When Affirmative Action Was White Analysis

How did the New Deal and World War II change the meaning and lived experience of race in America? Why did the labor rhetoric of A. Philip Randolph and speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inform the civil rights struggle during the height of the Civil Rights Movement? What are the social and economic implications of historic policies today? In When Affirmative Action Was White (2006), Ira Katznelson sheds light upon the historical inequities and policies that limited wealth creation and stifled economic opportunities for African-Americans (Katznelson 11). To that end, he explores how New Deal policies, such as the Federal Housing Administration and Social Security Act, constituted preferentially written programs for white Americans. Alas,

these educational and economic inequities are tangibly felt and understood by African-Americans whose livelihoods were affected by exclusionary policies drafted and enacted by the federal government. From the Great Depression until World War II, the federal government systematically denied African-Americans to receive veterans benefits, buy federally-backed insurance loans, and receive direct relief benefits through their respective jobs due solely to the color of their skin and the government’s limited conception of white citizenship.
Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, the problem of the color line during the Great Migration extended into New Deal relief programs, veteran benefits, labor relations, and residential housing policies from 1920 through 1963.

In the Origins of Economic Disparities, Douglass Massey recounts how racial violence and vigilantism impacted race-relations during the year of 1919 (Massey 49). To that end, Douglass Massey also describes the political mechanisms and policies instituted to maintain an embedded social and racial hierarchy in the increasingly multicultural North. He writes that “the distinguishing feature of racial segregation in the post-war era is the unprecedented role that government played not only in maintaining the color line, but in reinforcing and strengthening the walls of the ghetto” (Massey 61). Restrictive covenants, instrumentalized by real-estate agents, legally bounded sellers by deeds. Furthermore, these deeds, written in the form of contract law, enumerated which buyers fit the description of potential homeownership. In turn, only these potential residents were deemed eligible to buy a home in their respective all-white communities. If a white homeowner willingly decided to sell their home to an African-American family, they faced harsh repercussions and often-times extra-legal violence and intimidation from their neighbors. Given the economic impact of redlining policies, many white homeowners expressed their internalized thoughts about racial-mixing in their neighborhoods (ex. Levittown, PA and Chicago, IL) and followed unwritten codes of white flight to leave their seemingly “undesirable” neighborhood (Massey 55). Simply put, white homeowner groups produced a code of conduct and stringent deed contracts in which predominately white homeowner associations enforced through local administrative control. In sum, private actors and non-governmental organizations, such as a board of realtors, banks, and brokers, systematically excluded

black tenants from buying homes outside of city slums (Massey 61). As a result, contract law proved a more effective measure than the racial violence or vigilantism that shaped the race riots of 1919.
By the 1930s, the federal government became an agent of institutionalized racism—bureaucratizing homeowner insurance for white citizens only; it codified into law which groups of the population benefited from these edicts. Nevertheless, the Hoover administration made credit more widely available and banks made it more feasible for white families to mortgage their homes. However, the Stock Market crash prompted banks to pull their credit; it subsequently revealed the symptomatic byproducts of speculative spending that spurred the Great Depression and paved the way for the political ascendancy of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies drastically shifted the individual citizen’s relationship with the state. Through his Alphabet soup programs, President Roosevelt created a welfare state built on the foundation of Keynesian economics. Moreover, the New Deal programs introduced progressive taxation policies, coupled with public works investments and social welfare spending for citizens, that stimulated economic growth during the throes of the Depression. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (1933), Federal Housing Administration (1934), Social Security Act (1935), and Works Progress Administration (1935) excluded African-American citizens from securing the fruits of democracy promised to them by President Roosevelt during his campaign (Katznelson 37). In other words, this new activist state and its policies primarily provided direct relief to white workers and their families. For instance, the Works Progress Administration backed government sponsored construction and manufacturing jobs, while not addressing the lack of economic relief and jobs for domestic and agricultural workers—predominately black industries in the South (Katznelson 38).
President Roosevelt’s rhetoric of industrial democracy—a New Economic Bill of Rights—applied only to those who his Presidential administration and Southern Democrats deemed worthy of relief based on their narrow conception of white citizenship. Consequently, the federal government addressed the lack of employment and destitution for white Americans; it provided economic assistance to special groups and beneficiaries such as white veterans in the G.I. Bill and white female widows through the Social Security Act. Nevertheless, the New Deal housing policy introduced the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933, which appraised property value and stipulated which homeowners’ houses they deemed worthy to be saved. To that end, the Home Owners Loan Corporation led to the creation of residential security maps (Massey 69). In response, neighborhood appraisers used redlining tactics and appraised black neighborhoods with a “D” rating and those in close proximity with a “yellow” rating. Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Administration encouraged home building and stimulated housing markets. This policy put conditions on homeowners not to take out balloon loans, but instead purchase amortized mortgages—fixed monthly rates and reduced interest rates. In sum, the Federal Housing Administration created a class of first-time white home-buyers whose position as homeowners and property-owners elevated them to middle-class status. The long-term effects of this housing policy are two-fold. First, white homeowners’ properties began to appreciate and gain property-value. Second, these white homeowners also began to generate generational for their families.
In When Affirmative Action Was White (2006), Ira Katznelson recounts the economic effects and social repercussions discriminatory public policy had in black communities throughout the nation. According to Katznelson, “the exclusion of so many black Americans from the bounty of public policy, and the way in which these important, large-scale national programs were managed, launched new and potent sources of racial inequality. The federal government, though seemingly race-neutral, functioned as a commanding instrument of white privilege” (Katznelson 18). In other words, the systematic exclusion of African-Americans implied that the federal government endorsed underwriting manuals and discriminatory practices. To that end, the Federal Housing Administration placed restrictions of who could buy loans, demonstrated preferences for Work Administration construction projects in white suburban neighborhoods, and the only backed FHA insurance for white American citizens.