On When Affirmative Action Was White

I really like this book, and the reason for three stars instead of four is largely because I feel that Katznelson could have dived much deeper here—so much of what we see is legislative or at the surface levels, and I would have liked to see much more humanity beyond the role of the state.

The starting point for understanding Katznelson’s work is to look at inequality between black and white Americans during the 1940s and 1950s. As the “long Civil Rights” movement began to emerge in the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was even greater inequality between black and white Americans in 1960 than in 1940. Realizing this, Katznelson scratched his head and asked, “What is going on here? This doesn’t track with the widely accepted narrative of greater equality, beginning with FDR.”

To make sense of this, Katznelson expands the definition of “Affirmative Action.” Today, affirmative action is seen as a policy generally used to increase numbers of racial and sexual minorities in elite institutions—whether they be government, universities, or the workplace. However, Katznelson argues that our understanding of affirmative action must be expanded in a few different ways. First of all, affirmative action as public policy did not emerge in the mid-1960s but in the 1930s. Additionally, affirmative action needs to include more than just placement of African Americans in specific positions, affirmative action ought to refer to all government attempts to alleviate poverty, inequality, and social in justice.

Ultimately, Katznelson argues that racial inequality increased between 1940 and 1960 because policies meant to alleviate social issues excluded African Americans by design. For instance, social security would have been one way of alleviating poverty faced by the elderly, but it was not applied to African Americans until the mid-late 1950s (in contrast, the first payments for whites went out in 1939). Another example that Katznelson spends time on is government support for labor unions. During the New Deal, the federal government gave increased support to labor unions as a way of bettering the situation of workers. However, the same labor protections were not granted to agricultural or domestic workers, two of the most common industries for African Americans during the Great Depression. To make matters worse, Southern Democrats blocked all possible legislation that could alleviate this situation and give greater social and political power to African Americans. The biggest issue, in Katznelson’s view, was the GI Bill which, theoretically, granted heightened benefits to African American veterans, but these did not come true in practice. For instance, in a sample of 3,229 farm, business, and home loans granted by the Veterans’ Administration in Mississippi, Ebony magazine found that only two (2!!) went to African Americans, a paltry 0.06% in a state that was approximately 45% black. In a moment where the (white) American middle class came into its own, black Americans were entirely shut out—no wonder there is still so much inequality today.

Beyond the specific arguments made in this book, the content has made me think a bit more about the “asymmetry” of American politics. It almost seems that, in the 1930s and 1940s, the United States was a three party system, not a two party system. First, there was the Republican Party; second, the southern Democratic Party; third, the northern Democratic Party. The northern Democratic Party, in order to maintain power, had to shift between allegiances with progressive Republicans and conservative, southern Democrats and act as a power-broker between the two. This is not to say that all Republicans were progressive, the elites within the party certainly were not. This turned the Democratic Party into a vehicle constantly participating in a balancing act, especially with the influx of African Americans into the party in the mid-1930s—now, they had to balance between their new constituents and a regional bloc that broadly thought they should not exist.

In the realignment of the 1960s, the Republican Party was able to transform itself into an ideologically conservative party by expelling progressive Republicans and producing a Faustian deal with the South, while the Democratic Party had to continue its delicate balancing act between free-trade liberals, “professional” classes, African Americans, Roman Catholics, recently-naturalized citizens, urban peoples, and the working class (any of which, at any given moment, could be in opposition to the others). Although the Republican Party also participates in its own sort of balancing act, it is able to rally supporters around ideology (currently, economic protectionism, nativism, lowering of taxes, and the expansion of private property) in a way that the Democratic Party seems wholly incapable of doing.

Anyways, that is neither here nor there, but it’s something that coalesced in my mind as I made my way through this book.