Ira Katznelson makes the case for reparations in “When Affirmative Action Was White.”
Every so often, the title of a book tells the whole story. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America, by Ira Katznelson, is a perfect example. Originally published in 2006, it has just been republished with an extensive new Introduction in which the author sadly reminds us that racial inequality in the United States has not improved, and in many ways has worsened, in the last seventeen years.
This book should be Exhibit A in the emerging national debate over reparations for slavery and its persistent legacies. On July 1, the California Reparations Task Force is expected to deliver its final report and recommendations to the California legislature.
In addition to cash payments to the descendants of African Americans who were enslaved in the U.S. – which has been grabbing all the headlines – the task force is expected to recommend a “range of policies needed to guarantee restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and non-repetition,” including repealing or amending Proposition 209, a measure approved by California voters in 1996 that banned affirmative action; analyzing laws, policies and ordinances from the local to the state level for racial impact prior to passage and after implementation; amending the California Constitution to prohibit involuntary servitude; abolishing the death penalty; funding community wellness centers in African American communities; restoring voting rights to all formerly and currently incarcerated people; implementing rent caps for historically redlined ZIP Codes; increasing grants and financial assistance to improve homeownership rates among African Americans, including subsidized down payments and mortgage payments to those who reside in formerly redlined neighborhoods; providing free college tuition for all California residents eligible for monetary reparations; identifying and removing Confederate monuments, markers and memorials; creating a guaranteed income program for descendants of an enslaved person; automatically increasing minimum wage on a regular basis to adjust for increases to the cost of living, including inflation; providing interest-free loans to owners of small businesses in African American commercial areas; ending the cash bail system; repealing the “three strikes” law; adopting universal single-payer healthcare coverage and a healthcare cost-control system; and increasing Medi-Cal reimbursement rates to match reimbursement rates of private insurance.
Beyond these ambitious institutional remedies, the task force is expected to recommend that eligible recipients receive $13,619 for each year of residency in California, as compensation for health disparities; $2,352 for each year of residency in California during the war on drugs from 1971 to 2020, as compensation for mass incarceration and overpolicing of African Americans; and $3,366 for each year between 1933 and 1977 spent as a resident of California, as compensation for housing discrimination.
The proposal also is expected to call for additional compensation for unjust property takings and the devaluation of African American businesses, which have not yet been quantified. The task force is also expected to suggest that the legislature adopt an individual claims process to provide reparations for those who can prove particular harms.
Some will ask what justifies such extensive institutional remedies and expensive compensation plans. Others will ask how the government can afford to pay billions of dollars in reparations. There are many answers to these legitimate questions which the task force’s final report is expected to address and which will be intensively discussed in the ensuing debate over reparations. But When Affirmative Action Was White provides answers that may come as a surprise to many Americans. Beginning in the Twentieth Century, our country had already spent billions in comparable financial assistance programs. The only difference between then and now is that the recipients were white and their ancestors had not been enslaved.
Katznelson, the Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University and deputy director of Columbia World Projects, is a former president of the American Political Science Association and author of several books, including Fear Itself, winner of the Bancroft Prize in History. In When Affirmative Action Was White, he sets out to reveal “how policy decisions dealing with welfare, work, and war during Jim Crow’s last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s excluded, or differently treated, the vast majority of African Americans,” causing inequality to increase “at the insistence of southern representatives in Congress, while their other congressional colleagues were complicit.” As a result of the federal legislation they passed, “blacks became even more significantly disadvantaged when a modern American middle class was fashioned during and after the Second World War.” He marshals convincing evidence to show “how the cumulative and diverse public policies of the federal government during the 1930s and 1940s shaped affirmative action for whites primarily under the aegis of the South in Congress, and why this history matters for present-day efforts to create a less racially unjust country.”
Katznelson was motivated as a historian to set the record straight, as a political scientist to understand the mechanisms that produced these outcomes, and as a citizen “to present these understandings in order to alter our misconceptions and reposition the direction of how we think, talk, and act about affirmative action.”
