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

by Ira Katznelson

the goal to be pursued by affirmative action cannot be vague or only of moderate importance; it must be sufficiently valuable as a social good to justify suspending rules that ordinarily must be blind to race.

Such high-mindedness is too abstract and too removed from the country’s historical record.

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.”

it was impossible to “ignore the remarkable and unique separation between blacks and others” that continues in American life.

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,”

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,

It would be callous to ignore the tremendous and devastating impact of racism on American life.

“not only to end discrimination,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has argued, “but also to counteract discrimination’s lingering effects.”

Every violation of color-blind norms, in short, must be justified with the goal of a just color-blind society in mind.

strict scrutiny appropriately sets the bar high, but not beyond reach.

affirmative action to achieve educational diversity was permissible because it addressed the specific situation created by the historical pattern of nearly all-white higher education.

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.

the results that can be traced directly to public policy here were profound and long-lasting. Missed chances at homeownership obviously compound over time.

Over time, it is much harder to make up gaps in wealth than in income.

reversal of this income convergence

the hallmark social policy innovations of the New Deal and the Fair Deal themselves operated more as brakes than as accelerators in incorporating African Americans into the country’s rapidly expanding postwar middle class.

The old advantages and disadvantages have continued to compound.57

The Far East Command established such a program, aimed principally at blacks, to bring every soldier to a fifth-grade standard.

“Command spokesmen quite openly justified the disparity on the grounds that Negroes on the whole had received fewer educational opportunities in the United States.”

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.

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 programs discussed in this book did far more than cost people money or opportunity.

Extend affirmative action in order to end it within one generation.