America Dreaming
May 2019
“They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream…”[1]
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
The American Dream is at the very heart of two books published within the first two decades of the 21st century, both of which analyze how white Americans benefit from state policy that negatively impacts African Americans. Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action was White (2005) details how, from the 1930s through the 1950s, “at the very moment when a wide array of public policies was providing most white Americans with valuable tools to advance their social welfare—insure their old age, get good jobs, acquire economic security, build assets, and gain middle-class status—most black Americans were left behind or left out.”[2] Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) builds on previous scholarship to illustrate the federal government’s structural racism as expressed in segregationist housing policy and practices. Katznelson’s work purports to be an “untold” story; Rothstein’s is a “forgotten history.” Americans have a penchant for selective memory, and this forgetfulness imperils our future. To share these histories is to advance public understanding about structural racism and inequality, and pave a way toward remediation.
Katznelson’s work, published fifteen years ago, lays crucial groundwork for a study of how state policy disproportionately benefited white Americans. Katznelson wishes to destabilize our understandings of when and for whom affirmative action programs were begun, and bolster the case of proponents for affirmative action policies begun in the 1960s. Katznelson’s titular claim that affirmative action was once white is eye-catching. He provides overwhelming evidence to the fact that, for decades, white wealth was underwritten by government programs and policies. Katznelson’s book is a bold revision; affirmative action is largely understood to have been initiated in the 1960s to make American society more equitable by advancing African Americans. Katznelson wishes to place affirmative action in context in the hopes that white Americans might clearly see how they have benefitted from state policy, and thus might rally behind the continuation of affirmative action for another generation.
In Katznelson’s telling the political wrangling of mid-century Southern Democrats maximized “the flow of federal funds while maintaining local responsibility to ensure the continuing viability of the southern racial order,” which inevitably privileged whites over blacks.[3] This kind of regionalism deeply influenced legislation, and had foreseeable, national consequences. Black Americans received much less federal support proportionate to whites; thirty years after the New Deal, the difference between white wealth relative to African Americans’ was so stark that even President Lyndon B. Johnson, who decades before had been the paradigmatic Southern Democrat, was moved to introduce affirmative action as a central component of Great Society legislation.
Katznelson’s work, though important, is flawed in several respects. Taking Katznelson’s definition of affirmative action for whites literally as “positive economic reinforcement for the great majority of white citizens,” would require dialing back the periodization not to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s but all the way back to the founding of the American republic. A more ambitious undertaking could have enabled Katznelson to spread the blame not just on Southern politicians, as he is wont to do, but on all whites with settler-colonialist, racist mindsets who wished to extend the American frontier into Mexican and Amerindian holdings in the Southwest and West. Manifest Destiny would qualify as affirmative action for whites, if one were to take Katznelson at his word.
Most problematic, however, is the presumption that racist policies that benefited whites should be labeled “affirmative action.” There is nothing “affirmative” about racist policies. Conflating racist mid-century policies with the antiracist policies of President Johnson’s administration is a logical fallacy. Affirmative action as enacted in the 1960s was meant to better integrate American society for the benefit of all, not just African Americans. As Rothstein makes clear in The Color of Law, an integrated society is a healthier society, in all respects, for all individuals. Affirmative action may help advance African Americans, but it does so to effectuate a more equitable, prosperous America for individuals of all racial backgrounds, in contradistinction to the earlier racist policies Katznelson describes which benefited whites at the expense of African Americans. Racist policies—Katznelson’s “affirmative actions for whites”— is a false equivalence with affirmative action begun in the 1960s. As they say of apples and oranges, one of these is not like the other.
Despite Katznelson’s conflation of racist state policy with affirmative action, his scholarship was a welcomed addition to the historiography of the early 2000s. Particularly noteworthy was the author’s decision to discuss the various state policies that benefitted whites in “a single, if complex, configuration,” rather than “one at a time.”[4] Katznelson gets a lot of mileage out of this organizing principle—his efficient text clocks in well under 200 pages—and few critics, even those critical of his apples-to-oranges logic, would argue with the evidence he presents. When Affirmative Action was White is a digestible text, but the scope of the argument combined with the book’s brevity necessitates Katznelson’s focus on politicians’ words and deeds.
Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which describes how the federal government segregated housing and exacerbated an ongoing inequality crisis, does not merely focus on the actions of elected officials and state agents. The Color of Law is dotted throughout with interviews Rothstein conducted with black Americans whose lives were affected by racist state policies. These profiles helpfully illustrate Rothstein’s claims that the US government compounded a housing and wealth inequality crisis that remains not only unresolved, but virtually forgotten about by most whites. Moreover, Rothstein’s interviews, in tandem with his engaging prose, give the sense that whites’ racist policies were not just something that happened to black Americans but something many blacks actively, even heroically, reacted to and resisted. African Americans are rightfully portrayed as historical actors in Rothstein’s work, whereas Katznelson’s top-down story too often represents blacks as passive, as acted upon.
Central to this narrative line is Rothstein’s careful criticisms of the US’s de jure segregated reality versus the de facto myth. This persistent duality can be summed up as follows: de jure segregation is state-sponsored and now requires government intervention; de facto segregation is a fiction that erases the history of racist government practices, and claims, à la Candide, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Those arguing that segregation is de facto would likely agree that marginalized populations prefer to live among themselves, and that the federal government has not forced them into that situation. If Americans once espoused a de facto line of thinking—as many of us unwittingly have—reading Rothstein is likely to forever disabuse us of such flawed notions. As Rothstein writes, “The idea that African Americans themselves don’t want to integrate is a white conceit. Many thousands of African Americans risked hostility, even violence, when daring to move into predominantly white neighborhoods.”[5] The de facto myth is the armor whites have shielded themselves with from the daunting task of remembering their complicity in de jure racist policy.
Rothstein is insistent that midcentury Southern Democrats are far from the only blameworthy ones; moreover, casting blame is no longer the point—all Americans have inherited this problem, many have benefited at the expense of others, and so we must take deliberate, remedial actions. A great strength of Rothstein’s arguments is his direct appeals to readers. Rothstein does this implicitly when describing how de jure segregation affects individual Americans, like his interview subject Frank Stevenson in Richmond, California, but he does so explicitly, too, when he calls us to self-reflect: “If you inquire into the history of the metropolitan area in which you live,” Rothstein writes, “you will probably find ample evidence of how the federal, state, and local governments used housing policy to create or reinforce segregation in ways that still survive.” This is the American legacy, but it does not have to be our destiny.
Rothstein’s work deserves to be celebrated, but it should not be immune from criticism. State and private enterprises conspired to keep the majority of black Americans in a state of dispossession and out of the middle class, but Rothstein ignores the role played by black banks and mutual aid societies to provide for their investors. Also, as was the case for Katznelson, Rothstein could have been even more ambitious by expanding his periodization. Neither writer addresses in-depth the longue durée of inequality in the United States. In some cases, as with Rothstein’s utopic description of mid-twentieth-century California, the history is flat-out wrong.[6] Histories focusing on the last seven decades of the 20th century may purport to tell a long narrative, but in actuality the story begins much, much earlier.
Both books would have benefited from far more contextualization about how the settler-colonial mindset contributed to predatory, genocidal behavior, how such actions created modern notions of race, pitted racial groups against one another, and have lasting vestiges into the present.[7] This is not to say that either Katznelson or Rothstein’s book needed to be doubled or tripled in length; it is to suggest that more contextualization, efficiently worded and compellingly presented, could have even further bolstered their discussions of de jure racism and calls for remedial actions. Moreover, if Americans, as these authors write, have a tendency to forget their racist past, what better way to remind us than by putting it all down in print? Racist American policy is not a 20th or 21st century story; it is a story that began with European colonization of the Americas, and one that continues, very nearly unabated, aided and abetted by state and federal policy, into the present. Addressing these concerns might finally wake us from our dream and, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, place Americans “here in the world.”[8]
Bibliography
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Penguin Random House. 2015.
Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton. 2005.
Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: W.W. Norton. 2017.
Notes
[1] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017), p. 143.
[2] Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), p. 23.
[3] Ibid., p. 40-41.
[4] Ibid., p. xi.
[5] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017), p. 223.
[6] Rothstein’s utopic, whitewashed claim is that “The government was not following preexisting racial patterns [in mid-twentieth-century California]; it was imposing segregation where it hadn’t previously taken root,” The Color of Law, p. 14. For a discussion of 19th-century racism in California, see Sucheng Chang, “A People of Exceptional Character: Ethnic Diversity, Nativism, Racism in the California Gold Rush,” California History vol. 79, no. 2 (Summer 2000), p. 44-85.
[7] Gentrification, arguably, is one of these vestiges.
[8] Coates, Between the World and Me, p. 142.
