Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White

...In many professions, the numbers of African Americans have risen substantially...

...It is precisely because of these actual gains—and perceived opportunities for future gains—that more and more blacks turned their backs on the Republican Party, the party of their emancipation, and embraced the onetime party of the slaveocracy as their own...

...Millions acquired home mortgages through the GI Bill...

...The inequality in distribution also widened the gap in quality between white and black institutions in the South, further limiting the opportunities available to black veterans...

...In these cities, too, African Americans gained eligibility for the very social and labor programs—Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the GI Bill—that their earlier concentration in rural occupations and the South had denied them...

...When unions began advancing in the South in the 1940s, southern Democrats led the charge to eviscerate union rights by passing the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947...

...This kind of survival will bring Katznelson little comfort, for it evades rather than engages the original, and still imperative, purpose of affirmative action: to eliminate the disparities in the patterns of black and white economic achievement, disparities rooted in generations of discrimination...

...Nevertheless, opposition to affirmative action has always been strong and has recently gathered additional force...

...Some of these advances have been stunning—and unimaginable from the perspective of the racial order that dominated America as recently as half a century ago...

...One of the nation's most distinguished political scientists, Katznelson has written incisively on a broad range of subjects, from the nature and history of liberalism to the peculiarities of Congress as a governing institution...

...The University of Maryland (my employer), an institution that once deemed Thurgood Marshall unfit for its law school, now confers more advanced degrees on African Americans than any other public institution in the country...

...Given these time constraints and the narrow ways in which affirmative action programs must be constructed to pass constitutional muster, what is to be done...

...98 n DISSENT / Spring 2006...

...We can only hope that the United States will not have to endure an eighty-year interval—the span of years that elapsed between the end of the First Reconstruction in the 1870s and the beginning of the Second in the 1950s—before the imagination and will necessary to uproot the legacy of racism once again enliven and transform American politics...

...These were also the years in which the imprisonment rate among young black men shot up...

...This rural-to-urban movement, which became massive in the 1940s, helps to make sense of a phenomenon that Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom and others have noted: that African Americans made substantial income gains in the twenty-five-year period following the New Deal and before the Great Society and affirmative action programs of the 1960s were put in place...

...The notion that America had achieved urban peace by vaporizing the 30 percent or so underemployed black youth from the volatile fringes of the labor market (and from drug trafficking) and having them reappear under the lock and key of the world's largest criminal justice system speaks to the failure of U.S...

...And even if one decides that the grounds for choosing a black over a white applicant are legitimate, what is to be done to improve the life opportunities of disadvantaged whites...

...The answer to that question turns out to be surprisingly complex and renders problematic a reliance on the racist character of New Deal programs to justify future affirmative action programs...

...Katznelson initially leads his readers to believe that the inspiration for his brief will be President Lyndon BOOKS B. Johnson, who, in a famous 1965 Howard University speech, argued that government ought to promote equality "not just as a right and as a theory but . . . as a fact and as a result" —an approach to the problem of black poverty that Katznelson labels "revolutionary...

...If affirmative action survives at all, it will probably be because the courts continue to define "diversity" as a compelling state interest...

...For even the most sympathetic Powellite judge will contend, with justification, that only a portion of the economic gap between blacks and whites today can be blamed on the New Deal era programs, and that figuring out which part—and which African Americans ought to be given affirmative action benefits as a result—will far exceed the ability of the courts or politicians to design remedies that are both constitutional and effective...

...More recently, the apparent inability of a liberal politics grounded in affirmative action to address questions of class has also revealed itself in the unequal distribution of affirmative action's benefits across the black population...

...White America has always possessed an internal class structure, and it has widened during the affirmative action era, as the income of the wealthy has soared while the minimum wage is less, in real terms, than it was in 1968...

...Because "affirmative action" was once so white, in other words, it is fully justified in now being black—and remaining so until the inequalities introduced by New Deal policies are eliminated...

...Should liberals devote time and energy to advancing affirmative action policies when their long-term prospects appear dim...

...By 1955, more than two million veterans had gone to college on the GI Bill and more than five million had their vocational training paid for by the government...

...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...

...More often than not, northern liberals acquiesced to the wishes of southern Democrats, making blacks the big losers...

...But, as I have tried to suggest, it is not clear that Katznelson's case for pinning post-World War II poverty on New Deal policies will be any more persuasive to Powellite jurists...

...He has long understood that capitalist, or class, inequality in America has to be understood in relation to racial inequality, and he has devoted considerable energy toward exploring those relationships and their implications for American politics...

...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...The discourse on class in America has become so impoverished that this last question can barely be posed, let alone answered...

...Part of that opposition is cultural and constitutional...

