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July 4 - July 18, 2018
a change in our historical attention span.
“Their cause must be our cause, too.
the age of whiteness.
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.
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.
not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
“I am a Texan and I’ve got a southern constituency.”
he had become a revolutionary.
equality of outcomes
the social force that justified the new doctrine of race-conscious affirmative action was history itself, in the form of past discrimination.”20
Just at the moment the United States developed an increasingly suburban middle-class bulge, and Irish and Italian Catholics and Jews were advancing into mainstream white culture, African Americans remained stuck, in the main, in economically marginal class locations.
in the battle for true equality too many—far too many—are losing ground every day.
a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in our society.”
crafted and administered in a deeply discriminatory manner.
its southern members introduced features to fortify their region’s social, economic, and political order.
Yet only in, and surrounding, the former Confederacy did the formal political system utilize race to exclude adults from citizenship and full access to civil society.
In effect, the South maintained a legislative veto throughout this formative period.
constituted a program of affirmative action granting white Americans privileged access to state-sponsored economic mobility.
You Democrats who are pushing this vicious measure are destroying your usefulness here. . .
and by exploiting the gap between the intensity of their feeling and the relative indifference of their fellow members of Congress.
categories of work in which blacks were heavily overrepresented, notably farmworkers and maids.
local officials
they prevented Congress from attaching any sort of anti-discrimination provisions
constituted a massive transfer of quite specific privileges to white Americans.
“It is to fill the fair expectations of man.”
We have pursued it faithfully to the edge of our imperfections, and we have failed to find it for the American Negro.”
We should not imagine a freedom of action they did not have.
Yet we also should not minimize the ugly and lasting consequences of this Faustian bargain.
this was the most exploited group of workers in the country.21
Black health, not surprisingly, reflected a dire state of poverty.
In the thirty-one states that did not maintain separate schools for black and white children, the median classroom received just over $2,100 each year; in the seventeen southern states that practiced racial segregation, the sum was under $1,100.
“Negroes get fewer benefits, in relation to their needs, than do whites. Nevertheless, since they are so much poorer than whites, their representation on the relief rolls usually exceeds their proportion in the population.”
“he had to tailor relief . . . to accommodate the demands of southern plantation owners for cheap farm labor by curtailing [the level of] relief payments to agricultural laborers and sharecroppers.”
Relief payments were calibrated not to undercut the labor market. Recipients were not to receive more money on the dole than they would be earning if they had a job.
By decentralizing authority and fragmenting decision making, national policies could be administered to suit white southern preferences.
the key mechanism deployed was a separation of the source of funding from decisions about how to spend the new monies.
Their goal was to maximize the flow of federal funds while maintaining local responsibility to ensure the continuing viability of the southern racial order.
a disgrace that stinks to heaven.”
despite the absence of any threat to white supremacy, “the government was helping the poor colored people more than anybody else.”
more than one half of all black men, compared with one third of white men, remained in the labor market after the age of seventy-five.
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.
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.
“make it either less inclusive or less national.”
unemployment insurance required access to continual and secure work before getting laid off.
it was “like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”
non-southern Democrats proved willing to trade local control and the segregated utilization of federal funds in order to win southern support to overcome Republican opposition to liberal welfare state spending and services.
Since blacks counted in the numbers reported by the census, their large presence combined with their frequent inability to vote allowed white citizens to gain representation in higher proportions than their population in the House of Representatives.
not just as an instrument of racial discrimination but as a perverse formula for affirmative action.
calling for minimum wages and maximum hours legislation that would include both industrial and agricultural workers.
agricultural laborers have been explicitly excluded from participation in any of the benefits of New Deal legislation,
