New Deal = "Affirmative Action for Whites"?

I have been intending to post this piece by Columbia historian and political scientist Ira Katznelson for a while. i just received my copy of Katznelson's new book, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America, and while I have skimmed it, I am still looking forward to reading it. At its essence is a provocative argument that also informs this op-ed, which is about Katrina and some observers' responses that we need a new New Deal to address America's racial and class inequalities. The gist of Katznelson's argument:

It was during the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman that such great progressive policies as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were adopted. But with them came something else that was quite destructive for the nation: what I have called "affirmative action for whites." During Jim Crow's last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing with welfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of African Americans or treated them differently from others.

Between 1945 and 1955, the federal government transferred more than $100 billion to support retirement programs and fashion opportunities for job skills, education, homeownership and small-business formation. Together, these domestic programs dramatically reshaped the country's social structure by creating a modern, well-schooled, homeowning middle class. At no other time in American history had so much money and so many resources been targeted at the generation completing its education, entering the workforce and forming families.

But most blacks were left out of all this. Southern members of Congress used occupational exclusions and took advantage of American federalism to ensure that national policies would not disturb their region's racial order. Farmworkers and maids, the jobs held by most blacks in the South, were denied Social Security pensions and access to labor unions. Benefits for veterans were administered locally. The GI Bill adapted to "the southern way of life" by accommodating itself to segregation in higher education, to the job ceilings that local officials imposed on returning black soldiers and to a general unwillingness to offer loans to blacks even when such loans were insured by the federal government. Of the 3,229 GI Bill-guaranteed loans for homes, businesses and farms made in 1947 in Mississippi, for example, only two were offered to black veterans.

My impressionistic response is that this is an argument that should make us reconsider our concept of Affirmative Action more than the New Deal. We all knew the limitations of the New Deal when it came to race among many other things. certainly Katznelson's argument will not be startling to those familiar with harvard Sitkoff's, Pat Sullivan's, or John Egerton's work on race in the New Deal era, even though it seems that Katznelson's focus might bring some more critical focus to our ideas of what the New Deal meant. But where this might be an especially useful will be in confronting affirmative action, especially when people argue that the government should not be in the business of ameliorating past wrongs. if we can trace some of those wrongs not to the Governor's mansion in Jackson of the State House in Montgomery, we might suddenly have to address some harsh truths.

In any case, as I say, this is based on a skimming of the book and on the op-ed piece. I might change my tune when I read the whole book, but the argument about affirmative action for whites strikes me as a powerful one.