By Fredrick D Robinson
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s outrageous suggestion that some Blacks don’t belong in top tier universities because of their lack of intellectual talent made me dust off Ira Katznelson’s brilliant book, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.
Justice Scalia’s mouth may have been moving, but it was White supremacy speaking.
Edward Gero as Justice Scalia in The Originalist. Photo by Tony Powell, via The Washington Times.
Likewise, Abigail Fisher may have filed the initial lawsuit, but White supremacy pushed it to the Supreme Court.
It’s the same old story. Whenever it comes to leveling the playing field for Blacks, White Supremacy gets amnesia and changes the rules.
Never mind the fact that White folks in America are where they are because for the entirety of this nation’s history they have been the beneficiaries of the very program they say they detest: affirmative action.
So says Katznelson. He argues that racist governmental policies during the 1930s and 1940s provided affirmative action for Whites that not only afforded them social and economic advantages that widened existing inequality between the races, but that also paved the way for advantages they still enjoy today.
The book explores the federal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal that were enacted to raise living standards. These included policies like unemployment relief, welfare, Social Security, minimum wage, the rights to union membership and benefits, the G.I. Bill, and other programs that helped Depression-ravished families gain middle class status.
Though the programs were meant to be race-neutral, the administration of them was anything but. Because of Southern racism and Northern indifference, laws were added to cut out as many Blacks as possible.
“As a result of the legislation they passed,” Katznelson writes, “Blacks became even more significantly disadvantaged when a modern American middle class was fashioned during and after the Second World War.”
For example, laws regulating Social Security, government grants, and the minimum wage were written to exclude agricultural and domestic workers, which, you guessed right, impacted 75 percent of Black workers in the South. The result was a hardening of black rural poverty.
Similarly, labor unions were not open to Blacks because of rules exempting domestic labor and agricultural workers. While union membership improved the lots of Whites, Blacks slid further into poverty.
African Americans also received less help from the G.I Bill because the program was administered at the local level by racist officials who wanted to maintain the Southern “way of life.”
Apparently, there was also a Northern way of life racists wanted to maintain.
According to the Katznelson, in New York and New Jersey alone, “fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites.”
Not only were Black were denied housing, they were passed over for business loans and job training programs. And while Whites were given access to promising careers in radio, electric work and mechanics, African Americans were forced to settle for low-paying “Black jobs.”
It’s the same sad tale when it comes to elite Northern colleges. For example, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, supposedly the most racially friendly of the Ivy League universities at the time, only enrolled 46 Blacks in its student body of 9,000 in 1946.
Such practices were devastating because Black colleges didn’t have the space to absorb the estimated 70,000 black veterans in 1947. While Blacks were left without options, White universities doubled their enrollment largely because G.I. benefits that Whites veterans received.
These and other blatant acts of AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION stacked the deck against Blacks, reverberations of which can still be felt today.
Yet, modest programs of racial redress are met with derision, scorn and hypocrisy.
It’s only when Blacks are the so-called beneficiaries of affirmative action that White America waxes righteous with clichés like, “you can’t end discrimination with discrimination.”
Indeed, ever since affirmative action was conceived in the mid-1960s—ostensibly designed to address the social and economic devastation caused by 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow—it has been under siege.
White supremacy has no shame.
Even when it is winning and the game is rigged in its favor, it still can’t stand it when another team gets the benefit of a call.
The upper echelons of power in America—from academic to the boardroom—remain lily White. Wealth among Whites dwarfs that of Blacks.
And despite our nation’s history of slavery and subsequent generations of state-sponsored terror and oppression of Blacks, folks like Scalia have the nerve to blame disparities on Black deficiency.
What White supremacy wants to do, says Ian Haney Lopez, author of White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race, is preserve inequality under the ruse of “colorblind White dominance.”
White supremacy is cunning.
I have only one quarrel with Katznelson’s book: the title. Affirmative action is still White.
Fredrick D. Robinson is a BBN regular contributor. He is a social justice writer and theologian, and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. Follow him on Twitter @revfredrick
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