Geoff Tegnell, Brookline Public Schools

WHEN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION WAS WHITE: AnUntold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.

By Ira Katznelson. xv and 238 pp.; notes, bibliog., index. New York. W.W. Norton and Company, 2005. $25.95 (cloth), ISBN 0393052133; $14.95 (paper) ISBN 0393328511.

In When Affirmative Action Was White Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University recasts the affirmative action debate in the context of New Deal and World War II government policy in order to both broaden understanding of this issue and propose a possible resolution to the controversies it engenders. Katznelson holds that in the 1930’s and 40’s legislation passed by Congress to combat the Depression, mobilize armies, and re-induct soldiers into civilian life largely excluded African-Americans from considerable economic benefits due to the influence of white southern Democrats, thereby widening racial income disparities. This new perspective on governmental “affirmative action” for whites, Katznelson hopes, will help policy makers to craft a resolution to the divisive debate, based on time-tested Supreme Court guidelines concerning the use of racial preferences in public life. Katznelson’s well-researched and tightly-reasoned book presents a powerful case for a final settlement of the affirmative action debate and the establishment of a less racially unjust country.

Katznelson employs his multi-disciplinary expertise with deftness in this study. As an historian, he draws upon important recent scholarship about race and the New and Fair Deals to substantiate the charge that African-Americans had been largely left out of the major social programs of the 1930’s and 40’s. For example, he employs the findings of Robert Lieberman concerning the exclusion of predominantly African-American maids and farm workers from the Social Security system, references Dan Kryder’s work on race and training options in World War II military camps, and addresses Suzanne Mettler’s insight into the impact of segregated higher education on African-American access to the benefits of the GI Bill. As a political scientist, Katznelson applies standards enunciated in Justice Lewis Powell’s Bakke decision opinion to this body of knowledge about the racially inequitable distribution of New and Fair Deal largesse in order to fashion a targeted one-time correction of these governmental injuries.

A speech by Lyndon Johnson at Howard University in 1965 entitled “To Fulfill These Rights” is central to Katznelson’s analysis, in that it justified corrective economic action on behalf of African-Americans based on acknowledgement of a widening post-World War II income and employment gap between blacks and whites. In investigating the origins of this gap, Katznelson identifies its cause as the enactment of white “affirmative action” in the distributing of federal monies, as engineered by Southern Democrats intent on preserving the Jim Crow system in their region. For example, state-based administration of federal relief distribution ensured that whites received disproportionately better access to social welfare measures such as jobs programs and aid to dependent children, while social security eligibility requirements were designed explicitly to exclude maids and farm workers, the main African-Americans occupations in the South. During the war, segregation in the armed services forestalled African-American soldiers from equitable advancement through the ranks and access to specialized skill training. And lack of enforcement of Fair Labor Standards meant that prized war industries jobs went predominantly to whites. Likewise, in the post-War period, African-Americans in the South had difficulty making full use of GI Bill college tuition entitlements because of the inadequate facilities at under-funded African-American higher educational institutions.

In “To Fulfill These Rights” Lyndon Johnson resolved to take action, ultimately “affirmative action,” to address the growing poverty of African-Americans and as a consequence, governmental policy opened access to jobs and higher education, bringing about the integration of workplaces and colleges and universities across the country and enlarging the black middle class. Katznelson points out, however, that this policy is best understood as “corrective justice” in the context of the previous 30 years of privileged white access to federal assistance. Thus when opponents criticize affirmative action as reverse discrimination and claim the moral high ground of color-blind equality, Katznelson argues that the policy should actually be re-envisioned as “an attempt to compensate members of a deprived group for prior losses and for gains unfairly achieved by others that resulted from prior governmental action.” Next, Katznelson advises that modifications of color-blind policies ought to pass the Powell’s Bakke opinion test, i.e. there must be a clear and tight link connecting remedies to specific historical wrongs, a compelling public purpose must be served by the race conscious remedy, and non-racial means of achieving this purpose should be preferred, all other things being equal. . Employing this measure, Katznelson recommends that one-time federal compensatory payments be made to all documented victims of discriminatory New and Fair Deal governmental policy. He ends by hoping that such “appropriate signs and deeds would represent a collective apology, and indicate a communal desire to transcend such insults, especially when they are based in racial, and racist, distinctions.”

Among the strengths of When Affirmative Action Was White is Katznelson’s meticulous scholarship. He persuasively lays out the evidence of New and Fair Deal white preferment and documents the actions of the white southern Democrats, including apparently Congressman and Senator Lyndon Johnson, who engineered the overall black exclusion from federal benefits in the 1930’s and 40’s. Moreover, use of Powell’s Bakke test of permissible race-conscious policies provides a subtle and legally sound means of judging affirmative action policies that move the debate beyond simplistic sound bites. Lastly, Katznelson has crafted a solution that would actually remove affirmative action from the contemporary battleground of the “culture wars.” Less persuasive is Katznelson’s restriction of benefits to those who can prove that they were directly harmed by New and Fair Deal policies. This would seem to exclude the vast majority of African-Americans who left the south before 1933, mostly because of state policies that were motivated by the same prejudice and discrimination that poisoned federal welfare efforts. In addition, if at least two generations of beneficiaries are entitled to compensatory payment for “prior losses” due to federal discriminatory policies, does this not mean that perhaps millions of middle class as well as poor African-Americans will be eligible to receive publicly financed restitution, whether they need it or not, thereby again raising white complaints about racially driven policies?

Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White is an important addition to the literature about affirmative action. Some recent analyses such as Terry Anderson’s Affirmative Action and the Pursuit of Happiness take a four-decade view of the policy, which can inadvertently divorce affirmative action from its context of injustice. Other works like Philip F. Rubio’s A History of Affirmative Action: 1619-2000 assume such a long-term perspective as to justify the frequently-voiced complaint that an unbridgeable gap of centuries divides the program’s causes from its remedies. Katznelson’s perspective, however, is “just right” in that it permits scrutiny of the racially inequitable allocation of federal benefits in the 1930’s and 40’s that occasioned the widening poverty gap which President Johnson noted in the 1960’s. Moreover, rather than simply recount the rankling politics of affirmative action in the last 40 years, Katznelson focuses on the useful precedent of Powell’s Bakke test in order to craft a proposal that promises to put the affirmative action debate behind us all. When Affirmative Action Was White thus effectively employs history to inform public policy by unearthing past injustices in order to help us transcend them.