In his new Introduction, he expands the discussion of how to rectify the history of racism in the United States to elaborate on reparations. Seventeen years ago, he thought “claims for reparations were ethically on target, but their underspecified qualities made them seem utopian, politically impossible. Broad appeals favoring reparations based on America’s disturbing and long history of white privilege, however proper, were unlikely to garner necessary public support.” On the other hand, “arguments against affirmative action and reparations unconvincingly wore the mantle of color-blindness. Any use of race, their claim went, was inherently racist.” Since that “orientation required profound historical ignorance and a disturbing silence about the country’s history of anti-black racism,” he wrote When Affirmative Action Was White. He wanted to make clear that the call for reparations is not only based on what happened centuries ago but is also in response to “recent official patterns of discrimination and exclusion” which address “the consequences of injuries in the generation of our parents and grandparents, injuries that had been targeted, specific, painful, and enduring.” His book convincingly refutes the argument against reparations that coyly asks why Americans who never owned slaves should have to pay for what happened centuries ago.
This is why the republication and updating of When Affirmative Action Was White comes at such a pivotal moment in the reckoning with racism in the United States. Well-funded forces committed to perpetuating white privilege have been organizing for decades in Congress, Republican state legislatures, the Supreme Court, and conservative think tanks and media outlets like Fox News, to dismantle affirmative action and strangle reparations in its crib. The lynchpins of their campaign are the claims that slavery was abolished 160 years ago, that no one alive today owned slaves, that today the American people and their local, state, and federal governments are not responsible for the shameful institution of slavery, that we live in a color-blind society, that Americans and especially our school children should not feel guilty for what happened centuries ago, and that therefore reparations are unjustified.
Among many refutations to these misleading and incomplete assertions and half-truths, When Affirmative Action Was White contributes several new dimensions. It reminds us that the history of white supremacy in America did not end with the official abolition of slavery. Instead, that shameful history continues to this day as a consequence of laws and official governmental policies, including those explored in this book.
That would be enough to make When Affirmative Action Was White required reading for anyone who questions reparations. But the book doesn’t stop there. It tells the further story of how a nation in the grip of racist officials in Congress and in local governments purposely designed laws and sweeping financial assistance programs to benefit whites over blacks, exacerbating the wealth and income gaps first created by building the economic foundations of the United States on the free labor of millions of enslaved people. The book exposes the cruel truth that the United States has been more than happy to spend billions of dollars on a wide array of financial assistance programs when the recipients were largely white, and to systematically design and implement those programs to exclude people of color.
When Affirmative Action Was White exposes the story of “sanctioned racism during and just after the Great Depression and World War II,” when “master politicians from the South proudly protected their region’s entrenched white supremacy by passing landmark laws that made the great majority of America, the overwhelming white majority, more prosperous and more secure, while leaving out most African Americans, in full or in part.”
Passed during the 1930s, the Social Security Act provided old age and unemployment insurance. The National Labor Relations Act charted legal opportunities for unions. The Fair Labor Standards Act established minimum wages and maximum hours. As Katznelson explains, at “southern insistence, these laws excluded both farmworkers and maids, critical categories of black employment.” (Emphasis in the original).
In the 1940s, the Department of War and President Franklin Roosevelt maintained racially segregated armed forces, reinforcing existing patterns of racial discrimination. Black soldiers, often confined to the most menial roles, were denied chances to acquire new skills or develop leadership experience that many whites enjoyed. Congress then passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, popularly known as the GI Bill, whose massive benefits for 16 million veterans and their families helped create the American middle class based on home ownership and access to advanced education, together with job training and placement, and small business loans. “Southern representatives,” Katznelson writes, “made sure to place the implementation of these benefits in the hands of white political authorities in the region’s states and localities, and in private institutions, notably local banks,” providing “ample room for bias and bigotry.” In 1947, a coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats passed the Taft-Hartley Act, over the veto of President Harry Truman, making union organizing increasingly difficult and blunting efforts of the AFL and the CIO to expand in the South on a multiracial basis.