...The biggest loss of all, Katznelson claims, arose as a result of the discriminatory administration of the GI Bill, arguably the biggest and most generous welfare program in U.S...

...Such programs, Powell wrote, must meet two criteria: first, they could only be deployed in situations where discrimination could be shown to have occurred and where individuals were still suffering its effects...

...But they were determined to ensure that such assistance did not threaten a socioeconomic order built on low wages and racial segregation...

...Thus, a much higher proportion of white veterans than black received GI benefits...

...This view has found sanction among Supreme Court justices, a majority of whom, over the last twenty-five years, have held that many forms of affirmative action do in fact elevate group rights over individual rights and thus violate the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment...

...Everywhere, blacks encountered discrimination that held them back...

...I bequeath percent of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...The Taft-Hartley Act, for example, should not be interpreted as a device simply for denying southern blacks the opportunity to join unions...

...They have also encouraged the advance of blacks, nonblack minorities, and women in a broad array of major public and private institutions...

...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...

...roads...

...If the New Deal excluded farm tenants from Social Security eligibility, it also created the mechanisms through which blacks began moving out of rural areas en masse and into cities, many of them in the North and West...

...But not all of this discrimination— and the consequent gaps in black-white economic well-being—can be blamed on what New Deal programs did and didn't do...

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...A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (co-edited with Steve Fraser...

...This reality ought to be far better understood among contemporary policymakers and citizens than it currently is, and Katznelson's book can help to make it so...

...Katznelson does not dwell on the influence of such historically ingrained patterns of inequality for the simple reason that such "distant" examples of racial discrimination will not persuade a court guided by the Powell doctrine DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 97 BOOKS to uphold an affirmative action program...

...In growing numbers of areas in which blacks lived, in other words, New Deal era programs directly and indirectly brought blacks important gains...

...A significant portion of it was rooted in longstanding patterns of private and political life in the United States...

...And so workingclass and lower-middle-class white grievances DISSENT / Spring 2006 • 93 BOOKS about class inequality have festered and congealed into various kinds of resentments— against minorities, against the "liberal establishment," against "big government"—that Republicans have played brilliantly to their political advantage...

...Others question affirmative action because of its perceived inability to address questions of class inequality...

...But Katznelson's account is the most comprehensive account of this racism to date and, because of its clarity and concision, the 96 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 most accessible...

...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...

...And so, hundreds of thousands of black veterans got the short end of the stick...

...These black gains did not erase the income and wealth differentials between blacks and whites, not even in the North...

...Yet, the work of each was incomplete, and we will likely need a Third Reconstruction to complete the effort to overcome what Thurgood Marshall referred to in his 1978 Bakke dissent as "several hundred years of class-based discrimination against the Negro...

...They kept unions out, welfare payments and work relief stipends low, and black workers in segregated and poorly paid jobs...

...Unlike southern Republicans today, these southern Democrats did not celebrate the free market, exaggerate the virtue of self-reliance, or use religion as a wedge issue...

...But they were as determined to buttress their region's class hierarchy, which meant keeping hundreds of thousands of white workers (in addition to black ones) poor, powerless, and without union representation...

...Indeed, the persistence of racially inflected literacy gaps into the postwar period made the university provisions of the GI Bill less useful to blacks than to whites...

...The National Labor Relations Act, also passed in 1935, likewise excluded farmworkers and domestics from its protections, meaning that two-thirds of African American workers gained nothing in the short term from labor's Magna Carta...

...Between 1944 and 1971, the U.S...

...10025 (212) 316-3120...

...Katznelson shows little interest in the diversity question, from which one can conclude that he finds the reasoning behind it less than compelling...

...Now that the Senate has confirmed Samuel Alito as O'Connor's replacement, affirmative action programs may be eliminated much more quickly than O'Connor imagined...

...Other, more promising, initiatives will no doubt emerge...

...so is the proposition that some blacks were hurt in real and quantifiable ways by the racist manipulation of these programs...

...If the New Deal did not do enough to remedy this lack of access to quality education, it cannot be held responsible for having created it...

...Even as the military instituted crash programs to remedy illiteracy among its recruits— programs that, as Katznelson reveals in his fascinating chapter on the World War II military, worked remarkably well—the gap between black and white educational achievement had hardly vanished by 1945...

...Those who adhere to such views accuse affirmative action policies of granting individuals opportunity and advancement because of the group to which they belong rather than because of their actual qualifications or achievements...

...and, in the 1940s, military bases and defense industries...

...Sometimes, Katznelson is too zealous in making his case...

...Many well-qualified black veterans in the South were turned away from the black institutions they wanted to attend simply because not enough spaces were available...

...These benefits have gone largely to blacks who, within the black community, were already middle class or were able to become so...

