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

by Ira Katznelson

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.