Customer Reviews

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

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As I read this book I was reminded of the Broadway play and subsequent movie '1776' about the creation of the Declaration of Independence. In the play the Southern representatives agreed to support the Declaration only if words prohibiting slavery were taken out. Politics is the art of compromise, and without the Southern states there would have been no Declaration. So slavery was left in.

In the time of Roosevelt the Southern politicians had enough clout to stop all of the New Deal legislation if it were made truly color blind. As is often the case, it took a politician from the affected states to force legislation through the Congress to right this wrong. Lyndon Johnson had been in long enough that he truly understood how to get what he wanted through the congress.

In this book, the author explains how nominaly racially blind legislation and programs were in fact deliberatly and subtly were able to exclude blacks from participation. He uses this to make a plea to eliminate poverty and inequality in America.

Regarding the comments of Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Frantzman: yes, blacks may have been heavily represented in the military, but no, they were NOT able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill to obtain Veteran's mortgage loans.

Due to legal restrictions, restrictive convenants, and general violence and protests, blacks in the U.S. in the 1940's and 1950's were limited to obtaining housing in only all-black neighborhoods, or in neighborhoods that were rapidly turning all-black. There has been much research done showing that the FHA and VA both participated in redlining, and refused to provide home mortgages in neighborhoods which were all black, or on the verge of becoming all-black.

Therefore, any black veteran who wished to purchase a home using his/her V.A. benefits would be severely restricted, by A) not being able to buy a home outside of a black neighborhood, where mortgage funds were readily available and B) being able to find a home in a black neighborhood, but not being able to receive mortgage money to purchase it.

Check out the book "From the Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America" to see that what I am saying is correct.

This book is a thoughtful and well-documented antidote to libertarian and conservative propaganda. It shows exactly how racial discrimination permeated every layer of public and private life in both North and South -- and lasted well into the 1970s. Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and during legal racial segregation, especially under the GI Bill of Rights, whites -- especially men -- benefited immensely and blacks were either denied benefits or prevented from getting them by local bureaucrats.

This is proof that we have barely begun to correct the effect of racial segregation on generations of Americans. White men benefited from quotas in the past. They want to lose no priviledges. Libertarians and conservatives want to keep those advantages for themselves and deny fair competition to all those against whom they discriminated in the past. Color-blind policies now simply perpetuate the unfairness of a color-segregated past.

I don't know what Mr. Frantzman was smoking, but here's a quote from the book. In New York and New Jersey, "fewer than 100 of 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites."

It has been an easy mantra of the Right that government should not be involved in social engineering after the white majority has drunk so generously from the public trough.

80% of small business in the US were begun with equity loans from the GI Bill. Plumbing companies, carpentry shops, dentists, truckers.... African Americans had no access to that wealth creation. None.

Now people like Mr Frantzen pretend that everyone competes on a level playing field. But all he has to offer in support of his contention is rhetoric not facts.

Get the book!

This book provides valuable statistics comparing white and black economic status in the Depression era. Its strength is its documentation of how New Deal programs (and the GI Bill of Rights) had a disparate impact on whites and blacks. It describes how legislative provisions crafted by Southern Senators, and administration by Southern local officials, meant the African-American workers (often forced to labor as domestics or in agriculture) received far less generous support from the federal government than their white counterparts. Less direct aid, fewer contracts, lack of access to mortgages, non-coverage by the Social Security Act, fewer opportunities to attend universities, meant that the federal government was actively exacerbating the racial economic divide for much of the 20th century.

Just finished an outstanding book by Ira Katznelson on the untold history of racial inequality in America. Those who oppose affirmative action should get it and see who has really benefitted from The New Deal, the Fair Deal, Social Security and the GI Bill after WWII. I cannot see how anyone can read this book and not agree with me that Lincoln did not free the slaves. The slaves were not freed until 1964 and LBJ should be credited with that action.

Of course, this information cannot be taught in Florida schools. The education bill has a provision that History must be taught as inerrant gospel. No revisionist thought allowed in Florida schools. They plan to keep the children ignorant of what Southern politicians did from 1864 to 1964.

Katznelson's historical review of how legislation has been implemented from the Great Depression's New Deal to Johnson's Great Society is an eye-opener for its detail, and for linking the way legislation that looks universal was implemented through states rights to benefit whites and not blacks.
The control of Congress by 17 southern states intent on maintaining racist states' rights segregation made every decent piece of legistation including the GI Bill a boon for white folks and an impediment for African-Americans. Thus affirmative action for whites, of the books's title, was a result of a nearly invisible operation over and over; IN ORDEWR TO GET ANY LEGISLATION PASSED, CONCESSIONS HAD TO BE MADE TO THE SOUTHERNERS WHO CONTROLLED COMMITTEES AND THUS LEGISLATION. Because of their one-party white rule in their states, they had seniority in national legislatures, so they had control until Johnson, part of the southern bloc, broke rank during the civil rights struggles.
This is a must-read book for its historical documentation of how white working class peoiple benefitted and african-american working class people were denied.

For those who are either accidentally ignorant of -- or, more likely, willfully in denial about -- the dark side of the New Deal, many of these things have been documented before. James Loewen touches on a few of them in his well-written "Sundown Towns."

Signing off on Southern Democrats' demands in this and many other things, especially involving the Fair Labor Standards Act before the war, was part of the price FDR was willing to pay to keep his job for four terms. (Several goverment-created towns set up during the Roosevelt years, including Hanford, Wash., one of the cruxes of developing our nuclear weapons power, were deliberately founded by the government as sundown towns.)