...But Katznelson is able to show that this was the intent of southern Democrats in Congress who, through their control of crucial committees, were able to fashion legislation that buttressed rather than undermined their region's racial order...

...In the South, these white administrators, working for the Veterans Bureau or state departments of education, channeled most of their GI Bill revenues to white colleges and vocational schools and away from black institutions...

...Although he does not take a position on the appropriateness of allowing nonblack minorities to receive the benefits of affirmative action, his very silence on the subject seems to suggest an unease with this development...

...To the contrary, his book is best understood as a brief for what a focused and reinvigorated affirmative action program can still accomplish...

...government to offer a remedy...

...Neither law contained language explicitly discriminating against blacks...

...Still, Katznelson's larger point is undeniable: many New Deal programs were deeply—and sometimes appallingly—racist in their intent and application...

...Writing for a slim five-to-four majority in the 2003 Supreme Court decision (Grutter v. Bollinger) upholding the use of racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor expressed her conviction that all affirmative action programs would have to be gone within a 94 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 generation...

...Some of this progress undoubtedly resulted directly from the Brown v. Board decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...But, once we accept the Powell framework as the governing one, we have to ask a different question (and one that Katznelson does not ask), if only because "Powellites" would be sure to ask it: what portion of black poverty today was produced by the New Deal programs that Katznelson examines...

...Here, in short, is an effort to take Powell at his word, and to find a way of invigorating affirmative action policies within the strict scrutiny framework...

...Katznelson harbors misgivings about affirmative action: he is troubled by the elevation of group rights over individual rights, by the policy's lack of success in addressing the problems of the black poor, and by the demagoguery that overly expansive (and vague) interpretations of white responsibility for black suffering have unleashed in the name of compensatory justice...

...That southern Democrats aimed BOOKS to turn the final version of New Deal welfare and labor programs to their region's racial advantage is beyond dispute...

...Aware of their region's poverty, they welcomed federal assistance in the form of dams...

...His books include American Crucible, Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century and Ruling America...

...The statistics are sobering...

...GARY GERSTLE teaches history at the University of Maryland...

...I'm not sure it can, at least not if we follow Katznelson and accept Lewis Powell's "strict scrutiny" doctrine as our own...

...social policy to address adequately the problems of the black poor...

...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

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...The GI Bill accomplished its discrimination by placing decision-making power for distributing GI benefits in the hands of state- and local-level bureaucrats...

...And so the rationale for singling out New Deal programs as the leading reason (Katznelson's words) for the widening gap between blacks and whites after the Second World War—and the basis on which new affirmative action programs should be built— begins to seem less compelling...

...In these cities, blacks entered occupations that offered wages and incomes higher than what they had experienced in the southern countryside...

...Indeed, he makes clear his debt to the innovative scholarship of the many historians and political scientists, including Jill Quadagno, Robert Lieberman, Lizabeth Cohen, Desmond King, Daniel Kryder, Suzanne Mettler, William Julius Wilson, and Thomas Sugrue, on whose discoveries his book rests...

...But he adopts as his own the overall framework of Powell's "strict scrutiny" approach for determining the legitimacy of affirmative action programs...

...To take the most obvious and pertinent example for this book: illiteracy rates among black World War II conscripts were higher than among white ones...

...BUT CAN A BETTER understanding of this New Deal history spark, as Katznelson hopes it will, a renewed commitment to affirmative action programs...

...At every educational level, black women earn more on average than their white female counterparts...

...Moreover, since the state was responsible for creating this inequality, it now has a "compelling interest" in eliminating it...

...But Katznelson clearly relies far more on another figure, former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, whose opinion in the 1978 decision Regents of the University of California v. Bakke set the terms for virtually all subsequent court rulings on affirmative action...

...The southern Democrats who led the anti-union charge of the 1940s were certainly troubled by the possibility that union advances in the South would bring blacks higher wages and more rights...

...Between 1990 and 2000, the number of black men aged twenty-one to twenty-five who were estranged from the labor market (meaning they were no longer counted by government statisticians as looking for work and thus not even as unemployed) rose from 27 percent to 34 percent...

...Despite their premature ends, each of the two Reconstructions yielded important gains in the struggle against racial inequality...

...On any given day in the late twentieth century," write Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader in a study of the new black inequality published in the Journal of American History (June 2005), "nearly one in three black males aged 20-29" was in jail, on probation, or on parole...

...The furious and often violent resistance to residential integration on the part of white homeowners in Chicago, Detroit, and other major northern cities—and the support they received from northern government administrators who systematically fanned the fears of white homeowners by devaluing property in neighborhoods that had become racially diverse—underscores the major role played by northern elements of the New Deal coalition in perpetuating the era's racism...