Katznelson sums up, “legislative bias, military segregation, and administrative discrimination, in short, conferred advantages, huge advantages, for white Americans while denying most blacks anything like equal access to social and economic benefits. Ever since, many persons left behind have continued to experience deep poverty, together with social and spatial isolation.”
These skewed laws and policies were implemented as official policy of the federal government with the connivance of state and local authorities. While they certainly reflected the private prejudices of many white Americans, the impact, as Katznelson points out, was “more potent than the results of private bias.” Implemented and enforced by national, state, and local governments, “racism came to be undergirded by national law and reinforced by the legitimacy of democratic processes.” The federal government, through seemingly race-neutral laws, functioned as “a commanding instrument of white privilege.” And all of it happened in twentieth-century America.
In his brutally revealing 1944 assessment of race relations in the United States, An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal called the economic situation for African Americans “pathological.” He concluded that “except for a small minority enjoying upper or middle class status, the masses of American Negroes, in the rural South and in the segregated slum quarters in Southern and Northern cities, are destitute. They own little property; even their household goods are mostly inadequate and dilapidated. Their incomes are not only low but irregular. They thus live from day to day and have scant security for the future.”
Reinforcing Myrdal, Katznelson points out that in the 1940’s in the rural South, where most blacks lived and worked, their average family income was only $565 per year compared to poor whites who earned nearly three times that much, an average of $1,535. In southern cities, most black incomes reached $635 per family per year, while white family average annual incomes were $2,019.
To explain how these disparities were perpetuated by federal law, Katznelson devotes separate chapters to the politics and planning that went into their enactment and implementation. Some highlights of his exhaustive analysis are very revealing.
To begin with, in an era of “legal” segregation in seventeen states and Washington, D.C., the powerful southern wing of the Democratic Party was in a position to dictate the contours of federal legislation that, together, “constituted a program of affirmative action granting white Americans privileged access to state-sponsored economic mobility.”
The great majority of blacks were left out of the Social Security Act of 1935, because the law excluded farmworkers and domestics. Across the nation, fully 65% of African Americans were excluded; between 70% and 80% in different parts of the South. To complete the picture, Katznelson points out that given the agrarian nature of the economy, 40 percent of whites were also excluded. Yet, even among the excluded, the racial disparities are obvious.
Despite the fact that these laws contained anti-discrimination provisions, by “keeping temporary relief offered by the federal government in the first phase of the New Deal in local hands, the South’s heritage of bigotry was both reflected and reinforced in patterns of spending and administration,” Katznelson writes. The staffs making these decisions in the South were entirely white. Consequently, in 1940, the Social Security Board in Washington reported that during the prior two years, “the number of Negroes to whom aid was granted … was low in proportion to the number who needed assistance.”
Sometimes, racist motivations were on full display. In the debates over the Fair Labor Standards Act, setting minimum wages and maximum hours, Florida representative James Mark Wilcox argued against paying “the same wage for the Negro that [is] prescribed for the white man.” He warned that you “cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it.” Edward Cox of Georgia was appalled that “organized Negro groups” were supporting the new law because it will “render easier the elimination and disappearance of racial and social distinctions.”
Racial segregation was official government policy in the military during World War II. To justify it, the official Army War College training manual taught that the “negro is docile, tractable, lighthearted, care free, and good natured,” as well as “careless, shiftless, irresponsible, and secretive,” and “unmoral, untruthful, and his sense of right doing is relatively inferior.” With proper direction in mass, “negroes are industrious” but their “emotions are unstable and their reactions uncertain.”
The governor of each state had the authority to set up draft boards and the personnel staffing each board. There were 6,442 local draft boards, each with at least three members. Outside the South, only 250 blacks served on boards, out of a total of at least 25,000. Within the South, with the exception of a handful of draft boards in three states, there were no blacks on any local draft board. In 1944, the director of the Selective Service, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hershey, conceded, “what we are doing, of course, is simply transferring discrimination from everyday life into the army.”
