When Affirmative Action Was White
I just finished reading "When Affirmative Action Was White", a new book by Ira Katznelson, and it was pretty great. Katznelson's basic argument is as follows: starting with the New Deal, the government began to confer a lot of benefits on people that had a long-term effect of lifting a lot of people out of poverty. But African-Americans, especially in the South, were excluded from these benefits, making the gap between white and black that much greater by the time these disparities finally ended in the '60s.
This book, which is actually pretty short, is useful for providing several correctives to recent mythologies about class, race, and government. One of the most important points it drives home is that Jim Crow laws weren't just about separate water fountains and lunch counters. They were about keeping black people with as little money and education as possible.
The book is also surprisingly timely, given the renewed attention to class and race Hurricane Katrina has brought, as well as inaccurate conservative bromides like these two about the ostensible detrimental effects of anti-poverty measures by government.
From the Civil War up through the '40s, the South was solid Democratic territory. And I mean the most dead-end, racist Klansman South. They were all Democrats. The Southern Congressmembers faced less competition than in other parts of the country, so they accumulated greater seniority in Congress, held more committee chairs, and wielded greater power (20).* In order for FDR to pass New Deal programs through Congress, he had to get these Southerners on board.
As a result, a lot of the New Deal programs that benefitted white people effectively excluded black people (at that time, three out of four African-Americans lived in the South (30)). More than 60% of black workers nationally and 75% of black workers in the South were agricultural laborers or domestic workers (22). In order to keep their benefits down and their wages low, the statutes that established Social Security, unemployment insurance, collective bargaining rights, the minimum wage, and maximum hours specifically excluded agricultural and domestic laborers (22).
Remember, when we talk about African-American poverty in the South, particularly in this era, you're talking about a pretty grim experience. Less than 1% of black farm homes had indoor pipes and 3% had water pumped into their homes, compared with 20% of white homes (33). One in three white homes owned a refrigerator, and one in ten black homes did (33). In 1940, 97% of black homes lacked electricity (33). The cost of a doctor was $3, out of reach for most black families (33). Most southern hospitals would not admit black families (33), so medical care was pretty much nonexistent for African-Americans. The state of education was abysmal: white schools received much more money per pupil than black schools, 16% of black children were in the work force (compared with 3% of white children) (34), such that by the time World War Two came around, one out of four black registrants from Mississippi and Georgia signed their Selective Service cards with a mark (34).
Even Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), what most people mean when they talk about "welfare", was disproportionately routed to white Southerners despite the greater incidence of poverty among African-Americans (37), due to the fact that local administrators were given wide discretion to deny assistance on putative moral grounds.
Despite all of this discrimination, black Southerners still did get more public assistance then had ever been available before, and they started to switch from voting Republican (the party of Lincoln) to voting Democrat, especially in North (37). Eleanor Roosevelt's widely-known support for civil rights played a role, too.
The appeal of the Democratic Party for African-Americans -- and the concomitant decline in Democratic fortunes among white Southerners -- increased during World War Two. The national labor market got extremely tight in World War Two, so the traditional downward pressure on wages for African-Americans vanished (61). White Southerners, who had previously been either pro-union or indifferent to unions up to then, started to see labor unions as a means for African-Americans to gain wage parity with whites, a prospect they found unacceptable (61). Thus, Southern Democrats sided with Republicans who always were opposed to collective bargaining legislation for non-racial economic reasons. Together, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1946 and overrode President Truman's veto. Taft-Hartley restricted the ability of unions to organize (provisions of which continue to plague unions today) and allowed Southern states to designate themselves as so-called "Right-to-work" states and undermine unions that way.
The GI Bill was another mechanism by which white people were provided with benefits that black people -- black veterans, mind you -- did not get. The two greatest benefits from the GI Bill came in the form of housing and education. While white veterans were able to go to college in heretofore-unknown numbers, and reaped the economic benefits thereof, black veterans, even with the benefits they were eligible for, could not get into colleges because most colleges wouldn't admit them or would only admit very small numbers of black students (129-30).
Veterans were also entitled to get mortgages that had a government guarantee against default, thus increasing by leaps and bounds the incidence of home ownership in the U.S., which had previously not been all that common. But all the federal mortgage guarantees in the world could not get African-American veterans home ownership, because white owners would refuse to sell to them and banks would still refuse to give them mortgages (139-40). Indeed, as Kenneth Jackson points out in his book "Crabgrass Frontier", the presence of a black family on a block was thought to increase the risk of neighborhood decline and default on the mortgage, thus leading to redlining, where the government refused to guarantee mortgages in neighborhoods where African-Americans lived.