...But what about those who remained among the ranks of the black working class...

...THESE ARE THE questions that animate Ira Katznelson's provocative and engaging book When Affirmative Action Was White...

...The Social Security Act, passed in 1935, excluded farmworkers and household domestics from its old age and unemployment provisions, thereby denying a full 65 percent of African American workers access to its benefits...

...Racism in 1930s and 1940s America was a national, not a regional phenomenon...

...By 2000, almost half of those incarcerated—approximately 700,000—were African American...

...It is also the first work to argue that the discriminatory intent of the New Deal era legislation justifies affirmative action for blacks today...

...Even as his vote doomed all quota programs, Powell laid the groundwork for affirmative action policies that the Court could uphold...

...Powell cast the fifth and deciding vote in the Bakke decision, which held that the quota system adopted by the University of California, Davis, medical school (setting aside sixteen spots for minorities in every entering medical class) was unconstitutional...

...In the emergence of the reparations movement on the left and the "no-child-left-behind" movement on the right, we can discern the battle to define the content of the Third Reconstruction already taking shape...

...When Affirmative Action was White deserves to be widely read and discussed...

...Even if one grants that white skin has conferred economic, social, and political advantages on those who possess it, it is equally true that those advantages have never been equally distributed among whites...

...This bill is thought to have done more DISSENT / Spring 2006 w 9 5 BOOKS than any single piece of legislation to create the modern American middle class...

...So it seems unlikely that Katznelson's clever argument will do much to invigorate affirmative action...

...history...

...rROM HIS OWN prior work, Katznelson knows that key patterns of racial inequality predated the New Deal...

...work relief programs...

...THIS, THEN, leads to Katznelson's ingenious argument, which occupies most of the pages of his book: At the heart of the landmark liberal programs of the New Deal—Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act, in particular—Katznelson locates a methodical campaign to maintain white privilege...

...That this educational disparity proved so persistent spoke to the effects of generations of social policy in the South that either kept blacks from schools altogether or gave them the poorest education possible...

...government spent almost a hundred billion dollars on veterans of the Second World War, mostly in the form of tuition payments to colleges and universities, job training, mortgage subsidies, unemployment insurance, and health care...

...I bequeath S to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...electricity...

...WHEN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION WAS WHITE: AN UNTOLD HISTORY OF RACIAL INEQUALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA by Ira Katznelson Norton, 2005 238 pp $25.95 FOR ALMOST forty years, affirmative action programs have played an indispensable role in creating a larger, wealthier, and more varied black middle class than any that had previously existed in the United States...

...On what grounds, then, should a job opening on the New York police force or a place in a medical school class go to a black person if it means that it will cost an equally qualified poor white person a critical career opportunity...

...but other parts reflect the intensity and efficacy of affirmative action efforts first launched in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then integrated into the core ambitions of major institutions and key economic sectors—higher education, the corporate world, the military, and civilian government...

...And, although Katznelson is right to identify the important role played by southern Democrats in imparting a racial character to New Deal legislation, he too easily lets northern Democrats off the hook...

...Americans like to think of themselves as a nation of strivers and to regard economic success as a product purely of an individual's talents, dedication, and merit...

...If affirmative action is ever to execute its original purpose, the legacy of Powell will have to be overthrown...

...Katznelson is not the first to recover the racist elements of the New Deal era welfare and labor programs...

...In another decade or two, we will likely regard the evisceration of affirmative action in the name of the Powell doctrine as marking the demise of the Second Reconstruction, just as the removal of northern troops from the exConfederate States in 1877 came to be seen as signaling the end of the First Reconstruction...

...Powell was the first to argue that "diversity" constituted a compelling state interest, suggesting that it would help critical American institutions achieve their aims...

...This same migration movement, too, helps to make sense of what Suzanne Mettler has found—that black veterans who either lived in the North or found their way there used the educational benefits of the GI Bill at rates that exceeded those of their white counterparts...

...Given the current composition of the Supreme Court, that seems unlikely to happen in our lifetimes...

...and second, the programs had to serve a "compelling state interest," as only a high purpose could legitimate deploying a policy that was always going to put the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment at risk...

...Throughout his career, he has been drawn to the study of inequality in capitalist societies and has explored its causes, manifestations, and remedies...

...For these reasons and others, the days of affirmative action appear numbered...

...Because these New Deal era programs were so discriminatory in intent and because their injurious effects on blacks are so demonstrable, Katznelson argues, they meet the "strict scrutiny" test set forth by Powell and compel the U.S...

...Yet these doubts do not lead Katznelson to repudiate affirmative action...

...If so, what kinds of strategies should be deployed...