Johnson Lyndon Baines - When affirmative action was white : an untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America

WHEN
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
WAS WHITE

An Untold History of Racial Inequality
in Twentieth-Century America

IRA KATZNELSON

For Leah,
Who designs and beautifies

C ONTENTS

N O MORE CRITICAL situation ever faced the Negroes of America than that of todaynot in 1830, nor in 1861, nor in 1867. More than ever the appeal of the Negro for elementary justice falls on deaf ears. Three-fourths of us are disenfranchised; yet no writer on democratic reform says a word about Negroes. When I chanced upon these sentences in an essay by W. E. B. Du Bois, I was astonished to learn it had been written in 1935, a time of great achievement for President Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. That year, the president and Congress looked beyond the nations economic desolation and hoped to find more than temporary measures to relieve mass hardship. Joining forces, they created Social Security and assured workers they could band together in industrial unions. More broadly, they sought to demonstrate that the globes leading democracy could fashion an alternative to the appeal of Soviet and German dictatorships.

These new initiatives coincided with a historic political shift, in which a majority of black Americans had begun to turn away from Lincolns Republican Party to offer their votes, when they could vote, to Roosevelts Democratic Party, despite the presence within the New Deal coalition of southern Democrats who fiercely protected Jim Crow. Keenly aware that this shift hardly was ideal, Du Bois was in no mood to celebrate. Black America, he understood, was mired in difficulty despite any bounty offered by the New Deal:

Negro children are systematically denied education; when the National Education Association asks for federal aid to education it permits discrimination to be perpetuated by the present local authorities. Once or twice a month Negroes convicted of no crime are openly and publicly lynched, and even burned; yet a National Crime Convention is brought to perfunctory and unwilling notice of this only by mass picketing and all but illegal agitation. When a man with every qualification is refused a position simply because his great-grandfather was black there is not a ripple of comment or protest.

The contrast between the extraordinary policy advances of 1935 and Du Boiss mordant appraisal of the pervasiveness of racism at the height of the New Deal unsettled my conventional understanding. I soon launched a research program to ask how the achievements of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had been shaped by the pivotal role southern Democrats still were able to play as guardians of racial segregation. I also set out to identify the consequences of these ties between social and racial policy on American politics and society today.

When Affirmative Action Was White is one result of this endeavor. It reveals how policy decisions dealing with welfare, work, and war during Jim Crows last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s excluded, or differentially treated, the vast majority of African Americans. It also traces how inequality, in fact, increased at the insistence of southern representatives in Congress, while their other congressional colleagues were complicit. As a result of the legislation they passed, blacks became even more significantly disadvantaged when a modern American middle class was fashioned during and after the Second World War. Public policy, including affirmative action, has insufficiently taken this troubling legacy into account.

My goal in developing these arguments and proposing guidelines for new policies is not to write yet another history or analysis of affirmative action. The number of articles and books on this subject is considerable. Policy historians have taught us how the origins of affirmative action as federal public policy in the 1960s and 1970s were byproducts of other intentions. For more than three decades, justices of the Supreme Court have gauged the legal status of affirmative action. Many scholarly and popular onlookers have disputed how affirmative action has shaped our schools, workplaces, and government, civil and military. Advocates and detractors have developed powerful arguments about key moral, constitutional, and practical issues. These, by now, are familiar.

I remark on these conflicting understandings and patterns, but this commentary neither is my main theme nor my central purpose. Writing as a historian, I want to set the record straight. As a political scientist, I would like to understand the mechanisms that produced these outcomes. As a citizen, I wish to present these understandings in order to alter our misconceptions and reposition the direction of how we think, talk, and act about affirmative action. Rather than limit attention to successful programs that have made our elite institutions more racially integrated, I propose that affirmative action focus on antidotes to specific harms that date back to national policies in the 1930s and 1940s as remedies for the deep, even chronic dispossession that continues to afflict a large percentage of black America.

Above all, I want to shift our focus in three primary ways. The first alteration I propose is a change in our historical attention span. Discussions about affirmative actionwhether historical, philosophical, sociological, economic, or politicalusually begin with events and debates that took place four, rather than seven, decades ago. This I believe to be a mistake, albeit one easy to understand. After all, the language of affirmative action as well as explicit policies carrying that name only were launched in the 1960s. By contrast, I look back as well as forward from the vantage of the mid-1960s. As a result, a mainly neglected earlier history of race and public policy comes into view, allowing us to see, think, and act about affirmative action in fresh ways.

The second modification intends to broaden our understanding of these issues. Today, when we say the words affirmative action, we almost always think about higher education and top tier jobs. Recently, I conducted a quick key word electronic search to classify stories about affirmative action in some of the countrys leading newspapers ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today ), news magazines ( Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report ), and the black press ( New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender ). In each case, education and college vastly surpass any other category. Only jobs and employment are also present in significant numbers. By contrast, the words poverty, inequality, and social justice show up in the media with far less regularity. By linking the history of affirmative action for blacks since the mid-1960s with the prior record of affirmative action for whites, I hope to refocus public debate on these neglected sub jects.

A third shift in this book is placing affirmative action on more secure ground by binding New Deal and Fair Deal history to an argument about when, why, and how history should count in crafting public policies today. I first encountered affirmative action as a young assistant professor. In 1971 I served as the junior faculty representative at Columbia University on a political science search committee. The Department of Labor threatened the university with the loss of $13 million in federal funding unless it hired more women and minorities. Not fair, said my colleagues, who resisted by proposing the appointments of five white men. Struck by the fierceness of opposition to what manifestly seemed fair to me (together with the Department of English, Political Science had functioned for years as a relatively closed gentlemans club for white Protestants), I was distressed by the absence of good grounds for a rejoinder to the senior members of my department, who deployed high-minded talk about color-blindness and merit to reinforce a historical pattern of exclusion.