This history, which still goes pretty much untold, belies the position of affirmative action opponents, that slavery and Jim Crow were too remote in time to have any effect now. Ripple out the differences in wealth homeownership brings a generation or two, and you can see why white people not only have greater incomes than black people, but orders of magnitude more wealth. Ripple out the effects of poor schooling and prohibitions from attending college a generation or two for one group of people and subsidize it for another and you get the same effect.
In the meantime, the white South's opposition to unions for fear of African-Americans earning decent wages came to encompass things like Social Security and unemployment insurance as racial barriers to those things fell. Thus the ideological affinity for white Southerners and anti-government program Republicans strengthened. Combine that with Harry Truman's desegregation of the military in 1948, Hubert Humphrey's introduction of an anti-lynching plank to the Democratic platform in 1948, causing Strom Thurmond to bolt the Democratic Party, and the current alignment of politics -- African-Americans being reliably Democratic and white Southerners being reliably Republican -- starts to make more sense. Lyndon Johnson's championing of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and the War on Poverty ices it.
This history, of course, has obvious implications for the affirmative action debate. But it also makes me question facile condemnations of anti-poverty government programs as failures. Uhh, compared to what? The landmark statutes of the New Deal era -- Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act -- lent (white) Americans an unprecedented broad-based level of middle-class security. Laissez-faire strikes me as an evidently inadequate policy response to the status of African-Americans on the eve of LBJ's War on Poverty in the mid-'60s. Food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare are just some of the programs of that age that have made lives of millions of people better off.
When people criticize government programs like this or call them failures, I wonder, compared to what? The status quo ante of 1932 for all Americans or 1964 for African-Americans? As Matt Yglesias points out in this post, the War on Poverty actually worked, at the very least in that poverty rates have been significantly lower after it than before it. And for those that are poor, I don't really see how returning to the days when poor people had more trouble getting food and medical care without food stamps and Medicaid would be at all helpful.
Not that all government programs to alleviate poverty always worked all the time, but the broad-brush condemnations of them don't make much sense either and seem to me driven more by ideological opposition to government doing things to help poor people than by empirical facts. Katznelson's book is valuable not just for its insights into our recent racial history but on the efficacy of anti-poverty programs as well.
* Numbers refer to pages in Katznelson's book
This book, which is actually pretty short, is useful for providing several correctives to recent mythologies about class, race, and government. One of the most important points it drives home is that Jim Crow laws weren't just about separate water fountains and lunch counters. They were about keeping black people with as little money and education as possible.
The book is also surprisingly timely, given the renewed attention to class and race Hurricane Katrina has brought, as well as inaccurate conservative bromides like these two about the ostensible detrimental effects of anti-poverty measures by government.
From the Civil War up through the '40s, the South was solid Democratic territory. And I mean the most dead-end, racist Klansman South. They were all Democrats. The Southern Congressmembers faced less competition than in other parts of the country, so they accumulated greater seniority in Congress, held more committee chairs, and wielded greater power (20).* In order for FDR to pass New Deal programs through Congress, he had to get these Southerners on board.
As a result, a lot of the New Deal programs that benefitted white people effectively excluded black people (at that time, three out of four African-Americans lived in the South (30)). More than 60% of black workers nationally and 75% of black workers in the South were agricultural laborers or domestic workers (22). In order to keep their benefits down and their wages low, the statutes that established Social Security, unemployment insurance, collective bargaining rights, the minimum wage, and maximum hours specifically excluded agricultural and domestic laborers (22).
Remember, when we talk about African-American poverty in the South, particularly in this era, you're talking about a pretty grim experience. Less than 1% of black farm homes had indoor pipes and 3% had water pumped into their homes, compared with 20% of white homes (33). One in three white homes owned a refrigerator, and one in ten black homes did (33). In 1940, 97% of black homes lacked electricity (33). The cost of a doctor was $3, out of reach for most black families (33). Most southern hospitals would not admit black families (33), so medical care was pretty much nonexistent for African-Americans. The state of education was abysmal: white schools received much more money per pupil than black schools, 16% of black children were in the work force (compared with 3% of white children) (34), such that by the time World War Two came around, one out of four black registrants from Mississippi and Georgia signed their Selective Service cards with a mark (34).
Even Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), what most people mean when they talk about "welfare", was disproportionately routed to white Southerners despite the greater incidence of poverty among African-Americans (37), due to the fact that local administrators were given wide discretion to deny assistance on putative moral grounds.
Despite all of this discrimination, black Southerners still did get more public assistance then had ever been available before, and they started to switch from voting Republican (the party of Lincoln) to voting Democrat, especially in North (37). Eleanor Roosevelt's widely-known support for civil rights played a role, too.
The appeal of the Democratic Party for African-Americans -- and the concomitant decline in Democratic fortunes among white Southerners -- increased during World War Two. The national labor market got extremely tight in World War Two, so the traditional downward pressure on wages for African-Americans vanished (61). White Southerners, who had previously been either pro-union or indifferent to unions up to then, started to see labor unions as a means for African-Americans to gain wage parity with whites, a prospect they found unacceptable (61). Thus, Southern Democrats sided with Republicans who always were opposed to collective bargaining legislation for non-racial economic reasons. Together, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1946 and overrode President Truman's veto. Taft-Hartley restricted the ability of unions to organize (provisions of which continue to plague unions today) and allowed Southern states to designate themselves as so-called "Right-to-work" states and undermine unions that way.
The GI Bill was another mechanism by which white people were provided with benefits that black people -- black veterans, mind you -- did not get. The two greatest benefits from the GI Bill came in the form of housing and education. While white veterans were able to go to college in heretofore-unknown numbers, and reaped the economic benefits thereof, black veterans, even with the benefits they were eligible for, could not get into colleges because most colleges wouldn't admit them or would only admit very small numbers of black students (129-30).
Veterans were also entitled to get mortgages that had a government guarantee against default, thus increasing by leaps and bounds the incidence of home ownership in the U.S., which had previously not been all that common. But all the federal mortgage guarantees in the world could not get African-American veterans home ownership, because white owners would refuse to sell to them and banks would still refuse to give them mortgages (139-40). Indeed, as Kenneth Jackson points out in his book "Crabgrass Frontier", the presence of a black family on a block was thought to increase the risk of neighborhood decline and default on the mortgage, thus leading to redlining, where the government refused to guarantee mortgages in neighborhoods where African-Americans lived.
This history, which still goes pretty much untold, belies the position of affirmative action opponents, that slavery and Jim Crow were too remote in time to have any effect now. Ripple out the differences in wealth homeownership brings a generation or two, and you can see why white people not only have greater incomes than black people, but orders of magnitude more wealth. Ripple out the effects of poor schooling and prohibitions from attending college a generation or two for one group of people and subsidize it for another and you get the same effect.
In the meantime, the white South's opposition to unions for fear of African-Americans earning decent wages came to encompass things like Social Security and unemployment insurance as racial barriers to those things fell. Thus the ideological affinity for white Southerners and anti-government program Republicans strengthened. Combine that with Harry Truman's desegregation of the military in 1948, Hubert Humphrey's introduction of an anti-lynching plank to the Democratic platform in 1948, causing Strom Thurmond to bolt the Democratic Party, and the current alignment of politics -- African-Americans being reliably Democratic and white Southerners being reliably Republican -- starts to make more sense. Lyndon Johnson's championing of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and the War on Poverty ices it.
This history, of course, has obvious implications for the affirmative action debate. But it also makes me question facile condemnations of anti-poverty government programs as failures. Uhh, compared to what? The landmark statutes of the New Deal era -- Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act -- lent (white) Americans an unprecedented broad-based level of middle-class security. Laissez-faire strikes me as an evidently inadequate policy response to the status of African-Americans on the eve of LBJ's War on Poverty in the mid-'60s. Food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare are just some of the programs of that age that have made lives of millions of people better off.
When people criticize government programs like this or call them failures, I wonder, compared to what? The status quo ante of 1932 for all Americans or 1964 for African-Americans? As Matt Yglesias points out in this post, the War on Poverty actually worked, at the very least in that poverty rates have been significantly lower after it than before it. And for those that are poor, I don't really see how returning to the days when poor people had more trouble getting food and medical care without food stamps and Medicaid would be at all helpful.
Not that all government programs to alleviate poverty always worked all the time, but the broad-brush condemnations of them don't make much sense either and seem to me driven more by ideological opposition to government doing things to help poor people than by empirical facts. Katznelson's book is valuable not just for its insights into our recent racial history but on the efficacy of anti-poverty programs as well.
* Numbers refer to pages in Katznelson's book
posted by honestpartisan | 10:35 PM
1 Comments:
What an informative post. Thanks, Jack! It's often hard to separate out where issues of race end and issues of poverty start. For instance, when looking at the post-Katrina efforts (or lack thereof) or inequities in our legal system (I'm thinking of death penalties). When I hear the argument that something is a class issue and not a race issue, my gut reaction is usually that they're the same thing. From your post, I see my gut wasn't out of line. Our country's history has made them into the same issue.
Rachel
Post a Comment
<< Home