When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson

Benefits for veterans were administered locally. Farmworkers and maids, the jobs held by most Southern blacks, were denied Social Security pensions and access to labor unions. Southern members of Congress used occupational exclusions and took advantage of American federalism to insure that their region’s racial order would not be disturbed by national policies. Johnson missed the chance to assay how the major policies of the New Deal and Fair Deal of the 1930s and 1940s, inflected by the preferences of the Southern wing of the Democratic Party, had massively advantaged American whites while often excluding African Americans, especially the majority who still lived in the 17 states that mandated de jure racial segregation.

Conceding that “we are not completely sure why this is,” he stressed the need to adopt bold new policies of affirmative action to remedy the disabilities following from two centuries of oppression. In “To Fulfull These Rights,” a June 1965 graduation address at Howard University, President Lyndon Johnson asked why the black population of the United States had fallen even further behind the country’s white majority during the two decades since the end of the Second World War, despite the era’s sustained national prosperity. It also misses the chance to come to terms with how the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s contributed to the persistence of two Americas. But that nostalgia requires a heavy dose of historical amnesia. Others, taking a longer view, yearned for a burst of activism patterned on the New Deal. Understandably, most commentators focused on the woeful federal response.

Hurricane Katrina’s violent winds and waters tore away the shrouds that ordinarily mask the country’s racial pattern of poverty and neglect. By Ira Katznelson ( Click here to view the entire P&R issue)

When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson