December 1, 1955 sparked the beginning of the yet another U.S. Civil War when Rosa Parks—a seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama—refused to comply with de jure segregation. However unlike the battle that occurred nearly a century earlier, the outcome of the Second Civil War remains uncertain. America met the demands of a tired and determined people by enacting a series of laws that seemed to lay the groundwork for repairing the grievances that slavery and Jim Crow inflicted upon African Americans. The Civil Rights legislation that emerged from the 1960s conflict appeared to grant America’s blacks equal standing under the law. While the legislation benefitted a small percentage of African Americans, subsequent years would reveal its inefficacy in manifesting America’s promise of equality.
Affirmative action is arguably the most contested byproduct of the Civil Rights era. Opponents of affirmative action call it “reverse discrimination,” “unconstitutional,” “a hand out,” among other things. And yet, after less than one hundred and fifty years since the abolition of slavery and a little over fifty years since the Civil Rights Movement challenged the very fabric of Americanism, critics of affirmative action fail to recognize that since America’s inception, affirmative action has only ever been white.
Ira Katznelson tells one version of this story in his book, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. He points to a moment in history when affirmative action was explicitly white in order to strengthen the case for non-white affirmative action today. Katznelson explicates how the New Deal policies which emerged during the 1930s and 1940s served as a form of white affirmative action by excluding and disadvantaging blacks in order to almost exclusively benefit whites. This book attempts to link “the history of affirmative action for blacks since the mid-1960s, with the prior record of affirmative action for whites.” He follows the historical trajectory of New Deal policies in order to tie contemporary solutions to specific historical harm. Katznelson proposes a model of affirmative action that he believes will prove more palatable to those who currently oppose the measure.
The central questions that Katznelson seeks to address ask, “What are the historical instances of white affirmative action?” Additionally, “should affirmative action exist as a remedy for past and present injustice?” He answers the latter with a definitive “yes,” and the former by arguing that the 1935 Social Security Act, discrimination within the military and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), the G.I. Bill, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, among others, fashioned a white American middle class while negating the same upward economic and social mobility for America’s blacks. Said another way, Katznelson argues that black disadvantage found its roots in the generation preceding the end of Jim Crow. In her book, Schools Betrayed: the Roots of Failure in Inner City Education, Kathryn Neckerman accounts for the problems within public education by advancing a similar argument. She maintains that the challenges of urban education possess historical roots and attributes them to the extensive legacy of local decisions that have governed school policy and implementation.
The New Deal legislation was characterized by its exclusion of African Americans. While the Social Security Act offered meager benefits to the few blacks who qualified, it excluded most of them. Katznelson notes that “fully 65 percent fell outside the reach of the new program” which failed to apply to occupations such as agricultural labor and domestic servitude, leaving out the vast majority of black Americans. During this time, Southern members of Congress organized to exclude farmers and maids, “the most widespread black categories of employment,” from the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act. Katznelson notes that “without this fine-tuning, a majority of southern blacks might have had access to protections negotiated by unions that would have shaken the political economy of segregation.” The G.I. Bill of Rights, which represents the broadest set of social benefits offered by the U.S. government through a single program, enabled millions of white veterans to purchase homes, attend college, start businesses, and plan for retirement. This bill almost singlehandedly created a white American middle class and spurned burgeoning suburbs throughout the nation.
The history of New Deal policies reveal that local control remained the key to maintaining the status quo and perpetuating institutionalized racism. Although the legislation lacked explicitly racist provisions, Congress charged administrators on the local level with their enforcement. Within the educational arena, as Neckerman makes plain, similarly race neutral policies contributed to the ultimate demise of urban public education. Local control over education policies precluded federal oversight which opened the door to discriminatory implementations. In a similar vein, Katznelson notes that “guided by the model of decentralization that the South had achieved in earlier New Deal laws,” southern members of Congress drafted a law “that left responsibility for implementation mainly to states and localities, including, of course, those that practiced official racism without compromise.” In 1954, local control would again undermine the promise of equality in an ostensibly landmark ruling. Michael Klarman explicates in Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement that the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education failed to fundamentally alter the conditions within black America. Similar to the claim advanced by Klarman, Charles Ogletree argues in his 2004 book, All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education, that the critical flaw within Brown lay in the Justices’ decision to cede responsibility for its implementation to the states, allowing them to pursue desegregation with “all deliberate speed.” Southern Democrats indefatigably fought against centralized control over New Deal policies. “By decentralizing authority” Katznelson writes, “and fragmenting decision making, national policies could be administered to suit white southern preferences.” Southern congressional power ensured the preservation of the south’s racial order by strategically maximizing the flow of federal money while preserving local control.
Katznelson’s book possesses numerous strengths, one of which lies in his painstaking attention to the discriminatory development of New Deal policies. He places these measures within a historical context, grounding the argument for non-white affirmative action in historical facts that illustrate instances of specific harm suffered by African Americans. The underlying assumption girding his argument draws upon the age-old maxim, “what you do for one, you must do for all,” suggesting that past white affirmative action justifies non-white affirmative measures today.
There are some who, like Clarence Thomas, presume that affirmative action lowers standards for blacks. In his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger Thomas maintains that “a university may not maintain a high admission standard and grant exemptions to favored races,” when in actuality, affirmative action aims to give qualified women and people of color the same opportunities that whites have historically enjoyed despite mediocrity and under qualifications. Thomas naively subscribes to the belief that after four hundred years of racism and sexism, and after only a century and a half since the abolition of slavery, America has now become a meritocracy that is intent upon giving minorities and women equal opportunities. Like many right wing conservatives, Clarence Thomas believes that blacks ought to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, “even if they don’t have any boots.”* As President Lyndon B. Johnson observed in his 1965 address at Howard University:
You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders as you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
And yet, after nearly forty years of affirmative action, black Americans are still far from equal. Despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act the prevalence of discrimination in home lending persists. Ostensibly, the Fair Housing Act passed by Congress equalized opportunities for African Americans to procure homes. In actuality, it achieved just the opposite by including discriminatory provisions that inhibited the law’s enforcement. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) introduced under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act undermined, rather than reinforced, endeavors to equalize employment opportunities for blacks. The commission instead served white interests by protecting the seniority rights of individuals who had attained positions due to past discrimination against blacks. This in turn insulated the vast majority of white workers from the widespread layoffs that would characterize the decade following the bill’s implementation. Since its founding, affirmative action has done relatively little to narrow the economic and educational gap between black and white Americans. Statistically, affirmative action has advantaged more white females than it has benefitted any other minority group. Despite over forty years of affirmative action and diversity efforts, white men still own sixty-four percent of the nation’s businesses and occupy the majority of the nation’s highest paying jobs even though they comprise only forty-one percent of the nation’s work force. White males are still:
70% of judges
70% of university professors
71% percent of air traffic controllers
73% percent of lawyers
75% percent of police detectives and supervisors
84% of construction supervisors
85% of boards of directors
89% of U.S. Senators
94% of fire company supervisors
95% of senior managers.
Neither affirmative action nor the legislation that emanated from the Civil Rights era has significantly altered the problems that have historically impeded black Americans. As Martin Luther King observed, “What good is it to be able to eat at a restaurant when you can’t afford a hamburger?” The United States has allowed black Americans entrance into the restaurant of Freedom, Equality, and Justice for All, however it has yet to offer them the necessary means with which to purchase a meal. Rather, the government contents itself upon throwing blacks scraps from the Master’s table—token programs and policies like Upward Bound and affirmative action that target not the roots of America’s institutionalized racial problems, but merely the symptoms of its social ills. To these, select individuals all too eagerly attach the label “progress!” while others scream “foul!”
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