By the war’s end, 11 percent of white men in the military were officers, but fewer than 1 percent of blacks were. Of the 105,000 admitted to the Army Special Training Program, which placed individuals in civilian colleges to acquire a wide array of skills, just 789 – fewer than 1 percent – were African American. War service, Karznelson writes, “ended with a wider gap between whites and blacks, as white access to training and occupational advancement moved ahead at a much more vigorous rate.”
Consequently, the administration of the GI Bill – described by Katznelson as the most wide-ranging set of of social benefits ever offered by the federal government in a single, comprehensive initiative – “widened the country’s racial gap.” Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers, which experts called a “model welfare system,” totaled over $95 billion. After three years of implementation, a comprehensive report entitled Our Negro Veterans, concluded that it was “as though the GI Bill had been earmarked ‘For White Veterans Only.’”
Katznelson explains in detail how “the conversion of bigoted values into racist practices had been built into the law’s design and administration.” Local control strongly discouraged blacks from applying. The path to job placement, loans, unemployment benefits, and schooling was tied to local VA centers, which Katznelson found were almost entirely staffed by white employees, or through local banks and both public and private educational institutions.
The United States Employment Service (USES), which was mandated by the GI Bill to help veterans find jobs, operated through local centers, staffed almost entirely by white job counselors. In the South, Katznelson found, virtually no black veterans was given access to skilled employment by USES. By October 1946, of the 6,500 former soldiers placed in non-farm jobs, 86 percent of the skilled and semi-skilled positions were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled positions by blacks.
The same racial disparities existed for loans under the GI Bill, all of which were administered by local banks. The vast majority of financial institutions refused to approve loans to African Americans. And this was not confined to the South. In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supporting home purchases were granted to non-whites. “The performance of the GI Bill mocked the promise of fair treatment,” Katznelson writes. “The differential treatment meted out to African Americans sharply curtailed the statute’s powerful egalitarian promise and significantly widened the country’s large racial gap.”
Katznelson begins his last chapter by asking readers to imagine two countries. One is the richest in the world, the other amongst its most destitute. Then suppose that a global program of foreign aid transferred well over $100 billion, but to the rich nation not the poor. “This is exactly what happened in the United States as a result of the cumulative impact of the most important domestic policies of the 1930s and 1940s.”
The new federal programs initiated “a revolution in the role of government that remade the country’s social structure in dramatic, positive ways. But most blacks were left out. The damage to racial equity caused by each program was immense. Taken together, the effects of these public laws were devastating.” Consequently, “the Gordian knot binding race to class tightened.”
It shouldn’t have been this way. Black and white wages had begun to converge somewhat in the early 1940s, particularly outside the South. But as “the war-era labor market no longer produced favorable conditions for working-class African Americans,” Katznelson explains, “and with public policy now so powerfully and cumulatively shifting the balance of assistance offered by the federal government to favor whites, the black-white gap across a whole range of indicators actually began to widen.”
By 1984, as most GI Bill mortgages matured, the median white household had a net worth of $39,135 while the comparable figure for black households was only $3,397, not even 10 percent of white holdings. By the end of the twentieth century, the net worth of a typical white family was $81,000 compared to only $8,000 for black families.
“On virtually every social and economic dimension,” Katznelson writes, “blacks and whites are still a nation apart” due to “concentrated poverty, poor access to jobs, derisory housing conditions, high rates of incarceration, and challenges to traditional family formation.”
Sixty years ago, on August 28, 1963, in the very first sentence of his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the Emancipation Proclamation. He called it “this momentous decree” that came as “a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.” He said it “came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”
But without a pause, he bemoaned the fact that “100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.”
And today, 160 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Dr. King’s words tragically still apply to millions of people of color who continue to suffer the economic, political, and social disparities of racial inequality and white supremacy.
Dr. King reminded us that when the architects of our country wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet “it is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.”
It is high time America paid its debt in full.