Using control of the GI Bill, and of federal housing funds, was an easier, smoother, quieter way of keeping many of these sundown towns all-white (other than the occasional live-in maid) than the cross-burnings, white race riots, etc.

Speaking of those sundown towns, how many were there?

"I believe at least 3,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 independent towns went sundown in the United States, mostly between 1890 and about 1930," Lowen says. Again, very few of these were in the South. The vast majority were in the West and Midwest.

Unfortunately, many people from these towns -- and even entire sundown counties, in some cases -- are in denial about this part of the racism that was common in America's past and still exists today. That's both how and why their denial may extend to their own racism.

I like to read books that tell the truth, and this book fits the bill. My only complaint is that at page 140 he starts editorializing. Also you can't compare governmental policies that uplifted an entire class of people based on race, and purposely held down another to what we consider as Affirmative Action of Today. Otherwise the book is a worthwhile read.

This book, written in a formal manner, in the style of a political policy paper, touches on that most sensitive of American subjects, race, specifically the responsibility of American society to provide compensation to African Americans for the centuries of slavery and severe publicly and privately enforced economic and psychological misery.

The main focus of the book is on the increases in the disparities in terms of wealth, health and other indicators between black and white Americans that began during the New Deal period. It was this disparity that President Johnson noted in his speech to the Howard University graduating class in June 1965. LBJ noted that since 1947 white poverty had decreased by 27 percent while non-white poverty had decreased by only three percent. He declared that etween 1952 to 1963 the average percentage of the income of white men that black men earned, fell from 57 to 52 percent. The infant mortality of non-whites in the U.S. was 70 percent greater than whites in 1940. By 1962, it was 90 percent greater. LBJ stated that white and black unemployment rates were about equal in 1940 but by 1965 black unemployment was twice as high.

LBJ's speech is the foil for the exposition of the learned professor in this book........

For Katnzelson, as others have pointed out before him of course, the shaping of such New Deal policies of Social Security, public works jobs, housing mortgage subsidies, the Wagner act empowering workers to organize, minimum wage laws, and so on were dependent on the votes of Southern Democrats. They worked to insure that agriculture and domestic work were excluded from the minimum wage law of 1938 and the Wagner Act and the Social Security Acts of 1935. Agriculture and domestic workers, of course, were very disproportionately in the South represented in their work force by African Americans. The majority of African Americans lived in the South, the poorest people in the poorest region in the country. They worked to ensure that benefits and subsidies of these Federal programs would be distributed by local officials--thus in the South officials worked with a great deal of success to exclude blacks from the programs that whites had access to. Southern politicians wanted to keep Blacks in semi-slave conditions and so succeeded to a very large extent in excluding blacks from income accumulating opportunities that were available to Whites, such as the government guarantee of organizing for higher wages, benefits and conditions guaranteed by the Wagner Act and the programs of subsidies to the poor. When Blacks did receive subsidies from these programs in the South, they were considerably less than the same benefits accorded to Whites.

Blacks had considerably less access to the training programs offered to white service men during World War II. They were often placed in menial jobs. The Republican Secretary of War Henry Stimson believed that blacks should be kept from the battlefield as much as possible because of their alleged inherent incompetence at those tasks. Some black servicemen did have access to literacy training, combat experience and vocational training. Unionized black workers in the North benefited and blacks in the South were pulled along in the new prosperity but at very small distances compared to the benefits won by white veterans. In an endnote, he quotes Eisehnower that rural working class Britian lacked the strong race consciousness of Americans--thus white GIs stationed in England during the War were horrified by the sight of white British girls dating Black GIs and often responded violently. According to Ike, they were also upset that the British press seemed not at all perturbed by this dating.

Funding for college education, housing mortgages on easy terms, superior vocational training and so on were provided in massive amounts by the GI bill. The latter has been declared by Freddie Mac advertisements and Democratic politicians, quite plausibly as significantly contributing to the creation of the post-War middle class in this country. Once again, the programs of the GI bill were run by local VA officials and others in the South, the home of the majority of black veterans. The house mortgage and educational loans were distributed by private lenders in the north and south who at best loaned the money to black veterans infrequently but of course did so regularly for whites. Blacks eligible for higher education were either not allowed access to education or directed towards Southern Black universities and vocational schools that received much less funding than comparable white schools and were otherwise bad jokes as educational institutions. Northern white colleges, of course, engaged in extensive unofficial racial discrimination in admissions and student housing.

The subsidies and education which the families of white veterans and their descendants have benefited from show up in contemporary statistics, Katznelson shows. Many whites who took advantage of the GI bill were able to subsequently accumulate fairly comfortable assets in terms of stock ownership, retirement funds, savings and so on. Home ownership, providing by easy GI bill mortgage loans, was a major key. Such benefits, of course, have passed down through the generations. According to Katznelson, by the end of the 20th century, the median household net worth was $81,000 for whites but $8,000 for blacks.

Katznelson turns to the interesting question as to how a real affirmative action program should be implemented, even one that can be technically color neutral, getting away from the feeble arguments of Jesse Jackson & co. The affirmative action programs that have been implemented, Katznelson argues, have reduced significantly the inequalities between Black and White middle class incomes, if not net worth. But the large majority of African Americans have had their fortunes decline....

Of course, we need a popular movement to force our neoliberal politicians like Edwards, Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, and the rest to even begin to seriously address the issue.