obviously compound over time. Renters accumulate no equity, while homeowners almost always secure financial gains that exceed inflation.

By 1984, when GI Bill mortgages had mainly matured, the median white household had a net worth of $39,135; the comparable figure for black households was only $3,397, or just 9 percent of white holdings. Most of this difference was accounted for by the absence of homeownership. Nearly seven in ten whites owned homes worth an average of $52,000. By comparison, only four in ten blacks were homeowners, and their houses had an average value of less than $30,000.

Slowly but measurably, the disparity between the races in income has diminished, in part as a result of affirmative action.54 But the dramatic wealth gap has endured. At the end of the twentieth century, as a major study reported, “the net worth of the typical white family is $81,000 compared to $8,000 for black families . . . only 10 cents for every dollar of wealth held by white families.” Having lost out in so dramatic a way when federal mortgages first came on line, African Americans have not begun to catch up. Today, “the most dramatic difference is the wealth effect of homeownership.

Curiously, a series of forgotten early experiments in affirmative action by the military just after the Second World War can help point the way. Affirmative action for blacks began well before the term existed.

Military affirmative action worked.

How could it be fair, they asked, that Kitzingen’s schooling was reserved absolutely for blacks or that the courses offered to black soldiers were superior to the far more limited educational programs for literacy training then available to white troops? The military’s response, based on the effects of historical patterns, was summarized by an official Army historian: “Command spokesmen quite openly justified the disparity on the grounds that Negroes on the whole had received fewer educational opportunities in the United States.”63 The military did not, directly, explicitly connect these programs to its own ugly history of segregation; but its responsible authorities did rightly distinguish the deployment of race to remedy injustice from the use of racial categories to create injustice.

The best case for affirmative action is neither some very general reparation for massive harms nor the lighter and more limited, if desirable, objective of diversity. Rather, as the legal scholar Jack Greenberg has argued, the most compelling practical and moral goal should be that of “bettering the social conditions in which African-Americans live,” conditions that “affect everyone in our society.”

The color-blind critique argues that race, as a group category, is morally unacceptable even when it is used to counter discrimination. But this view misses an important distinction. African American individuals have been discriminated against because they were black, and for no other reason. Obviously, this violates basic norms of fairness. Under affirmative action, they are compensated not for being black but only because they were subject to unfair treatment at an earlier moment because they were black.66 If, for others, the policies also were unjust, they, too, must be included in the remedies. When national policy kept out farmworkers and maids, the injury was not limited to African Americans.67 Nor should the remedy be.

On this understanding it is important to identify recipients of affirmative compensation who have a direct relationship to the harm being remedied. This does not mean that they had to experience a specific act of discrimination directly. To qualify, however, it needs to be shown how discriminatory institutions, decisions, actions, and practices have negatively affected their circumstances. This approach does not limit remedies to individuals who have faced injustice directly, one at a time; neither does it justify remedies for African Americans as an exclusive group that has shared in a history of racism except when the harm, as in military segregation, was created with unambiguously racist categories.

One of two approaches is possible. In the first, a closely targeted program of corrective justice would search for identifiable individuals who have been harmed—even at the distance of one or two generations—by the pattern of exclusions and local administration

As examples: • For the lag in entering the Social Security system, the excluded could be identified and they, or their heirs, could be offered one-time grants that would have to be paid into designated retirement funds. • For the absence of access to the minimum wage, tax credits to an equivalence of the average loss could be tendered. • For the lack of access to key programs under the GI Bill, programs of subsidized mortgages, small business loans, and educational grants could now be put in place.

this approach would authorize a major assault on inequality and poverty which would be justified by these historical patterns and remedied by interventions offering boosts into middle-class status. The major instruments would be the same as those the federal government utilized in the GI Bill: subsidized mortgages; generous grants for education and training; small business loans; and active job searching and placement. This line of attack also could deploy an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, assure generous child care, and guarantee basic health insurance.

2nd approach

the racist motivations and primary targets of those who crafted affirmative action for whites must not be repressed. The programs discussed in this book did far more than cost people money or opportunity. They also projected humiliation, while stunting human imagination and possibility. Appropriate signs and deeds would represent a collective apology, and indicate a communal desire to transcend such insults,

After a review of affirmative action, President Bill Clinton famously proposed to mend, not end it. My appeal is different: Extend affirmative action in order to end it within one generation. If such a project were to succeed, the next assessment of affirmative action a president offers at Howard University could well be a celebration of success and culmination. Only then will affirmative action no longer be white or black.